The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (24 page)

It did not. I had somehow imagined or hoped that there might well be ghosts in the Evil East, or at least cannibalistic savages to whom I would be prey, but there were neither. So, I survived despite myself, saddened to think that all our chances bleed from us, like wounds that never heal.

The immense expanse of forest - poignantly beautiful even in its darkest vales and fog-hung fens - turned out to be haunted only with the natural dangers of serpents, bears, and wolves. As for the tribes, when they realized that we had come merely to observe and not to cut their trees or encroach on their land, they greeted us cordially enough, for barbarians. To win their hospitality, we traded toys - bamboo dragonflies, kites and firecrackers. I knew a simple joy with them, forgetting briefly the handful of chances that had already bled from me with my hope of fading from this world.

On the east coast, Buddhist missions and trading posts overlook the Storm Sea. By the time we emerged from the wild-woods, a message for me from the west had already arrived at one of the posts by the river routes that the fur traders use. I recognized your father’s calligraphy and knew before I read it - that you had left us to join the ancestors.

When the news came, I tried to throw myself from the monastery wall into the sea, but my companions stopped me. I could not hear beyond my heart. We who had once lived as one doubled being had become mysteries again to each other. I shall know no greater enigma.

For days, I despaired. My failures had lost all my cherished chances, as a writer and a farmer, as a father and, now, as your mate. With that letter, I became older than the slowest river.

It is likely I would have stayed at the monastery and accepted monkhood had not news come announcing the arrival of strangers from across the Storm Sea. Numb, indifferent, I sailed south with the delegation’s other volunteers. Autumn had returned to the forest. Disheveled oaks and maples mottled the undulant shores. As we ventured farther south, hoar frost gradually thinned from the air, and stupendous domes of cumulus rose from the horizon. Shaggy cypress and palm trees tilted above dunes.

Like a roving, masterless dog, I followed the others from one mission to the next among lovely, verdant islands. Hunger abandoned me, and I ate only when my companions pressed food on me, not tasting it. In the silence and fire of night, while the others slept, my life seemed an endless web of lies I had spun and you a bird I had caught and crippled. In the mirrors of the sea, I saw faces. Mostly they were your face. And always when I saw you, you smiled at me with an untellable love. I grieved that I had ever left you.

The morning we found the boats that had crossed the Storm Sea, I greeted the strangers morosely. These were stout men with florid faces, thick beards, and big noses. Their ships - clumsy, worm-riddled boxes lacking watertight compartments - featured ludicrous cloth sails set squarely, leaving them at the mercy of the winds. At first, they attempted to impress us with their cheap merchandise, mostly painted tinware and clay pots filled with sour wine. I do not blame them for underestimating our sophistication, because, not wishing to slight the aboriginals, we had approached in a local raft with the tribal leaders of that island.

Soon, however, beckoned by a blue smoke flare, our own ship rounded the headland. The sight of her sleek hull and orange sails with bamboo battens trimmed precisely for maximum speed rocked loose the foreigners’ arrogant jaws - for our ship, with her thwartwise staggered masts fore and aft, approached
into
the wind. The Big Noses had never seen the likes of it.

Ostensibly to salute us, though I am sure with the intent of displaying their might, the Big Noses fired their bulky cannon. The three awkward ships, entirely lacking lee-boards, keeled drastically. Our vessel replied with a volley of Bees’ Nest rockets that splashed overhead in a fiery exhibit while our ship sailed figure-eights among the foreigners’ box-boats.

At that, the Big Noses became effusively deferential. The captain, a tall, beardless man with red hair and ghostly pale flesh, removed his hat, bowed, and presented us with one of his treasures, a pathetically crude book printed on coarse paper with a gold-leaf cross pressed into the animal-hide binding. Our leader accepted it graciously.

Fortunately, the Big Noses had on board a man who spoke Chaldean and some Arabic, and two of the linguists in our delegation could understand him slightly. He told us that the captain’s name was Christ-Bearer the Colonizer and that they had come seeking the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom in the hope of opening trade with him. They actually believed that they had traveled twenty-five thousand
li
to the west, in the spice islands south of the Middle Kingdom! Their ignorance fairly astounded us.

Upon learning their precise location, the Colonizer appeared dismayed and retreated to his cabin. From his second in command, we eventually learned that the Colonizer had expected honor and wealth from his enterprise. Both would be greatly diminished now that it was evident he had discovered neither a route to the world’s wealthiest kingdom nor a new world to be colonized by the Big Noses.

Among our delegation, much debate flurried about the implications of the Colonizer’s first name - Christ-Bearer. For some centuries, Christ-Bearers have straggled into the Middle Kingdom, though the government always confined them to select districts of coastal cities. Their gruesome religion, in which the faithful symbolically consume the flesh and blood of their maimed and tortured god, disgusted our Emperor, and their proselytizing zeal rightly concerned him. But here, in the USA, with the Dawn-Settlers’ tolerance of diverse views, what consequences will ensue when the Christ-Bearers establish their missions?

I did not care. Let fat-hearted men scheme and plot in faraway temples and kingdoms. Heart Wing! I will never see the jewel of your face again. That thought - that truth - lies before me now, an unexplored wilderness I will spend the rest of my life crossing. But on the day when I first saw the Big Noses, I had not yet grasped this truth. I still believed death was a doorway. I thought perhaps your ghost would cross back and succor my mourning. I had seen your face in the mirrors of the sea, a distraught girl both filled and exhausted with love. I had seen that, and I thought I could cross the threshold of this life and find you again, join with you again, united among the ancestors. I thought that.

For several more days, I walked about in a daze, looking for your ghost, contemplating ways to die. I even prepared a sturdy noose from a silk sash and, one moon-long evening, wandered into the forest to hang myself. As I meandered through the dark avenues of a cypress dell seeking the appropriate bough from which to stretch my shameless neck, I heard voices. Three paces away, on the far side of a bracken screen, the Big Noses whispered hotly. I dared to peek and spied them hurrying among the trees, crouched over, sabers and guns in hand and awkwardly hauling a longboat among them.

The evil I had wished upon myself had led me to a greater evil - and, without forethought, I followed the Big Noses. They swiftly made their way to the cove, where the Imperial ship had moored. I knew then their intent. The entire delegation, along with most of the crew, had gone ashore to the mission, to interview the aboriginals who had first encountered the Big Noses. While they drafted a report for the Emperor and the local authorities about the arrival of the Christ-Bearer in the USA, the Big Noses had hatched a nefarious plan and would meet little resistance in pirating our ship.

Clouds walked casually away from the moon, and the mission with its serpent pillars and curved roof shone gem-bright high on the bluff - too far away for me to race there in time or even for my cries to reach. Instead, I ducked among dunes and scurried through switching salt grass to the water’s edge even as the Big Noses pushed their longboat into the slick water and piled in. With a few hardy oar-strokes, they reached the Imperial ship and began clambering aboard unseen by the watch, who probably lolled in the hold sampling the rice wine.

I stood staring at the ship perched atop the watery moon, knowing what I had to do but hardly believing I had such strength. I, who had iron enough in my blood to strangle my own life, wavered at the thought of defying other men, even the primitive Big Noses. Truly, what a coward I am! I stood rooted as a pine and would have watched the pirates sail our ship away, watched it depart into the dark like a happy cloud scudding under the moon - except that a scream and a splash jolted me.

The Big Noses had thrown the watch overboard. I saw him swimming hard for shore and imagined I beheld fear in his face. His craven face galled me! The watch, flailing strenuously to save his own miserable life, would make no effort to stop the barbarians from stealing the life of his own people! For I knew that we would lose nothing less if the Big Noses stole our ship and learned to build vessels that could challenge the USA and even the Middle Kingdom.

I dove into the glossed water and thrashed towards the ship. I am a weak swimmer, as you know, but there was not far to go, and the noise of the watch beating frantically to shore muted my advance. With moorings cut, the ship listed under the offshore breeze. The Big Noses, accustomed to climbing along yardarms to adjust their sails, struggled with the unfamiliar windlasses and halyards that control from the deck the ribbed sails of our ship, and so I had time to clutch onto the hull before the sails unfurled.

After climbing the bulwark, I slipped and fell to the deck right at the feet of the tall, ghost-faced captain! We stared at each other with moonbright eyes for a startled moment, and I swear I saw avidity in his features as malefic as a temple demon’s. I bolted upright even as he shouted. Blessedly, the entire crew was busy trying to control the strange new ship, and I eluded the grasp of the Colonizer and darted across the deck to the gangway.

Death had been my intent from the first. When I plunged into the hold and collapsed among coils of hempen rope, I had but one thought: to reach the weapons bin and ignite the powder. I blundered in the dark, slammed into a bulkhead, tripped over bales of sorghum, and reached the weapons bin in gasping disarray. Shouts boomed from the gangway, and the hulking shapes of the Big Noses filled the narrow corridor.

Wildly, I grasped for the flintstriker I knew lay somewhere near the bin. Or did it? Perhaps that was too dangerous a tool to keep near the powder. The Big Noses closed in, and I desperately bounded atop the bin and shoved open the hatch there. Moonlight gushed over me, and I confronted the horrid faces of the barbarians rushing towards me - and there, at my elbow, a sheaf of matches.

I seized the fire-sticks and rattled them at the Big Noses, but this did not thwart them. The oafs had no idea what these were! Those brutes dragged me down, barking furiously. I gaped about in the moonglow, spotted a flintstriker hanging from a beam. Kicking like a madman, I twisted free just long enough to snatch the flintstriker. Alas, I had inspired their fury, and heavy blows knocked me to the planks.

Stunned, I barely had the strength to squeeze the lever of the flintstriker. My feeble effort elicited only the tiniest spark, though that proved sufficient to ignite a match. The sulfurous flare startled my assailants, and they fell back. Immediately, I lurched about and held high the burning pine stick while gesturing at the powder kegs behind me. The Big Noses pulled away.

With my free hand, I grabbed a bamboo tube I recognized as a Beard-the-Moon rocket. I lit the fuse and pointed it at the open hatch. In a radiant whoosh, sparks and flames sprayed into the night. The cries of the Big Noses sounded from the deck, and the men who had seized me fled. A laugh actually tore through me as I fired two more Beard-the-Moon rockets. I was going to die, and now death seemed a fate worthy of laughter.

Perhaps the longtime company of Buddhists and Taoists had affected me after all, for I had no desire to kill the Big Noses. I waited long enough for them to throw themselves into the sea before I ignited the fuses on several heaven-shaking Thunderclap bombs. My last thought, while waiting for the explosion to hurl me into the Great Inane, focused on you, Heart Wing. Once I had committed myself to using death as a doorway, your ghost had actually come back for me, to lead me to the ancestors in a way that would serve the Kingdom. I thanked you, and the Thunderclap bombs exploded.

Yet, I did not die - at least, not in an obvious way. Later, when I could think clearly again, I realized that your ghost had not yet done with me. Who else but you could have placed me just where I stood so that my body hurtled straight upward through the open hatch and into the lustrous night? I remember none of that; however, the watch, who had made it to shore, claims that when the Imperial ship burst into a fireball, he witnessed me flying, silhouetted against the moon.

He found me unconscious in the shallows, unscathed except for singed beard and eyebrows and clothes torn. Like a meteor, I had fallen back to earth, back to life. I had fallen the way stars fall, from the remote darkness where they have shivered in the cold down into the warm, close darkness of earthly life. That night, I fell from the gloom of my solitary grief into the dark of terrestrial life, where we all suffer together in our unknowing.