The Chinese had beaten the agents bloody, all of them slumped or staggering in the narrow corridor, blinded by their bruises and disoriented, a few split lips bleeding and a few eyes punched bruised and shut. Jack and I herded the Englishmen toward the carriage door. Kuan Yu pushed the door open; Jack smiled and nodded to him. “Jump,” he said to the English.
The ground sloped down from the tracks, coated with a crystalline blanket of snow, and yet my heart was uneasy as the English jumped, one by one by one, and rolled down the slope, raising brief, low flurries in their wake. I hoped they would find their way to safety.
“How close is the nearest town?” I asked Jack.
He smiled, shook his head. “They’ll be fine. Unfortunately.”
Kuan Yu laughed. “Indeed. Why not kill them?”
“Diplomatic nightmare,” I said.
We returned to our compartments, but after a quick unvoiced exchange, I went across the corridor to speak to the Chinese. Kuan Yu seemed a bit more talkative, and I sat down next to him, making sure my posture was both casual and masculine: I rested my elbows on my knees, letting my hands dangle.
“So,” I said. “What do you gentlemen do?”
Kuan Yu grinned. “How do you mean, poruchik?”
“Just in general. What brings you to Russia, business or pleasure?”
The men laughed, their bright teeth twinkling in their dark beards with great mirth. “We are traders,” Kuan Yu said.
Liu Zhi laughed again, throwing back his head, and gasped for breath, overcome by too much merriment. “Yes, traders,” he confirmed once he regained his ability to speak. “Business is bad in Siberia, had to go west to sell all the silk and tea we had. Now going back home, to Beijing. Will be selling fur.” He pointed at their cloaks that were now hanging placidly on the wall of the compartment, and I determined the unnatural mix was composed of mink, fox, ermine, and otter furs.
“Us too,” I said.
“Trading fur?”
“Going to Beijing,” I said.
They nodded, expressing no further curiosity. “Long trip,” Kuan Yu said. “Rest up, young man — who knows when you will be able to sleep in such security and comfort as now. We always rest while we travel by train. We know when there’s an opportunity for danger to arrive, and when it is safe. Sleep while the wheels rattle on and wake up when they stop.”
“Thank you,” I said and rose, realizing I was being politely encouraged to leave. “And thank you for your help.”
Liu Zhi nodded, smiling. “Our pleasure,” he said.
I did not doubt his veracity.
Chapter 11
I woke up when the sun was high in the sky. Even with my eyes closed I could feel the air outside had a mature, late-morning quality rather than the slanted, insistent early morning light that prodded at one’s eyelids, forcing them open. I stretched before my eyes opened, and felt a warm breeze on my cheek — a barest whisper of air sliding against skin, tugging gently at the fine hairs of my carefully trimmed temples. I glanced between my eyelids, opening them just wide enough to sneak a peek. In a halo of distorted light, I saw Jack’s face, leaning so close to mine and peering so intently, it was as if he was trying to read his fortune in the veins of my eyelids, in the creases of my lips.
He sighed again, his breath like a slow caress at the ridge of my jawline; I opened my eyes, slowly, to give him time to move away.
He did not. “Good morning,” he whispered, his soft, gravelly voice rumbling with recent sleep and great fatigue.
“Morning,” I said. I had to pull myself back with my elbows, so that I could sit up without my forehead smashing his high arched nose. “You seem troubled with thought.”
“That I am.” He sat on the edge of my seat, leaning on both his arms, his palms planted on either side of my legs. He was too close, and his proximity was constraining enough that I had to fight a mild panic. If he were to try and kiss me, there would be little I could do to avoid it, save for a hearty slap in the face. “Can you talk?”
“Sure.” I pulled up my knees to my chest, circumventing the arch of his arms, and felt immediately better as soon as my feet touched the floor. “What do you want to talk about?”
“My past,” he said. “Remember what I was telling you about Canton?”
Jack stayed with the rest of the Englishmen in the English factory — or, as the Chinese called it, hong. From what he described, it seemed more a vast complex of apartments, stores and secondary buildings than a place where anything was manufactured; every western nation represented in Canton was in control of one such sprawling building, surrounded by shallow gardens and allocated to the outside of the city walls. They were not allowed to house women, and the merchants who made homes there kept their families at Macao, where the Portuguese opium addict Jack had befriended came from. The two of them often took long walks by the port and around the city perimeter, all the while arguing about religion.
Jack was bored, and he used his time to learn the local Chinese dialect in addition to the pidgin they all used to communicate with half-naked coolies at the docks and the shopkeepers who hung signs in Chinese and English, undeterred from trade by neither imperial edicts and threats of death nor apparently latent patriotism. They always had good advice on bribing the officials.
Jack’s knowledge of Chinese made him useful, and his Portuguese friend and mentor told him he was interested in leaving Canton and traveling up the Pearl River, to distribute some of the religious tract he had cobbled together and printed in Chinese courtesy of some Englishman working at the Canton Herald. The book was the usual mix of misunderstood mysticism, catechism, and drugged fancies, such as his assurance of human ability to fly.
Missionary work was nothing new. However, in light of the recent souring of the relations due to the opium impasse and the mulish stubbornness of Captain Charles Elliot, the man who tried to negotiate the conditions of trade on the English side, it had become even more thankless and dangerous than before. Paolo’s plan was to have Jack dress in Chinese garb and send him up the river to distribute the religious pamphlets. His Chinese would be passable enough to keep him out of trouble — at least they both hoped this would be the case.
Jack told me he did not know who the men who captured him were — they spoke a dialect of Chinese strange to his ears, and they had no knowledge of pidgin whatsoever. They were not Chinese officials. They took his books and his clothes and beat him with great vigor, but did not put him into jail. Instead, they lowered him into what seemed to be a dried up well and tied large stones onto his back, around his neck, and to his arms and feet, so that he could not move.
“This is where it gets interesting,” he said and smiled when I leaned closer, enthralled. “I started trying to move, so as not to be squashed by that weight, and I sang those little nonsense mantras Paolo had taught me. The more I moved, the easier it got. Soon, I stood up with the millstone still on my back.
“Then, I tried climbing the walls of the well. It was slow at first, but soon enough I could ascend twenty feet before having to climb back down. Not long after I began jumping in my well. It was a full year before I was strong enough to get out of the well, millstones and all.”
I held my breath. “And then… ”