Yang then slapped Ah Jack and stabbed his blade at the wooden boards. Ah Jack reeled from the slap, but stayed on his feet. His stubbornness had the jackals baying for his blood.
‘Knock him down! Knock him down! Teach him respect for the Red Flag Fleet!’
Yang’s henchmen went over to make Ah Jack kneel. They went to grab him, but Ah Jack shouted and thrashed out his arms, fending them off. ‘Don’t!’ you shouted. But Ah Jack kept throwing punches at Yang’s men, until Chief Maggot moved into the fray and Ah Jack’s knuckles struck his jaw, sending him lurching back. It was the first time anyone on the Scourge had seen the head of the Red Flag Fleet assaulted, and the sea ruffians’ jaws dropped. The deck tilted, as though the Scourge itself was reeling in shock, and Chief Maggot roared and stuck his dagger in Ah Jack’s guts.
He withdrew the blade and at last Ah Jack obeyed the order to get down, thudding to his knees and slumping on the splintery deck. Your mouth went round, as though you were saying ‘Oh!’, and you clutched your sides as though you had been knifed too. The blood of Ah Jack’s wound puddled around him, and parts of him twitched and he blinked as though he had dust in his eyes. Stabbing Ah Jack had lessened Maggot’s rage none whatsoever. He touched the swelling at his jaw and yelled, ‘Get this British devil, bleeding his stinking barbarian blood everywhere, off my ship!’ He nodded to the oarsmen chosen to row to Hermit Crab Cove, and waved his bloodstained blade at the taffrail. ‘Throw him over! Drown him in the sea!’
There’s no disobeying orders on the Scourge, so we all went over to Ah Jack. He’s dying anyway, I told myself. At least drowning will end his agony. We each grabbed one of Ah Jack’s limbs and, as we heaved him up, he screamed. Then Turtle Li shouted, ‘Wait! Don’t throw him yet! The head of an Englishman is worth a hundred dollars!’
Chief Yang looked startled. He had forgotten about the reward for an Englishman’s head. ‘Boy! Come here!’ he said.
The ‘boy’ Yang was beckoning to was me. His bloodshot eyes pierced into mine as he put the sweaty handle of the cutlass into my hand. ‘Take off his head first, before you throw him in.’
I turned back to Ah Jack. The oarsmen had lowered him back on the deck, where he lay bleeding, for his heart had not yet stopped beating. Ah Jack looked up as I went over to him, heavy and slow, as though my conscience was dragging in my feet. Ah Jack saw the dagger in my hand and shook his head and mumbled, ‘No no no.’ His eyes begged me for mercy as I knelt on the blood-soaked boards besides him. But there was no mercy on the Scourge. No mercy for him, and no mercy for those who don’t obey orders.
‘Sorry,’ I whispered in Ghost People tongue. ‘Sorry, Ah Jack.’
Ah Jack moaned and beat his hand against my chest, and two of the oarsmen came and held his wrists down against the deck. Ah Jack turned his head this way and that, with terror in his eyes. So I grabbed his dark curls to hold him steady, and brought the blade to his throat.
‘No!’ you shouted somewhere behind me. ‘No!’
But what choice did I have?
XIII
We rowed you away from the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, the flag of the Red Flag Fleet wilting from the mizzenmast. Oars splashed through the waves and seabirds swooped and soared in the clouded sky above, and we rowed as though the rhythm of our strokes, our heaving chests, had sent us into a trance. My arms were loose and shaking as I pulled the oars. Though I had rinsed my hands, they still looked drenched in Ah Jack’s blood.
Now in the robes of a galley slave, you were nothing like the scholar I had met in Fanqui Town. Bound up with rope and dumped in the bottom of the boat, you glared above your gag, your eyes deranged. Ah Jack’s head was in the burlap sack beside you, stained where the severed part had bled. The seawater that leaked into the boat, sloshing around our feet, had his blood in it too. Turtle Li sat on the bench above you, smoking his pipe, his flintlock aimed at your head. ‘Behave,’ he warned, ‘or your head’s going in that bag with your friend’s.’
We rowed up the Pearl River Bay to Hermit Crab Cove, then pulled the boat through the shoals and up the shore. We hid the boat and untied your ropes, and lent you a broken, splintery oar for a staff. We of the Scourge were wobbly at first on dry land; we were so used to pitching our weight to counter the up and down of waves. Mud squelched and splattered our staggery legs as we trudged over the mudflats. The rickety shacks of fisherfolk and pagodas stood out on hilltops in the distance, and further inland the scenery changed to lush green paddy fields, watered by streams of the Pearl River and tended to by crouching farmers in rice-planting hats. ‘Hurry up, cripple,’ growled Turtle Li, the muzzle of his gun prodding your back as you limped. Stinky Fu and Ah Xi had our rice and water, and Ah Chen and Scabby Rui each had a flintlock to ward off other bandits. Turtle Li had ordered me to carry Ah Jack’s head in the sack and, as we trudged on, the memory of those eyes of his, begging for his life, haunted my mind.
At dusk the sky began to spit down on our heads, and Turtle Li cursed and spat back at the sky. Though the plan had been to hike overnight, the outlaws of the Red Flag Fleet weren’t the sort for a gruelling slog through the cold and rain, and we detoured to a rocky outcrop Turtle Li knew from his time as a land bandit, where there was a cave.
We built a fire in the cave, under a hole like a chimney, borrowing driftwood left by those who’d sheltered there before. Scabby Rui bound you up with ropes again, and dumped you in the shadows at the back of the cave, with the creatures that scuttle and bite. Though the stench of rotting meat was coming from the burlap sack, Ah Jack’s head was thrown back there too. ‘So Ah Tom won’t be lonesome,’ grinned Turtle Li. Back in the shadows you glared above the gag, looking keen to rip out his throat.
Stinky Fu heated some rice over the fire and we dug in with grubby hands. When our supper was eaten, they passed round a flask of grog, grimacing as they swigged. The time had come for me to reveal what I’d stolen from Chief Maggot. So I brought the wooden box out of my robes and opened the lid. I spoke for the first time since the Scourge: ‘Look what I got.’
Turtle Li’s eyes went round, and he choked on his liquor. ‘How did you come by that?’ he spluttered.
‘I found it on the deck.’
‘You don’t find foreign mud lying about,’ said Turtle Li. ‘You stole it.’
‘That’s Chief Yang’s,’ added Ah Chen. ‘He’ll flay you alive.’
I said nothing and shrank back, leaving the opium out for the taking. They were opium-fiends, every last one, and the opium was here and Yang and his jackals were not. There’s no harm in smoking a pinch, they all soon agreed. Turtle Li stabbed his stubby finger at my chest.
‘Anyone gets done for this, it’s you, Tanka boy. Got that?’ Then he pounced on the opium and stuffed some in his pipe.
And so they smoked and spent an hour or so bragging about the merchant ships they’d sailed on, and the faraway lands they’d been to, and guffawing about the sinner’s boils they’d caught off the whores they’d poked. Smoke fogged the cave as they puffed on pipe after pipe and I had to crawl to the opening to clear my head.
The opium stole away their brains, or what they had of them, right before my eyes. They smoked themselves into a stupor, then stared into the fire, hypnotized by the leap of flames. When they spoke it was the same foolishness Three Pipes Qin used to come out with after a pipe or two:
‘I remember this cave from before I was born,’ said Ah Xi. ‘This cave’s where all humans come from before they are born. .’