Li grinned, wildly excited – as, Tom was already mature enough to reflect, only the very young can be stirred by the coming of war. ‘Come see!’
So they dashed out of the apartment, into a daylight already so bright it made Tom wince. And they ran directly south, towards the walls of the Inner City.
The heart of Peking, Tom told me, was a place of nested rectangles, each with its walls. You had the Inner City, a domain of aristocrats, officials, soldiers – with, in recent decades, the grudgingly admitted foreigners in the Legation Quarter – and within that the Imperial City with its extensive water gardens, and within that in turn the Forbidden City itself, protected by a moat and three sets of walls. There was also an Outer City appended to the south wall of the Inner, a tremendous annex stuffed with enormous temples. Of course since the fall of the Qing even the Forbidden City was forbidden no more, but every foreign visitor knew that the best view of Peking, and the countryside beyond, was from the city walls.
And it was onto those walls that Tom and Li climbed now. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of cordite, and a coarser stink of burning, and as he breathed deep from the climb Tom found himself coughing.
They soon made the top of the wall. The city from up here was always an odd sight, almost a sylvan scene rather than urban in the western sense, with the green of trees punctuated here and there by the egg-yolk yellow of the domes of palaces and temples.
Peking itself seemed at peace, but the countryside was not.
When Tom and Li looked east, into the rising sun, they saw the fighting-machines, silhouetted, their slim shadows long before them. It was a sight Tom immediately recognised from images of the British landings. Tom says he was struck by the sheer animal-like grace of the great machines, as are many observers on their first encounters with Martian technology. It was remarkable to see them suddenly superimposed onto this Chinese landscape, a world away from England.
And there were many of them, the machines marching in what looked like a grand crescent, heading for the city. Li tried to count them: ‘One, two, three, four… eight, nine, ten, eleven… many.’
There were attempts being made to resist the Martians’ advance, Tom saw. Weapons fire sparked around their footfalls, and shells burst close to their hooded carapaces. That was no surprise; Tom imagined that aside from the Germans’ front in Russia, this must be one of the most militarised places on the planet. And he wondered if the warlords were cooperating, for once, against this common enemy.
Even if so, they were doing no good. Just as was seen around the world that day, the Martians applied the lessons they had learned in England about the danger of our artillery, and simply shot the shells out of the air. Tom could see military vehicles, cavalry units on stocky horses from north China – even men riding camels from the Gobi – all scattering at the feet of the advancing Martians. And here and there men and animals and vehicles were incinerated in silent bursts of flame: moths before welding-torches, Tom thought, appalled.
Meanwhile, behind the machines a kind of corridor of smoke was rising, as the countryside the Martians had already crossed began to burn.
‘We must get out of here,’ Tom said. But he raised his camera and captured hasty images.
‘Magnificent sight.’
Tom glanced at his friend; Li’s face was shining. ‘You sound as if you are enjoying this.’
‘China flat on her back,’ Li Qichao said. ‘Foreigners everywhere. Russians want Mongolia. British want Tibet. Japanese want Manchuria. Americans – Americans just sell stuff. Government a joke, country full of warlords. And yet, and yet,China still a great country. Even Martians see that!’
‘They’re attacking you, and you see it as an endorsement?’
‘New age starts,’ Li said. ‘I, I will go east and south, find the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-Sen. It is said the Emperor will join us.’
‘What Emperor? Puyi? He’s just a kid.’
‘Let Martians drive out foreigners. Then Chinese drive out Martians. We survived Genghis Khan. Will survive this. And then…’
But already the Heat-Ray, with a range of miles, was licking at Peking, and buildings in the outer suburbs were flashing to flame.
Tom closed up his camera. ‘OK, Qichao. But for now let’s just make sure we live to see some of that future.’
Li grinned. ‘Come!’
They made their way around the wall parapet, away from the Martian advance, as the destruction of the city began in earnest.
14
THE MARTIAN INVASION OF MANHATTAN
The dawn of Saturday in Peking was around midday of Friday in New York. And through that long Friday afternoon Harry Kane and Marigold Rafferty watched the Battle of Manhattan unfold.
From Battery Park the end point of their flight south, it was hard to imagine a better view, Harry thought – if ‘better’ was a word to use on such a day. The Park itself was on a rise, and to get an even more favourable viewing platform they had managed to break into the Park’s Monroe Tower. Dating back to 1910, such towers had been set up all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at a time when German aggression had appeared to threaten the US itself, as well as to breach the long-held Monroe Doctrine of non-interference by European powers in the Americas. The Towers, intended for spotting warships at sea, had seen no use in anger, and had quickly become obsolete as aeroplane surveillance technology had advanced. But the Battery Park Tower offered an unparalleled viewpoint over south Manhattan, and had become a popular tourist spot. Of course that morning it was locked up; it had been the work of a moment to break in, and it took only a little longer for the two of them to scramble up a spiral stair to the spotting platform, an electric elevator being out of action.
And there was Lower Manhattan laid out before them, a great reef with its excrescence of tremendous buildings – like trees in a forest, Harry thought idly, competing for the light. The complex fretwork of docks and wharves around the island’s shore added still more organic character. It was magnificent, Harry thought, the windows of the buildings sparking in the sun, the elegant, rectilinear simplicity of the street plan – the sheer vigour of it all, the newness – though you could see even from up here the extremes of wealth and poverty, the towering palaces a short walk away from the darker warrens of a deprived polyglot population.
But now an interplanetary war had come to Manhattan. The fighting, in fact, had begun even as the Martians waded across the East River, dozens of them coming across from all along the Brooklyn shore. The Navy tried to hold a line at the river. A handful of destroyers bore down on the wading fighting-machines, but even before they closed the Heat-Rays had wielded their invisible energies; the ships, their hulls melting, their stores of fuel and armaments exploding, were turned to helpless hulks.
One, however, a slim ghost with four funnels spewing smoke, somehow survived to slide under the legs of the great machines. The Martians had been packed so dense that once she was among them the Fox could barely fail to find a target.
It somehow did not surprise Harry that Marigold kept a small set of binoculars, like opera glasses, in her jacket pocket. Now she studied the distant action. ‘I think that’s the Fox. Oh, so brave – she’s firing! Aiming for the machines’ cowls – got one! Two! And another!…’
Even with the naked eye Harry saw fighting-machines stagger and fall, each like a man shot in the eye – and each casualty took others out of the fight, he realised, for, just as had been observed since the Martians’ first incursion into England, when one Martian fell, its fellows would retrieve it. But the Fox had only minutes to make her mark on the war before multiple Heat-Ray projectors were brought to bear, and she exploded in a flash.