And there they were, all four of them. Not a weapon in sight, but somehow full of menace. Their leader, a barrel-chested man who wore khaki shorts and an off-white T-shirt, had arms like the legs of a cart-horse; and tattooed on one of them was the cypher that meant, in the old language of Shantung: One hundred and seven. It all came back to me at once.
There was a lot of history in that symbol; and it was terrifying history.
As I looked from one to the other of them, they began to move in on me.
CHAPTER 5
You probably don’t know about the Wuh-keis. They’re a fighting race of Chinese from up North, somewhat akin to the Sikhs of India, the dissenting sect of the Brahmanical Hindus, in that they have long regarded their vocation as fighting and not much else. But there, all similarity ends.
They were a Chinese tribe, the Wuh-keis, who lived beyond the Great Wall some two thousand years ago, a tribe that the Chinese Court historians, because they were never subdued, called barbarians. They devoted their entire lives to combat, and specifically, after the beginnings of the Great Legend, to unarmed combat—a form of fighting called Sha-hai. In modern Chinese, Sha-hai has come to mean ‘killing’, and with good cause.
The Great Legend said that in the eighth century, the Wang-ti, or Emperor of China, had conferred the title of Prince on the surviving head of the Wuh-keis after nearly thirty years of constant fighting; this was meant to be a noble gesture in admiration of the Wuh-keis’ skill and obstinacy. But the Wuh-keis had regarded the title as imposing some sort of vassalage, had called their forces together, and had gone on a terrible rampage, breaking out of their valley-state on the banks of the River Liao and taking on the rest of the world in general. The Emperor’s armies had invaded the river valley and had almost wiped out the Wuh-keis in a battle that raged for one hundred and seven days. But when he was finally victorious (with an army of two hundred and eighty thousand men behind him), the Emperor had made another noble gesture; he spared the lives of the hundred and seven best Wuh-kei fighters, one for every day they had held out against him, and had formed them into a special cadre of personal bodyguards. But he had taken the precaution of issuing an edict that their weapons were to be locked up at night—another insult the warriors weren’t about to tolerate. So, for a hundred and seven token days, they had submitted to this indignity; and then, on a given signal, they had risen up and slaughtered every man woman and child in the Emperor’s Court. With their bare hands.
Under their chief, Ha-to, they had escaped back to the Shan-a-lin, the Long White Mountain, and taken refuge in the high gorges. And ever since, the Great Legend went, the Wuh-keis had scorned the use of any weapon.
When I was conducting a course at the Institute for Oriental Military Studies some years ago, I had met one of the still legendary Ha-to family who now called himself Jennis Hatto and had learned from him a great deal about the old tradition. He told me, Jennis, that male babies in the Shan-a-lin were exposed on the bare mountain, naked in the snows, in a process that seemed, with some success, to weed out the weaklings. And before puberty, they were set out naked in the forest a hundred miles from home and expected to return before the moon changed, fully clothed, riding a horse, and carrying a spear or bow that was then ceremonially broken at the puberty rite itself.
And even today, the few surviving Wuh-keis still carry on their forearm the mystic and now much-dreaded symbol 107; and each one of them still spends his entire life practicing his own specific art of combat, the Sha-hai. It consists, quite simply of reliance upon muscular efficiency developed to an astonishing peak of speed and power. The classic killing format, for example, is a grip with the left hand on the opponent’s throat, a grip with the right of his thigh, a raised right knee and a smashing, downward blow that quickly breaks the poor bastard’s back. It is called the Sheng-ta, and is numbered six in the Sha-hai progression. It demands, of course, a fantastic strength and coordination because, while all this is going on, the opponent probably isn’t exactly standing still for it. He could be wielding a gun or a knife or a sword; but that doesn’t matter very much to the Wuh-keis; it’s there fast; one, two, three, and drop the body.
Strength and coordination? Jennis Hatto showed me. He wrapped a half-inch Manila rope round his right fist and smashed it into an ordinary, standard American brick wall. And while I watched, astonished, it took him fifteen minutes to batter a hole clean through it. I learned a lot from Jennis about the Wuh-keis. And now, I was getting a chance to watch them in action, but from quite the wrong standpoint.
They stood there, the four of them, with the leader ahead of the others, one to the left, one to the right, and the fourth man standing in reserve. It was the leader I was concerned with: the others, I knew, would not raise a hand unless their leader went down, and at the moment that didn’t seem very likely. He stood there with his feet well spread, his body crouched, his hands resting lightly on his knees. The hands were flexing rapidly in a butterfly sort of flutter; though with hands as big and red and fleshy as an Arkansas ham, this is not a very good analogy.
I tried to remember exactly where I stood. The main street, with all the comparative safety it implies, was on the other side of the building. The passage I was in led—ahead of me and beyond the Wuh-keis—to the old wharf area where the broken down fishing docks were. Behind me, it led to a cul-de-sac where all the garbage from the hotel was stored. I was cut off; they bad chosen the spot well, though the choosing was mostly mine. I tried to count the advantages I might have: height, weight, and speed in running, though not in immediate movement, and speed in the water too, if I could get to it.
His bullet-like head was thrust out temptingly for a blow, and I knew that if I made the mistake of trying to hit it, this would be the last move I’d ever make. Instead, I put my own head down low, and thrust out with my feet, and dived between his widespread ankles. I had two things in mind: either to knock him off balance, which I didn’t really expect to do, or to get between him and the water.
And I was right in my expectations; he moved aside with lightning ease, just simply not being there any more when I shot along the ground; and he put out a foot as I went by. It caught me in the groin, a glancing blow because I, too, was moving fast. I felt the pain sweep over me, but I wasn’t seriously hurt; not incapacitated anyway. I didn’t stop to see exactly where he was, but did a sort of neck roll and landed on my feet, and I knew that he’d have turned to face me, ready to take the next, more careful charge.
But I didn’t turn round to look and see; I just ran.
Once I ran against Louis Jones in the four hundred meters, and damn near beat his time of forty-five point two; and now I had only a matter of a hundred and twenty yards to worry about. I hit the wharf in just under twelve seconds and heard them all behind me as I raced along it to the end and dived. And where I landed, there was less than two feet of water with heavy, wet sand and hard, barnacle-covered rocks scattered about like so many blackjacks. I caught my head a crack that sent stars shooting across the bright red sky, and I rolled under the rotting timbers as I saw the first man, the leader, leap lightly over the wooden railing and land in the shallow water close beside me. He landed on all fours, like a cat and I threw myself at one of the heavy teak stanchions that were supposed to hold the wharf up; it was hanging loose on its iron bindings, its water-end long rotted away but solid up there where the business end of it was. It swung loose with the force of my two hundred pounds moving at speed, and crashed into him and we went down into the water, and then two of the others were there, coming straight at me among the floating cans and rotted garbage and broken planks that were the underside of the wharf.
One at a time, I thought, that’s what the Wuh-kei rules call for.
And indeed, one man did hang back when the other got there first. His left hand shot out like a bolt of greased lightning heading for my throat, and I could see the other hand striking downward. And then, suddenly, he seemed petrified. All motion stopped and he just hung there, both hands out and one knee raised; and on one leg, he toppled over slowly into the water. There was a red mess on the side of his head; and I had not even heard the shot.
He was out of action, but I was passing out myself. When you weigh as much as I do and dive onto a mass of barnacles from a height of ten feet or more, the pain, not insupportable, starts at the head and works its way down to the spine, and then on to the soles of the feet; that’s not too bad, but then, if you’re not careful, you black out; and that’s not a good thing to do when someone at that moment is trying to kill you.
But there were two of them in the water, and there was blood all over; some of it, at least, was my own.
The other two were there now, just moving in and frozen in motion; they were staring off to one side, and then they were gone: In one split second, there was no sight or sound of any of them; and I fell in the water and floundered, trying to find water deep enough to swim in; I was heading out, away from the shore because I didn’t know what had happened. The body of the leader was in my way, his head cracked open by the great timber I’d hurled at him; and I was blacking out in that terribly dangerous moment of semi-relief that comes when the danger seems, but might not be, past. You can hang on, half-dead, while the danger’s still there, like a chicken that prances around with its head cut off; but once it seems to have gone, then the natural weaknesses all sweep in on the flood, and you pass out, if you’re not mighty careful. I struggled for sanity in a black world of red darkness, and hands were trying to hold me and I was trying to fight them off, and a voice was shouting: “Senhor Cain! Senhor Cain!”
There was an urgency to the voice that had in it none of the casual calling of that would-be assassin with the rifle. And the urgency told me all I wanted to know; somewhere, out of the haze and the darkness and the yellow, bursting stars, a genie had materialized to come to my rescue. I wondered foolishly who was rubbing the lamp, and when I woke up I was lying on hard, polished wood that shone redly, and a saffron sail was high above me, patched with great sheets of pink and lavender, and there was the creaking of a gently swaying ship. A scarred face was peering into mine, and suddenly it grinned.
I put a hand to what seemed to be my head, and I heard myself groan, and the face said politely: “El Capitan Theophilo de Ericeira, Senhor Cain...Todo ben agora?” Somebody’s hand was under my shoulders and trying to pull me up into a sitting position, and someone else was holding an enameled mug of hot soup to my lips; it was made mostly of peppers, and I spluttered, and the capitano grinned and said in a sort of English: “Best thing for bad head, Senhor.”
There were eight or nine of them gathered around me, Chinese mostly, with the Portuguese captain who’d been following me back there, and a big, flabby-stomached Arab who turned out to be the cook who’d made the horrible broth they were offering me.
I pushed the boiling mug away and said: “A damn fool question, I know, but what happened?”
The captain grinned. “Four men come to beat you up. Somebody shoot one of them. I don’t know who.” The revolver was sticking in his belt like a pirate. “Somebody else break one man’s head. I think maybe that was you, no?”
I said: “Ah yes, I remember. I hit him with the wharf.”
And then there was a bustling of noises, and Bonelli was there, climbing over the side and hurrying forward. The others made way for him respectfully, and he stood there looking down at me. He was dressed in a blue blazer and white slacks, with an orange-colored Bayadere rose in his buttonhole. There was an anxious look in his eyes, but I heard the skipper say, cheerfully: “Nothing, Senhor Bonelli, nothing bad. Little bump on head is all.”
I tried to get to my feet, and Bonelli put out a hand and helped me up, and I swayed for a moment or two and heard him say briefly: “A drink. Some brandy, down in the cabin, can you make it?”
I asked him: “What kind of brandy?”
“Courvoisier. Remy Martin if you’d prefer it.”
I said: “I can make it.”
◆◆◆
It was one of the oceangoing junks from the Fukien coast, of the type known as ningpo, with two large eyes painted on the sides to keep a lookout for the omnipresent water-devils.
It was duck-shaped, with a high, carved prow painted in brilliant colors, and what is called a balanced rudder in the stern—the rudder that continues for a further third of its length forward of the steering post, where the impact of the water is one third greater, to permit a single helmsman to manage the huge tiller even in the heaviest seas. I recalled that this was an arrangement that the West had finally latched onto only after the Chinese had been using it for more than a thousand years. The twin sails were made of fiber matting, and the holes punched into them by the winds had been left unpatched because perforated sails are supposed to allow more control in a typhoon: The deck was a hundred and ten feet long, with shelters built of rush matting, and a huge wicker-work basket hanging from a cage over the stern. The fish basket assured that the day’s meals would be kept at water-freshness till it was time to eat. On the deck, there were wicker baskets lined with oiled paper and smelling foully of diesel oil, and when I went below, I discovered the reason for them—the junk had been fitted with a large and powerful diesel motor. The name of the junk, THE CRIMSON GARDENIA, had been painted in crimson and gold along the sides, in both Cantonese and European letters. The sour smell of oil mixed with the ripe scent of drying fish that hung in ropes along the decks was overpowering.
But below, the cabin we went to was clean and neat and comfortable. It was not very big, but the timber-work was polished teak, and it had been fitted out in a style that didn’t seem to jibe with the ship’s occupation, which was smuggling among the coastal ports.
Bonelli waved an airy hand and said: “Sometimes, I must travel on this junk myself; why should I be uncomfortable?”
I fitted myself carefully into a corner and accepted the drink he gave me. My head was pounding savagely.
He said accusingly: “You told me you didn’t think it was necessary for my man to keep an eye on you.”
