Chapter 44 of 90
The Rule of the Road
He did not hurry. He did not creep. He walked straight toward the water village in broad daylight, in an honest, open, unhurried way, with his hands swinging at his sides, like a man taking a stroll along a river on a summer afternoon.
The patrol saw him at once.
They came at him in a little knot, harpoons up, more startled than anything. Two of them got to him first—a tall one with a broken nose and a short one with a pocked face—and planted themselves in his path.
"Who are you? Do you know where this place is?"
Li Yuguo looked at them. Then he raised one hand, palm up, as if about to explain something, and stretched his arm out wide, and said, in a thoughtful voice:
"That… is a cannon…"
"A cannon?"
The two bandits looked at each other.
"Is this guy funny in the head?"
"Cannon Fist!"
Li Yuguo's eyes changed. All in an instant—the vagueness was gone and something hard and fierce was looking out of them, and both his fists were already moving. He stepped in between the harpoons as if they were not there.
Boom.
Two muffled thuds, so close together that they sounded like one. His left fist sank into the short one's belly and his right fist into the tall one's, and both men folded in the middle at exactly the same time, like two pairs of scissors closing. Their eyes bulged. The breath went out of them in a single wheeze. Their faces twisted up with pain.
But Li Yuguo was not finished.
He reached out with both hands, quite calmly, and took each of them by the back of the head. And then he brought his hands together.
Crack!
Like the two cymbals of a folk band. Face struck face, dead center. Both noses bent sideways at once—one to the left, one to the right—and both men toppled over backward into the mud and lay there, staring up at the sky, not moving.
Li Yuguo blew on his knuckles, as if blowing away a speck of dust.
"That move," he said to nobody in particular, "is called the Big Cymbal Face-Slapping Fist."
He smiled, and walked on.
The rest of the patrol had seen it. They had seen what this man could do with his bare hands, and not one of them was stupid enough to stay. They dropped their spears and ran—back along the bank, splashing through the shallows, shouting—toward the water village.
Li Yuguo followed them at a stroll.
By the time he reached the gate of the stockade, word had gone ahead of him. Five men were waiting for him there, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the timber gate with their harpoons leveled at his chest.
"Stop! Stop!"
They were barefoot like the others. Ragged like the others. Their shirts were more holes than cloth, their ribs showed under the holes, and their faces were gray with hunger and wet with sweat. They looked, he thought, very embarrassed. As if they knew exactly how they looked. At a glance, anyone could tell that whoever ran this village was not good to them.
"Why?" said Li Yuguo pleasantly, rolling his shoulders, cracking his knuckles one by one. "Do you want to experience the feeling of a roller coaster?"
They did not know what a roller coaster was. But they could guess.
The sweat ran down their faces. Their harpoons shook. And yet they did not move from the gate—because behind them, inside the stockade, was their boss, and they were more afraid of his anger than of the stranger in front of them. Li Yuguo could see it in their eyes. The kind of fear that has been beaten into a man so long it has become a habit.
He sighed.
The corners of his mouth widened. He reached into his sleeve and took out a handful of broken silver—small, irregular bits, the kind that market women chip off a bigger ingot to make change—and tossed it into the air in front of the gate.
It fell glittering onto the packed earth. Pitter-patter, clink, clink.
At almost the same moment, all five harpoons hit the ground.
All five big men dropped to their knees. And not just dropped—they slid. Knees first, across the dusty earth, the way boys slide across wet grass in summer, scrabbling and shoving at each other, straight toward Li Yuguo's feet, scooping up the bits of silver with both hands.
"Tell me," said Li Yuguo, looking down at them, "how many people are there inside?"
He did not want to waste his energy for no reason.
One of them—a big one with a gap in his teeth—stuffed his share into the waist of his trousers and looked up and smiled. It was an apologetic, hopeful, cringing smile.
"Master," he said, "our boss is inside, in the courtyard. You can go right in. The farm folk are in there too, locked up in the pens. But don't worry—nobody's dead. Nobody's even hurt bad. They're all people of Nalan City, after all. Our boss doesn't dare do anything to them. If we provoked the Tigress of Nalan City—" he shuddered "—our little water village would just be wiped off the river."
The Tigress.
"Yes," said Li Yuguo, half to himself. "She is indeed a tigress."
He thought of Nalan Meng. Of her face in the war council, cold as a blade. Of the whip at her hip. Of the way grown men in this city went pale and stepped back when her name came up, as if it were the name of a disease. She was fierce. Sometimes terribly so.
And then, unbidden, another picture slid in on top of the first. That same tigress, whom every bandit on this river was afraid of, standing every night under the red lanterns of Heaven Lust in a scrap of black string and silk he had sold to Shi Dacheng himself. Half naked. Carrying trays. Bending over strangers' tables.
He felt his face go hot, and pushed it away.
"Do you want to make money?" he asked.
He asked it loudly, of the whole gate. The five on their knees looked up. And from along the bank and down from the balconies and out from between the boats, other men began to drift over—the ones from the patrol who had run, and ones who had not gotten any silver, and ones who had only heard there was silver—until there was a small crowd of them, thin and dirty and sunburnt, standing around him in a ring.
"Of course we want money," said one of them. A hollow-cheeked man with a crooked jaw. He said it with a kind of tired bitterness. "Our boss gives us a steamed bun a day. One. That's it. He doesn't give us any money at all. Look at us." He held out his arms. They were like sticks. "Look how thin everyone is. We became water thieves to fill our mouths. That's all. We didn't do it for anything else."
"All right," said Li Yuguo. "Then from now on, you follow me. Every one of you gets a bucket of flour a day."
There was a silence.
A bucket of flour. If you mixed it yourself, with a little water and salt, a bucket of flour made four big steamed buns. Four. Every day. For men who had been living on one.
Every man in that ring was stunned.
They did not answer. They only stood there with their mouths open.
Li Yuguo raised an eyebrow. "Not satisfied? Fine. If you do well, there'll be some money every month on top of it."
That broke them.
More than a dozen men went down on their knees at once, all around him, in the dust. They knocked their foreheads on the ground. And then, all together, in one voice, they roared:
"DAD!"
So Li Yuguo walked into the water village with a large crowd of new "sons" at his back.
The courtyard was in the middle of the stockade, a square of beaten earth roofed over with old sail-cloth, open to the river on one side where the bridge began. Pens of split bamboo had been built along the back wall, and they were crowded with people—his people, the young men and women from the fields, sitting on the ground with their hands tied, looking up at the commotion with frightened eyes.
And in the middle of the courtyard, on a carved chair that had obviously been stolen from somewhere much richer, a big man sat with his legs crossed, eating fruit.
He saw the crowd coming in and stood up, grinning, and spat out a pit.
"Ha! Well done! So you've all caught him, have you? Good, good—tonight, everybody gets half a bowl of wine!"
Li Yuguo put his hands on his hips and looked up.
Up in the shadows of the roof beams, crouched on a crossbar right over the big man's head, was a pair of worn boots. The King of Thieves. Already there. Already waiting. One hand resting loose on his knee, and around the fingers of that hand, something thin and bright, curling like a ribbon.
Li Yuguo shook his head at him. Very slightly.
When the King of Thieves moved, people died. That was simply the truth of him; he did not know how to do it any other way. And the water bandits here were hateful, yes—they had stolen, and beaten old men, and starved their own—but they had not yet come to the point where they had to be killed.
The King of Thieves understood at once. He nodded down at Li Yuguo, and settled back on his beam, and watched in silence.
"Why haven't you tied him up?" The big man was frowning now, looking around at his men, who were all standing behind the stranger instead of in front of him. "What are you all doing? Tie him up! And then send him to Nalan City for the reward—he's worth a ticket, that one!"
"Oh?" said Li Yuguo. "It looks like I'm wanted. Excuse me—how much am I worth?"
The big man came over.
He was holding a coil of hemp rope in one hand. He was enormous—more than two meters tall, half a head taller than anyone else in the courtyard, with shoulders like a water buffalo's and arms as thick as Li Yuguo's thighs, scarred all over and knotted with muscle. He was the only man in the whole village who was not thin. He looked very, very strong.
"Not much," he said, looking down. "Five hundred taels of silver."
"Five hundred taels," said Li Yuguo, thoughtfully. "Then help me find out who's paying it. Who wants me."
He snapped his fingers.
Five big pieces of silver appeared in the air in front of him and dropped into his palm, one on top of another, heavy and gleaming. Proper ingots, the size of a child's fist, each one stamped with the square seal of the government mint. Each one worth exactly one hundred taels.
Every man in that courtyard went silent at the sight of them.
Even the people in the pens stopped murmuring. The only sound was the river, sliding past under the bridge.
The big man looked at the silver for a long moment. His jaw worked. His eyes went to it, and away, and back, the way a hungry dog's eyes go to meat. And then he gritted his teeth so hard that Li Yuguo heard them creak.
"Since I promised that man," he said, "I won't break my word. Even if you gave me five thousand taels of silver, I wouldn't betray him." He threw the rope down on the earth between them. "That's the rule of the road!"
Discussion
Comments (0)