In the Balance (22 page)

A squadron of devils tramped down the main street of the prison camp. Like everyone else who saw them, Liu Han bowed low. No one knew what would happen if the little scaled devils were denied all the outward trappings of respect their captives could give. No one, least of all Liu Han, wanted to find out.

When the devils were gone, a man came up to Liu Han and said something. She shook her head. “I am sorry, but I do not understand your dialect,” she said. He must not have been able to follow hers, either, for he grinned, spread his hands, and walked away.

She sighed. Hardly anyone here spoke her dialect, save the few villagers taken with her. The scaly devils threw people from all over China together in their camps; they either did not know or did not care about the differences among them. For the educated few, those who could read and write, the lack of a common dialect mattered little. They spoke together with brush and paper, since they all used the same characters.

Such was the ignorance of the demons that they had even put Japanese in the camp. No Japanese were left any more. Some had slain themselves in despair at being captured. Those whose despair was less deep died anyhow, one by one. Liu Han did not know just how they’d met their ends. So long as they were dead, and the little devils none the wiser, she was satisfied.

Two streets over from the one the devils most regularly patrolled, a market had sprung up. People landed in camp with no more than what they had on their backs, but they soon started trading that—no reason for a man with a gold ring or a woman whose purse had been full of coins to do without. Inside days, too, chickens and even piglets had made their appearance, to supplement the rice the devils doled out.

A bald man with a wispy mustache sat on the ground, his straw hat upside down in front of him. In it nestled three fine eggs. Seeing Liu Han looking at them, he nodded and spoke to her. When he saw she did not follow him, he tried another dialect, then another. Finally he reached one she could also grasp: “What you give for these?”

Sometimes even understanding did not help. “I am sorry,” she said. “I have nothing to give.”

Back in her own village, it would have been the start of a haggle with which to while away most of a morning. Here, she thought, it was nothing but truth. Her husband, her child, dead at the hands of the Japanese. Her village, devastated first by the eastern barbarians and then by the devils in their dragonfly planes—and now gone forever.

The man with the eggs cocked his head to one side, smiled a bland merchant’s smile up at her. He said, “Pretty woman never have
nothing
to give. You want eggs, maybe you let me see your body for them?”

“No,” Liu Han said shortly, and walked away. The bald man laughed as she turned her back. He was not the first in the market who had asked her for that kind of payment.

She went back to the tent she shared with Yi Min. The apothecary was becoming an important man in the prison camp. Little scaly devils often visited him, to learn written Chinese and the dialects he spoke. Sometimes he made suggestions to them about the proper way to do things. They very often listened—that was what made him important. If he wanted eggs, he had influence to trade for them.

All the same, Liu Han sometimes wished she had moved in with the other prisoners from her village, or with people she’d never seen before. But she and he had come here in the belly of the same dragon plane, he had been a speck of the familiar in a vast strange ocean—and so she had agreed. He’d been diffident when he asked her. He wasn’t diffident anymore.

She lifted the tent flap. A startled hiss greeted her. She bowed almost double. “I am very sorry, lord devil, sir. I did not mean to disturb you,” she said rapidly.

Too rapidly. The demon turned back to Yi Min, from whose words she had distracted it. “She say—what?” it asked in abominably accented Chinese.

“She apologizes—says she is sorry—for bothering you.” Yi Min had to repeat it a couple of times before the little devil understood. Then he made a noise like a boiling pot. “Is that how to say the same thing in your language?” he asked, switching back to Chinese once more.

The scaly devil hissed back at him. The language lesson went on for some time, with both Yi Min and the devil ignoring Liu Han as completely as if she’d been the sleeping mat on which they squatted. Finally the little demon bubbled out, what must have been a farewell, for it got to its clawed feet and scurried out of the tent. Even in going, it brushed past Liu Han without a word in either Chinese or devil talk.

Yi Min patted the mat. With some reluctance, Liu Han sat down beside him in the place the little scaled demon had just occupied. The mat was still warm, almost hot; devils, fittingly enough, were more fiery creatures than human beings.

Yi Min was in an expansive mood. “I shall be rich,” he chortled. “The Race—”

“The what?” Liu Han asked.

“The, Race. It is what the devils call themselves. They will need men to serve them, to be their viceroys, men who can teach them the way real people
talk and also learn their ugly language. It is difficult, but Ssofeg—the devil who was just here—says I pick it up more quickly than anyone else in this whole camp. I will learn, and help the devils, and become a great man. You were wise to stick by me, Liu Han, truly wise.”

He turned to her and kissed her. She did not respond, but he hardly noticed; his tongue pushed its way into her mouth. She tried to fend him off. His greater weight overbore her, pressed her down to the mat. Already he was tugging at her tunic. She sighed and submitted, staring up at the gray fabric of the tent ceiling and hoping he would finish soon.

He thought he was a good lover. He did everything a good lover should, caressing her, putting his face between her legs. But Liu Han did not want either him or his attentions, and so they failed to stir her. Again, Yi Min was so full of himself that her response, or rather lack of it, did not even reach him. Had she not been there at a convenient moment, she was sure he would simply have taken himself in hand. But she was there, so he took her instead.

“Let us try the hovering butterflies today,” he said, by which he meant that he wanted her on top. She sighed again. He would not even give her the chance just to lie there limply. Once more she wished the scaly devils had herded someone else into the dragonfly plane with her. She did not know why she’d yielded the first time he forced himself on her, save that he was the last link she had to the vanished life she was used to. Having yielded once, saying no became more nearly impossible every time afterward.

Looking in every direction but at his flushed, rather greasy face, she straddled him, lowered herself. He filled her, but that was all she felt: none of the delight she had known from her husband. She moved vigorously just the same—that was the way to make it over soonest.

He was thrashing beneath her like a gaffed carp when the tent flap opened. She gasped and grabbed for her cotton trousers at the same moment that Yi Min, oblivious as usual to everything not himself, groaned with his final pleasure.

Liu Han wanted to die. How could she show her face anywhere in camp now that her body had been seen in truth? She felt like killing Yi Min for piling such humiliation on her shoulders. Maybe tonight, after he fell asleep—

The hiss from the entranceway brought her out of her dark fantasy and back to the present. That wasn’t a person there seeing her shame, it was a little scaly devil. As she rolled off Yi Min and away, as she scrambled into trousers and tunic, she wondered if that was better or worse. Better, she supposed—a person would surely gossip about her, while a scaly devil might not.

The devil hissed and sputtered in his own devils’ language, then tried to speak Chinese: “What you do?”

“We were enjoying the moment of Clouds and Rain, mighty lord devil Ssofeg,” Yi Min answered, as coolly as if he’d said,
We were having a cup of green tea
. “I did not expect you back so soon.” Much more slowly than Liu Han had, he began to put his clothes back on.

“Clouds and Rain? Not understand,” the little devil named Ssofeg said. Liu Han could scarcely understand it.

“As well expect to trap the moon in a mirror as poetry from a little devil, it would seem,” Yi Min said in a low, rapid aside to Liu Han. He turned back to Ssofeg. “I am very sorry, mighty lord devil. I shall speak plain words for you: we were making love, doing what makes a baby, mating, balling, screwing, flicking. Do any of those make sense to you?”

Wanting as she did to find all things about Yi Min odious, Liu Han had to notice he was good at using simple words, and at using a whole cluster of them in the hope that the devil might grasp at least one.

Ssofeg did, too. “Make baby?” he echoed.

“Yes, that’s right,” Yi Min said enthusiastically. He smiled abroad, artificial smile and made extravagant gestures to show how pleased he was.

The little scaly devil tried to speak more Chinese, but words failed it. It switched to its own language. Now Yi Min was the one who had to grope for meanings. Ssofeg had patience, too, speaking slowly and simply as the apothecary had before. At one point, it aimed a clawed finger at Liu Han. She flinched back in alarm, but the scaly devil seemed just to be asking a question.

After a while, Yi Min asked a question or two in return. Ssofeg answered with a couple of short words. Without warning, Yi Min brayed laughter. “Do you know what this stupid turtle thinks?” he managed to wheeze out between guffaws. “Can you guess? You would never guess, not in a thousand years.”

“Tell me, then,” Liu Han said, afraid the joke would turn on her.

But it did not. Yi Min said, “The little scaly devil wanted to know if it was your breeding season, if you came into heat at a certain time of the year like a vixen or a ewe. If I understand him rightly, that is how his kind’s females are made, and when they are not in season, he can feel no desire himself.” The apothecary laughed again, harder than ever. “Poor, poor devil!”

“That is strange,” Liu Han admitted. She had never given any thought to the little scaly devils’ love lives; they were so ugly, she hadn’t thought of their having any. Now, almost against her will, she found herself smiling. “Poor devils.”

Yi Min gave his attention back to Ssofeg. He mixed Chinese and the devils’ language to get across the idea that women could be receptive at any
time. Ssofeg hissed and squeaked. So did Yi Min. Then, in Chinese, he said, “I give you oath, master devil, that I tell you the truth here.”

Ssofeg squeaked again before it—no,
he
, Liu Han thought—tried Chinese again, too: “True all woman? Not just”—he pointed at Liu Han—“woman here?”

“True for all women,” Yi Min agreed solemnly, though Liu Han saw the glint of laughter still in his eye. To make sure, his own sex was not demeaned, he added, “It is also true that men—human men—have no fixed mating season, but can mate with women at any time of the year.”

That started Ssofeg making cooking noises again. Instead of asking more foolish questions, the little scaly devil whirled and scampered out of the tent. Liu Han heard his clawed feet pattering away at a dead run. She said, “I’m glad he’s gone.”

“So am I,” Yi Min said. “It lets me think—how can I best turn to my advantage this strange and sorrowful weakness of the scaly devils? If they were proper men, I could sell them proper medicine to strengthen their peerless pillars. But if I correctly follow Ssofeg, without devil females he and his brethren might as well be so many eunuchs—though even eunuchs have desires, they say. Hmm …”

Not five minutes after his
yang
essence had mingled with Liu Han’s
yin
, he might as well have forgotten she remained in the tent. To Yi Min, Yi Min was all that truly mattered, with everyone and everything else to be rearranged at his whim for his convenience. Now he sat cross-legged on the mat, his eyes almost closed, feverishly planning how to turn the devils’ debility into money or influence for him.

All at once, he let out a cry nearly as intense as the one he’d made when he spent himself inside her. “I have it!” he exclaimed. “I will—”

Liu Han never found out what Yi Min’s latest scheme was. Before he could announce it, Ssofeg burst back into the tent. Three more little scaly devils were right behind him, all of them carrying guns. Liu Han’s bowels turned to water. Now Yi Min bleated like a sheep facing the butcher’s cleaver. “Mercy, kind devil!” he wailed.

Ssofeg pointed outside, then to Yi Min. “You come,” he said in Chinese. Yi Min was so frightened, he had trouble getting to his feet. He stumbled out of the tent on stiff, numb legs. Two of the armed devils flanked him as he went.

Liu Han gaped at Ssofeg. At a stroke, the little devil had given her what she wanted most—freedom from Yi Min. And if he was gone, then she’d have this fine tent to herself. She felt like kissing Ssofeg. If he hadn’t had a mouthful of sharp teeth and one armed retainer still standing by him, she might have done it.

Then the devil pointed at her. “Too come you,” he said.

“Me?” Her sudden hopes crashed down. “Oh, no, kind devil, you don’t want me, you don’t need me, I am just a poor woman who knows not a thing in all the world.” She knew she was talking too fast for the ignorant little devil to understand, but the words poured out of her like the sweat that all at once began to pour from her armpits.

Ssofeg paid no more attention to what she wanted than Yi Min had when he undressed her and satisfied his own urges. “Too come you, woman,” he said. The scaly devil behind him moved his gun so it bore on her. The devils were not in the habit of taking no for an answer. Moaning, she followed Yi Min out into the street.

People stared and pointed and exclaimed as the little devils marched her along behind the apothecary. She understood a couple of their remarks: “Ee, that doesn’t look good!” “I wonder what they did?” Liu Han wondered what she’d done, too, aside from being foolish enough to let, Yi Min take advantage of her. And why should the scaly devils care about that?

No one did anything more than stare and exclaim. The devils were little, but they were powerful. The three with guns could kill many Chinese by themselves, and even if they were somehow overwhelmed, the rest of the scaly devils would flay the prison camp with fire from their dragonfly planes. Liu Han had seen what such fire did to the Japanese in her village, and they had had arms to fight back. The people in the camp were utterly defenseless against assault from the air.