The Eleventh Tiger (26 page)

Tham looked surprised. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact when I passed by Guilin last month the Taoist priests there were swamped with requests for exorcisms.’

The Doctor steepled his fingers and looked down his nose at the map. ‘Sacred sites, temples and ancient towns. I see...’

‘You do?’ Ian asked.

‘Yes, I think perhaps I do, but I can’t be certain, of course.

No, I can’t be certain.’

‘It’s just instinct, is it, Doctor?’

‘Yes, my boy, instinct.’

‘Well, if you’ve got some kind of theory, is there some way to check up on it? To be certain of it?’

‘There would be, if I had a geological map of China. I should rather like to see a layout of China’s faults. Fault lines, I mean, and rivers and iron deposits.’

The
gwailo
woman, Barbara, was sleeping. Qin remembered sleep, and not with pleasure. With the darkness had come death, each and every night. Lanterns had never held it back long enough. The worst was not falling asleep, but waking, knowing that life had paused and not knowing how or why it had started again. Being sick to the stomach with terror that the next time there might not be a waking.

The
gwailo
woman, Barbara, showed no signs of such fear.

Her face was calm and soft. The softness must hide iron, he thought, to accept that daily taste of death with such equanimity. He had, of course, never seen his own face while asleep, but couldn’t imagine anything less than a contorted rictus, desperately struggling to breathe again with the rising of the next dawn.

‘Bring her,’ he told the guard with him.

The guard opened the store-room door and pulled Barbara out. Qin had her brought to his bedchamber. The woman looked frightened, but unbowed. This was new and therefore interesting to him.

He sat on a chair and indicated for her to sit too. She sat on the floor, pointedly avoiding the large bed, which still held the scent of womanhood from the three girls he had spent the night with.

‘You don’t fear me the way my own people do,’ he said.

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I’ve met your type before.’

Such strength of will and mind. He was surprised, as he had been so often since her arrival.

‘I do not want you to fear me.’ He paused. ‘I am told you are a scholar of history. A teacher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what I looked like?’

Barbara was afraid, though the man she was afraid of was the one who was insane and believed himself to be a historical figure. She certainly wasn’t afraid of a monarch dead for two thousand years.

She had been doubly afraid when he had her brought to his bedchamber, but the fear had been knocked aside by baffle-ment when he asked his question. She didn’t understand what he meant at first.

‘Do you know what I - Qin Shi Huangdi - looked like?’

For an instant, Barbara thought she saw anguish in his expression and heard yearning in his voice.

‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m not sure. I know more about European and South American cultures... But I remember seeing a portrait of the First Emperor in a book once. He was quite a large man.’ She hesitated.

‘You mean fat.’

‘I imagine palace food for the Emperor is richer than for his subjects.’

‘Continue,
gwailo’,
he said quietly.

‘He looked severe, unforgiving. He had a longish black beard.’

The man’s fingers reached up to his own white whiskers.

‘It’s ironic,’ the abbot - Barbara didn’t know what his real name was, but it was unlikely to be Qin - said. ‘A foreigner knowing more about me than my own subjects.’ He frowned.

‘Of course, it is a spy’s job to know such things.’

‘We are not spies.’

‘Yet you come to me with fine words, trying to draw my secrets from me.’

‘You kidnapped us, remember?’ Barbara said pointedly.

‘You have friends. I wish them to do something for me.’

Barbara felt a slight relief. At least it was not lust that was driving him.

‘Then I can complete my work here.’

‘Work? Raiding towns, killing... Do you love war so much?’

she demanded. ‘Does it make you feel like a big man to raze a town, or order people to work or to fight or to die?’

‘Yes,’ he said sharply, and somehow the sharpness told Barbara that he was lying. ‘That’s the best thing in life.’

‘“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you,”‘ Barbara said. ‘“To rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” That’s what Genghis Khan said.’

The abbot left her then and walked out on to the hillside. The sun was sinking, casting a honeyed light across the dusty path and enriching the woodland shadows. If he closed his eyes he fancied he could feel the trees, as if some emanation from them was pressing against him. He could hear his people moving around, attending to their duties and serving him with their loyalty.

Something spread up from his spine and out across his shoulders, enveloping his chest. It felt like the softest fur -

sensual, warm, comforting. He vaguely remembered it from long, long ago. It was the best thing in life.

These were his woods, his trees, his country and his people. If anything other than his love for them could bring him that spreading happiness, he had yet to find it.

Kei-Ying, Iron Bridge Three and Major Chesterton pored over the military maps in Chesterton’s office. With a practical military problem to solve, Chesterton was able to push the mystery of his duplicated self to the back of his mind.

‘From what... Mr Iron Bridge has said I think it’s clear that this abbot and his followers have been coming south for a while.’

‘How can we find out where they came from?’ Kei-Ying asked.

‘We can retrace the advances of the battle lines. They may have tried to disguise their origins by flanking manoeuvres, but if we have a chronology of which places were attacked -

or persuaded to join their cause - we should be able to track them back.’

‘Good,’ Iron Bridge snapped. ‘Then let’s get on with it, shall we?’

Ian paced around the main hall at Po Chi Lam, unable to settle. If only there was something he could do, a place he could go.

‘Cheng,’ he said. ‘You met this abbot person. Can’t you tell us where?’

‘It was aboard a junk. It moves around. I don’t know where it would be now.’

‘Can’t we put the word out to these Tigers of yours and have them look for it.’

‘We’re foreign to you, not stupid, Chesterton. Of course we’ve done that.’

Ian resented Cheng’s tone, but knew it was deserved. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just...’

‘Barbara is your woman. I understand.’

‘Ha!’ the Doctor exclaimed, attracting Ian’s attention.

He looked from his sheet of calculations to a map from Kei-Ying’s study, ‘I should estimate the focal point will be there,’

he stabbed a finger on to the map, ‘somewhere in Shaanxi province.’ His lips thinned. ‘Very near to Xianyang.’

‘Focal point?’ Ian asked.

‘I’ll show you,’ the Doctor said.

Qin Shi Huangdi was the only name he knew himself by. The face that stared back at him from the mirror had undoubtedly had a different name, but he had no idea what it might be.

In the mirror he saw Zhao step into the room behind him and kneel.

‘My Lord.’ Zhao lowered his eyes to the floor, respectfully.

The muscle-bound frame that knelt no doubt also had a different name, as had the lean body of Gao. Qin wondered whether either of them had any inkling of what those names were.

‘Yes, General,’ Qin acknowledged.

‘The caravan to Xianyang is in operation, my Lord.’

‘Good. We can return there shortly.’

‘What about the
gwailo
women?’

‘Bring the tall, dark-haired one with us.’

Zhao hesitated, and Qin could feel his indecision. ‘My Lord, she is a historian and teacher. Your orders are to leave none such alive.’

Qin looked down at his hands and studied them, trying to remember whether they were similar to, or different from, the hands he used to have. ‘And she will die when I have extracted from her all that I wish to know. She comes with us.’

‘And the girl?’

‘Who?’ The image of a younger
gwailo
girl came belatedly into his mind. Another...traveller? As if it mattered whether she was living in China or just visiting. She was nothing.

‘Zhao may kill her at his leisure.’

‘It shall be done,’ the abbot knew this as certainly as if Zhao had made the promise aloud. When he turned, Zhao was already gone.

The Doctor led his little group through to a small hall in the eastern wing. The ceiling was high enough for climbing ropes to dangle from the beams. Shafts of sunlight came through what would have been upstairs windows if the hall had an upper floor.

Picking a grapefruit from a bowl in one hand, the Doctor took a delicate pen in the other and began to draw lightly on the skin of the fruit.

‘What on Earth are you doing?’ Ian asked, intrigued despite himself.

‘Arranging a little demonstration. Actions speak louder than words, eh?’

Ian couldn’t deny this. He looked over the Doctor’s shoulder and saw that he was drawing a rough outline of the Earth’s continents on the dimpled skin.

The Doctor put the grapefruit on to a low stool and positioned it near one wall. Then he pulled a couple of spare pince-nez from his pockets and popped the lenses out of their frames. He called to four young students and handed each of them a lens before sending them up the climbing ropes.

Ian watched, puzzled, as the Doctor directed the students to go up or down a little, and then to hold out the lenses in their hands. All was explained when the first lens caught the sunlight from the high window and beamed it to the other lenses and onwards. A narrow pinpoint of light glowed on the grapefruit, in the heart of the outline of China. In seconds, the skin of the fruit began to smoulder, then blacken, and a thin column of smoke rose from it.

‘A magnifying glass a few inches away would have done the same thing,’ Ian said.

‘It would, but what if you are much further away and still want to transmit focused energy to an exact spot? You require a sequence of elements between you and your target.

If you are relying on nature, the motions of the stars, to provide this sequence of elements then you are constrained by the rhythms of the universe.’

‘You mean orbital cycles?’

‘Yes, and every now and again several orbits coincide and you have a conjunction. A sequence of elements between the Earth and a most dangerous region of the cosmos.’

‘And then people there can use that sequence to transmit something to Earth?’

‘Not people, young man. Intelligences. Sentient influences.

Beings quite beyond our kind of imagination.’

‘And what would they be sending to Earth?’

‘That I don’t know, and cannot until it happens. Perhaps energy, or their discrete sentiences in person, or memes and programs. It could be anything, but whatever it is will not be a good thing for the people of your Earth.’

Kei-Ying and Iron Bridge both stabbed their fingers at the same point on the map, in central China. Chesterton, who had been about to do the same, was astonished. These men hadn’t been trained by the British army, yet they had as good a grasp of strategy as he had himself.

‘Somewhere in this vicinity, I should think,’ Iron Bridge was saying. ‘Shaanxi province.’

Kei-Ying nodded in agreement.

‘Very odd,’ Chesterton said.

Both Tigers looked at him expectantly.

‘What makes you say that?’ Kei-Ying asked.

‘If they’re some sort of rebels, why not head east, for Peking, Nanking and Shanghai? It’s a shorter journey and the juiciest targets are there.’

‘Perhaps the Doctor will know.’

That afternoon Kei-Ying returned to Po Chi Lam. He paused for a moment, feeling as if he were sinking into the arms of his beloved wife. Then he walked on to tell the Doctor his news.

‘Doctor,’ he said as he entered the main hall. ‘We’ve calculated the abbot’s region of origin. If Chesterton and I are correct, it’s -’

‘In Shaanxi province,’ the Doctor said. ‘Yes, do try to keep up, will you?’ He handed Kei-Ying his calculations and pointed to the map. ‘Xianyang.’

Kei-Ying’s eyebrows rose. ‘I have never heard of such a place.’

‘It isn’t called that any more, but that was its name the last time there was a conjunction like this one. No, today it is called Xi’an, I believe.’

‘Xi’an.’

Ian chuckled at the Doctor’s trumping of Kei-Ying. He had long since ceased to be amazed by anything the Doctor did.

At least, he told himself he had, but it was a pleasant lie, like believing in Santa Claus, and the truth was just as reassuring.

A child came up to him. ‘Mr Chesterton?’

‘Yes?’

‘There is a messenger for you, at the gate.’

‘Thanks’

Ian went outside and crossed the courtyard to the gateway.

One gate was closed, the other was in a woodworking room for repairs. A man stood on the other side of the space the missing gate would have occupied. He lowered his hood as Ian approached, revealing an angular yet handsome face, and a topknot of black hair. Ian could make out the edge of armour below his collar.