The Eleventh Tiger (28 page)

He looked at the guard. ‘Return her to her room.’

The guard steered Barbara back through the kitchens towards the store room, the keys to its door jingling in his hand. It occurred to Barbara that he would not be expecting a white woman - or any woman, probably - to overpower him.

He would have to at least partly turn his back to unlock the door, and perhaps she would have a chance to do something then.

They reached the door and the guard made Vicki step further back into the room before he opened it. He never expected Barbara to reach forward and pull the sword from his belt. He reached for a dagger, opening his mouth to raise the alarm, but Barbara swung the blade as best she could.

The flat of the blade smacked against his ear and he dropped before he could shout. Barbara pushed the door open. ‘Come on,’ she urged Vicki.

Delighted at Barbara’s ingenuity, Vicki could barely contain her excitement as she ran through the door. Still holding the sword, Barbara led her towards what Vicki hoped was a supply entrance to the kitchen.

As they emerged out on to the terraces, Vicki heard a shout from the kitchen. Either the guard had woken up or another one had found him.

‘Run,’ Barbara told her, tossing the sword aside.

Both women dashed to opposite sides of the terrace. Vicki hoped the guards would follow her and allow Barbara to get away, but she knew Barbara would be hoping the reverse.

She heard a scream from behind her, and Barbara’s voice shouting ‘Keep going!’ Vicki didn’t dare stop to look round, but from fear of Barbara’s sharp tongue rather than the guards. She bolted for the town, and quickly lost herself in the rubble.

She could hear guards moving around, their armour and weapons rattling, and tried to be quiet now that she was out of their sight. She had no idea where she was, but hoped that if she could reach the river a boat might perhaps carry her downstream to Guangzhou.

Qin was furious when the guards dragged Barbara to him as he stood on the hillside. Her head was still ringing from where one of them had backhanded her.

‘This is how you “help” me?’ he snarled. ‘Poisonous viper!

You had best pray to whatever barbarian gods you worship that Ian kills Chesterton, because if he does not I will slake my thirst for vengeance with your head!’

‘I can help you,’ Barbara insisted, knowing it was a lost cause. ‘There’s another possibility.’

She felt guilty for what she was about to say. If the abbot really was mentally ill she would only compound the problem. However, she had seen enough strangeness on her travels to entertain the possibility that what he was saying was true, in which case her theory might also be true.

‘Perhaps what you’ve told me is completely true, all of it.

Then, what if the recording of your mind was somehow changed? Edited to remove unnecessary or undesirable elements.’

‘By whom?’

‘I don’t know. Who says it had to have been by anyone?

Perhaps it just didn’t work properly, and only part of what Qin was actually survived. Don’t you see what I’m getting at?’

Barbara didn’t want to shout, but she could feel her voice rising and tried to stifle it. ‘Even if what you’re saying is true, you can’t be the original Qin. You’re a copy of his mind and memories. Even Qin’s dynasty died with his son.’

Qin reeled as if struck. ‘I had a son...?’

‘Qin Shi Huangdi would have remembered that, surely?’

‘I am he!’ Qin roared. Thirty-odd years of blood and fire tingled in his nostrils. He heard the screams of the executed and cheers of the honoured. He could see the battlefields he had fought on as clearly as if he was still standing on them.

He could hear the cheers that had greeted his ascension to the throne of a unified China as if the trees around him were shouting their triumph.

He knew he’d had women, but why couldn’t he see their faces in his mind? He couldn’t remember the name of any woman from his palace at Xianyang, yet he knew the names of every one of the Eight Thousand who had accompanied him on that last, glorious campaign.

The birth of a son and heir would have been a momentous event, but he remembered no such occasion. So why did this Bar-Bara insist there had been one? To catch him out? Prove to him that he was just a deluded old abbot who imagined himself to be the unifier of China?

The most frightening thing was the thought that she might be right. What if he, Qin Shi Huangdi, was really dead and gone to dust long ago, cheated of the eternal rulership that was his divine right? What if he was just an old monk who’d been hit on the head once too often?

Qin sank to the floor, pulling his knees up and huddling around them. If he could make himself small enough he could hide from that fear.

The lights blazed on behind his face.

‘Yes,’ something boomed, and Barbara realised her mistake

- if the abbot was possessed by Qin, then Qin was also possessed by something else!

Terrified beyond words, she was dragged back to the store room.

With no boats usable, Vicki had slipped into the water and hung on to a log that was floating downstream. She hoped it would give her cover from any watching guards as well as keep her afloat.

Her plan had worked well enough, but she hadn’t counted on soon foiling asleep in the water. She coughed herself awake, vomiting up muddy river water as something pulled at her arms and pressed on her back. She screamed, thinking a guard had caught her. A grubby but strong hand pressed against her mouth to silence her as she was rolled over.

‘It’s all right, I’m a friend!’

The speaker was a short, middle-aged man whose grey-veined hair was too unkempt to be called a queue. It was more of a Gordian knot.

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘I came from Po Chi Lam. Wong-sifu and your friend the Doctor sent me.’

‘And who exactly are you?’

He smiled and puffed himself up as if he were a VIP in full evening dress. ‘My name is Soh Hut Yi. Most of my peers call me Beggar Soh.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ Vicki said in spite of herself. ‘Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.’

The man merely grinned, a yellowed wall of teeth. ‘I bet you can.’

He held out a grimy flask that looked like something that had originally belonged inside an animal. ‘Want a drink?’ He unstopped the flask, letting out something that smelt like used reactor coolant from a spaceship.

‘No thanks,’ Vicki said politely. ‘I’m... trying to give it up.’

‘Oh. That’s probably wise,’ the man said, and guzzled the contents in one go without any apparent effect. He tossed the flask aside and clapped his hands together. ‘Well now,’ he said with a grin, ‘I suppose we should get you back to Po Chi Lam, shouldn’t we?’ His eyes sparkled conspiratorially.

Vicki knew she should be delighted to be back at Po Chi Lam and with the Doctor and Ian again, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t get over the feeling that she had been wrong to leave Barbara. She felt sure Ian was hating her for not staying, or not managing to rescue Barbara from that awful place.

The Doctor and Ian both acted as if it was all right, of course. They smiled and said nice things about her bravery, and insisted that she had done the right thing, but they were only words. She was sure she had let the side down.

‘But if you escaped,’ she imagined she heard Ian thinking,

‘then where’s Barbara?’

Vicki looked at his pretend-happy face, and wished someone would call her away so that she wouldn’t have to say anything. She took a sip of water, suddenly needing to wet her lips. ‘Barbara thinks she can help the abbot get better. She thinks he might be just mentally ill.’

Ian blinked and his eyes were unfocused for an instant, as if he had taken a punch. ‘That’s our Barbara, all right.’

‘This is most unfortunate,’ the Doctor said. He stepped out into the courtyard and looked up into the heavens. He looked haunted for a moment. ‘Most unfortunate.’

‘Whether he’s just mentally ill or something more,’ Ian said,

‘we can’t just leave Barbara to him. Who knows what he might be doing with - or to - her.’

‘And what do you suggest?’ the Doctor asked.

‘That we mount some sort of rescue mission.’

‘That would be incredibly dangerous,’ Beggar Soh warned.

‘As a matter of fact, almost suicidal.’

‘I’ve risked my life for Barbara before.’

‘Oh, Ian, I don’t know,’ Vicki said. ‘I think we should rescue her, but we probably need the army. Something was definitely strange about that abbot.’

She didn’t think it was anything as mundane as insanity.

She knew there were illnesses, even in her own time, that caused the sufferer to hallucinate or to generate other personalities, some of which might be those of historical, mythical or fictional characters. She had never heard of glowing eyes being symptoms of such an illness.

Aliens, she thought. Either the abbot and his ‘generals’

must be aliens posing as humans, or they must be in the thrall of some kind of parasitic being that had taken control of their bodies. She had heard stories from her father, and other people on the ship to Astra, about creatures that could do that.

She shivered. Neither possibility was particularly pleasant.

‘Then let’s get the army. We have to rescue Barbara!’ Ian said. He looked around for a weapon, or a disguise that would get him into wherever she was being held.

‘We will rescue her, Chesterton,’ the Doctor told him. ‘We will. But you can’t just rush off and fight your way in.’

‘I can slip in. Disguise myself...’

‘I see, and can you disguise your face as that of a Chinaman?’

This stopped Ian in his tracks.

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ll go,’ Fei-Hung said. Ian looked at him in surprise.

Behind the young man his father sported a momentary smile of pride.

‘I can’t ask you to fight my battles for me.’

‘There is no “my” battle,’ Fei-Hung said quietly. ‘There is only right and wrong. And that battle is everyone’s.’

Ian felt a momentary swell of thanks, and a general pride in humanity. ‘Thank you, Fei-Hung. I can’t say enough to thank you for even thinking that.’

‘We’ll all go,’ Kei-Ying said suddenly. ‘Tham, Iron Bridge, Beggar Soh, all of us.’

The Doctor nodded his agreement. ‘And Major Chesterton will want to be involved. I will speak to him and see if I can borrow some of his men. That will take time, so I suggest that you,’ he indicated Fei-Hung, ‘act purely as a scout. Check out the lay of the land and see if Barbara is still there.’

‘The Doctor is right,’ Kei-Ying said. ‘You scout ahead and we will follow.’

Fei-Hung nodded. ‘Yes, Father.’

Beggar Soh interlocked his fingers and looked out from under his brows at Fei-Hung. ‘It seems we have a Tiger Cub,’

he grinned.

Fei-Hung walked out of Po Chi Lam on what might be his last night on Earth. He knew he was probably overdramatising the situation, but tomorrow he would undertake a journey as a compatriot of not just the Black Flag or the Guangzhou militia, but also of the Ten Tigers of Guangdong - or three of them, at least.

He found himself outside Miss Law’s window without consciously realising that this was where he was going. He tapped on the window quietly so as not to disturb her parents. After a moment she opened it, and let him in to her small fruit-scented bedroom.

‘Fei-Hung.’ She hugged him. He inhaled the scent of her hair, freshly washed but not perfumed. It was natural and pleasant.

‘I wanted to see you tonight,’ he said. He wanted to continue, to tell her that she might never see him again, but the words caught in his chest.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. ‘Is it your father?’

‘No. I... I have something to do. Something dangerous.’

He didn’t want to say any more. Barbara’s face floated into his vision, wracked with sobs and angry tears as it had been when her beloved was fallen. He closed his eyes as he embraced Miss Law, and Barbara’s face became hers, weeping and lamenting for him.

‘Whatever it is,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘you know I will believe it right.’

He swallowed hard, trying not to imagine the pain she would have in her heart, or the all-encompassing numbness that would freeze her mind if she saw him dead or crippled.

He didn’t want to go. What sort of lover could put his beloved through such a trauma?

He pulled slightly away from her, so that he could look at her. ‘I can’t go.’

She touched his face. ‘You’re afraid.’

Fei-Hung shook his head. ‘I’m not afraid of anyone. It’s just-’

‘You’re afraid of hurting me. Or upsetting me.’ She held his gaze. ‘Tell me honestly, Fei-Hung. Is what you’re going to do dangerous?’

‘Perhaps.’ In truth, he didn’t know, but he could guess.

‘Probably. I’m not afraid of death or injury, but I can’t put you through the emotions that you would feel if either of those things happened. I’ve seen it on the face of a friend of my father’s when her man was beaten and broken, and I would rather not have such a look in your eyes, whether I was there to see it or not. It would be as if I was attacking you.’

She held him tighter, and the sound of her breath next to his ear was as natural and soothing as the surf on a beach, or the passage of a bird’s wing through the air.