The Pirate Empress (74 page)

It was going the right way, but without Lao! Li shouted into the wind, body rigid at the helm as she tried by force of will to attract her son’s attention. Fong’s warship was downriver and they were heading out to sea. That creature was a sign from the gods. An omen of hope! All was not lost if only she could convince Fong to return! She ordered her men for more sail. The warship would soon reach the delta. If it found the open sea, Fong’s vessel would pick up speed. On either side of the river, the jungle was thinning. Something caught her eye and she turned to the far side, where the riverbank was caked with mud and rock like a low wall. The dark, ridged-back dragon-turtle breached the river surface before it bore into the bank like a drill. The upheaval of soil was breathtaking, as trees toppled one over the other, and the creature left the water to disappear into the ground.

“Fong! Did you see that?” Li shouted into her blowhorn. The warship had slowed. They were within hailing distance. “Did you see that?” she repeated to the grey-coated figure at the helm. She ploughed up beside him, signalling her men to cut the sails. Fong looked down at her with a small and frightened Lao beside him.

“It’s been following you, Lao,” Li said gently, addressing her son. “Ever since that night Quan and I escaped from your father’s ship. It followed us when I rescued you and brought you to the palace. It or should I say
he
, is the Black Tortoise, your namesake and your guardian. You must return with me. It is a portent, the will of the gods.”

“That was no tortoise,” Fong argued.

“Then what was it?”

Fong shook his head. “I do not know. But it is nothing like the tortoises I have fed on.”

“Of course not. Don’t you understand, Fong? The world is broken. Nothing makes sense the way we know it. Long ago, emperors ruled with dragons by their side and empresses rode upon golden phoenixes. Men of long life like yourself were protected by animal spirits. Your son’s is the Black Tortoise. It was foreseen long before his conception.” Li lowered her head. “I do not pretend to understand the prophecy. It said that the black warrior from the North, the Black Tortoise would rise against the enemy and save the Middle Kingdom from annihilation. It said that that warrior would be my son. Lao is my son, so isn’t it he who saves the world? Help us, Fong, all the world trembles on your choice.”

“I did not see this black tortoise that you speak of. I saw only a huge mound, like a whale, bore into the riverbank and vanish. How is this possible?”

“I told you. Nothing is as it was. And nothing is as it seems. You yourself have seen evidence of this from the mound of First Emperor Qin. You have seen the Magic Circle of the Fox Queen. Magic is everywhere and the demons rule it. They will continue to rule if you do not return with me.”

“I have seen the strange comings and goings. And I will not place my son in jeopardy. Long have I waited to have a son; three hundred years have I waited for the right mother to present herself. I will not lose him now. I have seen the forces that comprise that Circle. And my reason tells me that we cannot win. Our best chance is to let them fight it out amongst themselves, and we will return when the world is sane again.”

“It will never be sane under the Fox Queen’s rule. You hide only to be hunted down, rooted out and captured—and enslaved.”

“You have seen her armies, Li. We cannot win against ghosts, the undead, demons and giants. I am a man of the sea. I fight with cannon and musket, bow and blade. I cannot fight invisible enchantments.”

“You are the White Tiger,” Li argued. “A man of legend. You know better than all of us, except perhaps Master Yun, what it means to live in a world of magic and myth.”

“That is why I am telling you that the world of men will fail.”

“NO,” Li said. “Not while I still breathe. If you will not come, then give me our son. Let him make his own choice.”

“He’s a boy. He cannot choose, for he knows not what he chooses. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Without me, the Crosshairs will fail.”

“Aha!” she shouted. “
Will fail
. Are those not your words? If the Crosshairs
will
fail without you, then there is a chance that it will succeed
with
you. Admit it! There
is
a chance.”

“There is no chance, Li. You misread my words. All reason tells me we will fail.”

Li was at wits end. She could not force Fong to return if he refused. And the boy was not hers to take without his permission. But what would it matter if she returned with Lao? For without the White Tiger, there was no Crosshairs.

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All must accept Wu as emperor, if only in name. There was no time for pomp and ceremony, no time for a coronation. But Wu was merely a boy. What did he know of fighting and strategy? How could he rally the people and keep them steadfast? What could he possibly know about ruling an empire?

The Ming armies had set out at dawn, but Quan did not expect many to return by dusk. They fought south of the wall, and they would die south of the wall, unburied in the wild grasses, their corpses fresh meat for crows, their white bones left to shine under the moon. The waters of the Yellow River tributaries ran turbulent with blood, staining the brown rushes as though with ink. Quan saw it from his station atop the mound. He witnessed his first line of cavalry fight to the death, their exhausted horses whinnying in terror, pacing back and forth searching for their riders who were already dead.

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The yellow grasses along the bank were withering away. Li stood at the helm of her junk, thinking how the reeds of the river looked so much the colour of her tattered bamboo sails. She had failed to bring the White Tiger and the Black Tortoise. Now her only hope was that the Pirate King was waiting for her, and together they would sally forth and join the fight for all mortal kind.

Her thoughts were with Quan, He Zhu and Master Yun now—and the boy who would be emperor. How had that come to be? She had no will to answer it. Why did the weight of the entire world rest upon his small shoulders? Her heart sank toward despair. She thought dourly of how far away her quest had taken her, so unimaginably far. And so broken with gaps in her remembrance that she could not fill. How had she come to be a pirate, when she was a concubine, then to learn she was a princess? How had she come from the Forbidden City to the serpentine wall of the desert frontier to the water lairs of the sea gypsies? She loved Quan, and in all her exile she remembered she loved him, and for her own safety and his they were kept apart. Each night she dreamed they were together again, only to wake up to the knowledge that he was in foreign lands and she a pirate, always on the move, separated from each other: he at the wall where the withered mulberry trees defied the sharpness of the wind, and she upon the sea feeling the bite of its cold. And yet this path, her quest, was so broken. It had so many gaps in its telling that her memory lapsed intermittently and frequently.
Am I going insane? Have the gods finally taken all that is left of my sanity?

At the confluence of the Yellow River and the Grand Canal, the black flag of Mo Kuan-fu saluted her. Here, at least, was one more ally to fight an impossible war.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

The Battle of Nines

The lack of word from Li and her pirate consortium told Master Yun that there was every chance no help would come until the last desperate moment. He could not wait until then. He must have a contingency plan. A portion of the Ming Army must draw the eastern arc of the Circle toward the Forbidden City, leaving a gap by which Brigade General Chi Quan could distract the troops of the Inner Circle. Already, He Zhu was leading Zi Shicheng’s former rebels and Liao Dong’s Manchu forces to defend the city walls. Their hope was to lure the outer legions of the Circle to the east, and draw the enemy’s fire. If they succeeded at this diversion, Master Yun could slip through the channel and strike at the Fox Queen.

While Quan paced the plateau atop First Emperor’s mound, Master Yun scratched out his strategy on the hard, dry earth. The Pole winds raised yellow dust over the plain. “Quan, stop pacing. It’s making me nervous. Come here and study this plan before the wind wipes it away.”

The brigade general came to stand beside the warlock. Eight channels radiated between the troops of the Inner Circle. Which path was weakest? Quan must divert the legions of the Outer Circle, leaving only those inside protecting the Fox Queen. There was no chance of breaking the entire Inner Circle, but a crack in its rigid structure might be possible. The target was the Kui, the strange mutated man-beasts whose arms grew front-to-back. Because of this aberration they were useless as ground troops. They couldn’t use their arms for fighting and see at the same time, and so they were mounted upon the seven-headed, one-eyed Jian, who attacked from the air. On the other flank of the channel was the Tao Tie, the gruesome gargoyles seated upon the Nian. Both the lion beasts and the seven-headed birds were easier to spook, unlike the ghost warriors of the Night Guards Army.

If Quan managed to scatter the legions of Scorched Mountain and their gargoyle compatriots, Master Yun had a chance of reaching Dahlia with the Scimitar of Yongfang.

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The autumn air bit, and a dull mist swept over the vista. Off on the horizon, mountains and streams vanished before reappearing in a swirl of fog. The plains rolled away into the distance shadowed by the black armour of the Fox Queen’s marching armies. The horses of the Imperial troops whinnied anxiously. For a thousand miles, from where He Zhu stood upon the parapet of the wall, he watched the banners with the insignia of nine silver-tipped tails. Dust spiralled, mixing with the fog, and the vibrations of one hundred thousand demon warriors shook the wall. He Zhu raised a hand and the gongs thundered. Every soldier, mounted and unmounted went still. Zhu joined his generals at the frontline. The drums began to rumble.

Zi Shicheng, the former Chinese rebel, rode to the northernmost endpoint of the line, while the Manchu leader Liao Dong took the south. Zhu stayed in the center with his legion of Ming bowmen. He looked to the east for help from the sea and saw none coming. He raised his hand once more, dropped it like a bolt of lightning, and fifty thousand allied cavalry charged to meet their deaths.

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The challenge for Brigade General Chi Quan was to bait the undead from their queen. Because
Yaoquai
, the hopping corpse, and the Night Guards Army were not killable, Quan’s only hope was to lure them to the mountain and trap them there. The legend of the wall said its trajectory was written long before the first brick was laid. A great dragon had fallen from the sky. Dragons fought only for emperors and it was Master Yun’s hope that Fucanlong’s kindred would hear his plea, awaken from their slumber, and become the keepers of the captives they sent to the wall.

Oh, the irony, Quan thought. To capture the great ghost emperor, the very first emperor called Qin. His were the men who began the wall as a defense against the raiders of the north. And Quan had fallen into the same trap. Build a wall, he had urged. That will keep the barbarians out and protect the citizens. What was he thinking?
You cannot keep people in or out.
And at the end of all things, who is to say what is barbaric?

Would this wall work to hold back ghosts? It didn’t hold back men. He had linked the massive ramparts until they blocked the desert from the mountains and the mountains from the forests. And as soon as the walls were strong in the east, the hordes trampled them down and looted the west. And when the plundering ceased and the northern raiders retreated, the walls went up again. The bricklayers worked to exhaustion, from sunrise to sunset, until the sun and the moon themselves tired of watching.

But now the wall must save them.

Quan sought the sky, cloudy and wet. There were only six dragons left in the world: Fucanlong, the blue shapeshifting treasure dragon, Yinglong of the mountain, Shenlong of the rain, Tianlong
of the sun, Lilong, the hornless one of the sea, and Jiaolong
of the swamp. The king of all dragons laid buried in Hot Lake at the edge of the Red Desert where the Fox Queen had obliterated him. Yes, Master Yun had told Quan of their fate—but what of Dilong, the dragon to rule all dragons? True, he was no more. And since his devastation, all remaining dragons were diminished to sleeping kittens. But his bones had magical abilities, and Master Yun had been duped out of the fifth rib of Dilong
,
which had released the Night Guards Army.

But since things no longer follow the rules of the Cosmos, can’t the great dragon return from the dead?
Quan wondered
. He Zhu returned from the dead. And if that was possible, then anything is.
Where were the dragons? Quan looked over his shoulder as he galloped like a hundred thousand ghosts chased his soul, and saw that his fear was not unwarranted. Hordes of ghouls of all kinds pursued his troops in a flurry of acrid dust.

“Go, go, go!” he hollered to his men.

The line of Ming soldiers and their Mongol allies stormed across the plain, bringing at their rear, their imminent doom.

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The sails of the pirate consortium billowed under the deft hands of the sailors, and soon, eighteen hundred pirate junks, in single file, sailed up the Grand Canal toward Beijing. A mushroom cloud, black as ink, ballooned in the direction of the Forbidden City. Li dropped anchor and ordered all hands to arm themselves with dagger, sword, halberd and musket, any weapon they could find, and gird themselves for war. They rowed to shore en masse, weapons flashing like a school of silvery dace.

In horror, Li saw that the Imperial armies were near defeat. The strange warriors in ancient steppe rider raiment hammered the Ming forces to the western flank of the city wall. One brave commander fought two-handed with sabre and dagger when his crossbow finally failed. Li raised her halberd and charged into the battle on foot to spear a Xiongnu bowman who had his arrow aimed at the fearless swordsman.

“Sister,” Zhu said, removing his sabre from a warrior he had just stabbed, and watching the bowman fall. “You saved my life.”

“No time for that,” Li argued, though pleased with his manner of address. Quan had informed her that He Zhu, the warrior monk, was her brother.

Li fought hand to hand with another steppe rider. She laid him out with one swift stroke and moved on to the next. A female warrior with purple ribbons in her braids stepped into her path. As Li was about to end the life of an attacking bowman, they clashed blades, and Zhu suddenly leaped between them. “Alai!” he said. “That is Li.”

Alai paused for a split second. Li did also, though there was no time for dalliance or niceties. So this was Zhu’s true love, a bowmaid of the steppe.

An arrow whistled by and struck Alai in the leg. Despite violent protests, Zhu hefted the woman into his arms and into the safety of the nooked wall, while Li fended off the attacker. “No!” Alai shouted. “Don’t kill my father.”

In that instant of distraction, Li lost her focus and a dart found its way into her shoulder. She rose in spite of the stabbing pain, seized the bow from a corpse splayed on the ground and let fly an arrow into the fray, missing her assailant. Li protested when Zhu returned for her, and dragged her into the shelter of a nook in the wall to remove the dart. He insisted on tearing his shirt and bandaging her wound. “How is Alai?” she asked.

“See for yourself.” He turned to look past her.

One of the medics had bandaged Alai’s leg and she was back in the fray, slinging projectiles at her own people.

“She would kill her own for your sake, Zhu?” Li asked.

“She kills for the sake of the Taijitu,” he answered. “We are both victims of the broken Emblem of Balance. She knows as well as I do, that her people don’t belong here. And neither does she.”

“Nothing makes sense anymore, does it, Zhu? We are all victims.”

“No. It does not.” He tied the final knot to her dressing. “How does that feel? Can you fight?”

Li stretched the injured arm to collect some arrows that had bounced off the wall and landed nearby, and placed them in a quiver Zhu passed to her. The pain was nothing compared to what she had suffered at the hands of her Manchurian husband. “How will you bear to part with her?” she asked.

“Now is not the time. We are in the midst of battle.”

“But if she should die?”

Zhu stared glass-eyed at the dust and trampling hooves, the falling bodies and streams of blood. “Her people lived a thousand years ago, in the time of First Emperor’s armies. She is already dead.”

The pain on her brother’s face broke Li’s heart. “Then you’ll let her go? She won’t allow you to kill her family. She won’t kill them herself. She would not allow me to fling my blade into her father’s heart.”

“Don’t ask me these things, Li. I have no answer.”

The battle scream of the Manchus jolted Li out of her thoughts, and Zhu looked to where she stared, to where Liao Dong charged on his war steed into the churning dust. “White Bone Spirits,” Li whispered, shuddering. And those snakelike demons must be the Ba She that Master Yun had warned against. The former were shapeshifters. They must beware of their abilities; they could show up as one of them. They had mimicked her pirate sister and she had no doubt they could mimic almost anyone of their choosing.

Li racked her brains to find a solution. All creatures had a weakness. When the White Bone Spirit,
Bai Gu Jing
, chased her off the Pirate King’s junk, it had turned into a two-headed shark. The only thing she could suggest was that they were not immune to blade or arrow. They were made of flesh and blood. And so were the snake demons. They must kill them. The tens of thousands of pirates that Li had brought with her were pushing the Xiongnu back from the city walls, opening a passage for the demons. But there was one other thing she recalled. She had seen the shapeshifting
Bai Gu Jing
become many things. In human female form it was a beautiful woman, but in male form it was an ugly toadlike man, with a broad muscular body covered in lumpy warts and slug green skin. “I don’t think it can mimic an allied warrior,” she said.

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The Outer Circle was broken and scattered to the four winds. The Inner Circle was weakened, with many fewer troops. Master Yun drew the Scimitar from his robes, its bronze blade gleaming with an orange hue. Why didn’t the blade change him? He examined his feet and the hem of his robes and saw they remained the same. He had not become a Qin soldier.

“Its magic wanes,” a voice said.

Master Yun turned to see Yongfang standing beside him. “Why aren’t you leading your rebels to trap First Emperor’s ghost armies in the wall?”

“At the moment they are busy with battle. I will return. But it occurred to me that the blade would be little use to you without its power.” Yongfang bowed his ghostly head. “It will hew off the nine tails of the Fox Queen if that is your intent, but it won’t transform you, now that the Nights Guard Army is freed.”

“I was hoping to deceive the guardians of the Inner Circle,” Master Yun said. “If they thought I was one of First Emperor’s warriors they might provide access to their queen.”

“Only I can perform such a ruse, if the Fox Queen isn’t on to me yet.”

“Then you can take the Scimitar and destroy the queen yourself!”

Yongfang shook his head. “Only someone of Imperial blood can bring success.”

Master Yun sighed. “Wu is only a boy. He cannot wield such a heavy blade.”

“Then you must form the Crosshairs first.”

The device would hold the four winds at a standstill, freezing time, allowing Master Yun to walk between the soldiers forming the Fox Queen’s protective Circle. Then and only then could he slice off her tails. He stared across the plain from atop the burial mound and felt a jerk at his heart. “Yongfang, look yonder in the direction of the capital.” The sky appeared bruised by a plume of smoke as high as the ice-capped mountain of Feng Du. “I fear the battle for the Forbidden City has failed.”

“Dust, Master Yun,” the ghost warrior said. “Not fire. The city is not burning.”

“But such dust! What beings are these that create dust visible for thousands of miles?”

“Demons and giants,” Yongfang answered.

“Come then. If that is the case, we must try to reach their queen before they decide to return to her.”