The Year of Rice and Salt

The executioner and the caped priest then turned to Butterfly, who was tugging uselessly to get away. Kheim pulled his pistol free of the blanket and checked the flint, then aimed it with both hands at the executioner god. He shouted something, then held his breath. The guards were moving towards him, the executioner had looked his way. Kheim pulled the trigger and the pistol boomed and blossomed smoke, knocking Kheim two steps back. The executioner god flew backwards and skidded over a patch of snow, bleeding copiously from the throat. The gold knife fell from his opened hand.

All the onlookers stared at the executioner god, stunned; they didn't know what had happened.

Kheim kept the pistol pointed at them, while he rooted in his belt bag for charge, plunger, ball, wad. He reloaded the pistol right in front of them, shouting sharply once or twice, which made them jump.

Pistol reloaded, he aimed it at the guards, who fell back. Some kneeled, others stumbled away. He could see I Chen and his sailors toiling up the snow of the last slope. The caped priest said something, and Kheim aimed his pistol carefully at him and shot.

Again the loud bang of the explosion, like thunder in the car, and the plume of white smoke jetting out. The caped priest flew back as if struck by a giant invisible fist, tumbled down and lay writhing in the snow, his cape stained with blood.

Kheim strode through the smoke to Butterfly. He lifted her away from her captors, who quivered as if paralysed. He carried her in his arms down the trail. She was only semi conscious; very possibly the tea had been drugged.

He came to I Chen, who was huffing and puffing at the head of a gang of their sailors, all armed with flintlocks, a pistol and musket for each. 'Back to the ships,' Kheim ordered. 'Shoot any that get in the way.'

Going down the mountain was tremendously easier than going up had been, indeed it was a danger in that it felt so easy, while at the same time they were still light headed and half blinded, and so tired that they tended to slip, and more and more as it warmed and the snow softened and smashed under their feet. Carrying Butterfly, Kheim had his view of his footing obscured as well, and he slipped often, sometimes heavily. But two of his men walked at his sides when it was possible, holding him up by the elbows when he slipped, and despite all they made good time.

Crowds of people gathered each time they approached one of the high villages, and Kheim then gave over Butterfly to the men, so that he could hold the pistol aloft for all to see. If the crowds got in their way, he shot the man with the biggest headdress. The boom of the shot appeared to frighten the onlookers even more than the sudden collapse and bloody death of their priests and headmen, and Kheim thought it was probably a system in which local leaders were frequently executed for one thing or another by the guards of the Emperor.

In any case, the people they passed seemed paralysed mostly by the Chinese command of sound. Claps of thunder, accompanied by instant death, as in a lightning strike – that must have happened often enough in these exposed mountains to give them an idea of what the Chinese had mastered. Lightning in a tube.

Eventually Kheim gave Butterfly to his men, and marched down heavily at their head, reloading his gun and firing at any crowd close enough to hit, feeling a strange exultation rise in him, a terrible power over these ignorant primitives who could be awed to paralysis by a gun.

He was their executioner god made real, and he passed through them as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut.

He stopped his crew late in the day, to seize food from a village and eat it, then continued down again until nightfall. They took refuge in a storage building, a big stone walled wooden roofed barn, stuffed to the rafters with cloth, grain and gold. The men would have killed themselves carrying gold on their backs, but Kheim restricted them to one item apiece, either jewellery or a single disc ingot. 'We'll all come back some day,' he told them, I and end up richer than the Emperor.' He chose for himself a hummingbird moth figured in gold.

Though exhausted, he found it hard to lie down, or even to stop walking. After a nightmare interval, sitting half asleep by Butterfly's side, he woke them all before dawn and began the march downhill again, their guns all loaded and ready.

As they descended to the coast it became apparent that runners had passed them in the night, and warned the locals below of the disaster on the summit. A fighting force of men held the crossroads just above the great coastal city, shouting to the beat of drums, brandishing clubs, shields, spears and pikes. The descending Chinese were obviously outnumbered, the fifty men I Chen had brought approaching some four or five hundred local warriors.