their lamas quickly stepped in and bade them obey, and even took the pains to say a hypocritical prayer giving the people special dispensation on this occasion to insult the almighty Pota.
The preparations took only a few days, while the heralds and the engineers went on ahead, and the columns moved out as soon as they were finally formed up, on a beautiful morning of bright sunshine. I must say that even that mock army made a magnificent sight and sound as it left Ba-Tang. Up front, the band of Mongol musicians led with an unearthly but blood-stirring martial music. The trumpeters sounded the great copper trumpets called karachala, which name could rightly translate as “the hellhorns.” The drummers had tremendous copper and hide drums like kettles, one slung on either side of the saddle, and they did marvels of twirling and flailing their mallets and crossing and uncrossing their arms as they hammered the thunderous beat for the march. Cymbalists clashed immense brass platters that flashed a flare of sunlight with every stunning ring of sound. Bell players beat a sort of scampanio —metal tubes of various sizes arranged in a lyre-shaped frame. Between and among the louder, blaring noises could be heard the sweeter string music of lutes made with specially short necks for playing while riding.
The music moved on and gradually diminished as it blended into the sound of the thousands of hoofs clip- clopping along behind, and the heavy rumble of wagon wheels, and the creak and jingle of armor and harness. The Bho, for once in their lives, looked not pathetic or contemptible, but as proud and disciplined and determined as if they had actually been going out to war, and on their own account. The horsemen rode rigidly upright in their saddles and facing sternly forward, except to do a very respectable eyes-right when they passed the reviewing Orlok Bayan and his sardars. As the Wang Ukuruji remarked, the decoy men and women did indeed resemble genuine Mongol warriors. They had even been persuaded to ride using the long Mongol stirrups—which enable a hard-riding bowman to stand for better aim with his arrows—instead of the short, cramped, knees-up stirrups favored by the Bho and the Drok and the Han and the Yi.
When the last column’s last rank and its rear guard of real Mongols had disappeared downriver, there was nothing for the remainder of us to do except wait and, while waiting, try to maintain, for the benefit of any putative keen-eyed watchers from afar, the illusion that Ba-Tang was an ordinary, nasty Bho city going about its ordinary, nasty Bho business. In the daytimes, our people thronged the market areas and, at twilights, gathered on rooftops as if praying. Whether we ever really were spied upon, I do not know. But if we were, our stratagem could not have been discovered by the Yi down south, for it worked exactly as planned—up to a point, anyway.
About a week after the leavetaking, one of the rear-guard Mongols came galloping to report that the decoy army had got well within Yun-nan, and was still proceeding forward, and the Yi apparently had been fooled by the imposture. Scouts, he said, had seen the scattered individual snipers in the mountains, and outpost groups of them, beginning to collect together and to move downhill like tributary streams converging to become a river. We waited some more, and in another few days another rider came galloping to report that the Yi were unmistakably massing in force behind and on both rear quarters of our mock army—that, in fact, he had had to ride most evasively to get around the gathering Yi and get out of Yun-nan with that information for us.
So now the real army rode forth, and—though it moved as discreetly as possible, with no marching music— that must have been a
So we cantered a good many li in advance of the tuk, following the river Jin-sha and the broad, trampled track beside it that was the spoor of the mock army. After only a few days of hard riding and spartan camping, the Orlok grunted, “Here we are crossing the border into Yun-nan Province.” A few days farther on, we were intercepted by a Mongol sentry, one of that army’s rear guard set to wait for us, and he led us off the river route, taking us to one side of the line of march and around a hill. At the far side of that hill, in late afternoon, we came upon eight more of the Mongol rear guard, where they had made a fireless camp. The captain of the guard respectfully invited us to dismount and share some of their cold rations of dried meat and tsampa balls.
“But first, Orlok,” he said, “you may wish to climb to the top of this hill and look over. It will give you a view down this valley of the Jin-sha, and I think you will recognize that you have come just in time.”
The captain led the way, as Bayan, Ukuruji and I all made the climb on foot. We did it rather slowly, being stiff from our long ride. Toward the top, our guide motioned for us to crouch and then to crawl, and at last we only cautiously poked our heads over the grass at the crest. We could see that it was well we had been intercepted. Had we followed the river and the tracks for a few hours more, we should have rounded the other side of this hill and entered the long but narrow valley opening before us, in which our mock army was camped. The Bho, as instructed, were behaving more like an occupying force than an invading one. They had not erected any tents, but they had camped this evening as nonchalantly as if they had been invited by the Yi to Yun-nan and were welcome there— with innumerable camp fires and torches twinkling throughout the twilit valley, and only a few guards negligently posted around the camp perimeter, and much movement and noise going on.
“We would have ridden right into the camp,” said Ukuruji.
“No, Lord Wang, you would not,” said our guide. “And I respectfully suggest that you subdue your voice.” Keeping his own voice low, the captain explained, “All down the other side of this hill are the Yi, lurking in force, and at the entrance to the valley, and on the farther slopes—in fact, everywhere between us and that camp, and beyond. You would have ridden right into their rear, and been seized. The foe are massed in a great horseshoe, around this end and both valley sides of the decoy camp. You cannot see the Yi because, like us, they have lighted no fires and they are concealed in every available cover.”
Bayan asked, “They have done so every night the army has camped?”
“Yes, Lord Orlok, and each time increasing in their numbers. But I think tonight’s camp will be the last that mock army will make. I might be wrong. But, as best I could count, today was the first day the foe have not added to their numbers. I think every fighting man in this area of Yun-nan is now congregated in this valley—a force of some fifty thousand, about equal to our own. And, if I were commanding the Yi, I should deem this rather narrow defile the perfect place to make a crushing assault on what appears to be a singularly unapprehensive invader. As I say, I might be wrong. But my warrior instinct tells me the Yi will attack at tomorrow’s dawn.”
“A good report, Captain Toba.” I think Bayan knew by name every man of his half a tuk. “And I am inclined to share your intuition. What of the engineers? Have you any idea of their disposition?”
“Alas, no, Lord Orlok. Communication with them would be impossible without revealing them to the enemy. I have had to assume and trust that they have been keeping pace along the mountain crests, and each day newly placing and readying their secret weapons.”
“Let us trust they did it this day, anyway,” said Bayan. He lifted his head enough to make a slow scan of the mountains ringing the valley.
So did I. If the Orlok was going to persist in holding me responsible for the secret weapons, it was to my best interest that the things do what I hoped they would. If they did, some fifty thousand Bho were going to perish, and about that many Yi as well. It was a considerable responsibility, indeed, for a noncombatant and a Christian. But it would mean winning the war for my chosen side, and a victory would show that God was also on our side, and that would allay any Christian qualms about wholesale slaughter. If the brass balls did not perform as warranted, the Bho would die anyway, but the Yi would not. The war would have to go on, and that might cause me some Christian pangs of conscience—killing so many people, even if they were only Bho, to no purpose at all.
But what mainly concerned me, I must confess, was the satisfaction of my curiosity. I was interested to see if the flaming-powder balls did work, and how well. Certainly, I said to myself, I could see a dozen vantage points on the mountains where, if I had been doing the placing, I would have laid the charges. Those were outcrops of bare rock, like Crusader castles towering up from the forest growth, and showing clefts and checkerings where they had been split by time or weather, and where, if they were suddenly split farther asunder, the slabs ought to topple and fall and, in falling, take other chunks of their mountains with them … .
