The Journeyer

Bayan grunted a command, and we slithered down the hill the way we had come. At the bottom, he gave orders to the waiting men:

“The real army should be about forty or fifty li behind us, and also preparing to stop for the night. Six of you start riding toward it, this instant. One of you pull off to the trailside every ten li, and wait there, so your horses will be fresh tomorrow. The sixth rider should reach there before sunrise. Tell the sardars not to start marching again. Tell them to wait where they are, lest the dust of their march be visible from here, and spoil all our plans. If all goes as planned tomorrow, I will send Captain Toba riding next and riding hard, and you will rush the word on in relays to the tuk. The word will be for the sardars to bring the whole army on, at a stretch-out gallop, to do the mopping up of any remnants of the enemy that might be left alive in this valley. If things go wrong here, well … I will send Captain Toba with different orders to impart. Now go. Ride.”

The six men left, leading their horses until they should be well out of hearing. Bayan turned to the rest of us.

“Let us eat a little and sleep a little. We must be watching from the hilltop before first light.”

2

AND we were there: the Orlok Bayan and his accompanying officers, the Wang Ukuruji, myself, Captain Toba and the remaining two men of his troop. The others were each carrying a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and Bayan—ready for combat, not parade—was toothless. I, since I had the unwieldy flag-lance to handle, had no other weapon but my belt knife. We lay in the grass and watched as the scene before us slowly became visible. The morning would have to be well advanced before the sun would show itself above the mountaintops, but its rise lightened the cloudless blue sky, and that light gradually reflected down into the black bowl of the valley, and it sucked a mist up off the river. At first, that was the only movement we could see, a milky luminescence drifting against the blackness. But then the valley assumed shape and color: misty blue at its mountain edges, dark green of forests, paler green of the grass and undergrowth in the clearings, silver glitter of the river as the obscuring mist evaporated. With shape and color came movement also: the horse herd began to stir and mill a little, and we could hear an occasional distant whicker and neigh. Then the women of the bok began to arise from their bedrolls and move about, blowing the banked camp fires into flame and setting water to heat for cha—we heard the distant clink of kettles—before waking the menfolk.

The Yi had often enough, by now, watched that camp awaken to know its routine. And they chose this moment for their assault: when there was light enough for them to see their objective clearly, but only the women were astir and the men still asleep. I do not know how the Yi signaled for the attack; I saw no banner waved and heard no trumpet blown. But the Yi warriors moved all in an instant and all together, with admirable precision. One moment, we watchers were looking down an empty hill slope at the bok in the valley; we might have been at the top of an empty amphitheater, looking down the unpeopled seat-shelves at a tableau on the distant stage. The next moment, our view was blocked by the slope’s being no longer empty, as if all the amphitheater’s shelves had magically and silently sprouted a vast audience in tier upon tier. Out of the grass and weeds and bushes downhill of us, there sprang erect a taller growth—leather-armored men, each with a bow already bent and an arrow already nocked to the string. So abruptly did it happen that it seemed to me that some of them had arisen from right before my face; I fancied I could smell the half dozen nearest; and I think I was not the only one of us lurkers who did not have to repress an impulse to start up, too. But I only widened my eyes and moved my head enough to gaze about, seeing all around the valley amphitheater that suddenly visible and menacing audience, standing in thousands, in horseshoe rows and tiers—man-sized where they were near me, doll-sized farther away, insect-sized on the more distant valley slopes—all those ranks quilled and fringed and fuzzed with arrows aimed at a central point that was the stage-tableau encampment.

That had all happened in near silence, and far more quickly than it takes to tell. The next thing that happened—the first sound made by the Yi—was not a concerted, ululating battle cry, as a Mongol army would have made. The sound was only the weird, whishing, slightly whistling noise of all their arrows loosed at once, the thousands of them making all together a sort of fluttering roar, like a wind soughing along the valley. Then the sound, as it diminished away from us, was repeated, but fragmented and doubled into an overlapping noise of whish-whish-whish as the Yi, with great rapidity but no longer simultaneity, plucked from their quivers more arrows—while the first were still in flight—and nocked them and loosed them, meanwhile running full tilt toward the bok. The arrows went high against the sky and briefly darkened the blue of it, even as they dwindled in size from discernible sticks to twigs to slivers to toothpicks to whiskers, and then arced lazily over to become a dim, shady haze that drizzled down on the camp, looking no more dreadful than a gray patter of early morning rain. We watchers, being out behind and near to the archers, had seen and heard that first movement of the assault. But its targets—the standing women and horses and recumbent men in the bok—would probably have noticed nothing until the thousands of arrows began showering down and among and around and into them. No mere haze or fuzz at that extremity of their flight, the arrows were sharp-pointed and heavy and moving fast from their long fall, and many must have fallen upon flesh and struck to the bone.

And by then the ranks of the Yi nearest to the camp were running into the outskirts of it, still making no warning outcry and heedless of their own fellows’ arrows still falling, their swords and lances already flashing and stabbing and slashing. All the time, up where we were, we watched the Yi warriors still new-sprouting from our hillside and all the mountainsides around, as if the valley greenery was incessantly blooming over and over again into dark flowers that were standing archers, then shedding those and letting them run down toward the bok, then blossoming with more of them. Now there was also noise, louder than the wind-and-rain sound of the arrows— shouts of alarm and outrage and fright and pain from the people in the camp. When that noise began and surprise was no longer enjoined, the Yi also began to bellow battle cries as they ran and converged on their objective, now at last allowing themselves the yells that raise a warrior’s courage and ferocity and, he hopes, strike terror into his foe.

When all was clamor and confusion down in the valley, Bayan said, “I think now is the time, Marco Polo. The Yi are all running for the bok, and no more are springing up, and I see none held in reserve outside the combat area.”

“Now?” I said. “Are you sure, Orlok? I will be highly visible, standing here and waving a flag. It may give the Yi reason for suspicion and pause. If they do not drop me with an immediate arrow.”

“No fear,” he said. “No advancing warrior ever looks back. Get up there.”

So I clambered to my feet, expecting any moment to feel a thumping puncture of my leather cuirass, and hurriedly unfurled the silk from my lance. When nothing struck me down, I gripped the lance in both hands, raised the banner as high as I could, and began waving it from left to right and back again, the yellow shining bright in the morning light and the silk snapping briskly. I could not just wave it once or twice and then again drop prone, on the assumption that it had been seen from afar. I had to stand there until I knew that the distant engineers had seen the signal and acted on it. I was mentally calculating:

How long will it take? They must be already looking this way. Yes, they would have known where we had to come from, at the rear of the enemy. So, from their hiding places, the engineers are peering in this direction. They are scanning this end of the valley, alert for a moving dot of yellow among all the ambient greenery. Now—hui! alala! evviva!—they see the distant, tiny, wagging banner. Now they scramble back from their lookout positions to wherever they earlier secreted the brass balls. That may take them some moments. Allow a few moments for that. Very well, now they pick up their smoldering incense sticks and blow on them—if they had the good sense to have them already alight and waiting. Perhaps they did not! So now they must fumble with flint and steel and tinder … .

Allow a few more moments for that. God, but the banner was getting heavy. Very well, so now they have their tinder glowing, and now they are wheedling into flame a pile of dry leaves or something. Now they have each got a twig or an incense stick afire, and now they are bearing those over to the brass balls. Now they are touching the fire to the wicks. Now the wicks are burning and sputtering and the engineers are leaping up and running hard for safe distance … .

I wished them good luck and much distance and safe shelter, for I myself was feeling exceptionally exposed and visible and vulnerable. I seemed to have been flaunting my flag and my bravata and my person for an eternity already, and the Yi must be blind not to have spotted me. Now—how long had the Firemaster said?—a slow count of ten after the wicks were lit. I counted ten slow wags of my big, rippling yellow banner … .

Nothing happened.