The Journeyer

then, it was with a loud, slapping, moist slurp!, suggesting that the avalanches were cemented there to be the valley’s new and higher floor for all time to come. Also, at the instant of their collision, the sun bounded into view beyond the eastern mountains, but the sky was so thick with dust that its disk was discolored. The sun came up as suddenly and as brassy of hue and as blurred around the rim as if it had been a cymbal thrown up there to ring the finale to all the commotion in the valley. And, while the trailing rubble skirts of the slides continued to sweep down from the heights, the noise did indeed die down, not all at once, but with the kind of wobbling, clashing, diminishing clangor that a cymbal makes as its blur slows to stillness.

In the sudden hush—it was not a total silence, for many boulders were still thudding and bouncing down from the heights, and trees still crunching and skidding down, and patches of turf still skittering down, and unidentifiable other things still caroming about in the distance—the first words I heard were the Orlok’s:

“Ride now, Captain Toba. Fetch our army.”

The captain went back the way we had come. Bayan leisurely took out from a purse the great gleaming device of gold and porcelain that was his teeth, and forced it into his mouth, and gnashed it a few times to settle its jaws to his own. Looking now a proper Orlok, ready for his triumphal parade, he strode off down the hill in the direction we were facing. When he dimmed into the cloud of dust, the rest of us followed after him. I did not know why we were doing that, unless to gloat on the completeness of our unusual victory. But there was nothing to be seen of it, or of anything really, in that dense and stifling pall. When we had gone only as far as the bottom of the hill, I had lost sight of my companions, and only heard Bayan’s muffled voice, off to my right somewhere, saying to somebody, “The troops will be disappointed when they get here. No battlefield loot to pick over.”

The enormous cloud of dust thrown up by the avalanches had, by the time the two masses met, entirely obscured our view of the valley and its ultimate devastation. So I cannot say that I actually witnessed the annihilation of something like a hundred thousand people. Nor, in all the noise, did I hear their last hopeless screams or the snapping of their limbs. But they were now gone, together with all the horses, weapons, their personal belongings and other equipment. The valley had been resurfaced, and the people had been wiped out as if they had been no bigger or more worth keeping than the crawling ants and beetles that had inhabited the old ground.

I remembered the bleached bones and skulls I had seen lying about the Pai-Mir, the remains of animal herds and karwan trains that had encountered other avalanches. There would not be even that much trace left here. None of the Ba-Tang Bho we had excused from the march—little Odcho and Ryang, for instance—if they journeyed here to visit the place where their city’s population was last seen, would ever find the skull of a father or brother to fashion into a sentimental keepsake like a drinking bowl or a festa drum. Maybe some Yi farmer tilling this valley in some far distant century would turn up with his digging stick a fragment of one of the less deeply buried corpses. But, until then … .

It occurred to me that, of all the men and women who had been so frantically running about, and those who had crouched pathetically in the river, and those who had been already lying wounded or unconscious or dead, only the insensible had been the fortunate few. The others had had to endure at least one terrible last moment of knowing that they were about to be stamped on like insects or, even worse, buried alive. Maybe some of them were yet alive, uncrushed, still conscious, trapped underground in dark, tight, contorted little graves and tunnels and pockets of air that would persist until the great weight of earth and rocks and rubble had finished shifting and settling in its new location.

It would take some while for the valley to accommodate itself to its changed topography. I could tell that because, even while I groped about and coughed and sneezed in the cloud of dry dust, I found that I was sloshing about in muddy water that had not been there before. The Jin-sha River was nuzzling and probing at the barrier that had so abruptly impeded its flow, and was having to spread out sideways beyond what had formerly been its banks. Evidently, in my trudging about in the dimness, I had veered over to the left, to the eastward. Not wanting to walk any deeper into the gathering water, I turned right and, my boots alternately sucking and slipping in the new mud, went to rejoin the others. When a human shape loomed up before me in the murk, I called to him in the Mongol language, and that was an almost fatal mistake.

I never had a chance to inquire how he had survived the catastrophe —whether he was one of those who had gone running the length of the valley instead of back and forth, or whether he had simply and inexplicably been lifted up by the avalanche instead of crushed beneath it. Maybe he could not have told me, for maybe he did not know himself how he had been spared. It seems that there are always at least a few survivors of even the worst disaster—perhaps there will even be a few after Armageddon—and in this case we would discover that there were about four score still alive of the hundred thousand. Half of those were Yi, and about half of the Yi were quite undamaged and ambulatory—and at least two of them were still armed and brimming with a rage for immediate revenge—and I had had the misfortune to meet one of those.

He may have believed himself to be the only Yi left alive, and may have been startled to encounter another human form in the dust cloud, but I gave him the advantage when I spoke in Mongol. I did not know what he was, but he knew instantly that I was an enemy—one of the enemy that had just swept away his army and his companions in arms and probably close friends, even brothers of his. With the instinctive action of an angered hornet, he made a swipe at me with his sword. Had it not been for the new mud in which we stood, I should have perished at that moment. I could not have consciously dodged the sudden blow, but my involuntary flinch made me slip in the mud, and I fell down as the sword went whish! where I had been.

I still did not know who or what had attacked me—one thing went through my mind: “Expect me when you least expect me”—but there was no mistaking the attack. I rolled away from his feet and grabbed for the only weapon I carried, my belt knife, and tried to stand, but got only to one knee before he lunged again. We were both still only indistinct figures in the dust, and his footing was as slippery as mine, so his second swing also missed me. That blow brought him close enough to me that I made a dart with my knife point, but it fell short when I slid again in the mud.

Let me say something about close combat. I had earlier, in Khanbalik, seen the imposing map of the Minister of War, with its little flags and yak tails marking the positions of armies. At other times, I have watched high officers plotting out battle tactics and following the progress of them, using a tabletop and colored blocks of different sizes. Such exercises make battle look neat and tidy and perhaps, to a remote officer or an observer not involved, even predictable in the outcome. Back home in Venice, I had seen pictures and tapestries depicting famous Venetian victories on land and sea—over here Our fleet or cavalry, over yonder Theirs, the combatants always facing each other squarely and loosing arrows or aiming lances with precision and assuredness and even a calm look of equanimity. A viewer of such pictures would take a battle to be a thing as orderly and trim and methodical as a Game of Squares, or Shahi, played on a flat board in a well-lighted, comfortable room.

I doubt that any battle has ever been like that, and I know that close combat cannot be. It is a flailing, messy, desperate confusion, usually on wretched terrain and in vile weather, one man against another, both of them having forgotten in their rage and terror everything they ever were taught about how to fight. I suppose every man has learned the rules of swordplay and knifeplay: do thus and so to parry your opponent’s offense, move like this to get past his guard, execute these other feints to expose the weak places in his defense and the gaps in his armor. Perhaps those rules apply when two masters stand toe to toe in a gara di scherma, or when two duelists politely face off in a pleasant meadow. It is quite different when you and your opponent are grappling in a mud puddle with dense cloud all about, when both of you are dirty and sweaty, when your eyes are gritty and watering so you can barely see.

I will not try to describe our struggle, blow by blow. I do not remember the sequence. All I recall is that it was a time of grunting, panting, squirming, thrashing desperation—a very long time, it seemed —with me trying to get close enough to him to stab with my knife, and he trying to keep enough distance to swing his sword. We were both body-armored in leather, but differently, so that we each had an advantage over the other. My cuirass was of supple hides, allowing me freedom to move and dodge. His was of cuirbouilli so stiff that it stood out around him like a barrel; it hampered his agility, but made an effective barrier against my short, wide-bladed knife. When at last, more by chance than skill, I struck at his chest and the blade went in, I realized that it had penetrated the cuirass, and was stuck there, but could only lightly have pricked his rib cage. So in that moment he had me at his mercy, my knife wedged in his leather, I clinging to its handle, while he was free to wield his sword.

He took that moment to laugh derisively, triumphantly before he struck, and that was his mistake. My knife was the one I had long ago been given by a Romm girl whose name meant Blade. I squeezed its haft in the proper way, and I felt the wide blades jar apart, and I knew the inner, slim,