grinned slyly.
The Iron Society’s first battle was small, a brief skirmish with the Gao battalion, a unit of Zhang Zhuxi’s puppet regiment. The Iron Society soldiers, who were about to stage a raid on the Xia Family Inn blockhouses, met up with the Gao battalion as it was returning from a raid on grain stores. The two armies stopped and sized each other up. The Gao raiding party, made up of sixty or seventy men in apricot-coloured uniforms, was heavily armed. Canvas cartridge belts were slung across the men’s chests. Intermingled with the troops were dozens of donkeys and mules carrying sacks of grain. The black-clad Iron Society soldiers were armed only with spears, swords, and knives, except for a few dozen with pistols tucked in their belts.
‘What unit are you?’ a fat Gao-battalion officer asked from his horse.
Granddad reached into his belt and, as he drew his pistol, shouted, ‘The one that kills traitors!’ He fired.
The fat officer tumbled off his horse, his head a bloody gourd.
‘Amalai amalai amalai,’ the Iron Society soldiers chanted in unison as they launched a fearsome charge. Frightened donkeys and mules broke and ran. The panicky puppet soldiers tried to escape, but the slower ones were hacked to death by the Iron Society soldiers’ knives and swords. Those who managed to get away began coming to their senses when they’d run about the distance of an arrow’s flight. Quickly forming up ranks, they opened fire –
‘Spread out!’ Granddad shouted. ‘Crouch!’
His shouts were drowned out by the sonorous chants of men charging in closed ranks, heads high, chests thrust forward.
The puppet soldiers fired a salvo of bullets, cutting down more then twenty Iron Society soldiers. Fresh blood sprayed the air as the shrill wails of wounded soldiers swirled around the feet of their surviving comrades.
The Iron Society soldiers were stunned. Another salvo, and more of them fell.
‘Spread out!’ Granddad yelled. ‘Flatten out!’
Now the puppet soldiers mounted a countercharge. Granddad rolled onto his side and jammed a clip into his pistol. Black Eye raised himself halfway up and bellowed, ‘Get up! Chant! Iron head iron arm iron wall iron barrier iron heart iron spleen iron sheet keep away bullets don’t dare approach iron ancestor riding tiger urgent edict amalai…’
A bullet whizzed over his head, and he hit the ground like a dog scrounging for shit.
With a sneer, Granddad grabbed the pistol out of Black Eye’s trembling hand and shouted, ‘Douguan!’
Father rolled over next to him. ‘Here I am, Dad!’
Granddad handed him Black Eye’s pistol. ‘Hold your breath, and don’t move. Don’t shoot till they’re closer.’
Then he shouted to his men, ‘If you’ve got a gun, get it ready. Don’t shoot till they’re almost on top of you!’
The puppet soldiers rushed boldly forward.
Fifty yards, forty yards, twenty, ten… Father could see their yellow teeth.
Granddad jumped to his feet, guns blazing right and left. Seven of eight puppet soldiers bowed deeply, all the way to the ground. Father and Five Troubles fired with the same degree of accuracy. The puppet soldiers turned tail and ran, offering up their backs as inviting targets. Finding his pistols inadequate for his purposes, Granddad picked up a rifle abandoned by a fleeing soldier and opened fire.
This minor skirmish established Granddad as the unchallenged leader of the Iron Society. The cruel, unnecessary deaths of so many of its soldiers had laid bare the folly of Black Eye’s sorcery. From then on they shunned the iron-body ceremony that had been forced upon them. Guns? Those were needed. Sorcery and magic couldn’t stop bullets.
Pretending to be recruits, Granddad and Father joined the Jiao-Gao regiment and kidnapped Little Foot Jiang in broad daylight. Next they joined the Leng detachment and kidnapped Pocky Leng.
The exchange of the two hostages for weapons and warhorses fortified Granddad’s leadership of the now- awesome Iron Society. Black Eye became superfluous, a man in the way. Five Troubles wanted to get rid of him, but Granddad always stopped him.
Following the kidnappings, the Iron Society became the most powerful force in all of Northeast Gaomi Township, while the prestige of the Jiao-Gao and Leng regiments was silenced once and for all. Peace having settled upon the land, Granddad’s thoughts turned to the grand funeral for Grandma. From then on it was a process of accumulating wealth by whatever means, including the appropriation of a coffin and the murder of anyone who got in the way; the glory of the Yu family spread like an oil fire. But Granddad forgot the simple dialectic that a bright sun darkens, a full moon wanes, a full cup overflows, and decay follows prosperity. Grandma’s grand funeral would be yet another of his great mistakes.
The machine guns behind the dike roared again. Granddad could tell there were only two of them now, the others obviously taken out by the Jiao-Gao regiment hand grenades.
Granddad’s attention was caught by movement among the dozen or so Jiao-Gao soldiers who had been mowed down by machine-gun fire on the dike. A skinny, blood-covered little man crawled in agony up the slope, slower than a silkworm, slower than a snail. Granddad knew he was watching a hero in action, another of Northeast Gaomi Township’s magnificent seeds. The soldier stopped halfway up the slope, and Granddad watched him strain to roll over and remove a blood-stained hand grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin with his teeth, then ignited the fuse, sending a puff of smoke out from the wooden handle. Holding the armed grenade between his teeth, he dragged himself up to a clump of weeds growing on the dike. The green-tinted machine-gun barrels were dancing above him, sending puffs of smoke into the air.
Regret was what Granddad was feeling. Regret that he’d been so softhearted. When he kidnapped Pocky Leng, all he’d asked as ransom was a hundred rifles, five submachine guns, and fifty horses. He should have demanded these eight machine guns as well, but his years as a bandit had instilled in him a preference for light weapons over heavy ones. If he’d included these machine guns, Pocky Leng wouldn’t have been able to run amok today.
When the soldier reached the clump of weeds, he lobbed his grenade. The crack of an explosion sounded behind the dike, sending the barrels of the machine guns soaring into the air. The grenadier lay face down on the slope, not moving; his blood kept flowing, painfully, agonisingly, and very slowly. Granddad heaved a sigh.
That took care of Pocky Leng’s machine guns. ‘Douguan!’ Granddad yelled.
Pinned down by two heavy corpses, Father was playing dead. Maybe I really am dead, he thought, not knowing if the warm blood covering him was his own or that of the corpses on top of him. When he heard Granddad’s yell, he raised his head, wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve, and said between gasps, ‘I’m here, Dad…’
Pocky Leng’s troops came pouring out from behind the dike, like spring bamboo after a rain, rifles at the ready. A hundred yards away, the Jiao-Gao soldiers, clearheaded once again, opened fire on the charging troops, the submachine guns they’d got from Five Troubles’ mounted troops crackling loudly. The Leng soldiers tucked in their heads like a herd of turtles.
Granddad pulled the corpses off Father and dragged him free.
‘Were you hit?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Father said after checking his arms and legs.
‘Let’s get out of here, men!’ Granddad shouted.
Twenty or more blood-spattered Iron Society soldiers stood up by leaning on their rifles and staggered off towards the north. The Jiao-Gao soldiers didn’t fire at them. And although the Leng detachment fired a few shots, their bullets went straight up in the air.
A shot rang out behind Granddad, and his neck felt as though someone had punched him; all the heat in his body quickly flowed to that spot. He reached up and pulled back a palm covered with blood. When he spun around he spotted Black Eye, whose guts had spilled out onto the ground, his large black eyes blinking heavily – once, twice, three times. Two golden tears hung in the corners of his eyes. Granddad smiled at him, and nodded slightly, then turned and led Father slowly away.
Another shot rang out behind them.
Granddad heaved a long sigh. Father turned and saw a little black hole in Black Eye’s temple.
As night fell, the Leng detachment surrounded the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers, who had waged a desperate fight from the midst of Grandma’s funeral procession. Their ammunition exhausted, the two detachments were huddled together, clenching their teeth and staring with bloodshot eyes at the relentlessly advancing Leng detachment, recently fortified by a squad from the Seventh Army. The setting sun lit up the evening clouds and dyed
