SCORCHED EARTH

Originally published in Speed Adventure Stories, July 1944.

When Mu Lan fingered a curl which was already faultless, and paused for a moment to admire the hair-do which she had invented, a blend of Chinese and Manchu styling, plus a touch of her own. All her life, Mu Lan had been revising rules to suit herself, but this was the first time that the freedom of a sing-song girl promised to have real meaning.

Her amah stood behind her, watching with pride and apprehension; Yu Tang was glad when her mistress smiled and said that all was perfect. Then Mu Lan twisted a jade pendant of her ornate head gear. The jewel separated into hollowed halves, into whose cavity she put several small pellets. This was not her first invitation to appear at General Yasuda’s quarters, but it might be her last.

General Yasuda was Japanese, and a gentleman, and so, particularly disliking his guest of honor, he had outdone himself in arranging the dinner to welcome Gunther Dreckhauffen, who had come to observe the workings of Co-Prosperity in the Rice Bowl. The bullet-headed Nazi, on the other hand, true to the training of his kind, was not content with being as boorish as nature had made him: he pointed out how German efficiency would have improved every course from bird’s nest soup and steamed sweet doughnuts to the flattish and sticky champagne.

“General Yasuda—” Dreckhauffen consistently ignored both field and company officers, his gesture including them with the litter on the table. “It is already plain that instead of occupying China, and then breaking the Russian truce, you are becoming as Chinese as your cuisine.”

Yasuda smiled. He was a delicate-looking little man, as frail and unsubstantial-seeming as the evasion which he offered, instead of a retort: “After all, the Chinese are better cooks than we are.”

The Nazi was so shocked that his monocle dropped from his eye. Um gottes willen, what kind of a man is it who can see good in another nation? Not a bit more character than the Dagos! With such allies, no wonder that der Fuehrer had to save the world single handed.

Yasuda had a fair idea of what passed behind the envoy’s fat face, but his amiability did not waver. “Mr. Dreckhauffen,” he went on, using the English which served as a common tongue for the two, “when you see the final Chinese touch, I think that you do not blame me for—for—making concessions to art.”

“Eh? More food?”

He mopped his dripping face, and ran a thick finger inside his collar, over which his neck made a red bulge.

“Oh, not at all. Now that we have titillated our palates, we have a feast of wit and reason. Chen Mu Lan, the Shanghai sing-song girl, consents to entertain us.”

“Consents? Herr gott! Could she refuse?”

“Of course not. But one can hardly be entertaining, witty, and charming by command.”

Dreckhauffen snorted. “In Germany, one can, and one does.”

And then the Number One announced Chen Mu Lan. Yasuda nodded, beamed at his guest; the general, having the soul of an artist, took pride in being the patron of China’s loveliest sing-song girl, and ignored the possibility of her having had unusual motives in leaving Shanghai.

She moved with a mincing pace, artificial as it was graceful. Jade ear pendants, and the jade pendants handing from her satin hood made a thin, sweet tinkling, fragile as the conventional twitter of her voice when she kowtowed, greeting host and guest of honor.

Dreckhauffen eyed her from tiny embroidered slippers to the arch of close-packed curls which framed her forehead. Mu Lan was neither tall nor as slender as she seemed, for the knee length tunic combined with her silk trousers and prim, high collar to exaggerate her slimness, while the Manchu styled headgear increased the illusion of height.

The Nazi grunted, and with not quite his usual disparagement. “Nimble enough, for her crippled feet.”

Yasuda hissed, somewhat out of politeness, and somewhat to conceal his amazement at ignorance. “Please, begging pardon, those are naturally small. Sing-song girls never binding feet.” Mu Lan’s training had taken more time, and covered more ground than an American debutante and an American Doctor of Philosophy could claim between them; she knew how a wine glass should be touched, and how even the incorrect inflection of her smallest finger could detract from the perfection of the gesture: and so with her repartee. But none of the company knew enough Chinese to be worthy of her talent, so she sang in that studied falsetto, and pantomimed with all the finish developed in forty odd centuries of training sing-song girls.

The sam yin wailed. The drums muttered; drums, and the shivering, hissing brazen gongs. Dreckhauffen shuddered, and growled, “Herr gott! This is worse than those stupid geishas!”

Between songs, Mu Lan drank tiny cups of mui kwai lu, which tastes like sewing machine oil flavored with attar of roses. Though she wheedled Dreckhauffen into emptying cup after cup of orange-red ng ka pay, her glance slid always to Yasuda, a glance which, as to angle and the droop of eyelids, had been prescribed a thousand years before the ancestors of both Gunther Dreckhauffen and the Son of Heaven had quit raw meat and smoky caves.

The general smiled his appreciation. Of the girl, the Nazi thought; he didn’t know that the Jap relished the triple-edged mockery of Mu Lan’s song about the foreign devil with the eyes of a pig and the manners of a buffalo, sweating and grunting and fingering his tight collar.

Mu Lan knew now that she had not wasted those weeks of establishing herself in Cheng Teh, to make her presence the touch without which a dinner would merely have been a meal.

To impress the Nazi observer, Yasuda had inevitably to make an important move to convince him that the failure to complete the seizure of this sector of the Rice Bowl had been according to plan. Sooner or later, such a gesture would have had to come, if only to maintain Yasuda’s “face” in Japan. Dreckhauffen’s presence had merely hastened the climax.

The next move would be toward Ching Pao, Mu Lan’s native village; so she was going to her own people. The same instinct which once made Chinese section hands arrange to have their bones shipped from California to the ancestral burial ground, now drove Mu Lan to Ching Pao, “Precious Gold,” as the dumpy little village called itself, to sound more impressive than its neighboring rival, Yin Pao, Precious Silver.

She seated herself, smiled dazzling at Dreckhauffen, and proposed a game of chai mui.

“Like this,” Mu Lan explained, thrusting out three fingers. “I call three! You answer, seven, and put out enough fingers to make ten. A mistake, and you lose.”

“What do we bet?”

“You have to drink a cup of General Yasuda’s brandy. And if I lose—”

Dreckhauffen brightened some more. “You drink one, eh? Very good.”

But it wasn’t what he expected. Voice and fingers tricked him, and when it came his turn, he could not catch Mu Lan off guard. Though the general lost, he took it good-naturedly, while the Nazi considered that honor was being affronted.

The more bets he lost, the more ng ka pay he drank, and the more he fumbled. Yasuda began to enjoy the thus far unpleasant dinner, and so did his officers, until they fell on their faces to snore into the banquet remnants. Food rather than brandy had overcome them, since years of short rations had made them unaccustomed to hearty eating.

The amiable little general blinked owlishly through his misted glasses when Dreckhauffen crumpled in a heap, knocking down bottles and jugs and glasses.

“The foreign devil cannot even pass out like a gentleman,” Mu Lan said, laughing. “Now with your permission, worthy general?”

Though Yasuda handed the sing-song girl’s maid an envelope containing more than the customary fee for making an appearance, his enjoyment of his triumph made him reluctant to dismiss her; and Mu Lan, after pleading another engagement, let herself be talked into staying.

She did not stay long. A song and three drinks settled Yasuda, and without the assistance of the opiate in the hair pendant.

Yu Tang gathered up Mu Lan’s cape and fan and discarded bracelets. The musicians had long since left. Then, as the amah watched at the door, Mu Lan searched first the general’s pockets, and next the living quarters. She returned with a sheaf of orders, all in Japanese, which she could not speak; but since the monkey men had cribbed their hieroglyphics from the Chinese, lacking any writing of their own, the significance of many of the characters was clear to anyone who could read.

Rumor had been right. There was an order to make a demonstration because of the Nazi’s presence.

Once outside the house, Yu Tang awakened the coolies who snored in a corner. Mu Lan got into the sedan chair; her amah followed, then drew the curtains. The coolies shouldered their burden, and set out at a trot.

The pass which Yasuda had given Mu Lan to smooth her late return from his quarters was more than enough for the sentries posted at intervals beyond the outskirts of Cheng Teh. All night long the knotty-legged coolies trudged down the yard wide trail which wound and snaked among the rice patches.

During the hours of darkness, little more than instinct kept them from stumbling over slabs placed lengthwise to bridge ditches which led water from higher to lower terraces. There was no shoulder, nor any allowance for swerving; once off the paving, a pedestrian dropped into the knee-deep mud of the fields on either side.

When the moon rose, Mu Lan looked between the drawn curtains, and out across the headed rice which swayed in the hot breeze. Some of the terraced plots were no more than a few yards square; other reached a li in every direction.

Irrigation had for the time ended. Only here and there was the moonlight reflected from a dyked field. When once the waters sank, invaders and harvest time would come to the unoccupied stretches of the rice bowl.

Mu Lan had no reason to hope that her warning could put into the field enough guerillas to block Yasuda’s troops. The best she expected to do in Ching Pao was to persuade the villagers to destroy their crops rather than to harvest for the enemy. Now she wondered how any argument of hers could succeed when all others had thus far failed; for, seeing again, after those years of absence, how much backbreaking work went into building dykes, and ploughing knee deep in mud, planting rice shoots by hand, and ladling fertilizer to each cluster, she understood why the peasants stubbornly held out against scorched earth.

And the loneliness added its bit. She was in another world, a rural world cut off from news, from cities, from the rest of China. Her parents, if they still lived, bending in the mud of rice fields, could not see beyond local feuds, and the rival village, Yin Pao. To them, an enemy in Cheng Teh was an enemy in the moon.

Unless she could convince them, they wouldn’t learn until it was too late.

At times shelters loomed up, dark and massive: brick columns, supporting a tiled roof, flanked brick benches. Here the coolies rested, smoked a few pipes of finely shredded tobacco, and trotted on.

Mu Lan was not afraid. There could not be any pursuit until Yasuda emerged from his stupor, and had occasion to refer to an order whose contents already formed an unpleasant part of his memories. And though suspecting Mu Lan, he would hardly issue an order for her arrest, for to do so would make him lose face with whatever subordinates he detailed to execute his commands. Having been outwitted by a sing-song girl was not a subject he would care to mention, all the more so since the inevitable rumors which no vigilance ever prevented would certainly have warned the villagers. Every Japanese plan was so sure to become public property before being put into effect that Yasuda as a matter of routine included precautions to offset leaks.

Yet she craned her neck, and begrudged the coolies their short rest, some time after sunrise, at a grimy little inn, a hovel of brick and timber, where pigs and chickens shared quarters with the proprietor and his family.

The day’s heat was made worse by steam exhaled by the drying rice fields. In some villages, farmers were already cutting the clusters, and beating the grain out of the heads. The continuous drumming and thumping was like the far off rumble of thunder.

Toward evening, the coolies waded ankle deep. Premature rain, falling in the far off hills, had flooded an area before the harvesters could gather the crop, No need here for scorched earth. Famine was already on the way, and men and boys plunged into the mud and syrup-thick water, salvaging what they could. Sunrise to sunset, from year’s beginning to year’s end, there was rarely a day not given to outwitting hunger.

Mu Lao’s shoulders sagged, and more from the weight of her task than from weariness. Seeing these men fight to save the shreds of a crop made her mission in Ching Pao seem impossible.

* * * *

Near sunset of the third day, the coolies stumbled toward the wall which enclosed the rammed earth houses of the families who owned the surrounding acres. This was home, and the sight and smell of it made her for a moment regret Cheng Teh. Then, as the tea shop loafers set down their cups to gape and point, marveling at the gilded sedan chair and the splendid person it sheltered, Mu Lan smiled a little, and held her head high.

She had left this grimy village afoot, and to avoid marrying the village idiot. Far from postponing flight until her wedding day, she had shaken the dirt and dung of “Precious Gold” from her unbound feet the day after the betrothal feast, making her parents lose what little face they might have had. Nothing but instinct brought her back; instinct, and the urge to show her one-time people how to outwit the vicious barbarians from Japan.

Mu Lan’s parents, driven by famine and revolt, had not been able to encumber themselves with a daughter agonized and helpless from bandaged feet and when the times finally permitted the family to return to Ching Pao, the girl’s feet had grown beyond binding. They could have sold her as a slave girl, rather than lose face by keeping their big-footed disgrace, but they had managed to avoid that solution, for, luckily enough, there was a neighboring family which would accept a bride who did not have “golden lilies.”

Since the son was a half-wit, and the parents were as poor as Mu Lan’s, they had snapped at the chance.

Thinking of these things, she smiled a little more and said to her amah, “Yu Tang, ask that yokel where the house of Chen Ah Tien is.”

The amah had some difficulty in making herself understood. A crowd gathered, gaping, chattering, and spitting. They shook their heads, and marveled, saying, “Hai! What is this? Chen Ah Tien pretends to be poor, and see the concubine he’s buying!”

The local money-lender brightened. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before he’d get possession of Chen Ah Tien’s acre, for when the number one wife is dead, it doesn’t take a young successor very long to settle an estate. He followed the village elders, when they called to give Chen Ah Tien indirect advice. Like them, he was shocked to hear that Mu Lan was not a concubine, but the village disgrace coming home to roost.

There was even a greater shock when, upsetting the final shred of rice belt propriety, she boldly addressed her father’s callers. “The monkey men are coming, but there is still time to burn the rice and wreck the granaries and drive away the buffalo.”

She had fully expected an outcry of incredulity, then of horror, and was prepared to explain herself: but this was needless. A hard-eyed young man with a bandaged arm and ugly scar which twisted one side of his face addressed Chen Ah Tien: “Honorable First Born, this lady brings from Cheng Teh the advice I bring from commander of the night-marching army. Burn what is dry, flood what is wet, break down what stands, drive away what can walk, and carry what you can. The barbarians come for food, and having not enough guns, we must starve those we can’t ambush. They come for rice, and without rice, they can’t march.”

Like face and eyes, his voice was iron. Mu Lan, though used to monopolizing the spotlight, was grateful for an unexpected ally, particularly a man, and above all, a fighting man. But she had overlooked rural wit. An old man with stringy mustaches got up, bowed ceremoniously, and said, “Young Brother, we also will starve. And this young lady does not look hungry, she ate enough rice among the monkey men. Far better that we compromise.”

Mu Lan’s jewels and silks and sleekness had betrayed her, and worse yet, she saw the cool amusement in the glance of Zeng Hai Wong, who as much as assured her, with a look, that despite her bungling, he was not whipped.

Nor was he. Zeng’s wounds and scars and voice commanded respect, and so did his uncouth rural accent. A one-time farmer, he now harvested Japanese heads. Yet these were stubborn people, who could see no further than the neighboring village.

“Gung ho!” he concluded. “Work together!”

“Starve together,” they retorted, not mockingly, but rather, regretting the necessity of their logic. “When we leave with fire behind us, and what rice we can carry, will we be welcomed at the next village?”

“The Generalissimo will feed you.”

Zeng said this in good faith and certain truth, yet the retort was not slow: “But if the next village, and every other village destroys its crops, where does the Generalissimo get rice then?”

He could not make them believe in the extent of China. He described, but they could not conceive of a land so broad that by dint of advancing into newly made desert, the invaders would finally have to halt or go beyond their own lines of supply; yet it was not amazing that farmers could scarcely picture the needs of an army, nor believe that anything so powerful was also vulnerable.

“Fight them with scythes, that is good, and if we die, we die,” they agreed. “But that is not famine.”

Simple enough, to be faced stoically, but they could not gulp the nonsense of a sing-song girl and of a guerilla agent who had more valor than sense. However much he told of what he and his kinsmen had endured in occupied areas, they still held that famine was the ultimate enemy, and particularly, self-made famine.

The money-lender, having a stake in many a plot of rice, led the outcry, and then the old feud came into everyone’s mind, for Zeng had slipped sadly in mentioning the adjoining village.

“We destroy what we have, and in Yin Pao, they do not destroy. And they eat what the little monkey men allow them, while we eat the nothing we have made ourselves. That is not wise.”

Their bitter logic dismayed Mu Lan. No rapier play of wit could serve where the grim sincerity of Zeng Hai Wong failed. Then she rushed from the smoky room, and came back with all the money she had hoarded. She flung it to the rammed earth floor, and added her jewels to the heap. “This will buy your fields and your crops. Gold and may it choke you!”

Her father jerked to his feet, regained his poise, and said, “My disgrace has become an idiot, do not listen.”

She was Chen Ah Tien’s daughter, and her hoard belonged to him, and to whatever kinsmen might hear of it and come to town to share the family fortune. This was so well established, though long independence had made her forget it, that not a man of them considered her offer.

But Zeng Hai Wong addressed Chen. “Consider, Prior Born, how much face you will gain, buying all the village lands and offering them as a sacrifice to the ancestors. And how much face the misers of Yin Pao will lose if they don’t make an equal sacrifice.”

There was a growing mutter, first of wonder, then of approval as they saw the possibilities. The village would win either renown or cooperation.

Mu Lan was thinking, triumphantly, “My jewels, his wit.” For the first time in her life, she had met a man whose thought kept ahead of her own.

But she had not reckoned on Confucius. The eldest of the elders announced, “The Master Kung said, think before you act, and act before you speak. I would not willingly associate with a man who would empty-handed fight a tiger, or cross a river without a boat, or die without regret.”

Mu Lan flared up, “And the Master Kung also said, First Born, a man must have humiliated himself before he is humiliated by others: A nation must have defeated itself before it is defeated by others. And how can you better defeat yourself than by feeding your enemy? The ancestors of any of you would have committed honorable suicide to call to heaven’s attention the oppression of an unjust mandarin. Why not a village destroy itself to bring heaven down on the monkey men?”

“Heaven has no favorites,” the village wise man retorted. “And if we join the monkey men, perhaps we can each of us cover our floors with gold.”

The ironic quirk of his voice brought laughter. She lost face, and so did Zeng Hai Wong for having supported her argument. Ridicule drove Mu Lane from the room, and according to tradition, it should have silenced Zeng Hai Wong, but he stood firm, and he said, “I will prove this for heaven to witness. My honorable suicide, going to the enemy’s camp to kill their general. Then perhaps you can kill a field.”

The silence which followed his leaving told Mu Lan that he had won, and that through him, she also had won. Then her victory became a coldness and an emptiness: for they had believed him because they had not been able to doubt that he had devoted himself to death.

There was no smoke to redden the sun on that day, or the day which followed; whatever Zeng Hai Wong’s fellow-agents had said and done, they had not succeeded in scorching any earth belonging to the villages between Ching Pao and Cheng Teh. And the Japs were on the march. Swift-racing rumor, and the flights of bombers and fighters coming out of the southwest to harass the enemy made that clear enough.

Zeng lounged in the tea shop and played mahjong. The failure of his fellows to the east had apparently pulled the teeth of his resolution. When he went to keep his word, it would be too late. There was nothing he could do: for if he went to meet the invaders, already delayed by guerillas, he would find his fate too far from Ching Pao to convince the skeptical farmers.

And he might escape alive, in which case, heaven would not be the least interested. The sensible thing to do about radical proposals was to let the other fellow try them.

But Mu Lan had her thoughts. In the first place, a wounded man could not possibly get through the enemy lines. He’d be suspected of guerilla activity. They’d not even bother to question him. A sing-song girl, however, had a chance to do her work, and escape. Since a woman amounted to nothing at all, her survival would not affect the issue any more than would her death. Heaven simply wouldn’t notice.

But the villagers might; and if she settled the commanding officer, there would be no occasion for Zeng Hai Wong to make a sacrifice which she now felt would be useless. Had the enemy approached only a few days sooner, Zeng’s resolution would have had weight, but now time had dulled the edge of his words.

Zeng was useful. He should not waste himself.

She went to the market, and made a great show of buying red bands. It was noised about that Chen Ah Tien’s disgrace was going to make the gesture of binding her feet. While she could hardly cripple them at her age, they were exceptionally small, and only a little cramping would satisfy convention.

The coolies, homesick for Cheng Teh, trotted eastward with the empty sedan chair. It gleamed bravely, all gilt and red and tasseled, exhaling the perfume of its one-time occupant. The villagers said, “So she didn’t own it, after all.” Others laughed and said, “She sacrifices a chair, we sacrifice our fields.”

But Mu Lan was not there to hear their irony. She was one of two ragged women who trudged eastward along the flagstone trail. Both were bent double under bundles. Her father would not miss her for some hours. Then let them all guess.

The coolies lagged. That night, Mu Lan and her amah overtook them at the first inn, a good many li to the east.

In the morning, Mu Lan wore her silks and her jewels; her hair-do was perfect. She was exactly as she had been on her arrival at her old home, except for one detail—her feet were bound, mercilessly, torturingly, a sample of the three years of torment she had escaped in childhood.

Well, she’d avoided marrying the village idiot, and now it was nice to think of Zeng Hai Wong. She’d often think of him. She might even see him, some day, though a guerilla’s grave was always open.

The coolies were not worrying. The worst that could happen to them would be some forced labor, and there was always the chance of escape, and flight to Cheng Teh, where their advance pay waited at their hong. Their only complaint was the jam of refugees on the flagstone trail. There was no shooting. The guerillas worked from the flanks, chewing off unwary detachments, luring them into blind ravines, or knee deep mud.

Finally Mu Lan had a chance to try the pass which General Yasuda had given her that night in Cheng Teh. A non-com, recognizing the official seal, did not bother to read the details. As for the interior guard, her presence spoke for itself.

She demanded to see the general. The splendor of her dress and polished haughtiness of her manner protected her.

Yasuda, despite his rank, was well to the front. Since he had to make a showing, it behooved him to leave little or nothing to subordinates, and thus Mu Lan faced the ultimate test sooner than she expected.

While waiting at his headquarters tent, she lost, as she expected, both coolies and the gilded sedan chair. Then, in the private tent, a slave girl searched Mu Lan, and finding no weapons, took the long pins from her head gear. When she went to greet the general, she had not even her maid with her.

Yasuda had to deny to himself that Mu Lan had once outwitted him, even though the information she had gained had been useless. She wondered where the Nazi observer was, and what he would have done in Yasuda’s place. And then she said, “I have canceled many engagements to sing for your excellency.”

“So now you have golden lilies?”

“I am retiring. This is my farewell performance. For you.”

“Thank you. But this time, if you insist on playing chai mui, the forfeit is hot saki and not rice brandy.”

She laughed, and spoke of the pig-faced man and the murderous headache he must have had: and Yasuda was happy, remembering how the Nazi had been the first to collapse.

An orderly gestured to the attendants, and then drew the tent flap. Outside, an army; inside, a gentleman of Nippon, who wondered whether he had become as Chinese as his favorite dishes.

She sang, and without musicians. Her pantomime made him follow the slender hands, each of which seemed to have a life of its own. It took an artist to appreciate art.

He found an interpretation for the dainty gesture toward a jade pendant, and ignored the possibility of a second meaning. The hands rippled on, weaving their part of a story told by face and voice and step.

His glance followed her as she shifted. Though he did not know it, Mu Lan had designed for him to turn, and upset the porcelain saki-jar. And she was ready, catching it by the neck before it broke or even spilled more than a gulp.

“And now,” she wheeled, “see if you can beat me at chai mui.”

He could not. He had never taken that strenuous course of charm, which included the finesse of beating wealthy aristocrats at that popular after dinner game; sober on saki, he was no more skillful than when drunk on ng ka pay. If for no other reason, eye and hand and voice were always a little out of step for he was distracted by the concealment and primness of that high-collared silken tunic, far more devastating than any décolleté.

And the opiate she had not needed in Cheng Teh now served its purpose. He had lost five games to her one, and he could not stand five times the drug.

Mu Lan continued her mirth and her gestures, mimicking the male falsetto and giggle of the unconscious Jap. The lights were low, and there would be no betraying shadows against the canvas. So under cover of the noisy game, she had one hand free to unbind her tortured feet.

Still calling numbers, she twisted the bands to make a cord, and she did her work to a double take of laughter. Strangling does not take great strength or much time.

Then she glanced about. The final thought which came to her at the end should have come from the beginning, yet she was still glad that she had used foot bindings. Her search was short. Habit and tradition favored her. A Japanese gentleman’s sword can never be far from him. She found it, drew it, cut once, and put out the light.

Now that it was done, her feet claimed their due. Better even have married an idiot than be a lady!

Finding her amah was beyond trying, so, since Yu Tang, who might have carried the unexpected head back to China Pao, was not there, Mu Lan had to hobble with it as best she could.

She took off her conspicuous head gear and jewels. Muffled in a long quilted jacket, she set out, pass in one hand, and a compact bundle in the other. As verification, she had even taken Yasuda’s insignia.

Her luck held until the interior guard was well behind her, but as she approached the outposts, there was a shot, followed by a challenge, and the groan of a man mortally wounded. Sentries at adjoining posts quite needlessly passed on the alarm. A non-com answered, and brought a detachment of the guard. A large disturbance about nothing at all: not a raid but a solitary prowler, who no longer made any sound.

Either he was dead, or had taken cover.

An officer wanted to know all about it. While listening to explanations, he sensed rather than saw the vague movement when Mu Lan made the mistake of trying to slip past under cover of the distraction. Zeng Hai Wong would have waited.

A yell—a challenge—the blaze of a flashlight, and the thin, spiteful snap of a six millimeter pistol. A second and a third shot. She felt the bite of the puny slugs. Her stride broke, but she recovered, and prayed for the life to return to her aching feet.

The blundering pursuit was brought up sharply by the officer, who said, “Just another camp follower. Woman. Get back to your posts.”

By now Mu Lan knew where she had been hit. She coughed, and the taste of blood was plain in her mouth. What worried her most was that leg. Given time, she might get to Ching Pao, but she had no time, for they would miss the general’s head in the morning.

“Mu Lan,” someone said in an iron whisper. “Mu Lan!”

Zeng Hai Wong came out of the darkness and found her; groping, he found the bundle and guessed from its shape. “You—you did it—”

“You came to do it? Did they hit you?”

“No, I groaned to fool them, I wasn’t where the sound seemed to come from, I thought they were shooting at my false voice. What’s this—you’re bleeding—?”

“No, it’s his head.”

“It’s not. This is warm.”

“Just a scratch.”

But her cough betrayed her, though she choked it to a gasp which carried no more than a yard. “How’d you know me?”

“I knew you’d left. And then that flashlight, though the perfume made me sure.” So he remembered her perfume, what little of it he could have picked from the reek and smoke of her father’s house. That was the happiest of all her extravagances.

“It’s my feet,” she explained as she stumbled. “I bound them.”

Zeng Hai Wong half-dragged, half-carried Mu Lan and her proof of victory. When she lagged hopelessly, he set her on his shoulder, and jogged along like a porter. He knew what a race he was running with the enemy, but he was too intent to realize what a race Mu Lan was losing.

At the dawn rest, she toppled, and would not mount his shoulder. “You can’t go fast enough. Unless you go alone. Hurry, Hai Wong, take the proof or we both lose face—” The feigned rattle in her throat tricked him. Without a backward glance, he swung into a trot. When he was almost beyond her sight, she struggled to her feet, and tottered on. She knew that she could never reach Ching Pao, yet she had to walk as long as she could.

The small bullets lengthened her torment, yet in the end, she blessed them. Had they been larger, she would have dropped many li further from her goal. There was no chance of being buried among her own people; that was clear, and she was resigned to reality when she knew that she could not again pick herself up.

Finally she raised her face a little from the flagstones. The height of the embankment above the fields gave her a small advantage, and the rise of a crest furthered it.

Though she could not see Ching Pao, she saw smoke, and ever spreading flame. Mu Lan twisted a little. The men of Yin Pao were not being shamed by their rivals. She saw the smoking fields of the neighboring settlement, and she had even a moment to be glad for that, and for Zeng Hai Wong’s fast march.