The Jungle, Page 2

  Though not a military man, he knew instinctively that this was the critical phase in the general’s plan. He glanced up. The sky remained clear directly overhead, but a single puffy cloud was moving toward the battlefield. Its shadow cut like an eclipse across the hills behind the town. If it swept over them, he feared Khenbish’s secret weapon would be rendered useless.

  No lookout had shown himself for many minutes. He could imagine the anxiety and confusion among the defenders, not knowing what had struck them or how it had rendered them blind. This wasn’t a particularly large community, and he knew from his travels that rural people tended to be superstitious. To what manner of witchcraft had they ascribed their sightlessness?

  Like an army of ghost soldiers, the column of horsemen was making deceptively good time across the fields. The mounts were so well trained that none whinnied or neighed.

  The cloud was still several minutes away. The emissary did some quick calculating in his head. It would be a near thing, and yet the riders didn’t quicken their pace. The general instilled discipline above all else.

  A head popped over the wall, and both light cannons swung on him so quickly that he got the barest glimpse of the battlefield before his retinas were seared by the invisible beams. Khenbish stiffened on his horse, waiting for a cry of alarm that would signal unseen archers to release their arrows. A scream from above caused him to suck air through his teeth. It was nothing more than a crow in the branches of a tree behind them.

  The lead rider reached the wooden gate and casually tossed the bag he’d been carrying in the dirt at its foot. A moment later another joined it, and another. And another. The pile grew until it was a misshapen hillock pressed up against the stockade.

  Finally someone within the walls showed some intelligence. When he raised his head over the battlements just to the right of the gate, he kept one hand shaded over his eyes and his gaze downward. His warning shout carried clearly across the field. The element of surprise had been shattered.

  The riders abandoned their pretense at stealth and quickly had their horses at full gallop. The last few hurled their bags at the gate and wheeled around. They scattered as arrows fired blindly from within the walls once again darkened the skies.

  But it wasn’t so much the arrows blotting out the sun as it was the cloud that had been so silently approaching. And by some twist of fate the winds that had sustained it ceased, and it hovered like an enormous parasol over the village. Without direct sunlight, Khenbish’s ray guns were nullified.

  Alert sentries realized what was coming and started throwing buckets of water onto the pile of bags that reached almost halfway up the thick wooden gate. The general had anticipated this and made certain each had been coated with a thick layer of resin so the water couldn’t permeate it.

  Motivated by desperation, archers appeared along the wall and took careful aim before loosing their arrows. The horsemen wore armor on their chests, and helmets covered their heads, but their backs were exposed, and soon arrows found their marks. In moments there were several jockey-less horses milling on the field, their riders lying sprawled on the ground, some writhing in agony, others ominously still.

  One of Khenbish’s men raced parallel to the wall, standing high in his stirrups, a nocked arrow ready in his short cavalry bow. Rather than a sharp bronze point, the arrow’s tip was a pitch-soaked wad of cloth that burned brightly. He fired and immediately pulled hard on the left rein. The horse knew the signal and went down onto its flank in a cloud of dust, its legs kicking awkwardly while its heavy body shielded the rider from what was to come.

  The arrow hit the pile of bags near the base of the gate at the same moment a bucket of water was tossed off the parapet. The flame turned to white smoke and steam, and then nothing. Time on a battlefield has an elasticity that defies all logic. It seemed forever elapsed, but it was less than a half second before the last dying ember of the arrowhead burned its way through the bag and touched off the contents inside.

  Alchemists searching for the Elixir of Life had stumbled upon the ratio and composition of chemicals, and so it was called huŏ yào, or Fire Medicine. The world would later know it as gunpowder.

  Because it is a slow-burning explosive, gunpowder needs to be compressed to do much more than flash and sizzle. The first bag burst into smoky flame, igniting others on the outside of the pile, until flames were shooting dozens of feet into the air. The pyre was enough to detonate the bags buried at the base of the mound, and the weight of the sacks above tamped the expanding gases long enough to produce a titanic explosion.

  The concussion wave rippled across the field, sending a wall of hot air as far as the general and his remaining foot soldiers. The blast knocked the ambassador off his horse, and to him it felt as though he’d stood before a potter’s kiln. Flame and smoke rose high into the air, while on the other side of the wall the gates were blown inward and shredded. The debris scythed down anyone in its way, while archers and lookouts along the parapet were tossed like limp dolls, their cries shrieking over the roar of the blast.

  The Khan’s man slowly regained his feet. The ambassador’s ears were ringing, and when he closed his eyes, the afterimage of the explosion was burned on the inside of his lids. This was the second miracle weapon he had seen today. First the light gun and now some means of containing fire in bags and unleashing it all at once. Truly this was an amazing land.

  On the battlefield, the scattered horsemen turned as though a shoal of fish and began charging for the destroyed gates, where wood smoldered and the dazed defenders ambled in shock. Swords were unsheathed and reflected the sunlight brightly now that the cloud had moved on. The men in the towers searched for victims, but the explosion had taken the fight out of the garrison.

  General Khenbish released his reserves of foot soldiers to follow after the cavalry. With a roar almost as loud as the blast of gunpowder, the men tore off across the field, eager to do the Khan’s work and restore his honor from being robbed and, worse, made to look weak because of it. They would spare the comeliest women, and boys who could be used as slaves, but everyone else in the town would be put to the sword and the entire village razed. The local warlord’s head would be placed on a pike in the nearest settlement as a reminder for those who thought their Khan’s wrath was not swift and all-consuming.

  “I wish to know more of your amazing arsenal,” the ambassador said as he and Khenbish dismounted. It wasn’t common practice for the general himself to take part in the slaughter, and the ambassador had no desire to see what was happening on the other side of the wall.

  “I will introduce you to my alchemist. He can explain both in greater detail than I. For me it is enough that they work.” An aide handed him a bone-porcelain cup of strong tea.

  As they started off toward the copse of trees where camp servants and staff waited to treat any wounded from the battle, the ambassador mused that there were so many remarkable things that he’d witnessed during his years roaming this strange nation. Some things he would never reveal, like the intimacies he’d enjoyed with some of the Khan’s concubines. And some things he would never discuss because they were just too bizarre to be believed. Like the Great Wall—it had the height and breadth of a five-story stone building and yet it stretched from horizon to horizon and beyond. It alone dwarfed every bit of Roman engineering that lay across Europe. There were the rocklike bones of dragons he’d been shown in the central desert, skulls as big as wine barrels, with teeth like daggers and femurs as tall as a man. And then there was what he saw today: a device capable of throwing light intense enough to blind a man.

  For his own sake he wanted to know how this weapon operated—Khenbish had mentioned a crystal of some sort—but he knew that this was one more mystery he would take to his grave.

  Marco Polo strode alongside the general, unsure that his fellow Venetians would believe even the more banal stories he could tell about his travels in China.

  1

  BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND

/>   FOUR MONTHS AGO

  WILLIAM CANTOR HAD SNEEZED INTO THE MICROPHONE before he knew he was about to. The need hit him that hard, and he didn’t have the chance to turn his head away. The phlegm the sneeze had discharged into his nasal passages had to be snorted back, and that amplified sniff echoed through the nearly deserted meeting room.

  “Sorry,” he said miserably and coughed, covering his mouth and turning away so as to show the ten-odd people here for his lecture that he wasn’t a complete philistine. “As an American I knew at Christ Church College said”—that’s right, you rubes, I went to Oxford—“I can shake a hand, I can shake a leg, but I sure can’t shake this cold.”

  The response from the crowd might have been polite laughter or, most likely, a muted cough.

  God, how he hated these lectures, the ones in annex buildings or village libraries, where the only attendees were pensioners with no interest in the subject but nothing better to do with their afternoons. Worse than those, actually, were the ones in cities such as Birmingham, so blighted that the sun never seemed to shine, and the people in the room were just here to get warmed up before heading out to panhandle or line up at soup kitchens. He had counted ten attendees before taking the lectern and no fewer than fourteen overcoats. He imagined a string of rusted shopping carts, overladened with detritus, in the library car park.

  “ ‘I have not told half of what I saw.’” A much better opening line than spraying the microphone with bogies, Cantor thought ruefully. Still, he had goals, and one never knew, maybe the bundledup woman toward the back of the fluorescent-lit room was secretly J. K. Rowling in mufti. “These were the last words uttered by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo upon his deathbed.

  “We know from his legendary book, The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both languished in a Genoese prison, that Polo, along with his father, Niccolò, and uncle, Maffeo”—the names tripped off Cantor’s tongue despite his head cold, this being far from the first time he had given this particular talk—“that he made many incredible discoveries and beheld many amazing sights.”

  There was a disturbance at the back of the room as a newcomer entered from the library’s brutalist-style reading room. Metal folding chairs creaked as a few people turned to see who had come to hear the speech, probably assuming it was a homeless buddy coming in from Chamberlain Square.

  The man wore a cashmere overcoat that nearly swept the floor over a dark suit, dark shirt, and a matching dark tie. Tall and big, he gave an apologetic wave and took a seat in back before Cantor could see his features. This looked promising, the cash-strapped scholar thought. At least this bloke was wearing clothes that hadn’t already been discarded a few times.

  Cantor paused long enough for the gentleman to settle. If this was a potential financial backer, he might as well start licking the guy’s boots now.

  “Even in his day, Polo’s Travels sparked debate. People simply didn’t believe he had seen and done all that he claimed. They couldn’t look past their own prejudices to believe that there was another separate civilization that could rival or even surpass the European states. Later, a glaring omission arose. Simply stated, for all his years in China, and all that he wrote of that distant land, he never once mentioned its greatest achievement, its most iconic image.

  “You see, at no point in his dictations to Rustichello da Pisa did he ever mention China’s Great Wall. That would be like a modern tourist saying they’ve been to London but not seen the Eye. Wait. That hideous Ferris wheel may be something a savvy traveler would want to forget.” Cantor paused for laughter. Got more coughing. “Ah yes, then, his failure to mention the Great Wall, which is just a short distance from Beijing, where Polo spent so much time, led his detractors to discount his entire tale.

  “But what if fault lies not with the dic-ta-tor but the dic-ta-tee.” Here he had planned to make a play on words and mention the despotic Genoese doge who had imprisoned Polo and the scribe, Rustichello, but decided against it. “Little is known about the man Polo dictated his story to while they served time in a Genoese prison cell following Polo’s capture at the Battle of Curzola. Rustichello himself had been captured some fourteen years earlier after the pivotal Battle of Meloria, which marked the beginning of the decline of the Pisan city-state.

  “Rustichello was, to put it in today’s vernacular, a romance writer who’d gained some measure of success prior to his being taken prisoner. Think of him as the Jackie Collins of his day. That would give him a strong insight into what would capture the imagination of his reading audience and what would be seen as too fantastic to believe.

  “With that in mind, I see him not only as the man wielding the pen that put Polo’s story to paper but as his editor as well, a man who could perhaps blunt some of Polo’s more controversial discoveries in order to give the manuscript more mass appeal. Medieval noblemen—and that’s almost exclusively who writers wrote for at the time—wouldn’t appreciate that China rivaled them and in many cases surpassed their achievements in the fields of medicine, engineering, social administration, and especially warfare.”

  Cantor paused a moment. Expressions on the faces of his audience ranged from asleep to slack-jawed indifference. So long as they were out of the freezing rain pounding the central English city, they didn’t much care what he said. He wished he could see the man in the dark suit, but he was hidden behind a tall homeless fellow who slept in an almost perfectly erect posture.

  “It was with this thought in mind—that perhaps Rustichello took notes during their long confinement that were edited out of the final draft of Travels and that those notes would account for some of the lapses in Polo’s story that have vexed future scholars and made them question the validity of the entire book—that I come to you today.” The line sounded clunky to Cantor’s ear too, but he was trying to come off as learned, and all his dons at Oxford spoke in run-on sentences that could fill a page or more.

  “I believe,” he continued, “that somewhere in the world exist those notes, those bits of Polo’s story that couldn’t get past the medieval censor—that was the Vatican—and would have raised too much doubt among the contemporary readership. Since leaving Christ Church”—no sense admitting that he hadn’t graduated—“I have searched across Italy and into France for a hint of such a book. And finally, six months ago, I believe I found it.”

  Did Black Suit stir at this news? It seemed to Cantor that the shadow at the back of the room shifted position slightly. He felt like a fisherman who senses that first nibble on the end of his line. Now he had to set the hook before reeling in his prize.

  “I was given access to the sales records of a small antiquarian bookshop in an even smaller town in Italy that has been in business since 1884. They have a record of selling a copy of Rustichello’s seminal work, Roman de Roi Artus, in 1908. Included with the book of Arthurian legend was a folio of loose pages.

  “At this time, Edwardian English families were exploring Italy in order to broaden themselves. Think of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.” To most of this lot it should be Cardboard Box with a Cellophane Window, but Cantor knew he was really playing to an audience of one. “Like any tourist, these travelers brought back souvenirs. Furniture, statuary, just about anything they could get their hands on that would remind them of Lombardy or Tuscany. One particular family fancied books and returned with veritable trunkloads of them, enough to fill a library about the size of this room floor to ceiling. Some of the volumes dated back to a century before Polo was even born. It is this family who acquired the Rustichello works.

  “For a fee, I was granted limited access to their library.” Five hundred pounds for an afternoon, Cantor recalled bitterly. He recalled most things bitterly these days. The current library’s owner was a right miserable git who, knowing Cantor’s desperation to see the library, wasn’t above capitalizing on the scholarly interest of a thirty-year-old researcher.

  Cantor had scraped together only enough for a single visi
t, but it had been enough. And that was what he was really doing here today, and for the past few months. He had no interest in enlightening dowagers and the homeless. He was hoping to find a patron who would help him fund his research. The folio’s owner had expressed in no uncertain terms that he would not sell it, but he would be willing to allow Cantor access, at five hundred pounds per day.

  The young academic was sure that once he published his research, pressure from historical societies would force the owner to, if not donate, at least let a major university authenticate Rustichello’s work and thus cement Cantor’s reputation and hopefully his fortune as well.

  “The text is written in typical medieval French, my specialty along with Italian from the same era. I managed to translate only a small portion since I only discovered it toward the end of my sojourn in the library, but what I read is mind-boggling. It is the description of a battle Polo witnessed in 1281 where a general named Khenbish obliterated his enemies using gunpowder, which Polo had never seen used in such a way, and a most remarkable device that utilized a special crystal to channel sunlight into a focused beam, much like a modern laser.”

  Cantor paused once again. Dark Suit had gotten to his feet and skulked from the library annex room, his long overcoat dancing around his ankles like an obsidian cape. Cantor cursed under his breath. He’d failed to set the hook, had in fact scared the fish out of the water entirely. He looked dejectedly at the unshaven and sullen faces arrayed against him. What was the point of continuing? They no more wanted to hear his nasal monotone than he wanted to deliver it.

  “Ah, thank you very much. Were there any questions?” He was taken aback when a spidery hand went up. The woman had the scrunched face of one of those dolls made of nylon stockings. “Yes?”

  “Can you spare some change?”