Part 23 (1/2)

It was also true that Colonel Hu drank to blot out the emotions that these dread people had engendered in him. When he at last returned from his tour of duty in Cambodia, he had knelt down when no one was watching and pressed his lips lovingly into the soil of his native China.

He drank to forget, but he could not forget. The terror crept through even the most serious drunk. Only when he pa.s.sed out near to dawn was his mind washed clean for a few hours. But when he awoke, the memories rushed back at him again like howling demons until he wished only to rip his own brain apart.

Instead, he steeled himself and got on with his job. And now his job was brainwas.h.i.+ng Qi Lin.

This was no easy task. In fact, she presented a number of unique and at first baffling problems. That was quite all right with Colonel Hu. The more difficult the subject, the better he liked it because the deeper his mind was occupied. Work at least kept the hounds inside his head at bay.

The nights were what Colonel Hu dreaded most.

Now his men were asleep, and Huaishan Han had departed, having spent all day with Hu and his special subject; Hu was alone, face to face with the chill solitary night filled as it always was with the scrabbling of nocturnal creatures, the wind rustling down the trees like faraway voices a voices of the dying, of the d.a.m.ned. It was then that Colonel Hu reached for the bottle.

At times, he would not even bother with a gla.s.s; it made the river of surcease flow too slowly.

On this night, consumed by gusty winds that rattled sand from the Gobi against the windows, Colonel Hu lay in a semitorpor. He had not dared to touch liquor while old, crooked-backed Huaishan Han was here. But Huaishan Han had left hours ago and the night grew long. Colonel Hu drank. One hand now grasped the neck of a nearly empty bottle of liquor with the kind of desperation only a drowning man summons up.

Tiny droplets of sweat glistened like sad diamonds in his brush-cut hair. His eyes were filmy with the tread of ghosts marching in an endless parade through the interstices of his skull. His uniform s.h.i.+rt was open at the neck and deep crescents of sweat showed beneath each arm and down the front where the starched fabric clung to his fluttering chest, losing all shape.

His feet were bare; he seemed to feel the squelch of that mixture of mud, blood and offal peculiar to ravaged Cambodia. It had seemed to him that there was no soil left in the country. This putrid compound slid across the valleys, fields, and lakesides like the effluvia of some monstrous volcano.

Colonel Hu started and shuddered, hiccuping. He said something, indecipherable even to himself.

Then he looked up. Qi lin was framed in the doorway.

There was nothing but utter blackness behind her and this stygian color seemed to dwarf her completely, lending her the appearance of a street waif, thin and ill-fed, living from moment to moment.

”Is Huaishan Han gone? Already?”

”What are you doing here?” Colonel Hu asked with slightly slurred diction.

”My sleep was filled with a” Qi lin's quavery voice trailed off. She seemed so young, so a ”With what?”

”With life. Teeming life.”

Colonel Hu thought of his own sleep and what it was like without the utter oblivion alcohol provided. He shuddered again and swallowed.

He raised his hand, discovered the bottle still in it and waved the thing at her. ”Come in.” There were guards all around the perimeter of the encampment but none at her doorstep. That was not considered sound psychological practice. ”Sit down.”

Qi lin did as she was told, perching herself on a bamboo-and-canvas ottoman. She looked like a bird, thin and frail seeming, peering at him with those huge dark enigmatic eyes. They were odd eyes; they had held Colonel Hu's attention from the moment he first saw her. They were bright with intelligence, glossy with a more elemental quality he could not name. They were Chinese eyes, to be sure. But they were also something else. There was a Western aspect to them, as if the epicanthic folds were not complete or had been subtly altered in the formless genetic state. Colonel Hu knew where that came from.

Her eyes held him now, their intensity burning through the deadening liquor like hot sunlight through a morning haze.

”Tell me about your dreams,” Colonel Hu said.

”I was in a city,” Qi lin said obediently. ”It was big, big as a hive. It was built on a hill a on many hills so that the streets were never flat. Never ever. They rose and fell like the ocean tides. It was strange.”

”In what way was it strange?”

”I felt perfectly at home there,” Qi lin said with a bit of wonder in her voice. ”I don't see how that's possible. I know the jungle. I know that is where I have been, where I feel at home. You have told me that time and again.”

”It is true.”

”Then the city”

”The city is a dream.”

”But it felt so real. I dreamt in such detail a the streets, the houses, shops. Even the people.”

”What people?” Colonel Hu was sitting up straighter. He ran a hand through his hair, wiped the wetness away on his trouser leg.

”I don't know.”

”But you said you dreamt in such detail.”

”I did.”

”Then describe the people.”

”I can't.”

”You are lying to me.”

Qi lin gasped and her eyes were filled with fear. Such a pity, Colonel Hu thought, because all the gloss went out of them. They were dulled to opacity and then they became merely eyes as everyone had eyes, nothing special at all.

”No!”

”Then tell me!”

”I can't!”

”Tell me! Tell me!” Colonel Hu became aware that he was shouting. He had hold of her and was shaking her violently. He felt a constriction in his throat, a rage suffusing him as the choir of the d.a.m.ned sang its funereal dirge in his inner ear.

Qi lin was sobbing, a tender shoot trembling before the force of a gale. ”Oh, Buddha!” she gasped. ”Buddha protect me!”

Colonel Hu's rage doubled and he shook her maniacally. ”Why do you invoke the name of Buddha here? That is forbidden! Strictly forbidden!”

His rage fell upon her like cruel sleet, blinding her, making her choke and pant for breath. She felt gripped by forces beyond her control, forces which threatened to rip aside the fabric of this life to which she had become acclimated. That would mean a return to the painthe awful, ringing, echoing, reverberating pain, behind which lurked the nothingness that froze her marrow.

Thus she struggled, hurling herself against him so that her tears streaked his cheeks, running into his eyes, salt droplets clinging to his lips, trembling just before he swallowed them.

Colonel Hu felt her against him and he felt warmth. Her tremors went through him. It was as if he was feeling her soul shaking itself apart. And without even thinking, he gathered her into him.

Just as two animals in the wildenemies evenwill seek one another out and share in bodily warmth in order to survive the bitter cold of nature's crudest months, so Colonel Hu acted out of instinct. It was as much for his own survival as it was for hers, though he might not yet understand that.

All he was aware of was the suffering.

”Little one,” he murmured. ”Little one,” hearing her tiny whimpers and within them the anguished cries of the mult.i.tudes who had been mutilated in the name of a blasted, nihilistic ideology without heart or soul. Those same mult.i.tudes through whom he had tramped, their muck seeping into his boots, squelching between his toes.

He felt her curling up against him, her sobs slackening, her tears drying, and with them, the terror in her soul.

Warmth began to suffuse him and he wondered at it because it was a warmth from an outside source. Colonel Hu was not a celibate. He took his pleasure from a variety of women. But all of them had thighs like alabaster, cool and ungiving. Their jade gates were like marble, smooth, drawing from him his hot seed during the clouds and the rain but nothing more.