Patrick O’Brian 3-Book Adventure Collection: The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
showed his passport, his permit from the Central Government and several letters of recommendation. The officer pretended to be able to read them – Derrick noticed that he held them upside down – and snapped, ‘Come with me. You are under arrest.’
‘But my good man,’ said Professor Ayrton, ‘why? For what reason? What is your authority?’
The officer glowered at him, fingered his revolvers, changed his mind, and shouted an order. The soldiers rushed forward and seized the Professor and Derrick. The monk and Li Han had already disappeared: they might have melted into the thin air, for Derrick had never seen them go.
It was useless to resist, so they allowed themselves to be hustled along to a closed Peking cart: their captors threw them in and mounted guard outside.
The Professor put on his spectacles and rummaged through his notes. ‘How very annoying,’ he exclaimed, when he had looked through them. ‘I have left several pages under a stone in the temple. I will just go and …’ Still speaking, he put his head out of the cart: the guard instantly hit him with the butt of his rifle, and he fell back unconscious. Derrick pulled him into a more comfortable position, and held his head on his knees. A few minutes later there was a shouting outside; the cart lurched into motion, and the troops moved off.
Derrick was worried, far more worried than he had ever been before. He did not know what to do, or where they were going, or whether the soldiers were bandits. He listened to the voices of the troops through the creaking and rumble of the cart, but those who were nearest to him were peasants from a province whose dialect was incomprehensible to him.
They went on and on. It was horribly stuffy inside the closed cart, and Derrick began to feel very thirsty. The Professor was still knocked out, but his breathing and his pulse were steady: that was the one comfort Derrick could find in the whole situation.
Hour followed hour, and Derrick had ample time to reflect upon all the disagreeable possibilities that might await him. Whether the soldiers were bandits or not, it was almost certain that they would hold their prisoners to ransom, for the war-lords were utterly lawless in these remote provinces, and they obeyed the governments orders or defied them as they pleased. And Derrick knew what happened if the ransom were not paid.
Then another thought seized him, and a worse one: there were several war-lords who hated all foreigners, and would even forgo a ransom for the pleasure of killing them – killing them in the Chinese manner. And the worst of all these was the rebel leader Shun Chi: it was he who had raised the cry ‘All foreign devils to the sea,’ and it was he who had so recently killed the three completely inoffensive European priests.
Derrick shuddered as he remembered what he had heard in the serai of the fashion of their death. If these men who were marching outside the cart belonged to Shun Chi, then there was very little hope: and these men had been bitterly hostile from the first – if they belonged to Shun Chi, of course they would hate foreigners at sight.
Once the cart stopped. It sounded as though they were in a village or a town, and from the shouting Derrick thought they were changing the horse. He cautiously put his head out to ask for water; he half-expected a blow, and when it came he dodged it by an inch.
After that he sat for hours and hours in the bottom of the cart, holding the Professor’s head. When the cart stopped next he was grasped by two men and dragged out. It was dark: he could not tell where they were, but as he was pushed into the camp he saw the outline of steep hills against the western sky.
Two men held his arms, hurried him over the rough ground, and thrust him into a tent: there was a man there, sitting at a table, writing. He was obviously their leader, and several officers stood behind him. Derrick staggered forward, blinking in the light. The man at the table glared at him, and Derrick glared back.
He was a short man, thick and middle-aged, but he was the toughest-looking man Derrick had ever seen, and there was a very dangerous expression in his eyes.
For a moment Derrick almost lost his courage: but then he saw that the man’s left ear was hardly there at all; at some time it had been chewed off. He felt a violent thrill of relief, and he cried, ‘You are Hsien Lu!’
‘So what?’ snapped Hsien Lu.
‘Is Mr Ross here?’ asked Derrick. ‘My uncle and Mr Ross have been looking for you.’
‘What you mean?’ said Hsien Lu, narrowing his eyes.
‘Mr Ross –’ began Derrick.
‘Sandy Loss? You know Sandy Loss?’ cried Hsien Lu. ‘You say Loss? The pilate, live Canton-side one time?’
Why is he talking pidgin-English? wondered Derrick. Then he remembered that he himself had cried out in that language first. ‘Yes, I know Mr Ross – Sandy Ross –’ he replied, in Chinese, ‘he is my uncle’s partner. But he is not a pirate.’
Hsien Lu stood up and came round the table. He was still appallingly ugly, but the wicked look had gone out of his face. He pulled up a chair and sat staring in Derrick’s face. ‘You are Sullivan’s nephew,’ he said at last, searching in his memory. ‘What is your name?’
‘Derrick.’
‘Dellick. That’s right.’ The Tu-chun smiled and clapped his hands for tea. ‘But how do you come to speak Chinese?’ he asked, with a sudden return of suspicion.
‘My parents were missionaries,’ explained Derrick: he was feeling suddenly very weary, and he wanted above all to ask for the Professor to be taken care of; but the Tu-chun went on, ‘Where is Loss?’
‘In Liao Meng, I think – but please could I go and see to my cousin? He was hit on the head. He is an old, learned man, and he was hit on the head like a – like a beast,’ cried Derrick, with a sudden burst of rage at the memory of it.
Hsien Lu murmured a quick order, and two officers hurried from the tent. ‘Never mind,’ he said to Derrick, ‘he will be looked after. Now tell me where they started from, and where they were going.’
Derrick had lived in China nearly all his life: he knew that he would never be able to sit down in the presence of an elder, let alone a Tu-chun, however weary and faint he might be, so he gathered his wits, concentrated his attention, and answered Hsien Lu’s questions as clearly and as briefly as he could. The war-lord went on and on; he wanted to know a great deal, and Derrick had to stifle gigantic yawns. Soon he was conscious of the Tu-chun’s voice alone, coming as from a great distance: he jerked himself into wakefulness, and answered ‘Yes’ at haphazard. He kept himself alert for some time, but then again the voice went booming on: it was somewhere in the distance, and it seemed to be stating that Ross and Sullivan had blown up four competing pirate junks in the harbour of Pu Ying itself, the stronghold of the society of the Everlasting Wrong: but that might have been a dream; it came and went in snatches, and in another moment Derrick was fast asleep where he stood.
He woke up suddenly, and it was the morning. He was in a strange bed, and for some time he could not remember where he was. Li Han stood beside him, offering a cup of tea: on the other side of the tent Professor Ayrton lay on a comfortable palliasse, already sipping at a bowl of tea. His head was bandaged, but he seemed quite recovered. He nodded to Derrick and said, ‘Good morning, my boy. How do you feel?’
‘Fine, thank you, sir. How is your head?’
‘It spins like a teetotum, but it appears to be whole, which is a blessing. I must admit, however, that I deserved the blow. I am afraid that my ill-timed enthusiasm for the abbot’s stelae overruled my caution. We might easily have been caught by Shun Chi instead of the excellent Hsien Lu, and then we should have been in a pretty mess, as I believe the phrase goes. What a deserving man the Tu-chun appears to be: he came to me by candle-light to offer his compliments and excuses, and he assured me that if it would afford me the slightest pleasure he would arrange to have the soldier who was so impetuous with his rifle-butt tortured to death in front