Chapter 2922: Tianjin Wei (1)

"Master, Master—"

Watching Saoye flap aside the cabin's door curtain in a breathless hurry, Li Luoyou set down the copy of the Lingao Times in his hands. Ever since boarding ship at Tongzhou, apart from the occasional climb to the deck for a breath of air, he had kept to the stern cabin poring over the newspapers and periodicals that had made their winding way up from the south — the Lingao Times, the Yangcheng Express, the Lingao Commercial Daily, Tianshui Life Weekly — sheet after sheet, issue after issue, piled on the cabin table in a tall stack. Though nearly two months had passed since these papers had first reached his hands, he still read them closely, refusing to let a single word or line escape him.

Violating the edict that banned the circulation and reading of Australian books and newspapers meant, for the common sort, running the risk of a flogging that would bloom the backside open and three days in the cangue; but for capital officials and grand merchants like Li Luoyou it had long since become a dead letter. Never mind that before he boarded at Tongzhou, the officials of his acquaintance had for years passed Australian papers around among themselves, everyone's understanding unspoken; even among the imperial kinsmen and palace in-laws, what household did not keep a rare Australian trinket or two tucked away? The court's ban banned the common people; those with connections and silver it could not ban at all.

And yet the more he read, the more he felt that he could no longer see through the Australians at a glance, the way he had presumptuously imagined he could years ago.

Take this newspaper, for instance — his gaze fell on the front page of the Lingao Times at his hand, which carried a notice concerning a newly built railway in Qiongzhou. The prose was plain and level, without a syllable of flourish, setting out one by one the date the line would open, its length, even the specifications of the rails used — like a ledger drawn up for someone to audit. Yet the plainer and more forthright it all seemed, the less certain Li Luoyou felt. They appeared to be informing you, in the broad light of day, of everything they did; but if you racked your brains to see through to why they did it, and what it was they ultimately wanted, it was all like sleight of hand, luring a man straight down into a boundless fog.

As he read on, the lead type on the page seemed to transmute into that dazzling white flare of the Australian cannon works, the sky-scraping column of smoke laced through with steam; the faces of Liu San, Li Mei, and the other Australians flickered in and out amid the fire and smoke — glance again, and they were utterly changed. The flame, the smoke column, those faces caught between smiling and not — they seethed and intertwined and warped before his eyes, as if to drag his whole person in.

Li Luoyou shivered despite himself, a thread of cold shooting up his spine, and the chill set off two sneezes in a row. Were it not for the excellent effect of the liver-soothing pills Shopkeeper Leng had given him, who knew how many more attacks of dizziness the journey would have brought on. Without quite meaning to, he touched the little porcelain vial in his sleeve; the bottle was warm against his skin, and only then did his heart settle somewhat.

It was fortunate that Saoye came in just then and broke these wild fancies short.

"What is it?" Li Luoyou collected himself, folded the paper, pressed it beneath the paperweight, and lifted his teacup for a sip. The tea had gone cold and acrid, leaving a faint bitterness on the tip of his tongue.

"Master, a big boat's plugged up the Lu River — ours can't move." Saoye's face was tight with alarm, a fine sweat beaded at his temples; plainly he had just run back from the deck to report. "The boatman says it's stopped up tight — nothing will budge for a good while yet — and asks you to come up and have a look."

Li Luoyou frowned, rose, straightened his robes and cap, tucked the visiting card into his sleeve, and stepped out through the cabin door.

"Just look for yourself, Master — how is any boat to pass?"

Li Luoyou mounted to the deck to find the boatman at the scull's tail, his brows screwed into two knots, the creases on his forehead deep enough to grip a copper coin. One hand on the scull, one hand pointing ahead, he muttered a few oaths — whether at the boat blocking the channel or at this wretched weather, there was no telling.

The Lu River — that is, the North Canal. Years of travel between the capital and Tianjin had made Li Luoyou intimately familiar with this stretch of water. Where the river passed Xigu it bent slightly east, then turned southwest again; the current slowed there, and the grain boats plying back and forth slackened their speed, so the least carelessness could snarl them into a jam. The authorities had built a ferry crossing here besides, and the ferryboats shuttled without pause, adding disorder to a channel that was none too wide to begin with. Even on ordinary days grain boats, ferries, and merchant craft jammed into one writhing mass here, the boatmen's curses rising and falling; there was not a single peaceful day in it.

But the scene at this moment was a hundred times worse than an ordinary bad day.

A wharf had been newly thrown up beside the ferry crossing at some point — no one could say when — and what lay against it was no skiff or light pleasure boat but a great sand boat, ten-odd zhang long and four or five across, her hull short and fat, sitting so deep in the water that she looked like a stranded whale, plugging the narrow Lu River tight. The planking along her sides had been soaked black by the river; cables thick as rice bowls were made fast to her gunwales, their far ends bound to stone blocks on the wharf, drawn drum-tight.

The grain boats and ferries trapped behind her were in chaos. Boatmen hauled frantically at scull and oar, swinging long punt poles to fend off collisions, while loosing their throats in filth and abuse in every accent of south and north — Shandong voices, Huaiyang voices, Jiangxi voices, and a few strains of Fukienese he could not quite catch, all stewing together in a hubbub like a pot of boiling porridge. Several little ferryboats were wedged into the gaps between the grain boats like fish caught in the crevices of stones, unable to advance, unable to retreat; their passengers stretched their necks to gawk, or bawled toward the shore, or simply sat down where they were, wearing the look of men resigning themselves to Heaven's will.

The sand boat rode deep — her near side almost rested against the bank slope, the hull canted slightly, as if she were laden to the beams with heavy cargo. On the side toward the wharf a trough-like timber slide had been let down, built of thick planks nailed together, one end resting on the gunwale and one on the wharf, its rough surface worn to a shine — clearly it had already seen many days of service.

The confusion and din on the river touched the sailors aboard the sand boat not at all. They wore matching blue short jackets, cloth belts knotted at their waists, straw sandals on their feet, every one of them burnt dark by the sun, and they moved with the brisk precision of wound machinery. Immense baskets were hauled up from the hold onto the deck, each requiring two brawny men to carry it, the thick carrying poles pressing their shoulders down while their steps stayed perfectly steady. The sailors chanted work calls, rough and strong — "Hey-yo — hey-yo —" one cry after the next, like some ancient incantation.

Together they heaved the baskets up and tipped their black contents into the slide. The black stuff came clattering down, striking the wooden trough with a muffled booming. At the foot of the slide, on the crude wharf, stood a great wagon drawn by two oxen, its body built of elm, stout and clumsy, its wheel ruts deep — a veteran of heavy freight at a glance. The black matter poured into the wagon bed like a waterfall, kicking up a haze of gray-black smoke, a drift of fine powder spreading through the air, bearing a sharp, nose-stinging smell of sulfur.

Li Luoyou watched with fixed attention the wordless coordination of sailors and carters, his gaze moving from the black waterfall to the great wagon, and from the wagon to the vehicles waiting on the bank. Only when the load in a wagon bed had risen into a little black peak did it sway off toward the high ground by the river, its wheels grinding a deep rut into the dirt road; another empty ox cart rolled at once into the wharf to fill the gap, its driver adjusting the shafts with practiced hands until the bed stood square beneath the mouth of the slide. They were long inured to this orderly loading — every link fitted seamlessly, as though they had drilled it a thousand times over.

Li Luoyou had lived long in the capital, and the camel trains that hauled coal into the city from the Western Hills were no strangers to him. Those camels wore bronze bells at their necks and went jingling down Chang'an Avenue, coal baskets heaped on their backs, shedding coal dust the whole way. But their coal was gray-black, small of lump and loose of grain — not much like the stuff before his eyes now, black to the point of gleaming, broken to an even fineness.

"This cargo they're unloading — is it... small coal?" he asked haltingly, half a guess already formed in his mind.

"And what else? They say that government foundry burns a thousand jin of small coal a day." Finding Li Luoyou asking after it, the old boatman opened his box of talk, and pointing at the sand boat he ran on at length. The official foundry at Xigu, he said, had been guarded by soldiers of the provincial governor's camp from the day it went up — walls towering, gates strict; idlers were bawled off for so much as a second look, let alone drawing near. All anyone ever saw was coal boats coming and going, the sky smudged black, and what they were casting in there no one knew.

Then he turned to the sand boat blocking the channel while it unloaded, and his talk took on a note of grievance. That vessel, he said, was in truth a war junk of Tianjin's coastal-defense squadron, built for patrolling the seas and hunting pirates, for keeping the waters safe and the people at peace — yet nowadays the squadron could neither patrol nor hunt, but either smuggled Changlu's official salt or hired itself out to merchants to haul freight for the carriage money, snatching rice from civilian boats' bowls. A fine warship, doing a merchantman's trade instead of a warship's duty — what use the court fed these soldiers for, Heaven only knew.

"And Grand Secretary Xu sits by and lifts no finger. Mark me — this dynasty of ours is about done for." The old boatman finished on this, his voice pressed low, as if afraid of being overheard, or as if he had held it in so long that not spitting it out would choke him.

Li Luoyou paid the boatman's grumbling no mind whatsoever. His attention had been seized by the several thick columns of dense black smoke rising from the riverbank. The columns were thick as a man's waist, twisting and rolling beneath North Zhili's low-hanging clouds like black serpents struggling between heaven and earth. At their bases a firelight could be glimpsed flickering — the glow of coal fires burning in the furnaces, leaking out through the chimneys' seams.

The smoke columns, the firelight, the waves of heat and the smell of iron rust drifting over on the wind — all of it gradually stirred up those bygone years when he had cast Red Barbarian cannons for Wang Zunde in Guangdong. Then, entrusted by the Governor-General, he had hired more than ten furnace households in Foshan to cast cannons, racing the work day and night, the furnace fires reddening half the sky — and the smoke columns had been just this thick, just this black, twisting and rolling in the wind just so. The cannon founders had gone bare-shouldered, drenched in sweat around the furnaces, stirring the molten iron with long iron rods, sparks flying everywhere; where one landed on a man's body, it left a scar.

(End of chapter)