The Journeyer

And by then the ranks of the Yi nearest to the camp were ru

When all was clamor and confusion down in the valley, Bayan said, “I think now is the time, Marco Polo. The Yi are all ru

“Now?” I said. “Are you sure, Orlok? I will be highly visible, standing here and waving a flag. It may give the Yi reason for suspicion and pause. If they do not drop me with an immediate arrow.”

“No fear,” he said. “No advancing warrior ever looks back. Get up there.”

So I clambered to my feet, expecting any moment to feel a thumping puncture of my leather cuirass, and hurriedly unfurled the silk from my lance. When nothing struck me down, I gripped the lance in both hands, raised the ba

How long will it take? They must be already looking this way. Yes, they would have known where we had to come from, at the rear of the enemy. So, from their hiding places, the engineers are peering in this direction. They are sca

Allow a few more moments for that. God, but the ba

I wished them good luck and much distance and safe shelter, for I myself was feeling exceptionally exposed and visible and vulnerable. I seemed to have been flaunting my flag and my bravata and my person for an eternity already, and the Yi must be blind not to have spotted me. Now—how long had the Firemaster said?—a slow count of ten after the wicks were lit. I counted ten slow wags of my big, rippling yellow ba

Nothing happened.

Caro Gesu, what had gone wrong? Could it be that the engineers had misunderstood? My arms were weary of the waving, and I was sweating profusely, though the sun was still behind the mountains and the morning was not yet warm. Could it be that the engineers had waited to see my signal before even placing the balls? Why had I entrusted this enterprise—and now my very life—to a dozen thickheaded Mongol rankers? Would I have to stand here, waving more and more feebly, for another eternity or two, while the engineers leisurely did what should have been done already? And how long after that would it be before they even began lackadaisically to rummage around in their belt purses for flint and steel? And during all that time, must I stand here flailing this extremely eye-inviting yellow flag? Bayan might be convinced that no warrior ever looked back voluntarily, but any of those Yi had only to stumble and fall, or be knocked sprawling, so that his head turned this way. He could hardly fail to see such an uncommon battlefield sight as I presented. He would yell to his companion warriors, and they would come pelting toward me, loosing arrows as they came … .

The green landscape was blurred by sweat ru

The whole center of the valley, where now the Yi and the Bho mock-Mongols were intimately commingled, was clouded by the dust raised by their fierce confusion. But the flashes and smokes were high above that dome of dust, and not obscured by it. They were up where I would have put them myself, twinkling and puffing from those crevices in the castle-like rock outcrops. They did not all ignite at once, but flared by ones and twos, from one mountain height and then another. I was pleased that the engineers had placed them where I would have done, and I was pleased when I counted twelve ignitions; every single ball had performed as warranted—but I was dismayed by the apparent puniness of them. Such tiny flashes of fire, and so soon extinguished—and leaving only such insignificant plumes of blue smoke. The sound of them came much later and, though the noises were loud enough to be heard above the clamor of shouting and scuffling down in the valley, they were no such thunderous roar as I had heard when my palace chamber was demolished. These noises of ignition were only sharp slaps of sound—as might have been produced by a Yi warrior yonder hitting the flat of his sword on a horse’s flank—one and two slapping sounds, and then several together in a sustained crackle of slaps, and then the final few separate again.

And then nothing more happened, except that the furious but futile battle continued unabated down in the valley, where none of the combatants seemed to have noticed our byplay in the heights. The Orlok turned and gave me a lacerating look. I shrugged my eyebrows helplessly at him. But suddenly all the other men were murmuring “Hui!” in a wondering way, and they were all pointing, and most of them in different directions. Bayan and I looked first where one was pointing, and then where another was, and another. Over here, high up, the cleft gashed in a wall-like rock was perceptibly widening. Over there, high up, two great slabs of rock that had been side by side were gradually leaning apart. Over yonder, high up, a pi

If those mountains truly never had suffered an avalanche before, then because they never had, they may have been ready and poised for one. I think we could have accomplished our intentions with just three or four of the brass balls lodged on either side of the valley; we had put six on each side, and all had done their work. And, puny as was the commencement of the performance, the conclusion was spectacular. I can best describe it thus: consider the high rocks to have been a few exposed knobs of the backbones of the mountains, and consider our charges to have been hammer blows that broke the bones. As the mountains’ spines crumbled, their earth cover began to peel away here and there, like a hide being ski