CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
Northern China
March 1st, 168 CE
Daiyu—Black Jade—shivered slightly.
The six cast-iron cannon of the battery roared, belching off-white smoke that stank of burned sulfur, more powerful than the smells of horse sweat and unbathed humans and melting muddy snow that surrounded Black Jade. Two kilometers away the six-kilo round-shot struck the knot of nomad horsemen. She lowered her binoculars, face impassive but still wincing slightly internally.
The horses . . . and men . . . they spatter when the shot strikes. I had not expected that. They splash for meters!
She didn’t have to fight down nausea anymore, though. And she’d seen what nomad raiders did in a frontier village they overran. She had lost the contents of her stomach at that, which had cured her of any conscious sympathy for the Xianbei. They were wild men, and barbarically cruel even by the standards of the Eastern Han dynasty.
Still, the way blood splashes so far . . . and the horses, they do not choose their masters.
Their escort of horse archers cheered. They were nomads themselves—Xiongnu, Huns, whose ancestors had come south to what she thought of as Inner Mongolia when the Xianbei drove them from the steppes further north, north of the Gobi. Rather than going west, as some had done.
They despised the Han as grass-eating farmers, like so many humanoid cattle or sheep. But they hated the Xianbei with a passion, which made them useful allies.
Now I know what barbarian really means, she thought.
They were also using stirrups and framed saddles, copied from the ones the five Chinese had brought from the future. The problem there was that the Xianbei would copy it too, and not too far in the future. It was one of the immediate inventions they were introducing, one that needed no new tools or methods to make.
Only the idea is needed there. Cannon, though . . . cannon are different.
Colonel Liu nodded in satisfaction as the regular Han infantry soldiers around him cheered too. Half of them carried crossbows, which her ancestors had invented a bit later than this . . . but improved models, with rifle-like stocks and sights that about doubled their effectiveness. The other half had nearly rectangular iron-faced shields graven with scowling, snarling tiger faces, and long spears.
The gun crews were already reloading after they pushed the cannon back into position, a long hisssss sound as the bundle of soaked cloth on one end of the ramrod met hot metal and quenched any sparks in the barrel, then a dance-like play of agility as the fresh rounds were rammed home and the touchhole primed.
The colonel motioned her forward.
“You see what the new weapons can do,” he said to the Han general sitting his horse beside him.
The man looked a little puzzled; Black Jade repeated it in better court Old Chinese, and he repeated it back to her . . . with a distinct regional accent.
She turned to the colonel and dropped into Mandarin: “Sir, he mostly understood you . . . ”
“Good. I thought I’d finally gotten fluent, down in Luoyang!”
“You have, sir. You are fully comprehensible in Luoyang.”
Which was true. Though his accent was still vile, and prompted laughter now and then. It would not be tactful to say that, though.
And tact . . . tact you need to survive around State Security. Or the nobility, here.
Her accent was still detectable but diminishing . . . but then, languages had always come easily to her.
She went on:
“But his own speech is a northern dialect, and the combination of his learning the Luoyang speech as a grown man and his accent plus your accent made it uncertain. There is less uniformity in language here than we expected! But then, Old Chinese has been spreading in all directions for over a thousand years by now. Only to be expected that it will diverge regionally in such a long period. Even among the upper classes, since our system of writing is not alphabetic.”
“Inefficient,” her commander said, and shrugged. “We will introduce an alphabet, eventually . . . but it will be some time before a universal schooling system can be created with mass literacy in a standard speech . . . He seems impressed, at least.”
There was a sheen of sweat on the general’s face, despite the chill spring weather, and his eyes kept flicking back towards the guns. There were only three batteries of them so far, and this was their first visit to this section of the border.
The man wore a back-and-breast of black leather with red-lacquered iron scales over it, and larger scales on the shoulder pieces. His helmet looked distinctly odd to her: it was of leather padded with cloth on the inside, and had more black iron scales laced to it on the outer surface, and a hanging neck guard of the same. Pheasant feathers stood up to either side of it over his ears, which was a mark of rank; a long, single-edged straight sword hung at his waist; loose trousers were tucked into soft-surfaced knee boots beneath, both originally copied from the nomads.
His bodyguards were similarly equipped, and carried lances that often had a projecting side blade or a hook; their gear was much like his otherwise, except that it looked plainer, and his saddle and theirs were in the old style.
She and the colonel were in steel-wire chainmail with knee-length skirts split before and behind for riding, and plate-steel helmets with flared neck guards. Those were among the first from the new workshops, but more would follow later—it was just as good protection or better than the local product, and weighed about a quarter to a third less. At least the concept of mass production was something that the locals were thoroughly familiar with, in military workshops at least.
Hooves pounded; they all looked up, but it was two riders with the blazons of Imperial messengers on their chests, trotting over the rolling grassland from the south. They drew up, bowed in the saddle, and handed over a sealed scroll to her; she passed it to the colonel.
He reads the local language well, but then, he did before we . . . arrived. Odd to say before of something in the distant future!
“Ah,” he said in the language they shared; that made it absolutely safe from eavesdroppers.
“Sir?”
“The Roman envoys have started talking about departing for Rome once more.”
They’d been there for months when the Chinese party arrived at court. And they’d been intensely curious, and had enough contacts to follow what the newcomers were doing. Whoever had picked them had been shrewd about their abilities.
Colonel Liu smiled thinly and dropped into their birth speech, which made his remarks invincibly private:
“That would be unfortunate, since they would take news of us back to Marcus Aurelius. Not fatal—what can he do, ignorant of the devices of the future? Still, he was . . . is . . . a very intelligent man. Better he know nothing. But something can be . . . arranged, I think. If I can persuade Emperor Ling. That man . . . that spoiled boy . . . keeping his mind on matters of importance is like sculpting a statue from warm pig lard!”
“And if he cannot be brought to see the necessity, sir?” Black Jade said.
The colonel’s smile showed teeth now.
“Something can still be arranged,” he said. “With our other contacts at court. Three years is enough to develop such.”
Black Jade shivered slightly again.