Читать книгу Forbidden City - Alex Archer - Страница 5

Loulan City, China

184 A.D .

Everyone in the city hated Emperor Ling’s tax collectors. Times were hard. Spring floods had ruined crops and dwellings. Families struggled to make ends meet while still having enough left over to fill the imperial coffers. The Han Dynasty, though, remained unsympathetic to the needs of its citizens. Rebellions had begun around the kingdom.

Occasionally, when angry men grew tired of the heavy tax burden, they killed the royal collectors and took back their taxes. The emperor then had to employ more warriors to protect the tax collectors, and that raised the taxes again.

Of all the emperor’s tax collectors, Tsui Zedong was the most hated.

Fat and arrogant, Zedong enjoyed throwing around the emperor’s power. It was said that were he not able to add sums so quickly in his head he would have been executed for being a thief.

Dressed in brocade robes, he traveled the countryside inside an opulent carriage. Six armed warriors on horses escorted him and protected the emperor’s gold from bandits. All of the warriors were experienced and scarred from many battles.

When the carriage slowed that late spring morning, Zedong slid the rice paper shade from the carriage window and peered out. Loulan City was small, filled mostly with farmers who barely eked out an existence. But there were a few skilled artisans and craftsmen. Most of them had shops on the street he presently traveled.

The driver pulled the carriage to a stop, then got down and opened the door.

Holding his robes together, Zedong heaved his bulk up from the padded seat and got out to do the emperor’s collecting. Zedong smelled food in the air. When he stepped down from the carriage, he saw a tavern three shops down. The carcasses of ducks and geese hung from a rope out front, ready for purchase by those who worked inside the city and didn’t raise their own livestock.

All of the shops ran in straight lines on either side of the street. Most of them had existed for years, put together by families and trained carpenters. A well in the center of the square provided water for travelers. Several shopkeepers stopped their work and came out to look at the carriage. Most of them wore looks of dread.

The warriors, bristling with swords and bows, tied their horses to the back of the carriage. They took the chest from inside the carriage. Two of them carried it between them.

Several murmured curses echoed along the street. The shopkeepers knew what was about to occur.

Unrolling the scroll the emperor’s tax keepers had prepared listing the shopkeepers and the amounts they were to pay, Zedong reviewed the listing for the jeweler he planned to visit first. Zedong rolled the scroll back and entered the small shop.

The jeweler’s establishment was small and tidy. On the surface, he appeared to be a poor man, but Zedong knew from years of collecting that many shopkeepers and tradesmen disguised their wealth.

An old woman sat in a chair holding a fat cat in her lap.

“I have come to collect the taxes for the emperor,” Zedong announced.

The old jeweler looked nervous. His back was bent from years of hunching over his tools, creating settings and pulling thin gold wire. With a trembling hand, he handed Zedong a cloth bag that clinked.

Zedong knew from the feel of the bag that it didn’t contain enough gold. He could have told the shopkeeper that without opening the bag, but he opened it anyway and spilled the contents across his hand.

“There is not enough,” Zedong accused.

“It is all we have,” the jeweler whispered.

“Nonsense. You have a fat cat. If you have enough to keep your cat fat, then you have enough to pay the emperor his taxes.”

“No, I swear to you,” the old man said. “It is all we have.”

Zedong dropped the bag into the emperor’s chest. Then he looked around the shop. “You have gold ingots and jewels.”

“Please,” the old man begged. “We do not have many of those. Hardly enough to stay in business. If you take those, we cannot make items to sell. Then the emperor’s new taxes won’t be met.”

“If you don’t meet the taxes,” Zedong promised, “things will go badly for you.” He turned to the warriors. “Seize the gold and gems.”

The warriors went about their assignment. Screaming in outrage and pain, the old jeweler grabbed one of the warriors by the arm and yanked. Without hesitating, the warrior shoved the old man away and thrust a dagger through his throat.

The jeweler fell and his blood stained the wooden floor. He clasped his throat and kicked helplessly as his life ebbed.

Wailing, his aged wife abandoned her chair and rushed to her stricken husband. She called on the gods and for help from anyone, but no one came. No one dared.

The old woman’s pain didn’t touch Zedong. He’d ordered the deaths of many others. This one had been easy because he didn’t have to think about it. Furthermore, with one man dead, the other shopkeepers would readily pay.

As her husband died, the old woman turned to Zedong. “May the gods curse you,” she moaned. “May your life end soon and in painful agony. May you throw up your own entrails and take days to die.”

Zedong knew he couldn’t afford to allow such an affront. He was the emperor’s tax collector. An insult to him was like an insult to the emperor. If he did not avenge it, the emperor would have him executed.

“Kill her,” Zedong ordered.

The nearest warrior drew his sword instantly, then slashed down into the old woman, cleaving her from shoulder to heart. With a last gasp of pain, she fell across her husband.

Zedong looked at her and hated her even in death. He kicked her three times, getting madder each time because she wasn’t alive to feel pain.

He wished he’d killed her before she’d cursed him. Curses were powerful things.

At his order, the warriors looted the shop. Zedong stood and watched. The fat cat stared at him with its unblinking green gaze. Zedong walked toward it, slipping a dagger from inside his sleeve. When he was close enough, he struck.

But the feline moved at the last moment, leaping over Zedong’s knife, landing on his arm and leaping up again. The cat’s claws struck Zedong’s face above his right eye. Blood dripped onto his cheek and fire stung his flesh. He swung the knife again, but the cat vaulted through a window and vanished.

Zedong wiped the blood from his face and kicked the dead woman again. He didn’t think she had the power to properly curse him. The cat was merely bad luck.

Still, he wished he knew for sure.

T HAT EVENING , AFTER FULL DARK had finally draped Loulan City and all the shopkeepers had paid, Zedong left town. With two people dead, Loulan City wasn’t safe for him. He wouldn’t have admitted that to the emperor, though.

Eating roast duck from the large basket of food he had seized from the vendor, Zedong listened to the emperor’s gold clinking in the trunk at the back of the carriage. He relished the spicy meat enough to lick the flavor from his fingers.

The carriage took a sudden hard turn to the right. Zedong cursed the driver as he reached into the basket for one of the pastries he’d claimed.

The carriage dodged again.

Cursing more, Zedong slid the window shade aside and took a deep breath to better yell at the incompetent driver. Likely the man had gone to sleep. He had complained of fatigue for himself and the animals when ordered to leave town.

Before Zedong could remember the man’s name, the driver’s corpse suddenly sprawled over the side of the carriage. The man’s dead face slapped against the window. Only the long arrow through his throat kept his head from entering the carriage. A fearful look was frozen on his face.

In a moment he was gone, dropping to the road beneath the whirring wheels of the carriage. The vehicle rose sharply for an instant as it rolled over the dead driver.

Zedong grew afraid. The horses ran faster, thundering over the road as fear filled them.

“Help!” Zedong called out. “Help me!”

Inside the carriage, he bounced vigorously, slamming against the walls and the cushioned seats. He fumbled the door open and gazed outside, thinking of trying to climb up to the driver’s seat.

Twenty feet ahead, one of the warriors toppled from his mount with an arrow deep between his shoulder blades. Only then did Zedong see two other riderless horses running after the carriage.

One of the warriors in front of the carriage wheeled his mount around and spurred the animal to speed. “Get back inside the carriage!” the man yelled.

Zedong wanted to retreat to safety, but he wished to know what was happening. Gazing behind the carriage, he spotted a slim rider dressed in black. The rider drew back an arrow and let fly.

The warrior who’d gone to engage the enemy gazed down at the arrow that suddenly jutted from his chest. While he still seemed lost in his astonishment, he slid from the saddle. His right foot didn’t clear the saddle straps and his body was dragged across the broken terrain.

The surviving two warriors approached more carefully, riding low over their horses. They closed on the rider in black.

Ignoring them, the rider urged his mount on. He slid the bow over one shoulder and pushed himself into a crouch on the horse’s bare back, balanced one foot in front of the other.

Before Zedong realized what the rider was doing, he’d vaulted from his mount to the top of the carriage. Zedong screamed shrilly and dodged back inside the carriage. Glancing through the back window, he watched helplessly as the final two riders went down to arrows.

Seconds later, while Zedong quivered in fear, the carriage came to a stop.

The rider was at the side of the carriage. He held a sword in his hand as he opened the door.

“Out,” the rider demanded.

Certain that he’d been held up by one of the many thieves that made travel so dangerous in the area, Zedong obeyed. He tripped on the step and fell to his hands and knees. Before he could stand, a blade was pressed to his throat.

The clouds cleared the face of the full moon in that moment. Surprise filled Zedong when he realized that the thief was a woman. A fox mask covered her facial features.

“Who are you?” Zedong demanded, using the imperious voice that he employed whenever he was on the emperor’s business.

She didn’t answer. The sword never moved.

“I represent the emperor,” Zedong threatened. “Your life is forfeit for killing the imperial guardsmen.”

“One more life,” the fox-faced woman said, “won’t matter, then, will it?”

Zedong had time to think only briefly of the curse the old woman had called down on him. It took a moment more to realize that the woman before him might not have been wearing a mask at all and might have been one of the legendary fox spirit women who drained men of their lives.

His throat was cut before he knew it. Then blackness filled his vision.

1900 A.D .

Huddled beneath a thick wool blanket that stank of wet donkeys, Dr. Heinrich Lehmann, a university professor at Berlin University, cursed in the four languages he knew.

“Steady on, Lehmann,” one of the older men at the dig site advised, shouting to be heard over the roar of the storm. “We’ll be out of this shortly.”

Lehmann ignored the man. He hadn’t cared for any of the men Dr. Hedin had employed for the dig. All of them were coarse and vulgar, nothing like the educated men he’d gone to school with.

The windstorm howled and dirt thudded against his blanket.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Lehmann asked.

“Every now and again,” the man yelled. He was American, thick and swarthy from equatorial digs. He spat on the ground at their feet. “It’s worse in Egypt.”

Long minutes later, the windstorm passed.

Lehmann threw the heavy weight of the blanket off. Dust obscured his spectacles. He removed them and cleaned them with his handkerchief. Tall and lean, he was in his twenties, his body stripped of any spare flesh by hard work. He wore jodhpurs, boots and a khaki shirt that was wet with sweat.

Only a few feet away, Hedin doffed his own blanket and looked around. With his glasses and hair in disarray, coated in dust, the Stockholm professor looked like some kind of rodent burrowing out of the dry lands.

“Look!” Hedin pointed.

Staring off to the left where the professor was pointing, Lehmann was amazed. Where piles of loose earth had been, the broken remnants of a city stabbed up at the dusty sky.

“I knew it was here.” Hedin’s voice barely contained the excitement that filled him.

Lehmann couldn’t believe it. Even though Hedin had already achieved several finds in China, in fact had been one of the few Western archaeologists to be allowed into the area, Lehmann had begun to think that Loulan City was nothing more than a fictional reference.

But that would have meant the gold was fictional as well. Lehmann couldn’t accept that. He knew about the City of Thieves. Hedin didn’t. The Swedish professor had been assigned to map out Asia and to trace the history of the Silk Road, the trade route used for centuries to ferry silk out of China and import Western goods.

“I see it, Dr. Hedin.” Lehmann smiled in acknowledgement. The Stockholm professor was only in his midthirties, not much older than Lehmann.

Gazing into the sky, Hedin shook his head. “We need to move quickly. In case Mother Nature decides to take back what she’s so freely given.”

Lehmann reached for his pack and shovel. Dust and grit rubbed his skin under his clothes, promising yet another uncomfortable day. He pushed the discomfort from his mind, remembering only the legend of the gold and the fox spirit that had stolen the emperor’s gold nearly two thousand years before.