Christopher Stasheff by St Vidicon to the Rescue

Author:St Vidicon to the Rescue [Rescue, St Vidicon to the]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

When the Manchus conquered China, they made the Chinese men shave their heads except for a pigtail down the back. When Hung So-Chien declared the advent of the T’ai-Ping Tien Kwoh, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace with himself as emperor, and his troops conquered most of southern China, he banned the pigtail as a badge of Manchu oppression. For his masquerade as a T’ai-Ping soldier, Chu-Yi had only had to let his hair grow—but now, as a Chinese fighting for the Manchu Emperor, even though he was supposed to be a blatant mercenary working only for Gordon’s pay, he would still have to wear the pigtail—and no makeup would do when he would have to maintain the appearance for several days, sleeping and waking and in battle—so the barber shaved his head except for the small round of hair in the back, which he plaited into a queue. So, shaved and dressed in traditional Chinese costume,

Chu-Yi stepped into the time machine to enlist in Gordon’s Ever-Victorious Army.

“This foreign devil is crazier than the last one!” Po Chao grumbled as he cleaned his musket.

“Maybe, but he wins the battles.” Chang Chu-Yi ran the whetstone along the blade of his knife. “I thought he was a fool, naming us the ‘Ever-Victorious Army’ when we’d never even won a skirmish.”

Chao shrugged. “It sounded good to the merchants, and they’re the ones who pay us to keep Shanghai safe from these crazy T’ai-Pings.”

“Assemble!” the sergeant bawled.

Po Chao came to his feet with a sigh and shoved the ramrod back into its holder. “At least he waited until I’d finished cleaning. What is it now, I wonder?”

“Probably another of this foreign devil’s ‘parades,’” Chu-Yi said, resigned. “Well, I don’t mind his checking our gear as long as we win.”

They trotted down to the bare, beaten ground fringed by the bulrushes and reeds of the river and fell into place in the line, and the sergeants bawled, “Atten-hut!” in the finest English style as they stiffened into brace. The lean young Englishman stepped out between them and began to prowl along the front rank, his ludicrous rattan cane stuck under his arm.

It was typical of the Western ethnocentrism of the time, Chu-Yi thought, that Gordon regarded the English form of drill as the only acceptable one. The Emperor’s troops knew how to line up, of course, but they didn’t have to subject themselves to the ludicrous postures Gordon called the Manual of Arms.

Still, Chu-Yi stood at attention like the rest, musket slanted forward at ten degrees from the vertical, and waited for Charles George Gordon to find some miniscule fault in his uniform. Not his musket, of course

—Chu-Yi made sure it was immaculate. He didn’t want Gordon inspecting it too closely, gazing down the barrel or such. He might have noticed the rifling inside.

Outwardly, the piece looked like any of the others in the hodgepodge of arms Gordon’s soldiers had managed to assemble, but the rifling made it far more accurate. It had to

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