Iron Jaw and Hummingbird by Chris Roberson

Author:Chris Roberson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2011-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Gamine climbed the steps to the wide platform atop the scaffold and looked down at the uplifted faces of the faithful gathered at the center of the camp. There were more of them now than ever, and more new faces joining them every day.

It wasn’t just Gamine, Temujin, and Wei sleeping rough by the side of the road anymore. The camp had grown until it numbered nearly a hundred tents arranged in irregular concentric circles, the pinkish orange sands mounting in low drifts on their eastern sides. At the center of the circle, near the trio of tents that Wei, Gamine, and Temujin had made their own, was a roughly built scaffold, constructed of cast-off timbers, discarded aluminum sheets, and other odds and ends. Before the scaffold was a broad, open space, and it was here that all their followers now gathered.

Gamine remembered when she and Temujin had first joined Wei on his travels three years before, when they’d made do with a bare patch of dirt at the edge of market squares. Wei would preach his rambling sermons about the “powers,” as he called them, figures drawn indiscriminately from fiction and religion, legend and mythology. Gamine would come onstage after the homily was done, professing her belief, and then proceed to demonstrate her virtue by reciting passages from novels, operas, and plays, as though possessed by the spirits of those characters. Scenes from The Miner’s Journey or Water Margin or The Journey to the West. Or, depending on the makeup of the audience, she might assay a few scenes from the Briton myth-play Robin Hood, about a man who stole what the poor needed from the rich, or episodes from the story of the Vinlander culture hero Paul Bunyan, a woodcutter who supposedly stood against the invading armies of the Dragon Throne centuries before. Then, once Gamine had recited long enough to establish possession by the powers, Temujin would come forward to test her mettle and her resolve. It was nothing more than a pulled punch and faked reaction, but the act so impressed audiences that Gamine would forevermore be known to all of them only as the girl with the jaw of iron, or simply as Iron Jaw.

At first, they had simply gone from village to village as the mood struck them, staying only long enough to garner a few filling meals and comfortable beds from the newly converted, and then moving on to the next village when it began to appear that they might have overstayed their welcome. Temujin was primarily in charge of their movements in those days, using his well-honed instinct and practiced eyed to gauge the patience of those who supplied as charity that which the three drifters could never afford to buy. Wei, who was somewhat addled and out of touch even in his best days, simply did as he was told, and if he harbored any doubts about the man and girl who had joined him on his journeys, he never voiced them.

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