Page 62 of The Bedlam Stacks

Shang climbed back into the cabin and pulled a throttle, and we leaned out into the current. The people he had let in through the hold began to come up on deck. He must have packed them in below, because it was quite a crowd. I felt the ship rock and sent the bigger men back down, to be ballast.

‘Is silk really important enough to start a war over?’ Keita said to me when I came back. He already knew the answer, but when he was worried he asked things like that in the way other children asked to be told fairytales they already knew off by heart.

‘Sit up here,’ I said, tapping the rail so that we could hear each other over everyone else talking and fretting. He climbed up and I put my arm across him in case one of the other ships bumped us. They were close. ‘It’s not about the silk. It’s about not pissing about with the East India Company. If you try and dictate terms of trade to them – if you say you can only buy silk with silver bullion – they make sure you do something stupid. They’ll run obvious smugglers, like us, until someone snaps. Some poor bastard from Customs boards a British ship to try and put a stop to it, like they did with the Arrow.’ He nodded. I explained it in the same way every time and sometimes he filled in parts if I left space, but he didn’t now. He sat back against me, fitted to my chest like he never usually would have. I squeezed his arm, worried. It was starting to bother me that he was frightened of shots that wouldn’t even be aimed at us. In the near future hung the shape of something else, something he wasn’t saying, but there was still nothing unusual on the river.

‘That’s a violation of treaty. They can’t touch our flag. So the Navy comes, shells the hell out of everything for a week, and when the Emperor folds, Britain dictates the terms of the peace treaty. This time it will hinge around the legalisation of opium.’ I could smell iron; the ship was running hot. ‘It’s a new kind of war. There’s no need to lay a siege and take someone’s capital city any more. You just have to make them sell underprice. That’s . . . I don’t really have the right sort of mind for all this, but it’s how the British Empire works, I think. There’s a queen, a prime minister, and the East India Company board of directors.’

Keita nodded. He had absolutely the right mind for it. ‘Quinine next. They’re selling it too dear, aren’t they, in Peru?’

‘Damn right they are. The sooner someone shells Lima and makes them trade the sodding stuff for tea, the better. I’m sick of getting a cough and worrying for a fortnight if Sing will spend the money on us if it’s malaria.’

He was holding my sleeve hard and looking, not at the other ships, but down at the water. I could feel his heart through his ribs.

We were passing the crocus fields just outside the city and I was starting to feel like we might just have got away. Between the crumbling buildings and above the flooded streets – it had rained all last month – great swathes of dyed cloth swam yellow from lines strung thirty feet above the ground. A melon seller was still going about his ordinary business close to the shore and so, around him, was everyone else. The dyers and saffron pickers had nowhere else to go. The chances of their having helpful relatives in Hong Kong were the same as my having them on Mars.

‘It’s none of my business,’ I said, ‘but can I ask why you signed up for all this rather than staying safe at home like, you know, an ordinary child?’

Keita laughed, but not much. ‘Really it was the cook. I don’t like him.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘He keeps post under his wig. I mean, when he collects it he brings it back like that, even if he isn’t carrying anything. And it’s just . . . if you wear a wig, that’s an effort towards ordinary hair, isn’t it? But there isn’t much in the way of a verisimilitudinous illusion if there are envelope corners sticking out of it. I don’t know. I feel like he might be a stupid person and the postal wiggery typifies the stupid. Does it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He looked uncertain. ‘Usually I’m being unreasonable.’

‘No, I think that sets a worrying standard of behaviour. Don’t go back, stay with me. Japan sounds bloody dull anyway.’

He tensed well before the shell screamed over us, although it was completely incongruous. There had been no warning; we were too far from the ironclad to hear them beating to quarters. The shell smashed into some buildings on the riverbanks and blew them to pieces, some of which crashed into the water right up close to our hull. I twisted back to wave at Shang and point towards the middle of the river, but every other ship was doing exactly the same. He shook his head and we sped up to bypass it all, but we were dangerously close to the banks. Another shot blasted a dyer’s. I saw a vat of saffron fly whole across our path and land in the water, where the dye spiralled out and made a floating, bright yellow patch.

We swerved, and I felt Keita slip from under my hands. Later, I was sure that he had pushed himself from the rail on purpose. His balance was so good and I’d been holding him so tightly that he couldn’t have fallen. I stared at the empty patch where he had been for a second, then dived after him. Because the water was exactly the same temperature as the air, it felt for a bizarre second like hitting a denser sort of mist.

The shell must have been a stray. They wouldn’t have aimed at us, and there was nothing close to aim at anyway. But the reeds about twenty yards from me exploded, and I felt myself lifted up and hurled backwards in the water. At first I hung still, not sure which way was up, or what had happened. When I understood at last, it was because Keita was next to me and dragging my sleeve. We broke the surface together. Bits of blasted reed floated around us, and chunks of mud torn from the riverbank.

‘Swim. I can’t help you, you have to swim,’ he said, as unlike a child as I’d ever known him in all his history of unchildishness.

I did, because at the time I couldn’t feel anything wrong. It was only when Shang swung back to find us that I saw what had happened to my leg.

When I woke up properly, I couldn’t tell where I was. It was a good room with a big piano taking up half the far side, which usually meant Hong Kong. A while ago, a firm in Manchester or somewhere had been certain that every one of the thirty million or so moneyed ladies in China would want a piano now that trade was more open and so they’d shipped a silly number out, only to find that the climate was all wrong for piano strings and nobody was interested anyway. In an effort at charity, all the British diplomats and EIC writers had bought two apiece and fitted them into whatever corners they could. On the wall was an oil painting of some tea clippers.

Sing was in the chair beside me.

‘You’ll be lucky to walk again,’ he said, and I had a strange wave of gratitude that he had got straight to the point rather than edging around it. He was pale. ‘The bombardment started half an hour early. It was a mess. They ended up catching French troops in the crossfire too. I’m surprised they didn’t hit Hong Kong by accident.’

‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could think of to say.

‘So am I.’ He let his breath out. ‘Just get better the best you can. I do not want to send Horace bloody Spruce out to the Amazon. He’ll spend half his time coming up with Greek names for all the new kinds of cinchona he misidentifies.’

I laughed, which sent a pulse of bone-deep pain twanging up through my spine. ‘Yes. Right.’ I could already feel it was never going to be better, but never is a broad thing to understand in the few seconds after waking from an opium sleep. I could see the idea, but I couldn’t hold it or feel it.

He watched me for another moment and then stood up, which brought Keita into view where he was sitting in the window. ‘I’m going to arrange passage for you back to England.’

‘Can’t I stay here?’

‘Only until you’re well enough to be moved,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. We’re not the Navy. There’s no invalid provision. If you’re not working we can’t keep you.’

He left in his clipped way and I sat very still, knowing I was in that strange, long space between being shot and feeling it.

‘Come over here,’ I said to Keita, to give myself something to do. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ He was. Somebody had found dry clothes for him, Chinese. But he didn’t look like a coolie’s son. He was too healthy and too clean, and he had a slow, unskipping way of moving that might only have been his own character, or old-money tuition. I’d never asked. ‘Does it hurt?’ he said.