Chapter 1479 - Manila Arsenal

Manila's ordinary white citizens and merchants had initially regarded the new munitions factory standing in the suburbs with suspicion. Beyond the fact that the Governor had funneled money—scraped from monopoly laws and special taxes—into a project that profited them not at all, the factory itself inspired unease. For colonial residents so far from Europe, it was a frightening novelty. Nowhere else in the entire Philippines had so many machines and furnaces been concentrated in one place. The ceaseless clanging of metal, the unending screech of drills, planes, and chisels—all combined into a continuous din that provoked complaints even from Spaniards in Manila proper, nearly ten kilometers distant, who could no longer recover the tranquil rhythm of dozing through the day. Worse still, the great numbers of pagan Chinese and local natives gathering around the factory stirred all manner of illusory anxieties; talk of "the threat of thousands of savage workers" circulated frequently.

Of late, another terrifying rumor had swept through the colonial European circles: that the fanatical priest Paul was manufacturing a terrible new explosive in the factory—so powerful that a small bag could level the entire city. This was not purely rumor. Dull explosions, like thunder on the horizon, were often heard from the direction of the arsenal. Some swore they had seen oxcarts carrying severed limbs and shredded flesh leaving the factory at night for secret burial in the wilderness.

Aisui Saburo lounged lazily against a crude sentry shed cobbled together from scrap wood and straw, facing the main road to the factory workshops. He was utterly oblivious to the prospect of being blown to dust at any moment. This former ashigaru leader had come to Luzon partly out of faith, partly with dreams of making his fortune overseas. Unfortunately, after Lords Ukon and Naito had died of illness in succession, the Southern Barbarian Governor's regard for Japanese immigrants had steadily declined. After years of scraping by, Aisui Saburo's dreams of riches had long vanished like smoke. Still, serving as soldier and sentry for the Southern Barbarians was far more comfortable than bending double in the fields. He calculated that he could eat his fill at every meal. Though the Southern Barbarians were not especially generous—only issuing rice and dried fish as salary—combined with the taro and vegetables his Tagalog wife cultivated around their house, feeding a family of four posed no great difficulty. If he could rotate next time to a lucrative post like guarding a tax checkpoint, perhaps he might scrounge a few small coins to drink tuba palm wine in a Chinese-run tavern in the Parian and savor a plate of roast pork. The rich, fragrant taste seemed to linger on his tongue. Leaning against the sentry shed's wooden pillar, Aisui Saburo drifted into blissful reverie, mouth half-open, saliva trailing down his sun-darkened face.

"Hey!" Aisui Saburo started awake at the loud greeting. Captain Kuroshima Jubei stood before him—a ronin from Owari, rumored to have fled to Manila after killing a man in Hoi An. "Aisui-kun, show some dignity. Mind wandering while on sentry duty again?" Jubei pointed forward. "A carriage is coming."

In Madrid or Seville, no one would have given this plain, even crude, two-wheeled conveyance a second glance. Drawn by a listless, stunted Chinese pony, the unpainted log carriage had nothing but an oilcloth canopy. But in the Philippines, where horses cost more than men, the factory grounds swarmed with oxcarts hauling timber and iron parts. A carriage—even the crudest one—was a mark of nobility.

Aisui Saburo walked forward to meet it, arquebus held to his chest, though the hammer was not cocked—better not to startle the noble within, he reasoned. The new arquebuses made by the Southern Barbarians were remarkably neat, eliminating the troublesome and dangerous slow match. One bit open the paper cartridge of abaca, stuffed it into the barrel, placed a small round copper cap on the touchhole, drew back the hammer, and pulled the trigger to fire.

When Aisui Saburo first received this contraption—familiar as he was with Japanese matchlocks—the new mechanism confounded him. He had suffered many accidental discharges on the drill ground, provoking the Southern Barbarian officers' wrath and earning himself more than a few bin-ta from the captain.

Although the new invention performed admirably, its use remained limited: the arsenal could produce only small quantities of the copper caps, and production was intermittent and unreliable. Merely a few of the newly formed Japanese companies had been issued them, in small quantities. For the local Spanish garrison, clumsy matchlocks remained the standard weapon.

What emerged from beneath the canopy, unexpectedly, was not some Southern Barbarian lord but an Indio. True, he wore a hip-length silk openwork barong like a native squire and carried a short cane to affect Southern Barbarian style, but the white-edged wrinkles etched by the sea wind into his face, the dark brown sunspots splashed across his exposed skin, and the agility with which he leapt from the carriage—anyone could see this was an old hand who made his living on the sea.

"What is this old sea dog barking about?" Aisui Saburo was puzzled. In his years making a living in the Philippines, he had learned Tagalog and Pampangan, spoke passable Spanish, and could make out Hokkien and Cantonese well enough. Yet what this Filipino sailor spoke resembled several languages he knew—but matched none of them completely.

The sailor seemed impatient with the chicken-to-duck communication. He reached out and thrust a paper at Aisui Saburo, waving it insistently. Though the Japanese recognized few Latin letters, the Manila city coat of arms printed on the document and the bright red Governor's seal stamped in sealing wax, swaying before his eyes long enough, finally made him understand. He glanced at Captain Kuroshima, who had wandered some distance off, then at the carriage only nobles could ride—and at last lowered his gun and waved the carriage through. It swayed into the factory grounds. Aisui Saburo returned to his sentry shed and soon sank back into his daydream of roast pork.

Fernando Marcos leaned back in his seat beneath the canopy. After wasting so much breath on those Japanese, he felt too tired to utter a single additional word. Nothing was more exhausting than spending one's tongue explaining who one was and what one could do to people of this world.

In another spacetime, Marcos's career as a sailor on various ships engaged in illicit trade had spanned more than twenty years. He once believed himself a born lucky man. Whether the smuggling ship he piloted was seized by the Korean Coast Guard, or the vessel he was aboard encountered a Russian Border Guard patrol and was shot up until smoke poured from the bilges, nearly sending him to meet the Dragon King, he had at least preserved his life each time. But he never dreamed fate would play such a strange joke—hurling him and everyone aboard the Mackerel into a world he still hadn't fully comprehended. When the lifeboat capsized in wind and waves and they were thrown into the sea, Marcos had nearly given himself up for dead. Fortunately, after drifting in the brine for half a day with the Mackerel's engineer Aquino, just as they were about to lose consciousness, they were rescued by an Anhai ship bound for Zhongzuosuo.

Zheng Zhilong and his men initially regarded these two strangely dressed Filipinos—unable to explain their origins—as Dutch spies, then later as accomplices of the shaved-headed bandits. The two unlucky men were thrown into a water dungeon. After various tortures were applied in turn, the final consensus was that they were simply a pair of half-mad gibbering wrecks—harmless but equally useless.

Had Fernando Marcos ever heard the Chinese idiom "Dragon-Slaying Skill," he would have grasped at once that it was a vivid portrait of his situation. In the Zheng territory there was no GPS, no Loran navigation station for him to use, no diesel engines or power equipment for Aquino to tend and repair. They understood nothing of the work aboard a seventeenth-century Chinese junk, failing to qualify even as common sailors. These two valueless wretches were forced into the lowest, most wretched labor, toiling under the overseer's whip. Occasionally, someone would avail himself of their bodies to sample an "exotic flavor." The inhuman torment continued for years. Aquino weakened day by day and finally succumbed to malaria. Had Hale not discovered and ransomed Marco while building a cannon foundry in Zhongzuosuo, the same fate would surely have overtaken him before long: collapse for one reason or another, a stone lashed to the corpse, and consignment to the sea for fish and shrimp to gnaw the bones white.

The squeak of turning waterwheels and the clamor of metal being struck and hammered drew nearer, pulling Marcos from the terror of that imagined future. The wooden workshop doors stood open. In the open space near the gate wall, the factory's products and semi-finished products were arrayed in rows. Marcos poked his head from beneath the canopy to look: a line of cannon barrels flashing with green glints lay there. These were bronze guns recently removed from various fortress batteries and galleons in Manila. After polishing and washing, their bores were re-milled on water-powered milling machines and then rifled.

Not far off stood another row of bronze cannons still mounted on two-wheeled carriages—field guns of the Spanish garrison, awaiting similar modification.

Though national education in twentieth-century Philippines had been limited, and Marcos had never personally handled firearms during his illicit career, he understood that rifled weapons shot more accurately and farther than smoothbore ones.

Beneath a bamboo shed farther away lay some newly cast guns. Black ones, thick as soda bottles, were cast-iron heavies destined for fortress emplacements. Smaller, blue-gray pieces were copper-cast field guns—few in number, looking sparse. Several workers were busy grinding and washing the gun bodies.

(End of Chapter)