Chapter 2909: Mai Ruibao in Guangzhou (2)

"Three fresh orange sodas — Yimin." In the eyes of naturalized citizens bred in Lingao, Yimin, put out by the Tianchu Food Company, was the very mark of the genuine article in soda and cold sweets. "And has your shop any milk ice, any ice cream?"

The ice parlor's waiter had to inform them, however, that while the shop kept a modest stock of Yimin ice cream, the soda was finished — indeed the Yimin brand had sold out across the whole Guangzhou market, for word had it that the Senate was about to make war in the Nanyang, and every bottle Tianchu brewed was being requisitioned as military stores. "Might I invite the comrades to try our own Zhengguanghe soda? Produced at a factory established here in Guangzhou itself — absolutely fresh, made on a complete set of distilling machinery licensed by the Senate, hygienic and wholesome. Even the recipe was handed down by the Chiefs in person. His Honor the Mayor drank it and pronounced it excellent."

"Zhengguang-what? Never heard of it. We drink Yimin and nothing else."

"No need to take on so, comrades — as the ancients said, a hundred hearings are not worth one seeing." The waiter drew an orange-colored soda from the ice-packed cooler and pointed to the label on the glass bottle. "Observe, if you please: our trademark was inscribed by Chief Liu, the Mayor himself, in his own hand. His Honor tasted our soda and pronounced it admirable — true of flavor and limpid in quality, dispersing summer heat and harmonizing the humors, a genuine delicacy of the Guangzhou prefecture — and thereupon bestowed the name 'Zhengguanghe.'" Mai Ruibao gave it a brief inspection: the characters on the label did, in fact, display precisely the same "Chiefly characteristics" as those on the shop sign. That left him nothing more to say.

In the end Mai Ruibao paid six jiao for three rather elegant iced treats. The waiter carved off slices from a great brick of ice cream, divided them among crystal glass bowls, then tipped a whole bottle of Zhengguanghe orange soda over them; at once, wherever orange met cream-white, countless bubbles burst and boiled up, drawing out the soda's clean sweetness and the ice cream's milky fragrance, and under the river breeze drifting in through the window the two mingled and fanned apart — enough to set a man floating clear of his own body. This manner of eating, needless to say, was another of the Senators' pet indulgences. The three ate and drank with gusto, and their talk grew ever more congenial.

Among naturalized citizens, a first meeting's chat almost always begins from origins. It had become a kind of unwritten convention. Out of such talk they could roughly place one another: native place, and the year and the reason each had "gone over to the Kun." Trifling as those few sentences were, they often determined where everyone stood thereafter.

"...In the winter of Chongzhen 5, floods and autumn famine drove our whole family out of our old home in Haizhou, and we went north to throw ourselves on the mercy of kinsmen in Jining. On the road we fell in with bandits, who took our money, aye, and stripped us of every grain of food and stitch of clothing besides. In the depths of that twelfth-month cold, had fortune not been with us — had a Senate reconnaissance party come along just then and strained every sinew to our rescue — my whole family would long since have been so many stiffened corpses by the roadside." Shi Pandao grew a little worked up as the old days came back to him. "Who could have guessed that in the Chiefs' relief camp I would run into my clan cousin here."

"That same summer the South Four Lakes rose in a great flood, capsizing grain barges and drowning countless fields. Scarcely had the waters receded when the Prince of De's lackeys came swarming out in every quarter to seize commoners' land by force. My father would not consent; they got their hooks into the yamen and had him clapped in prison, where he sickened and died. The last of the family's money went to the funeral, and then the palace whelps came pressing at our door — they even tore the roof off our house." Shi Tai'er's tone was perfectly even, as though he were recounting another man's misfortunes. Hot as the day was, he still wore his combat cap with strict correctness; it was Shi Pandao, warmed by his drinking, who pulled off his visored cap and fanned himself with it, baring close-cropped hair half an inch long and a scalp of blue-gray.

"Afterward we came to Lingao, and the moment my cousin was out of quarantine camp he declared he was off to join the army. I was young and ignorant then; all I knew was that joining the army meant learning the big guns — no bandit's stockade, no prince's walled city, could stand against one good pounding from the Senate's artillery. Only after I had enlisted myself did I learn that the gunner's trade is the hardest of all to learn and to master. Physics and chemistry, geometry and algebra, geography and phenology — everything from the old classroom finds its use in gunnery. Gunnery embraces all things beneath heaven, broad and profound: among the Chiefs' military sciences, the very first school."

This delivered, Shi Pandao cocked an eye at Mai Ruibao and said something that nearly sent the man's mouthful of soda spraying across the table: "Now mind — none of what I just said goes into any newspaper, understood? Otherwise that pack of dolts from the cavalry, the infantry, and the engineering branches will come round making trouble for me again."

"It's hardly an exaggeration. When your elder brother here first entered the service and studied the artillery branch, the worst headache was nothing but the draft horses — fussier by untold degrees than the oxen and horses we farm families were used to handling. If the fodder was not laid in, or a shoe was nailed a hair off, and an officer caught wind of it, we'd be disciplined by being made to haul the gun carriages and ammunition wagons, thousands of jin apiece, on foot, on the training march." Shi Tai'er kept to his level tone. "But those new guns you train on now are truly exquisite and handy — they can engage targets beyond the line of sight. In workmanship the Chiefs outdo nature itself; in planning, they reach a thousand li. Ask the heroes of all under heaven — which of them could stand against that?"

As a journalist, Mai Ruibao naturally took the keener interest in anything involving "planning that reached a thousand li" — the Fubo Army Northern Detachment's hard fighting in Operation Engine had always been a favorite theme of Australian Song propaganda. Yet once Operation Engine had ended, the Lingao Times and the Senate's other military-news periodicals would offer only a sentence here and there about the Northern Detachment's continued stationing in the Ming-controlled districts of Shandong to "uphold humanitarian interests." Mai Ruibao tried several times to bend the talk toward the Northern Detachment, but Shi Tai'er would either cite "strict observance of the Chiefs' discipline" and decline comment or — more often — answer with talk of everything else under the sun. It was when Mai Ruibao turned instead to what he had seen in the Danzhou Specialty Chemical Zone and to the course of the Zhaoqing grand exercises that Shi Tai'er listened with real attention.

"Brother Mai, I don't pretend to understand the work of you newsman folk, but I'd suppose that when the Chiefs send you to cover a military exercise, how the matter ought at last to appear in the papers is something the Chiefs have naturally weighed." Shi Tai'er expounded his conclusion in the same steady, four-square tone. "An example. You said just now that the Red side's breech-loading rifles had overpowered the White side, armed with Minié rifles. True to the exercise as that may be — were it printed, and read by comrades still equipped with the Minié, even by units still carrying the Nanyang pattern, how would they take it?"

"Won't they all be re-equipped with breech-loaders sooner or later...?"

"That's hard to say." Shi Pandao glanced at the waiter still bustling behind the counter and dropped his voice. "We artillery cadets, once in camp, have to learn the infantry basics first, same as anyone, so they issued us those short-barreled carbines — breech-action, as Brother Mai described, firing brass-cased cartridges. At every live-fire drill you hang a sack on the piece to catch the spent cases. I remember that beside the catch-hook on the receiver, where the sack hangs, there was a little emblem cut into the metal: the Bopu Shipyard's. And I thought at the time — why set a shipyard to making rifles? Later, when proper gunnery instruction began and we laid hands on the Type 1635 mountain gun itself, I noticed that one bore the factory insignia of the Bopu Arsenal. So why does the arsenal make cannon but not rifles? Can it be the Navy holds priority on the new pieces — or is it that..."

His speculation was cut short by a woman's scream. Even the ice-parlor waiter started and looked up, in time to see three customers already charging for the door. On the wharf, idlers and passersby were likewise streaming toward the commotion, while a woman's voice — shrill and desperate, crying the New Speech in a Shandong accent — rang out again and again: "Thieves!" "Police, police! Robbers — robbers!"

"Miss Sun!" Mai Ruibao's heart sank. Through a gap in the crowd he could see Sun Shangxiang hemmed in by two men in short jackets, calling for help while struggling desperately to shield the bags in her hands and on her arm. The Shi brothers broke into a run; the two robbers gave Miss Sun a violent shove, tore the document case from her shoulder, snatched her handbag, and turned to flee. She could not keep her footing — staggered back several steps — and pitched backward over the edge of the bank into the river.

Mai Ruibao's swimming was, at best, passable — but with a colleague struggling in the Pearl River there was no arguing with necessity; the life came first. Still — hold on: the plate case must not go into the water, that had to be stowed safe, and the shoes would have to come off — and in the middle of this flustered fumbling there came a splash: someone had already gone straight off the bank into the river. This one was a finished swimmer; a few strokes carried him to the wildly floundering Sun Shangxiang, and he plainly knew his water rescues too, for he deliberately curved a half circle to clear Miss Sun's windmilling arms, came at her from behind, locked an arm about her waist, and began sculling slowly toward the stone steps by the wharf that served the small boats. Even the idlers looking on broke into cheers. A constable arrived at just that moment, and together with Mai Ruibao, who had hurried down the steps, they lifted that limp, yielding figure and carried her up onto the bank.

"Aiyah — the pretty girl done fainted."

Mai Ruibao, past caring about propriety, caught up Miss Sun's wrist and pressed it; she gave no response, but a pulse could still be felt. "Overwrought, most like — collapse." So the constable judged. Mai Ruibao saw the good soul who had gone into the water come up the steps, dressing as he climbed: a half-grown lad of about his own age, the uniform of the Australian Song Navy plastered tight against his soaked body. "Comrade! Comrade!" Reporter Mai hurried over. "May I have your name? What naval unit are you with?"

"Guan Zongbao." The young sailor waved a hand — a trifle, nothing more — turned, squeezed into the crowd, and was gone.

Over on the far side of the wharf the two robbers had fared no better: bare strides into their flight the Shi brothers ran them down; in desperation they drew their knives — and did not survive three exchanges against the bare-handed pair. By the time the police arrived, both men were already stretched on the ground, bound hand and foot.

By the time Mai Ruibao came over and received the recovered loot from the police — besides the kidskin document case he knew so well, an array of gift boxes large and small; so all this while the little minx had been off on a buying spree at the Great World under cover of "interviews" — he had no heart to inventory it closely. One detail his eye had caught kept circling back through his head: after kicking the robber facing him to the ground, Shi Tai'er had picked his cap off the pavement, fallen in the scuffle, and set it on again — and in the brief instant that cap was down, it had bared the crown of his head: the knotted topknot, the loose-gathered hair-net of Ming fashion. That momentary image printed itself in Mai Ruibao's mind and would not be scrubbed out: the Fubo Army officer's uniform and a Ming-style coif and net, a pairing that should have contradicted itself outright — and set beside Shi Tai'er's manner of talk, so evasive it amounted to running in circles — some nerve of Mai Ruibao's, one he had never known he possessed as a newsman, had been plucked, and he could not have said how.

"Comrade Shi—" The words were out before he knew it, and then he had no notion what to ask.

Shi Tai'er gave him a calm look and straightened the brim of his cap once more. Beneath the brim, those eyes showed not a ripple. "Brother Mai — in some matters the Chiefs have their own arrangements. It is enough for us to do our own part well."

Shi Pandao stepped in to smooth it over. "Ai-ya, come now — let's first see how the young lady is doing. Ah, and this bundle of things... tsk, tsk, what all has the little minx been buying?" He rummaged idly through the scattered gift boxes. "Oho — Kwong Sang Hong vanishing cream, Sanfeng Powder Shop's goose-egg powder, and... what's this one? 'Senator Special Supply'... tsk, tsk. Women comrades do know how to live."

(End of Chapter)