A man who looked like an officer came running up and gently urged us to turn around and head back. Mother replied with cold self-assurance. “Captain,” she said, “if you force us to leave, we have no choice. But we will just have to find another way around the place.” “Don’t you fear for your lives?” the man said, clearly puzzled. “You’re not afraid of losing your family to artillery fire? You don’t know how powerful these guns are.” “We’ve come this far not because we’re afraid of death, but because death is afraid of us,” Mother replied. The man stepped aside. “You’re free to go where you want.”
We moved on, traveling through an alkaline wilderness. We had no choice but to follow along behind Mother. Actually, we were following along behind Laidi. Throughout our arduous journey, Laidi pulled the cart like an uncomplaining beast of burden and, when necessary, stopped to fire the rifle at anyone who threatened our safety when we stopped for the night, for which she earned my admiration and respect.
The deeper we went into the wilderness, the harder the going on the heavily trampled road. So we moved off the road and onto the alkaline ground. Unmelted snow made the ground look like a head with scabies, the occasional clump of dead grass like tufts of hair. Though danger seemed to lurk in the area, noisy flocks of larks still flew overhead and a cluster of wild rabbits the color of dead grass set up a skirmish line before a white fox, attacking it with high-pitched whoops. Having suffered bitterly and nursing deep hatred for the fox, they mounted a heroic charge. Behind them, a bunch of wild goats with finely chiseled faces moved up in fits and starts, and I couldn’t tell if they were backing up the rabbits or just curious.
Something in the grass glittered in the sunlight. Zaohua ran over, picked it up, and handed it to me across the cart. It was a metal mess kit. Inside were little golden-fried fish. I handed it back to her. She picked up one of the fish and offered it to Mother, who said, “None for me. You eat it.” Zaohua ate the fish daintily, like a cat. Big Mute reached out from the basket with his dirty little hand and grunted, “Ao!” Little Mute did the same. Both boys had square, gourdlike faces, eyes high up on their heads, which made their foreheads seem smaller than normal. Their noses were flat, with long grooves that led to wide mouths and short, upturned upper lips that failed to hide their yellow teeth. Zaohua looked over at Mother to see what she should do. But Mother was looking off into the distance. So Zaohua picked up two of the fish and gave them each one. Now the mess kit was empty, except for a few scraps of fish and little spots of oil. She licked it clean. “Let’s rest awhile,” Mother said. “We don’t have far to go before we should be able to see the church.”
I lay on my back on the alkaline ground and gazed up into the sky. Mother and First Sister took off their shoes and knocked them against the handles of the cart to empty them of alkaline soil. The heels of their feet looked like rotten yams. All of a sudden, a frightened flock of birds swooped down close to the ground. Had they seen a hawk? No, it was a pair of black, double-winged airships buzzing through the sky from the southeast. The sound they made was like a thousand spinning wheels turning at the same time. At first they were flying high up in the air, traveling slowly, but when they were directly overhead, they went into a dive and picked up speed. They flew with the grace of winged calves, plunging at full speed, propellers buzzing loudly, like hornets circling the head of a cow. As they flew past, nearly scraping the top of our cart, one of the goggled men behind the glass smiled at us like an old friend. I thought he looked familiar, but before I could get a good look, he and his smile sped past me like a bolt of lightning. A violent gust of swirling wind, carrying a cloud of fine dust sucked up loose grass, sand, and rabbit pellets, and flung them into us like a hail of bullets. The mess kit in Zaohua’s hand flew into the air. Panic-stricken, I jumped up, spitting dirt out of my mouth, as the second airship bore down on me even more savagely, spitting two long tongues of flame from its belly. Bullets kicked up dirt all around us. Trailing black smoke behind them, the airships tacked to one side and flew into the sky above the sandy ridge. Flames continued to spurt from under their wings in bursts, the sound like barking dogs, sending more puffs of yellow dirt up into the air. They dove and dipped like swallows skimming the surface of water, swooping down recklessly and then abruptly soaring upward again, sunlight dancing off the glass and turning the wings a bright steel blue. Dust gray soldiers on the sandy ridges were thrown into a panic, leaping and shouting. Yellow flames spat into the sky around them, announcing the insistent crack of gunfire, like continuous gusts of wind. The airships were like gigantic startled birds wheeling through the sky, the sound of their engines like a crazed form of singing. One of them abruptly stopped wheeling as thick black smoke belched from its belly; it gurgled, it rocked, it spun, and then it plunged straight down into the wilderness, gouging out a furrow in the mud below. The wings shuddered briefly before a crackling ball of fire consumed its belly, creating an earsplitting blast that rocked all the wild rabbits in the vicinity. The other bird banked sharply high above with a cry of anguish, and flew off.
At that moment, we saw that half of Big Mute’s head had disappeared and that a fist-sized hole had appeared in Little Mute’s belly. Not yet dead, he showed us the whites of his eyes. Mother grabbed a handful of alkaline dirt and pressed it up against the hole, but too late to hold back the sizzling green liquid and white intestines that squirmed out. She rammed more and more dirt up into the hole, but couldn’t stop the flow. Little Mute’s intestines began filling up the basket. My goat’s front legs buckled, drawing a series of strange-sounding complaints; then its belly contracted violently and its back arched, as it threw up a mouthful of half-eaten grass. First Sister and I both bent over and vomited. Mother, her hands smeared with fresh blood, stood there gaping in bewilderment at the mass of intestines. Her lips were quivering; suddenly, her mouth flew open, releasing a jet of red liquid, followed by loud, grief-stricken wails.
Shortly after that, volleys of black artillery shells tore into the sky like flocks of crows from the artillery blind in the little stand of trees, heading straight for our village. Blue flashes of light turned the sky above the grove the color of lilacs. The sun was a dull, colorless gray. After the first volley, the ground trembled, followed by the shrieks of the shells overhead; then came the muted thuds of explosions, sending columns of white smoke into the air above our village. Finally, the shooting stopped, producing a momentary silence that was quickly shattered when guns on the opposite bank of the Flood Dragon River sent their answer our way with even bigger shells; some landed among the trees, others fell in the open wilderness. And so it went, like a series of family visits. Waves of hot air swept across the wilderness. After an hour or so, the stand of trees went up in flames as the guns fell silent. But not those from our village, as their shells fell farther and farther off in the distance. All of a sudden, the sky above the sandy ridge was blue with flying shells that whistled through the air and landed on our village. The volleys dwarfed those that had come from the trees, both in numbers and impact. I’ve described the volleys from the grove as flocks of crows. Well, those that burst from behind the sandy ridge were like neat formations of little black pigs, with loud oinks and twitching tails until they chased each other straight into our village. When they landed, they were no longer little black pigs, but big black panthers, tigers, wild boars, biting everything they touched with fangs like ripsaws. As the artillery battle raged, the airships returned; but this time there were twelve of them, flying in pairs, wingtip to wingtip. From high up in the sky, they dropped their eggs, creating holes over the landscape. And then? A column of tanks rumbled out of our village. At the time I didn’t know those clumsy machines with long, trunklike gun barrels were called tanks. Once the column reached the alkaline wilderness, the tanks spread out, followed by helmeted foot soldiers, trotting at a crouch and firing into the air. Pow pow pow. Pow pow pow. Pow pow pow pow pow pow pow. Hit-or-miss. We dashed over to one of the artillery craters, where some of us sat and others flattened out on the ground, yet calmly, as if unafraid.