"See! The Chinese general smites the blasphemers!" Saint George cried. "And blasphemers they are, for Hung Hsiu-Ch'uan has declared himself to be the Younger Son of God! There can be no doubt now that we should strike against them!"
"And no doubt that we shall be on the wining side," the Puritan said darkly. "Well, one of my own nation has begun it; let one of yours pursue, to take the credit for the defeat."
And so General Gordon did—in the eyes of the Western world. But the Chinese knew better.
"He defies us!" said Saint Louis. "Do you wait for his blood to boil if you will—we shall attack his head!"
"Nay, I shall lead you," Saint George averred, and even as the Dragon's body writhed in fever, the knights rode with lances levelled at his huge brain.
There was fire in the Dragon's blood, as Hung Hsiu-Ch'uan committed suicide by swallowing powdered gold and his capitol of Nanking burned—but there was fire in the Dragon's head, as the English burned the Summer Palace. He awoke roaring in anguish for, though the Manchus might have bathed in its luxuries, the fabulous park had been of Chinese making, and had been a Chinese treasure. He awoke, and turned on his tormentors. One huge paw drove them back; talons raked open their armor. Huge teeth closed on Saint George, the Puritan, and the others, and held them fast.
The emperor's favorite concubine had borne him a son who had become emperor in his own right—a very weak emperor, cut off from the world, immersed in pleasures. When he died, the dowager had her nephew declared emperor, and ruled while he grew. But when he came of age, the young emperor took power into his own hands and strove to modernize China, to eliminate the corruption of the officials and restore the prestige of the Manchu Dynasty. But the dowager empress organized a coup, deposed him, and ruled as regent. Now she dealt smiling with the Western ambassadors—but in secret, she nurtured a secret society that had learned the fighting techniques of the Shao-lin Temple, but not its spirit. They erupted in rebellion, killing Europeans and driving them back into the foreign enclave within Peking. The Westerners, not knowing the terms for Chinese martial arts, saw only that when they fought without weapons, the "rebels'" techniques resembled boxing, and called them "the Boxers." They manned the parapets and held their enclave for fifty-five days, while their ambassadors sent urgent messages to the empress dowager, which she ignored, and Western gunboats massed to press inward. They came to Peking; they met the Boxers, and wiped them out. Finally, the empress agreed to prosecute the "rebels," and thanked the Westerners for saving China from them.
Blood welled from the Dragon's head, but still on his feet, he faced the saints, roaring, claws slashing.
"We can never defeat him," Mark warned the others, "but we may tame him . . ."
"Do not counsel gentleness, I pray you." The Puritan had discarded his conical hat and shoe buckles; he now wore a frock coat, trousers, and a beard with no moustache. "We have only to keep our distance and harry him from all sides; he shall wear himself out."
But within the Dragon's bloodstream, new ideas were percolating. Even as he advanced and retreated, roaring and slashing with huge claws at targets that sprang away from his blows, the fever mounted within him as new armies sprang up, and troops of bandits grew in size to become armies in their own right. Finally, fever overwhelmed the Dragon, and he sank back into torpor as Sun Yat-sen, a descendant of a Tai-Ping rebel, armed with ideas from the West and gathering armies by the glittering splendor of notions of human rights and government by the people themselves, overwhelmed the Manchus and drove the last emperor from Peking.
"The empire has fallen apart!" Frederick cried. "Now may we loot it at will!" He raised his sword to strike.
"Hold!" Saint Louis caught his arm. "It is my missionaries who have borne the risk; it is I who shall have first fruits!"
Frederick threw him off with a snarl, but Saint George caught Saint Louis and together, they charged the emperor. The saints fell to fighting among themselves, while the Puritan watched until finally he, too, was drawn into the melee.
The Kuomintang was not enough in itself to hold all of China; as World War I racked the globe, its afterechoes disrupted Sun's government. Mandarins gathered armies and hacked their way to power; whole provinces fell under the sway of warlords who ruled as petty kings.
And an idea more virulent even than Hung Hsiu-Ch'uan's Christianity took hold in the heartland of China and began to grow apace—the idea of Communism, and the warlord who raised its red banner was Mao Tse-Tung.
Still, he was only one warlord of many, and as Sun Yat-sen died and his lieutenant Chiang Kai-Shek rose to power, the Kuomintang steadily lost its hold, Chiang too becoming only one warlord out of many. For decades China writhed in the anarchy of internal strife, while villages burned and peasants starved. Western missionaries scurried among them, trying to save lives, to stave off starvation, but they were few, so very few. . . .
"We should put him out of his misery," Saint Louis said. "He has grown so little now!"
The Dragon still dwarfed any one of them, but no longer dwarfed them all together. He slept, but his sleep was racked with nightmares; he growled and moaned, and his whole body shivered with the fighting within.
"Shrunken or not, he is still too big even to think of cutting him into pieces," Saint George objected.
"It is not he who has diminished," Saint Mark pointed out, "but we who have grown."
"We can at least bleed him," the Puritan said. "It might lessen his fever . . ."
"Dragon's blood is a prized commodity, eh?" asked Saint Andrew.
But before any of them could approach with lance or leech, a new figure stepped near the sleeping behemoth. He wore square-skirted armor and a flaring helmet with upsweeping points on the front, like horns. With a harsh short cry, he slashed his sword into the sleeping monster. The Dragon waked roaring, slashed feebly at the armored figure—then sank back into torpor.
"What is this?" the Puritan cried. "A Chinese attacking China?"
"Not Chinese!" the attacker shouted. "I am a samurai of Nippon!"
"Nippon? Oh, are you mean Japan!"
"Nippon!" And the samurai slashed the dragon's side again, for emphasis. Scales that could turn the best steel the West had to offer, gave under the second blow of the samurai's sword. The Dragon muttered in his sleep, gave a short howl, but did not wake, for the fighting within him was so furious that it kept him in a coma. The samurai shouted and slashed, again and again.
The Japanese had conquered Manchuria. Now they invaded China, dismembering the armies, attacking civilians. Chiang Kai-Shek hung agonized in a dilemma, unsure whether to continue his fight against the Communists, or to turn all his forces against the Japanese. Finally, his generals virtually forced him to make peace with Mao so that he could turn and fight the army from the eastern islands.
"How base a deed, to attack one who sleeps!" Saint George cried.
"We cannot let him kill a sleeping beast," the Puritan stated.
"Surely not," said Saint Mark, with a cynical smile, "for if he did, there would be nothing left for us to dismember."
With a shout, the samurai turned and slashed at the Puritan. The monochrome man cried out, leaping back as he raised a forearm to shield his face. But he did not leap quite far enough, for the arm came away with blood spreading over the cloth.
In the middle of the Pacific, Pearl Harbor burned, and the people of the United States, who had been determined to stay out of Europe's war, found themselves clamoring to fight the Japanese. President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war.
"There is no doubt who we must attack now," the Puritan said grimly, and his clothing metamorphosed into a military uniform.