Behind me were the sounds of battle. What was going on? I didn’t dare look around. The trouble with my strategy was that this guy was a master with that sword. His swings didn’t expose him to danger. His recoveries were lightning swift. And that martial-arts stance of his — bowlegged, low-slung — offered me nothing to chop at closer than his ankle. Fat chance: the moment I dipped down to slice at his leg he’d behead me with that weed-cutter of his.
His next attack brought the sword down in an overhand slicing action that would have halved me at the part in my hair if it’d hit me. Quick as lightning, it turned into a lateral slash that missed my nose by inches.
I continued to circle, hoping against hope that I could draw him away from her (hoping that she was still alive back there). As I did, he attacked again. His next move came fast and furious as usual — but it had a hole in it somewhere. Don’t ask me where; I didn’t have time to think it out. I just let the adrenalin take over.
His two-handed slash was on the diagonal, sixty degrees from the ground. It wasn’t at me. It was at my feint. And it was right on target for where I’d have been if I hadn’t been faking it.
As it was, I just plain wasn’t there. And the backswing nearly tore his arm off. As he tried to regain control I put Hugo up just under his jaw and sliced, forward and down.
Hugo is like a straight razor on both edges. The cut he made was narrow, but deep. In the dim light I could see the pink vein sticking out of his neck, spurting blood. He dropped the sword; he put his hands to his neck; he fell to his knees, quivering and whimpering helplessly.
I turned to the scene behind me.
Tatiana stood with her back to the wall. Her eyes were not on me. They were on an incredible scene in the middle of the street.
One of the attackers lay dead in the gutter. His guts were out in the street in front of him, and the pavement was slippery with his blood.
That wasn’t what she was looking at.
In the center of the street the man with the trident and the man with the spear had, boxed between them, a little old white-haired man — a Caucasian, and in his sixties at least — armed only with a curious pair of knives. These he held, blades pointing to the sky, to his fore and aft, in a posture of two-way defense; I could see them clearly in the dim light. They were single-edged and massive, like Bowies, only bigger — a foot in length, perhaps two and a half inches wide at the blade. The handles were fitted with knuckle-guards in front, curious up-jutting hooks in the rear.
The old man was smiling serenely, as if the deadly game he was playing were no more lethal than chess. He was inviting their attack.
In a moment I saw why.
The man with the spear lunged forward.
The old man, for a second ignoring the man behind him, moved — not backward, but forward. The twin hooks engaged the thick spear-handle, diverted it from his body, slid swiftly up the wooden shaft. At the handle — the attacker was still lunging forward, confident of skewering the old man on that first rush — the forward knife disengaged from the spear’s wooden base. Its blade ran softly across the attacker’s neck, slicing through the same vein I’d hit on his machete-wielding partner.
The attacker dropped.
At that moment the second spearman — the man with the big, deadly-looking trident — attacked from the old man’s rear.
The old man’s head didn’t even turn. He caught the trident on his rear knife, turned it to the ground, and only then, with a single piercing cry, whirled to swing the lethal blade in his other hand in a wide arc.
The attacker’s head was down, drawn there by the old man’s pinioning of the trident. The blade sliced through his face, cutting it instantly in half. The wounded man screamed; his hands went to his ruined face. He sank to his knees.
Calmly the old man bent over one of the dead men and wiped his knife clean; he’d only soiled one blade. Then he looked up and smiled first at Tatiana, then at me. And he picked up the machete-like sword.
All the others were dead. The man with the ruined face was still kneeling, crying. Blood dripped from between the fingers that pressed the slit surfaces of his face together.
In a single powerful but effortless movement the old man swung the machete high, brought it flashing down... and the faceless man became a headless corpse. The bloody trophy of the brief battle rolled to rest in the gutter. The body slumped forward.
The old man bowed to the bodies. The bow was measured, respectful. I was still in the Orient after all.
“Hello,” he said to me. Then he turned to her, still smiling that same Buddha-like smile. “Tatiana, my dear. How glad I am that I was able to arrive on time.”
Her eyes still full of nameless terror, she melted into his arms. Patting her on the back, the old man turned that same smile on me. “Well,” he said. “You certainly acquitted yourself well tonight. My compliments.”
I bent over as he had done and wiped Hugo clean. “I’m lucky to be alive. But you... I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”
“Oh,” he said, shrugging it off. “I am a man blessed by fortune. I have had much good luck in my life.”
Inside the circle of his arm the girl sobbed. She clung even more closely to him. Her weeping was loud and unashamed; disconsolate. I could understand nothing of it all. “That wasn’t luck,” I said. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“Ah,” he said. “Every form of contest has its own rules. A logical contest, as in choy li fut, has logical rules. It only remains to learn them. They will apply, to the extent that we learn them well.” The smile was calm, happy, forgiving. He turned to the girl in his arms. “But come, my dear. Time to take you home. There, there. It’s all right now. You’ve no reason to be frightened. No more. Now, now — come along. Mr. Carter and I will just go turn off the lights, and lock up, and we’ll be home in two shakes. There. There’s my good girl...” His wrinkled old hand patted her short cap of hair gently. He looked at me; winked. “Here, my dear, let Mr. Carter hold you. He can comfort you quite as well as I. I’ll just finish closing up; I’ll be done in a jiffy.” And he handed her to me. And I held her while he skipped nimbly down the block to that single light we’d seen burning; held her while her sobs grew lighter, softer; held her while she got control over her emotions. Finally, as his light went off and I saw him come out of the distant building and head our way again, she nestled her tear-stained cheek against my shirt and nodded up to me that everything was okay.
Okay? Everything was crazy. Who were these hired killers, with their medieval weapons? What were they up to? What was the girl up to? Who was the old man?
And how did he know my name?
Chapter Eleven
On the Western shore of the Kowloon Peninsula a sturdy breakwater juts far out into the bay to give protection to as odd an assortment of boats as you’re likely ever to see, anchored inside the mole and sheltered against the typhoons that sweep in from the Pacific every late summer or early autumn.
These include motor launches, fishing boats, sampans, junks, houseboats, cargo lighters, commercial vehicles — the more far-ranging among them bearing a curious double registry and even, often as not, flying double flags of both the Crown Colony itself and of Red China. The Yaumati people, the guide books will tell you, live most of their lives over the water, supporting themselves by fishing or other seagoing pursuits and raising their families in the houseboats that lie permanently moored in the nest of slips that acted as the backbone of the water community.