Chapter 179

That shout makes Shen Fei turn his head toward the bow and set off walking in that direction without an apology for interrupting the conversation, without a gesture, and of course, without asking permission.

He crosses the deck at a brisk pace without looking at anyone, and along the way, without raising his voice too much, he begins to let loose short sentences toward the men he passes, and his men, who three seconds ago were each about their own business, set into motion immediately.

And I, who have spent thirteen days watching this ship function from my dead corner, realize that it is the first time I have seen him do that.

Because in thirteen days I have seen this crew work a lot, and they work well, with that lazy efficiency of people who do the same thing every day and have done it for years. But this now is people who leave what they have in hand half-finished and go directly to a concrete spot without anyone having to tell them which is their spot.

And those things are not improvised, those things are rehearsed.

Meanwhile, with half my head elsewhere, I do the only useful thing I can do at this precise moment, which is to gather up my papers, and when I finish doing that I lift my gaze and look for Chen Mo.

He is still where he was, leaning against the wall of the quarterdeck, but he no longer has the face of one who is enjoying himself, but rather he has separated from the wall, has his arms loose at his sides and is looking toward the bow with narrowed eyes.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him.

He does not take his eyes off the bow, but he tilts his head a bit toward me to indicate that he is listening.

“Why has he gotten like that?” I ask him. “We have spent thirteen days crossing paths with ships without that alarming anyone.”

And there he does turn his head.

“With ships, yes”, he answers me. “The problem is that he has said there are several.”

“Several?” I ask him.

He separates definitively from the wall and takes two steps until he is beside the table, and when he speaks he does so with that tone he uses to explain things that to him are evident and that he knows perfectly are not so to me.

“A lone ship is going somewhere, comes from somewhere and is of no interest to anyone”, he tells me. “Down here hundreds cross paths every day.”

He lifts his chin toward the bow.

“But ships do not travel together just because, Xiaojie”, he continues. “Traveling together costs money, because it means the fastest has to go at the pace of the slowest and that everyone loses days. And no one loses days for pleasure.”

“So if they go together it is because they have a reason to go together”, I tell him.

“Exactly”, he answers me. “And the reasons are two. Either it is the fleet of a merchant large enough to have several ships, which does exist but is not frequent, or they are people who have joined together to raid.”

“Pirates”, I say after hearing his explanation.

“Pirates”, he confirms to me, and he says it with an absolute tranquility, like someone mentioning hail or taxes. “It is not the most probable, but it is probable enough that a captain who wants to keep on living gets on alert before knowing which of the two it is.”

And I listen to that, nod slowly, and the first thing that appears in my head, with an absolutely ridiculous sharpness, is a man with his hair full of trinkets and a compass walking in an impossible manner across a deck, and on top of it with powers.

And that image lasts me as long as a blink lasts, because right away it goes out on its own and there remains beneath it a considerably less amusing residue.

Because the real pirates were not that.

The real pirates, the ones I studied in passing when I had to take a semester of underwater archaeology, and whose complete bibliography I swallowed because in those days I still did not know how to say no, were people like l’Olonnais.

And of l’Olonnais I remember perfectly, because I remember what he did with prisoners, I remember why he did it, which was because it worked and because a well-constructed reputation saves combats, and I remember above all that he did it without any kind of personal morality, taking it as a job similar to unloading a cart.

And that man did it while being a normal man, with a normal knife and a normal body.

But here there are people who climb onto a ship in a single leap from the water, people who endure a spear thrust in the chest and keep walking, and people who can make a piece of paper turn into a bolt of fire, and I know it because I was seven years old the first time I saw that paper flying toward my face.

My mouth goes dry at the possibility of being raided by real pirates with powers and not by the Hollywood or manga version, so I do the only thing I can do, which is to look toward the bow and try to extract information from what I have in front of me, which is not much.

Because from my spot absolutely nothing can be seen of what is ahead of the ship. I have the quarterdeck at my back, the starboard rail two meters away and the entire length of the deck in front, with the mast and the sail.

But what I do see is Shen Fei, who reaches the bow, rests both hands on the rail, leans forward and stays still, although clearly nervous about what he is seeing.

To my left, without my having said absolutely anything, I notice that Lianhua moves.

It is not a large movement, it is simply that she has stopped being where she was and now she is between my chair and the starboard rail, slightly forward, with her body turned a few degrees toward the bow, and with her hands, which a minute ago she had crossed in front, loose and at waist height.

She says nothing, and I don’t either.

And so we stay a while that becomes fairly long for me, with the entire ship in silence save for the water against the hull and the creaking of the wood until, at last, from the bow I hear Shen Fei’s voice.

And I don’t hear him speaking with his men, but rather I hear him shouting outward, toward the water, calling out a greeting twice and then letting loose a question that comes out perfectly clear to me.

“Can someone tell me what is happening upriver?!” he shouts. “Why are you all in such a hurry?!”

After his question there is a pause, and then the answer arrives, weaker because it comes from farther away and over the water, but sufficient.

“Spirit salmon!” someone shouts. “A complete run, and it is coming upriver fast!”

Another pause.

“We have them three or four hours away!” the voice keeps shouting. “We are trying to reach port before they catch us in the middle of the channel!”

And then, from the bow of the ship, there arrives a curse.

And it is not just any curse, but rather it is one of those long and compound curses, with two or three pieces chained together, of the type that in my previous world we would have called, in this case with reason, a sailor’s curse.

And it comes accompanied by the noise of Shen Fei coming down from the bow at a rapid pace and coming toward us.

I, while I watch him approach, do a very quick mental review of the information I have just received and reach a conclusion, and it is that I don’t understand it.

Because I expected pirates, or expected a flood, or expected, I don’t know, anything that on a river twenty kilometers wide could make a pile of ships decide all at once that today is not a day for working.

And what they have said is that fish are approaching, so when Shen Fei reaches the height of the table, I ask him directly.

“Captain”, I tell him. “I am going to ask you a question that will probably strike you as a foolish one, but I am asking it all the same because I prefer to seem foolish than to be mistaken.”

Shen Fei looks at me.

“What exactly is the problem with a school of fish approaching?” I ask him.

And Shen Fei answers me with a calm that turns out considerably more alarming than if he had shouted at me.

“The problem is three things”, he tells me. “And they are bad enough separately, but it is much worse that they come together.”

He raises a finger.

“The first is that a spirit salmon is a type nine beast”, he tells me.

And he makes a very brief pause, that pause people make when they say a piece of information and want to check whether the one listening knows what it means.

“That is to say, the equivalent of a cultivator who has finished the Body Tempering”, I continue for him.

“Exactly”, he confirms to me, and I notice that his consideration for me rises a point, something that at any other moment would have pleased me quite a lot. “Skin that endures a knife, bones that don’t break and enough muscle to pull a grown man into the water without breaking a sweat.”

He raises a second finger.

“The second is that they don’t go alone”, he continues. “There are no lone salmon. They always go in runs, and a small run is thousands.”

And he raises the third.

“And the third is the truly bad one”, he finishes. “And it is that a spirit salmon cannot be frightened off because it does not attack you. It simply swims up the river, and whatever it finds in front of it, it rams, and it makes exactly no difference whether it is a rock, a log or the hull of my ship. It simply rams until the obstacle disappears or it dies.”

And I listen to that and stay silent a moment, because I have just understood it perfectly.

And I have understood it so well that the image forms for me in full detail, which is an image of several thousand fish, with the skin and the strength of a cultivator, coming up the river at full speed to slam head-on into the same piece of wood, one after another, without stopping, for hours.

It is not an attack, it is a damned living jackhammer.

“All right”, I tell him. “I grant you that it is a problem.”

Shen Fei lets the air out through his nose.

“I could do what those are doing”, he tells me, and he makes a gesture with his chin toward port.

And I turn my head and for the first time see what he has been seeing for a while, because the ships are already reaching our level.

They pass on both sides and at a fair distance, but they can be seen perfectly. There are five or six, all loaded, each rowing in addition to having set every stitch of sail possible (which is a detail that says a great deal) and all headed in the same direction, which is the opposite of ours.

“I could turn around and run with them”, Shen Fei continues. “And I am going to tell you exactly what would happen if I did.”

He crosses his arms.

“That they would catch us”, he tells me. “We passed the last decent port yesterday afternoon, and to return to it I would have to go up the river, that is to say, with the current against us.”

And that is where Chen Mo intervenes, who has spent all this while listening without saying a single word.

“So, what do we do?” he asks him, and he asks it without a single gram of dramatism, like someone asking a price.

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And Shen Fei, who evidently already had the answer thought out before coming down from the bow, answers immediately.

“We hide”, he says.

He uncrosses his arms.

“The salmon are not coming for us”, he continues. “They go up, and they go up where there is more water, which is the center of the channel, because that is where one advances best. Along the banks some go up too, but there are far fewer.”

He points with his hand toward starboard, toward the green and dark line of the forest we have had beside us the whole trip.

“So what has to be done is to look for a nook in the coast”, he says. “An inlet, a spit of land, anything that covers us in front. We put the ship in there, we drop the anchor and we endure the ones that arrive.”

And then he adds the sentence that is the one that truly matters.

“And the ones that arrive have to be killed off”, he says. “Because if you let them hit the hull all afternoon, it makes no difference how well built it is.”

Chen Mo nods a single time.

“My men are seven and none is a warrior”, he tells him. “But all have done the northern route and all know how to use a pole and a knife. I put them at your disposal and they do what you tell them.”

“It is appreciated”, he answers him.

And it is at that moment when I decide to speak.

“Captain”, I tell him. “I can help too.”

And two things happen at once.

The first is that Shen Fei looks at me, and he doesn’t look at me badly, but rather he looks at me with the face of a man who is trying to find a polite way of saying no.

And the second is that Lianhua turns toward me.

“Xiaojie”, she says.

And with that I already know perfectly where she is going.

But I answer Shen Fei first, because the one who commands on this ship is him.

“I know exactly what it looks like I am saying”, I tell him. “But I don’t intend to fight with anything, nor to approach the rail, nor to place myself anywhere someone would have to worry about me.”

And then I look at Lianhua, because this part is hers.

“Xiaojie, my obligation is to keep you safe”, she tells me, and she says it with a tone she had not used with me since the Empire.

“I know”, I answer her.

“And your mother told me…”, she continues.

“I know what my mother told you”, I cut her off, and I do it without raising my voice but without letting her finish, because if I let her finish this conversation lasts half an hour and we don’t have half an hour. “And precisely because of that I want you to listen to me very carefully, because I am going to explain it to you a single time.”

Lianhua closes her mouth.

“The defense of this ship comes first”, I tell her. “And I don’t say it out of heroism, I say it out of logic.”

I settle myself in the chair so I can look at her straight on.

“If I hide in the cabin and the ship holds, nothing has happened and I have made a fool of myself for a while”, I continue. “But if I hide in the cabin and the ship does not hold, then I will be at the bottom of the river shut in a wooden box, unable to swim and with the absolute certainty that I could have done something and decided not to.”

I make a pause.

“Compare those two risks for me”, I tell her. “Compare them truly, and not as my bodyguard, but as someone who knows what is a priority.”

Lianhua says nothing.

“And besides there is a second thing”, I add. “And it is that you already know what technique I am going to use.”

And there I see the gesture, that extra blink.

“You know exactly which one it is”, I continue. “So you also know that I don’t need to approach the rail, that I don’t need to see any of them up close and that I can do it from the center of the deck far from the fish. The real risk I run is that my head will hurt.”

After telling her that I fall silent, and Lianhua holds my gaze three seconds before, very slowly, inclining her head.

“As you say, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

But the last word is neither hers nor mine, because Shen Fei has spent all this while listening to us with his arms crossed and an expression I have not managed to decipher.

“All help is welcome”, he says at last. “And I am going to be honest with you, because I am not in a position to reject some hands, wherever they come from.”

He uncrosses his arms and points at me with a finger, without rudeness, but pointing at me.

“But I put one condition on you and it is not negotiable”, he continues. “Where you place yourself cannot be in the way. If my men have to pass running through a spot and you are in that spot, my men die, you die and I sink. And that is not going to happen on my ship.”

“That strikes me as perfectly reasonable”, I answer him immediately. “And I give you my word. I only need to be in a place from which I can see the water clearly. Nothing more.”

Shen Fei looks at me half a second longer and then nods.

“Deal”, he tells me.

And he leaves while he begins to give the first order before having finished turning around, and in two strides he is already at mid-deck pointing at things and handing out work.

“I’m going for my people”, Chen Mo tells me, and he goes out after him.

I stay with Lianhua with a mental list of the things I have to do before the fish of death arrive.

“Lianhua”, I begin. “I need you to go find…”

And I don’t finish the sentence, because Xia comes shooting out through the hatch.

She comes with her hands stained with flour up to the wrist, with her hair stuck to her forehead, and reaches my chair in four strides.

“What’s happening?” she asks me. “Everyone is running. The cook put out the fire while he told me to come up and he didn’t tell me why.”

And I, at that, take half a second to choose my words because she is eleven years old, and because what I tell her in the next five seconds is what she is going to carry in her head for the next four hours.

“An enormous run of giant fish is coming upriver”, I tell her with all the tranquility in the world. “And they are large enough and brutish enough to do damage to the ship if we let them. So we are going to get into a sheltered spot on the bank and we are going to kill them off as they arrive.”

Xia listens to me, I see how she processes what I have told her and finally she asks me a question.

“And can they be eaten?” she asks me.

I stay looking at her.

“I beg your pardon?” I tell her.

“Whether they can be eaten”, she repeats, and she repeats it with an absolutely exquisite patience, as if the one who wasn’t catching on were me. “Because if we are going to kill a pile of fish and then throw them in the water, it is an enormous waste. And if they are large, with two or three there is already food for everyone for days.”

And I open my mouth, and close it while I think, with a clarity that doesn’t please me at all, that this girl has just asked the only truly practical question that has been asked on this deck in the last ten minutes.

Because it is true. Thousands of spirit beasts are going to come up this river, we are going to kill a few and no one, not me, not Chen Mo, not the captain, has thought for a single second about what one does with them afterward.

“I have not the slightest idea”, I answer her with honesty. “But it is an excellent question and we are going to ask it of Shen Fei as soon as we have a moment.”

Xia nods, satisfied.

“Now listen to me”, I continue, and I change my tone. “I need you to go down to the cabin and bring me up the box of talismans. And on the way, take these papers and leave them inside a backpack so they don’t get lost.”

And I hold out to her the papers with the diagrams of ships with keels.

Xia takes the papers, tucks them under her arm and shoots off toward the hatch without saying anything more.

The moment she disappears, I turn toward Lianhua.

“Good”, I tell her. “You and I have to talk about how we are going to do this.”

“I’m listening”, she answers me.

I breathe and order my ideas, because I have spent since Shen Fei’s curse turning this over and I think I now have it.

“First, what I am not going to do”, I begin. “I am not going to use the Dragon’s Grip to kill them.”

Lianhua raises an eyebrow.

“It is the only offensive technique you have, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

“It is”, I grant her. “But for this situation it is of no use.”

I put my open hand in front of her, with the fingers spread.

“The Grip can squeeze what it is holding”, I tell her. “But to burst one of those salmon it would take squeezing for an unknown quantity of time.”

I close my hand.

“And thousands are going to come”, I continue. “If I go killing them one by one and taking an unknown quantity of time for each one, I will have exhausted myself before anything at all is noticed in the quantity of fish that are probably going to attack us.”

Lianhua nods slowly.

“And on the other side there is you”, I tell her. “But you don’t have offensive techniques. And you alone, against the fish you have near you, are going to spend the afternoon slashing at water.”

“That is true”, she admits, and she admits it without a single objection, which is one of the things I like most about her.

“Well then the solution is evident”, I tell her. “Since neither of the two of us can do it separately, we coordinate.”

And here I lean forward.

“I use the Dragon’s Grip”, I tell her. “Not to kill them, but to take them out of the water and hold them in the air beside you. And you, who are not going to have to bother chasing them, finish them off.”

Lianhua stays silent, and she doesn’t stay silent out of politeness, but rather she stays silent because she is clearly thinking about that tactic and looking for holes in it before answering, which is exactly what I want her to do.

“It is a good tactic”, she tells me at last. “Taking them out of the water takes away almost everything from them, since a fish out of water cannot push against anything, so it cannot escape even if it has strength to spare to do so. And without having to chase them, I can kill many more and far faster than I could any other way.”

She makes a pause.

“But there is one condition”, she adds. “That I place you in the center of the deck, far from both rails and in a spot from which I can keep from losing sight of you.”

I permit myself to smile for the first time since the shout sounded after hearing her.

“I expected nothing less”, I answer her.

And then, because I remember in time, I add what was missing.

“And one more thing”, I tell her. “No shouting at each other over the noise. The moment it begins, we use the Golden Chains of Ogma and we coordinate with them.”

Lianhua nods immediately, and I notice that that detail has pleased her more than the rest of the plan, but just at that moment Xia returns with the box.

She leaves it on top of the table, I open it, rummage inside among all the types of talismans I have in there, push aside a couple of blocks and take out the two I want.

“Xia”, I tell her, and I put the two in her hands. “This is the air-barrier one and this other is the fire-arrow one. Look carefully at the difference, because the central stroke is not the same.”

Xia lowers her gaze, compares the two and nods.

“I want you to go over the entire ship”, I tell her. “And to everyone, crew and Chen Mo’s men, without skipping anyone, who can use talismans, you give one barrier and two arrow.”

“And to the one who can’t?” she asks me.

“To the one who can’t, nothing”, I answer her. “A talisman in the hand of someone who doesn’t know how to use it is not a weapon, it is a piece of paper. And don’t tell them it is from me, tell them it is from the company.”

Xia hugs the two blocks against her chest.

“I’ll do it right now”, she tells me, after which she goes off running again.

And the moment she goes, Lianhua speaks.

“That is a very considerable quantity of talismans, Xiaojie”, she tells me, and she says it measuring her tone a great deal, which is her way of telling me that I am overdoing it. “There are nineteen people.”

“I know perfectly”, I answer her, and then I half close the box.

“But I prefer to overdo the precaution today than to spend the rest of my life remembering that I had a box full of talismans in the backpack and decided to keep them just in case”, I tell her. “A stored talisman is a piece of paper. A used talisman is what has prevented someone from dying.”

Lianhua does not argue.

“And now go”, I tell her. “Find me a spot. And find it well, because our tactic depends on that spot.”

Lianhua inclines her head and moves away toward the center of the deck, and I stay alone with the box to do the last part, which is mine.

I open it again, rummage slowly, take some of the strongest talismans I have for myself, just in case, and close the box.

I lift my gaze from the box, when, from mid-deck, one of Shen Fei’s men shouts.

“Captain! There ahead, to starboard! Behind the point!” he says with evident enthusiasm.

Shen Fei, after hearing him, reaches him in four steps, leans out, follows the man’s arm with his gaze and stays looking a good while.

Afterward he says something I don’t hear, the man goes off running toward the helmsman, and after speaking with him I notice how the ship begins to turn.

We approach the bank, which from close up is far higher than it seemed from the center of the channel, with the shadow of the branches falling directly on the water and the roots poking out of the cut of the earth. And when we are almost on top of it, I finally see what the man had seen.

It is a spit of land that juts out toward the river, not very large, covered with trees to the very point, and behind it the bank goes inward forming an inlet of still water.

It is a good spot, so good that it is evident even to me.

The ship enters slowly, and once positioned they drop the anchor while Lianhua returns to where I am.

“I have the spot now, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

And she carries me in her arms to a point that is right beside the mast, a bit behind it, between two bundles of cargo well lashed down.

She sits me on top of a coil of rope with a folded blanket underneath, with my back resting against the cargo, and steps aside a pace so that I can look, something I do right away.

What I see is that in front of me I have the entire deck, that I'm five meters from the rail, I am not in the way of any path, and from here I see the water, from one end to the other of the part of the ship that faces the channel, without a single obstacle in front.

“It is a very good spot”, I tell her, and I mean it. “It is exactly what I asked you for.”

And from there on, nothing happens, which is the worst thing to endure.

Shen Fei goes over the deck one last time, checks the moorings, checks the poles, checks the people, and afterward he climbs on top of a barrel and speaks in a loud voice to the entire ship.

“Work is over!” he says. “We don’t know whether they are going to take three hours or five! Whoever can sleep, let them sleep, and whoever cannot sleep, let them sit down and eat something! If you stay on your feet looking at the river all afternoon, when they arrive you are not going to be good for anything!”

And he gets down from the barrel.

And I, who in these days have formed a fairly high opinion of this man, raise it one step further, because I have just realized that that order is the most difficult of all the ones he has given today.

I look at Lianhua.

“I am going to take his advice”, I tell her.

Lianhua blinks.

“You are going to sleep?” she asks me, and she doesn’t entirely manage to keep the astonishment from showing.

“I am going to try”, I answer her. “Because when that arrives I am going to have to use a technique for what will probably be a long while, and if I arrive tired I will last half as long. So yes, I am going to take a nap.”

I settle myself against the cargo.

“And you wake me”, I add. “The moment there is the slightest piece of news, whatever it may be, even if it is a triviality. Don’t let me sleep a single second longer out of considering that resting does me good.”

“I will do so, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

And then I close my eyes to realize, without meaning to, that there is one ability, among all the ones I brought from the other life, to which I have given no value in thirteen years and that turns out to be still intact.

And it is that of falling asleep anywhere.

It is learned on its own when you spend your summers at digs, and it is not learned out of vocation but out of exhaustion. I have slept in the back of a van with the tools digging into my back, in a plastic chair in an airport at four in the morning, and once very memorably on the floor of a tent with two centimeters of water inside.

So I fall asleep and dream.

And I dream that I am in the middle of the channel, alone, while a column of water that reaches up to the clouds turns in front of me, and that column is full of salmon. Thousands and thousands of salmon going around inside the tornado with their mouths open while they hurl themselves at me.

“Xiaojie”, I hear suddenly, so I open my eyes all at once.

Lianhua is crouched in front of me with a hand on my shoulder, and there is a different light, lower and orange, in the silence that seems to envelop the ship.

“They are coming”, she tells me.

I clear my head in a second and a half, which is a personal record, and turn my head toward the river to see how, downriver, the water is boiling.

It is not a manner of speaking, since it is literally what it seems. There is a band that occupies the entire width I am capable of taking in with my sight, from bank to bank, where the surface of the river has turned into a white, churned and broken thing that advances toward us at a speed that does not correspond at all to something of that size.

And it is at that moment, while the band approaches and I begin to distinguish the loose bodies that leap above the others, that I have the answer to the only question whose answer it had not occurred to me to ask.

Which was the size a spirit salmon can come to have.

Because what has just leapt there in front, outlined against the afternoon sun and turning in the air before entering the water again, is an animal that would make any fisherman from my old world faint from the shock upon seeing it, since it is longer than a grown man.