The Skin Map

CHAPTER 18
In Which Arthur Meets an Avenging Angel

The two dockland roughnecks on either side of Arthur Flinders-Petrie maintained a powerful grip on his arms, which were bent painfully behind him as he was frog-marched from the House of Peace Inn and propelled down along a noisome alleyway that led to a derelict yard. Earl Burleigh followed a short distance behind to discourage any curious onlookers from becoming involved in the proceedings.

The unresisting captive was dragged into the centre of the yard. Arthur gazed around, searching in vain for a means of escape. There was none. The deserted patch of waste ground was surrounded on three sides by the blind backs of the buildings fronting the dock-storehouses, boat sheds, fishing huts, dilapidated dwellings-and on the fourth by the alley entrance. “What do you want from me?” Arthur demanded, looking from one to the other of his captors.

The answer came from Burleigh. “I’ve already told you, Arthur. I want to share in your discoveries. I want to learn your secrets.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he protested. “You have no idea.”

“I think I do,” replied Burleigh. “In any event, it doesn’t matter. Since you refuse to share, I have no alternative but to take it all for myself.”

“Let me go,” pleaded Arthur. “Hurting me will avail you nothing. I won’t tell you anything. Believe me, I will not be forced.”

“Oh, I do believe you,” answered Burleigh. “More’s the pity.” He nodded to his men.

The one on Arthur’s left reached behind him and produced a lumpy iron ball attached to a crude wooden handle, and the whole bound in boiled leather. In the same moment, the thug on the right drew a knife and gave Arthur a violent shove, sending him sprawling to the ground. He rolled onto his knees and made to rise, but the cudgel came whistling through the air toward his head.

He jerked away.

The blow was haphazardly aimed and struck him a glancing blow on top of his shoulder. He gave a yelp and tried to pull free.

The cudgel whistled again and thudded into the back of his neck. A scarlet bloom erupted in his brain, and Arthur’s knees gave way and he slumped to the ground, writhing.

Burleigh moved to stand over him. “I tried reasoning with you, Arthur,” he said quietly. “We might have been friends.” He held out his hand, and the bully with the knife placed the blade in Burleigh’s palm.

“Please!” moaned Arthur through the roar of blood in his ears. He thrust out his hands to fend off the knife, but one of the brutes seized his wrists and yanked his arms over his head. “What are you going to do?”

Burleigh grabbed his shirt and slipped the tip of the knife through the fine fabric and gave a sharp upward stroke, narrowly missing his captive’s jaw. Two more rough slices and the shirtfront was cut away, baring Sir Arthur’s torso and revealing the swarm of curious tattoos inscribed there. Burleigh’s eyes narrowed with approval at the sight of his prize: dozens of small, finely etched glyphs of the most fantastic and cunning design, intricately picked out in indigo ink.

Arthur saw the look and instantly realized what it meant. “No!” he yelled. “No! You can’t.”

“I assure you, sir, that I can,” countered Burleigh. “I’m the man with the knife.”

“Release me!” shouted Arthur, squirming in the grasp of his tormentors, who were now holding his limbs, stretching him out, and pinning him to the ground. Burleigh sketched a line along Arthur’s ribs with the tip of the knife. Blood began to trickle down his side. “You’re insane!”

“Not insane,” objected Burleigh calmly, drawing the knife up across the top of Sir Arthur’s chest along the collarbone. “Determined.”

“Agh!” screamed Arthur, trying to squirm free. “Help!”

“You will have to be quiet,” Burleigh told him. “And be still; I won’t have the map damaged.”

He gave a nod to the man at Arthur’s head, and the cudgel came down once more, with a thick and sickening crack. Arthur felt his slender hold on consciousness begin to slip. “It won’t do you any good,” Arthur murmured, black clouds of oblivion gathering before his eyes. “… You don’t know how to read it…”

“I know a great deal more than you think,” replied Burleigh, with malice cold as the grave. The blade bit deep. “And I will simply learn the rest.”

Arthur screamed again and felt the icy sting of the blade slicing into his flesh.

His vision grew hazy and ethereal.

As if in a dream he saw the deadly club hover in the air above his head as Burleigh’s man took aim for the killing blow. It seemed to hang there for the longest moment…

And then… Arthur could not be certain, for his mental acuity was occupied wholly with clinging to the last shreds of consciousness. But it seemed to him as if, inexplicably, the crude weapon jerked in the attacker’s hand and struck its wielder in the face with a force strong enough to shatter bone. The cudgel, which appeared to have taken on a life of its own, then whirled in the air, striking the second thug a wallop across the nose and continuing on its arc, narrowly missing Burleigh, who dodged aside just in time to avoid a blow that, had it connected with his temple, would have cracked his skull.

The knife blade flashed in the dingy light-a cruel and cutting arc. Then, curiously, it halted in midflight, hovered, and spun, spent to the ground as an agonized cry split the warm evening air.

Arthur sensed, rather than saw, a rush of movement. Something-a hand perhaps or, more strangely, a foot-swinging lazily through the air to catch a forward-hurtling thug in the throat, crushing his windpipe; Burleigh’s man dropped heavily to the ground, clawing at his neck and gasping for air.

There was an incoherent shout.

The sound seemed to Arthur to come from a very great distance above, or possibly from somewhere deep inside him. Someone seemed to be calling on someone to stand and fight. Dutifully, Arthur struggled to rise, his head throbbing, his eyes bulging with the effort. The sound of his own blood surged in his ears with the roar of wild ocean surf.

Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he fell back… but not before he saw an angel.

The heavenly figure was swathed in glowing white silk and took the form of a young Chinese woman, tall and lithe, with long hair black as jet, braided to her slender waist. Her face was a smooth oval of absolute beauty and composure, and Arthur knew he had never seen anything so lovely in all his life. The angelic creature’s movements were performed with a calm, unhurried grace as, with an exquisite kick to the forehead of a charging attacker, she snapped the fellow’s neck, sending him crashing to the dust in a quivering heap of twisted limbs. Pirouetting with a dancer’s poise, she lightly turned to address pale-faced Burleigh, who was now backing away, stumbling, cursing, and cradling a loose and strengthless arm that appeared to have adopted a wholly unnatural bend.

Arthur, overcome at last by pain and shock, allowed himself to lie back and close his eyes. When he opened them again, the white-clad angel was bending over him, cradling his head in her lap. “Peace, my friend,” she breathed, and her voice was the soothing music of paradise.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and tried to lift his hand to her face. The effort brought pain in shimmering silver cascades that stole the breath from his lungs.

Laying a fingertip to his lips, she hushed him and smoothed back the hair from his forehead. “Rest now,” she said. “Help is coming.”

In that moment, the pain of his wounds receded, ebbing away on the dulcet notes of her low, whispered voice. Bliss enfolded him, and he lay gazing up into the most beautiful dark almond-shaped eyes he could conceive-and would happily have spent an eternity in such delightful repose. Then, wrapped in the warmth of the knowledge that he would live and not die, he felt himself lifted up and carried on light wings from the derelict yard that was to have been his pitiful grave.

He was roused again some while later to the sensation of being laid upon a bed of fragrant linen in a room aglow with candlelight. There were other figures floating around him now-more angels, perhaps?-and one of these was dabbing at his seeping wounds with a warm, damp cloth that smelled of camphor and stung him however gently applied. The pain caused him to cry out, whereupon another angel applied a folded cloth to his nose. He breathed in heavy, sick-sweet vapours, and the room with its heavenly beings grew dim and vanished into a realm of white and silence.

It was pain that brought him to his senses once more, to find himself in a dim room, covered by a thin sheet and shaking uncontrollably. The smell of burning spices and oil in a pan, mingled with the barking of a dog, made him heave violently, but his stomach was empty and nothing came up.

Arthur lay back, panting and sweating, his head and chest and side burning as if live coals had been placed beneath his skin. When he could open his eyes again, he looked around. The room was small and neat-bare wooden floors, grass matting on unadorned walls, a low three-legged stool, and a bed-the bed a simple straw-stuffed pallet; a roll of woven bamboo strips covered a wide door half open to a tiny garden. Through the slits of bamboo, he could see a plum tree and, beneath it, a large copper basin of water. In the shade of the tree sat his old friend, the master tattooist, Wu Chen Hu, his expressionless gaze fixed in meditation upon the surface of the water in the basin, where a plum leaf floated.

Arthur raised his hand to wave and made to call to his friend, but even that small exertion proved such a fierce and insistent agony that the effort lapsed as soon as it began. Instead, he drew a deep breath and held it until the pain subsided, then turned his attention to his wounds. He could see little, for they were covered with strips of cloth that had been soaked in some kind of aromatic liquid. Gingerly, and with the minimum of movement, he lifted the edge of one of the cloths and saw an ugly, ragged cut, its red, inflamed edges oozing blood and pus.

He had just replaced the cloth and was about to close his eyes against the throbbing in his head when there was a movement in the doorway. He turned on the pillow to see a young Chinese woman enter the room, carrying a steaming bowl. She was dressed all in white with long, black, braided hair, and he recognized her at once.

“You.” Arthur sighed. “You are the angel of my dream.”

Her perfect lips curved in a smile. “You are alive still. That is good.”

“It was you who saved me,” he continued, his voice an ineffectual whisper. “My angel.”

“Please,” she said, placing the bowl on the floor beside the bed. “What is ain-jel?”

“A creature sent by God,” replied Arthur, “to be a protector and helpmate of man.”

“Ah, anjo,” she said, then smiled and dipped her head. “For you, I am pleased to be ain-jel.” She drew the low stool close, seating herself primly on it. With the most graceful and gentle fingers, she peeled away the cloth covering his wounds, rolling the strips up and placing them into the hot liquid in the bowl.

“You speak English,” observed Arthur.

“Father sent me to Jesuit School. They teach me very well.”

Arthur’s eyes widened with surprise. “Xian-Li?”

The young woman smiled and dipped her head. “I am. And you are Master Arthur.”

“Xian-Li, the last time I saw you…” He fell silent looking at her, amazed at the transformation as if it had taken place before his very eyes. “You have grown into a beautiful woman, Xian-Li.”

“And you have been hit on the head,” she replied, carefully removing another strip of cloth. The bandage stuck to the skin and pulled at the wound, making Arthur wince. “So sorry.”

“No,” he said, “you continue. I am sure it is doing me a world of good.”

“So sorry, too, because I came so late.”

“So late?”

“To save you injury,” she said. “Father foresaw trouble. We went to inn and waited. When you did not come out, father went in. But you had gone. It was a little time to find you.”

“Yet, you found me,” replied Arthur. “For that I will be forever in your debt.”

She smiled.

“It is a service I must repay,” he told her. “I owe you my life.”

“You owe me new shoes,” she corrected lightly. She indicated her feet, and he saw that her blue silk slippers were soiled and stained with blood.

He smiled. “As soon as I am better, we will go out together, you and I, and we will buy you the best shoes in all Macau. On that, you have my sacred vow.”