I awoke with a start and sat up in bed. By the angle of the moon's light through the east window, I guessed it was four in the morning. Beiju stirred in the bed next to me, but did not wake. I thought of rousing her to make love, but decided to let her sleep.
We were in the village of Deleng on the Amur River, where the Chinese Empire maintained a military outpost and little else. An active marketplace and a few craft shops, however, had sprung up in the shadow of the barracks, and the local tribes -- and occasionally Russian hunters -- brought basic goods there to trade. The Far East Crown Agent, Jackson, who was our contact in Deleng, had told us that it was our last good spot for any sort of provisions before we continued up the river, a journey for which he had engaged a bargeman to take us on our first leg.
We had originally planned to stay in Deleng for a week, but that had stretched into ten days with Lord Harrington's typical hesitation before delving into the unknown, a tendency in him that I feared one day would put me in serious danger.
Still, it was ten days well spent. Jackson pointed out to me the six dialects spoken by the various locals, along with three separate racial types, not including the two Brits, me, and a few Russians.
The Cantonese I'd learned as a boy in Cheyenne, Wyoming was next to useless. I did manage to convey to the Russians that I was "Americanisch," using the term I'd learned from Russian whalers in Alaska. I'm not sure they believed me, and, while I didn't know the Russian for it, I thought it best not to mention my British companions in any case.
We also laid in several sacks of rice and barrels of dried meat, fish, and fruit. Harrington was upset that we couldn't get wheat flour, but he'd get over it. And tea; Harrington insisted on a small crate of tea, and, ridiculously, a bulky Russian contraption called a "samovar" to boil water for it. While he never said so, I was certain that Jackson was glad he wouldn't be continuing on with us.
My three rifles, two revolvers, and crates of ammunition for each had been brought from San Francisco. Even the Russians had had little better than flintlocks, so I kept the guns well hidden at all times; these were likely the most valuable equipment for a hundred miles around.
In the darkness, I considered whether there was anything I needed to prepare before we departed, but decided there was not. My thoughts returned to Beiju.
She was a prostitute, of course, but in the ten days we'd spent together, I'd grown quite fond of her. Harrington, typically, had chosen the very youngest girls available, two of them, when we'd taken our rooms. I expected that he'd subjected them to every sort of abuse he could imagine; it was as if it was a matter of pride for him. I'd learned during our voyage across the Pacific to change the subject as quickly as possible whenever he started bragging about his sexual exploits: the man was a pig.
What I'd looked for was a girl at the state between the fear or misplaced excitement of youth and the bitterness of long experience; "resignation," I'd named it to myself. I could neither bring myself to despoil innocence nor subject myself to the bitterness born of abuse from others, but for a brief moment in time, some prostitutes -- probably not all of them -- could be pleasant company.
And this was Beiju. She had come from somewhere to the north, I made out from our pantomiming to each other, but her parents had sold her several years before after their flocks had suffered an epidemic. She was a striking woman, full-breasted and curvy, particularly for an Asian, and with unusually thick eyebrows that at first I found a bit off-putting, but that I later came to like quite a bit.
