William Wu - Emperor

Steve grinned as she prattled on with another of her lectures. After seeing her genuinely scared and vulnerable last night, this lecture did not annoy him the way the earlier ones had. Now it just struck him as funny. While she talked, Steve ordered some meat-filled buns they could take with them on the road.

When Marcia finished her lecture, even the tea was gone. Steve got the duffel bag out of his room and paid the innkeeper. Then he and Marcia walked out to the stable and had the hostler saddle their horses, which had already been fed. Steve paid him, too, and mounted up.

Marcia grimaced as she swung into the saddle. “I don’t think I’ve ever used these muscles before. Not in this combination. It’s not like riding a bike or a motorcycle at all.”

“No.” Steve grinned. “That’s true.” He kicked his mount and turned up the road.

Marcia steered her horse after him. “Well, it’s a nice, clear, cool morning, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And we have a leisurely ride ahead. We don’t dare catch up to the travelers ahead of us, and we want Hunter to catch up to us if he can.”

“Good,” said Marcia, with a wry grin. “Slow and easy sounds just fine to me.”

Jane, Wayne, and Ishihara landed in early morning right outside a small peasant village. Several chickens and a couple of children darted away in surprise. Beyond the buildings of the village, Jane could see adults walking from the village into the fields with their farm tools.

As they got to their feet, Jane looked around in all directions. They were out of the mountains. Then she recognized the walls and towers of Khanbaliq a short distance away. In fact, she could see that they were fairly near the spot where Hunter had first brought his team from their own time.

She yawned and wondered if she would be able to sleep soon. Wayne also needed rest. She waited to see what her captors would do next.

An elderly man walked out of the house in the front of the village with an expression of concern on his face. He spoke sharply to the children, then stopped abruptly when he saw Wayne and Ishihara. The man bowed deeply to both of them.

Wayne and Ishihara responded in kind. Then Wayne leaned close to Ishihara and whispered something too low for Jane to hear. In turn, Ishihara spoke quietly to the elderly man, who nodded as he listened.

“Come on in,” Wayne said to her in a casual tone. “We’ll get some rest.”

Their host took them inside to a small room. It had two sleeping pallets of straw, covered with some sort of rough cloth. The single window was shuttered.

“Thank you, Lao Li,” Ishihara said to the villager, who bowed and left them alone.

“You and I both need a good night’s sleep.” Wayne looked pointedly at Jane. “Ishihara will remain with us both for safety and to make sure you stay with us.”

“I’m too tired to run off,” said Jane. She sat down on one of the pallets. “I guess this will do.” Then she looked up at Ishihara. “Just make sure you stay here. I don’t want to be left alone with him or in this village without you.”

“No harm will come to either of you,” said Ishihara.

Steve and Marcia rode slowly along the winding mountain road. Each time they crested a rise, he looked ahead for the travelers who had kidnapped Hunter and Jane the night before. Usually, they were too far ahead to see, but twice, when the terrain allowed him a particularly long view of the road ahead, he glimpsed the knot of riders moving north in the distance.

Several times during the day, Steve called Hunter just to make contact with him as he followed them. Frequently, Steve stopped to allow Marcia some time to dismount and walk around; that was all they could do about her stiff muscles. They ate the food he had brought from the inn and kept on riding.

Late in the day, they rode in the shadow of a mountain as they came around a curve. Below them, in a narrow pass between two steep mountainsides, sunlight angled across a huge gate in a massive gray wall. The wall had a rock base and high brick sides with crenellations across the top. A small town had grown up just inside the gate. Startled, Steve reined in to take a look.

Steve had seen pictures of the Great Wall of china, always long shots in which the wall snaked over the top of a ridge. Those distant shots had no reference by which a viewer could judge the’size of the construction. Now, seeing the wall in front of him at a distance he could judge for himself, Steve simply stared at it.

“Chuyungguan,” said Marcia. “That’s the name of this gate. I was able to visit it once in our time. The version standing now was restored in the twentieth century, but it looked the same as this one to me.”

Steve could see that this gate was in an important place. The arched gate ran under a watchtower, and high on each mountain to the east and west, another tower stood guard over the land. The narrow pass would be easy to defend, blocked by the Great Wall.

“How big is this thing?” Steve asked quietly. “How high are those towers?”

“The towers are about twelve meters high. They’re about twelve meters square at the base and angle inward as they go up to about nine meters square at the top.”

“ ‘About’?”

“They didn’t use the metric system back then. They had a measurement system of their own. I’m rounding off the fractions.”

Steve nodded, still gazing at it. “How high is the wall itself between the towers?”

“It varies. No shorter than about six meters and no higher than just over seven meters.”

“That thing is thick, too, isn’t it?”

“ Just over seven and a half meters.”

“Is it solid rock? Or brick?”

“Neither. They raised the inner and outer faces of stone and brick first, then filled the space between them with earth or clay. They pounded it down and then paved a brick road over the top of the wall.”

“So they can march troops along the top.”

“Yes. Or ride four horses side by side.” She pointed to the three towers in turn. “They were placed within two bow shots of each other and they extend forward from the outer surface of the wall. The idea was that archers in the towers could reach attackers all along the front of the wall.”

“I’m impressed.”

“So were the Mongols.” Marcia smiled. “Genghis Khan failed in a couple of assaults on this gate. He finally took it when another Mongol army under a subordinate broke through another gate that was less well defended and came up behind the Chinese defenders here.”

“I guess no one needs it now, right? Kublai Khan rules on both sides of the wall.”

“That’s right. This gate has a small garrison, but in this time, it’s more of a checkpoint for travelers than anything.”

“Shall we ride on down? I guess the Polos will be down there somewhere.”

“Sure.”

Steve enjoyed the view as they rode down the slope into the narrow pass. As they descended, the wall loomed larger and higher than ever, a magnificent edifice that seemed to be part of the mountain ridge on which it had been built. As they drew closer they could see that the individual stones in the wall were very large. When Steve remembered the wall had been built entirely by human and animal labor, with no modem machinery or robots at all, it seemed even more impressive. Dusk had arrived by the time they reached the town just before the gate.

On the watchtower over the gate, and along the top of the wall, soldiers were silhouetted against the sky, all of them looking away to the north.

Steve could see that the gate was standing open. Four uniformed soldiers stood guard inside the gateway, leaning casually on their spears and looking attentively at something beyond his sight on the far side of the gate. At the sound of hoofbeats as Steve and Marcia drew near, the guards glanced idly back over their shoulders, then resumed looking through the gateway.