Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

When the devils were gone, a man came up to Liu Han and said something. She shook her head. “I am sorry, but I do not understand your dialect,” she said. He must not have been able to follow hers, either, for he grinned, spread his hands, and walked away.

She sighed. Hardly anyone here spoke her dialect, save the few villagers taken with her. The scaly devils threw people from all over China together in their camps; they either did not know or did not care about the differences among them. For the educated few, those who could read and write, the lack of a common dialect mattered little. They spoke together with brush and paper, since they all used the same characters.

Such was the ignorance of the demons that they had even put Japanese in the camp. No Japanese were left any more. Some had slain themselves in despair at being captured. Those whose despair was less deep died anyhow, one by one. Liu Han did not know just how they’d met their ends. So long as they were dead, and the little devils none the wiser, she was satisfied.

Two streets over from the one the devils most regularly patrolled, a market had sprung up. People landed in camp with no more than what they had on their backs, but they soon started trading that-no reason for a man with a gold ring or a woman whose purse had been full of coins to do without. Inside days, too, chickens and even piglets had made their appearance, to supplement the rice the devils doled out.

A bald man with a wispy mustache sat on the ground, his straw hat upside down in front of him. In it nestled three fine eggs. Seeing Liu Han looking at them, he nodded and spoke to her. When he saw she did not follow him, he tried another dialect, then another. Finally he reached one she could also grasp: “What you give for these?”

Sometimes even understanding did not help. “I am sorry,” she said. “I have nothing to give.”

Back in her own village, it would have been the start of a haggle with which to while away most of a morning. Here, she thought, it was nothing but truth. Her husband, her child, dead at the hands of the Japanese. Her village, devastated first by the eastern barbarians and then by the devils in their dragonfly planes-and now gone forever.

The man with the eggs cocked his head to one side, smiled a bland merchant’s smile up at her. He said, “Pretty woman never have nothing to give. You want eggs, maybe you let me see your body for them?”

“No,” Liu Han said shortly, and walked away. The bald man laughed as she turned her back. He was not the first in the market who had asked her for that kind of payment.

She went back to the tent she shared with Yi Min. The apothecary was becoming an important man in the prison camp. Little scaly devils often visited him, to learn written Chinese and the dialects he spoke. Sometimes he made suggestions to them about the proper way to do things. They very often listened-that was what made him important. If he wanted eggs, he had influence to trade for them.

All the same, Liu Han sometimes wished she had moved in with the other prisoners from her village, or with people she’d never seen before. But she and he had come here in the belly of the same dragon plane, he had been a speck of the familiar in a vast strange ocean-and so she had agreed. He’d been diffident when he asked her. He wasn’t diffident anymore.

She lifted the tent flap. A startled hiss greeted her. She bowed almost double. “I am very sorry, lord devil, sir. I did not mean to disturb you,” she said rapidly.

Too rapidly. The demon turned back to Yi Min, from whose words she had distracted it. “She say-what?” it asked in abominably accented Chinese.

“She apologizes-says she is sorry-for bothering you.” Yi Min had to repeat it a couple of times before the little devil understood. Then he made a noise like a boiling pot. “Is that how to say the same thing in your language?” he asked, switching back to Chinese once more.

The scaly devil hissed back at him. The language lesson went on for some time, with both Yi Min and the devil ignoring Liu Han as completely as if she’d been the sleeping mat on which they squatted. Finally the little demon bubbled out, what must have been a farewell, for it got to its clawed feet and scurried out of the tent. Even in going, it brushed past Liu Han without a word in either Chinese or devil talk.

Yi Min patted the mat. With some reluctance, Liu Han sat down beside him in the place the little scaled demon had just occupied. The mat was still warm, almost hot; devils, fittingly enough, were more fiery creatures than human beings.

Yi Min was in an expansive mood. “I shall be rich,” he chortled. “The Race-”

“The what?” Liu Han asked.

“The, Race. It is what the devils call themselves. They will need men to serve them, to be their viceroys, men who can teach them the way real people talk and also learn their ugly language. It is difficult, but Ssofeg-the devil who was just here-says I pick it up more quickly than anyone else in this whole camp. I will learn, and help the devils, and become a great man. You were wise to stick by me, Liu Han, truly wise.”

He turned to her and kissed her. she did not respond, but he hardly noticed; his tongue pushed its way into her mouth. She tried to fend him off. His greater weight overbore her, pressed her down to the mat. Already he was tugging at her tunic. She sighed and submitted, staring up at the gray fabric of the tent ceiling and hoping he would finish soon.

He thought he was a good lover. He did everything a good lover should, caressing her, putting his face between her legs. But Liu Han did not want either him or his attentions, and so they failed to stir her. Again, Yi Min was so full of himself that her response, or rather lack of it, did not even reach him. Had she not been there at a convenient moment, she was sure he would simply have taken himself in hand. But she was there, so he took her instead.

“Let us try the hovering butterflies today,” he said, by which he meant that he wanted her on top. She sighed again. He would not even give her the chance just to lie there limply. Once more she wished the scaly devils had herded someone else into the dragonfly plane with her. she did not know why she’d yielded the first time he forced himself on her, save that he was the last link she had to the vanished life she was used to. Having yielded once, saying no became more nearly impossible every time afterward.

Looking in every direction but at his flushed, rather greasy face, she straddled him, lowered herself. He filled her, but that was all she felt: none of the delight she had known from her husband. She moved vigorously just the same-that was the way to make it over soonest.

He was thrashing beneath her like a gaffed carp when the tent flap opened. She gasped and grabbed for her cotton trousers at the same moment that Yi Min, oblivious as usual to everything not himself, groaned with his final pleasure.

Liu Han wanted to die. How could she show her face anywhere in camp now that her body had been seen in truth? She felt like killing Yi Min for piling such humiliation on her shoulders. Maybe tonight, after he fell asleep-

The hiss from the entranceway brought her out of her dark fantasy and back to the present. That wasn’t a person there seeing her shame, it was a little scaly devil. As she rolled off Yi Min and away, as she scrambled into trousers and tunic, she wondered if that was better or worse. Better, she supposed-a person would surely gossip about her, while a scaly devil might not.

The devil hissed and sputtered in his own devils’ language, then tried to speak Chinese: “What you do?”

“We were enjoying the moment of Clouds and Rain, mighty lord devil Ssofeg,” Yi Min answered, as coolly as if he’d said, We were having a cup of green tea. “I did not expect you back so soon.” Much more slowly than Liu Han had, he began to put his clothes back on.