The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the man comes around?
-Johnny Cash
Few things are more stifling than a Peking summer. Despite all the crude wooden carts that raced or plodded down the alleyways, despite all the half-clothed children running underfoot, despite all the adults milling about the baking dirt streets, not a single breath of air seemed to move. Fresh-cut flowers, lava hot peppers, burning sesame oil and raw sewage congealed in this atmosphere, choking anyone not already accustomed to it. Sally Acorn had finally stopped noticing the smell during her sixth month here: however, the heat still weighed on her.
Almost as much, she thought, as the looks I'm getting. She was dressed in the light, roughspun robes and domed straw hat of a local peasant, which partially obscured her face; but nothing could hide her European species. For every ten faces that saw just another peasant going about her business, one looked a bit closer, and then saw a foreign demon. This awareness made the old Colt revolver inside her robes itch against her thin fur, and made the short, thick knife displayed on her belt into a lead weight. She grasped neither weapon. Instead, she shifted her basket to a more comfortable position on her shoulder.
Two hostile faces, a boar and a sow, regarded Sally as she passed a pot-shop's entrance. Steamed rice and fish touched her nose. They both wore robes like hers, but they were dyed a bloody scarlet. Boxers, she thought. Among themselves, they went by "The Society of Righteous Fists", but their pugilistic demonstrations had earned them the nickname "Boxers" among the foreigners who lived around here. Unaffiliated locals often called them "Red Fists", in reference to their clothes. Unfortunately, Sally had noticed these Boxers too late to give them a wider berth.
She was ten feet away when their verbal assault began. "How was worship?" the boar jeered, "Was it your rag they drank from this week?"
"Go back to the English," the sow chimed in.
When Sally passed without giving either of them a glance, the pair continued their tirade.
"That's right, keep walking!" the sow shouted, "Go home!"
Sally kept walking as if she hadn't heard. "'Though I walk through the valley...'" she recited under her breath.
The boar shouted: "Hey! We asked you a question!"
She sped up her stride, hoping to put as many bodies between her and the hecklers as possible. "'Of the shadow of death...'"
After a few yards, a tall, powerfully built cat stepped in front of her. His face was matted with yellow paint, his torso with bloody red, and he only wore tattered yellow trousers. His voice was low and soft, yet brimmed with menace. "I think you were asked a question, wench."
Sally stood straight as an arrow, nearly looking vertically into the cat's golden eyes. "I will fear no evil," she promised herself in English, before switching to Mandarin. "What should I say?" she said humbly. The cat glared at her, but said nothing.
Another yellow-and-red figure appeared beside them, a bat. He seemed young, perhaps her age, with fiery green eyes. "You should say nothing," he said, "Say nothing. Go home now."
The cat nodded in agreement. "China doesn't need your filthy ideas nor you, wench. Find a ship and go home."
"Whore!" another voice shouted, "Foreigner whore!"
"I'll bet she's got opium stashed in that costume!" said one.
"Cut it off her and we'll see!" sneered a third.
Sally quickly glanced around to see three more painted figures coming up through the crowds behind her, and one coming swiftly from both her right and left. The boar and sow had stood up to join them. She thought she saw a club in one of their fists, and a chill went down her neck into her stomach as she began to draw the knife. She didn't want to draw her pistol here, not with all these bystanders, and yet...
The cat, apparently the de facto leader of this motley gang, smiled. His meaty paw flashed out. Sally found herself flat on her back.
Five more grinning and scowling and shouting devils loomed overhead as her lungs tried to regain their wind, as the baking heat of the ground leeched through her robes, as she tried to get up, get up, GET UP NOW.
"RAUS!"
A parade-ground shout split through the noise and turned the gang's widening eyes further up the street.
"RAUS!"
Sally heard the rapid tramping of horse hooves, even felt them through the ground.
"GEH RAUS!"
A slightly younger, higher pitched voice yelled "VATERLAND!"
The gang turned and scattered like mercury struck with a hammer. As Sally rolled onto her side to prop herself on an elbow, she heard a horse come to a halt in front of her, heard spurs tinkle as their owner dropped to the ground, felt a hand take her other arm. Slowly, she got to her feet.
As she did so, she finally saw her rescuer: a blue hedgehog, about her age, dressed in a smart, grey uniform and black knee-high boots. A matching slouch hat topped his neat, slicked-back head quills. He recalled her father's stories of the Confederate officer he had captured at Gettysburg. "Are you hurt?" he asked.
Sally shook her head, growing tired as the adrenaline ebbed from her veins. "A bruise or two," she said, rubbing the spot where the cat had struck her. She breathed deeply, then out. A slight twinge in her right side. Maybe a hairline fracture, she thought. It was then that she noticed the long, curved saber and box-like pistol that hung from his belt.
Before she could say more, a second rider reigned up beside them: a twin-tailed fox, dressed identically to the hedgehog. He said something in a language she didn't recognize, to which the hedgehog smiled and nodded. Turning back to her, the hedgehog said: "Were those the tax men?" He nodded up the street. "Ours at home aren't so pretty."
Sally had to laugh, though it hurt to do so. "If only it were that simple." She took off her hat to straighten out its crumbled edges. "The Church isn't popular on this side of the world." She then noticed her fallen vegetables and began to pick them up. She was glad they hadn't flown very far.
The hedgehog bent to help her, displaying the black, white, and red cockade that pinned the right brim of his hat upright. "Are you a nun?" he asked as he dusted off a carrot. "Should we take you back to your parish?"
It took a moment for Sally to gather her thoughts. It was bad enough that many Peking citizens already saw her as a part of the hated empires that encroached on their homeland, worse that she'd been denounced so publicly, and worse still, that she had been rescued by two foreigners! If they escorted her home, Sally had no doubt that the seven they'd chased away, would come knocking with seventy more. She had to do something to salvage the situation. "I am a Quaker, sir," she said neutrally.
He grinned. "Catholic, but I won't hold that against you," he said, putting out a hand to shake. "Call me Sonic: Americans find my full name too difficult to pronounce."
She didn't take the proffered hand. Instead, she collected her hat from the ground and placed it back on her head. "Sir, I'm not ungrateful, but I think it would be best if I found my way alone."
"Sonic" frowned. "They may have regrouped-"
Sally cut him off. "I blend in more than they or you might. I also have this." She hated to display the pistol, but now, more than ever, it seemed prudent to wear it openly. She drew the Peacemaker from her robes and shoved it down her belt as she stepped past her rescuers. She noticed that quite a few more faces were following her now, and none of them were smiling.
After a moment, she stopped and turned back to the two men. She spoke Mandarin to them, for only in that tongue could she make her profound disgust known to the onlookers. This is a crude translation of what she said:
"Damned fools!" she spat, "Those men were really after you! Without your guns, they would rip your eyes out and never give the Church a second thought! But no, you have all of it, so they desecrate our chapels, terrorize our flock, and kidnap our children because we're easier pickings! And you have the nerve to tell me I might be in danger?" She made a harsh, scornful noise, something between a laugh and a sneer. "You have no idea."
With that, she turned and strode away, leaving the two soldiers to blankly gape after her.
"Tails, did you understand any of that?" Sonic asked when the chipmunk woman had left earshot range. He spoke in his native German, but even so...
The fox nodded gravely. "More than I would care to. The poor woman's scared out of her wits."
They watched her faded yellow hat bob its way through the Peking masses, considering.
"We'll follow her," Sonic decided as he mounted his horse, "At any rate, she seems to be heading toward the Tartar Wall, same as us."
It took Sally two hours to get back to the chapel she called home. It wasn't at all like the whitewashed Georgian chapel she'd attended as a child, made tall by its elaborately decorated steeple and made friendly by the chiming black clock above the entrance. This Chinese chapel resembled a squat medieval longhouse, built on two dozen five-foot beams that kept it safe from the infrequent but devastating floods that tormented the city. During one such flood, as filthy water churned through this neighborhood of dilapidated wooden hovels, Amy had jokingly nicknamed the chapel "Vanilla's Ark."
On days like this, this gap between the building and the ground provided shelter from the hellish sun. Sally counted twenty or so figures-mostly old people and children-/ying prone or supine under the building as she approached. She was glad to see that the three guards she'd posted at the front door hadn't joined them.
One of them, a huge, muscular, bright red echidna, waved to her. "Where the hell have you been?" he cried, "I was about to come looking for you!"
Sally had to smile. This man, called "Knuckles", had been a local nuisance even before the Boxers. When they first met two years before, Knuckles had drunkenly stumbled into the chapel during dinner; Vanilla had offered him a bowl of rice and a spot to crash that night. At first, he had gratefully accepted, but the trouble began when in his excitement, he slapped Sally's behind. The trouble compounded when he called her "Princess" when she ordered him to sleep outside, which turned into a shouting match, which turned to tears. The next morning, she and Vanilla had given him a bath, the latter jokingly calling it his "baptism". Now he was dead sober.
"I was held up," she said vaguely. "How's Vanilla?"
About sixty yards up the lane, Sonic and Tails watched Sally as she and the echidna talked. She stiffened. She gaped. Then she rushed past the echidna into the building. The two men looked at each other. Sonic could read Tails's face: "Should we ask?"
Sonic checked the wristwatch his mother had sent him two years ago, after he wrote to her that he was transferring from Berlin to Peking; it read 5:38 PM. They were expected back at the Legation Quarter by 6:00 PM. A "Hello friend, we made sure you weren't harassed, call on us if you need help," would have taken ten minutes at most, but anything more serious would take time they wouldn't have.
Sonic shook his head. "We'll check on them in the morning," he said, "Her nerves should be cooled down by then." With that, he turned his mare and gave her his spurs. Tails followed.