The BSN writers club

The bell rung and Han Zhang stepped into the dark chemist’s shop from the sunlit street. The morning sun, he had to admit, was far more pleasant than the scorching blaze of the afternoon he was used to getting up to.

He preferred to be called Zha Yao, the Black Powder, when he went among the commoners. It was a part of his legend as a sharpshooter and a duelist, an enigma of a gentleman, more dangerous than any lowlife bravo that captured commoners’ imagination for a thousand years. People needed heroes like him, and by tomorrow, by sunrise, he was sure the whole of Xingji City would be singing songs about him. After all, he left generous honorariums with no less than three poets on his way to the chemist.

Life was glorious! Anything, absolutely anything, pleased and amused him right now, even the sight of the slouching and pale young man at the counter.

“Cow Dung, my good man!” Zha Yao exclaimed, “believe it or not, I need a refill!” He’d unhooked the finally filigreed powder horn off his ornamental belt and tossed it to the chemist’s apprentice. “What a night, what a night!”

The apprentice, Cow Dung, dropped the pestle he used to grind something odorous in the mortar, and deftly caught the horn out of the air. “Did you enjoy the festivities, Master Zha Yao?”

“Ha!” exclaimed Zha Yao and settled in a chair set up in the corner of the shop for the waiting customers. “Your best powder, Cow Dung. Fill it right up!” He’d almost giggled saying it. Sure, the shop was not the fanciest, but it was worth it for the apprentice’s name. Those commoners, they knew what’s what. If the kid was born to shovel cow’s dung, that’s what they’ve named him. And if the kid escaped the farm, well, he did not escape his name. Zha Yao beamed at the looser benevolently. His visit brightened the kid’s sorry existence. He could bet anything that the poor sod’s idea of a wild party was having a few cups of wine in some wretched tea-house. Now, he just had to wait till the kid mustered his bravery to ask… and there it came.

“Have you had an… adventure, Master?” Cow Dung asked timidly. He lowered his face, ostensibly to open a jar with a tightly fit lid, that the apothecaries used for the most fashionable and pricey commodity, the gunpowder.

“Ha!” Zha Yao repeated, enjoying keeping him in suspense. “Maybe I did.” He fidgeted in the chair, gave up on sitting, jumped, and paced restlessly, patting two pistols holstered in a bandolier across his chest.

Cow Dung started measuring the powder out. “Is that why you are out of the black powder, Master Zha Yao?” he probed.

“You bet!” Zha Yao felt that torturing the wretch was just cruel now. The kid earned the best part of his day. Ancestors! Maybe his whole week! Or a year!

“Well, kid, if you happen to hear rumors that Thirty Claws bit the dust, well, take it from me, it’s all true.”

Cow Dung gasped: “Thirty Claws, you don’t say! Is not he a famed swashbuckler from Sulan?”

Zha Yao chuckled: “He should have stayed in Sulan, the dirty pirate that he was. Not ride into Xingji, and start throwing gold around like dirt, and wave a piece of paper that granted him nobility under our noses. The ink is so fresh on it, I was afraid it would smudge his fingers.” Zha Yao grinned. “I was as impressed as the Emperor by this smuggler’s help in the last war. Of course, I can’t hand out the titles, but I did what I could to make this folk hero welcome. Why, I practically felt obliged to introduce him to our fine customs. Dueling, for example.”

“Oh!” was all Cow Dung could say. “How did he offend you, Master?”

“There was a lady involved, Cow Dung, a wholesome peach on the tallest branch of the noblest tree. I am afraid, I cannot go into more details, you understand?”

Cow Dung nodded with a rapt anticipation: “Of course, Master. And you’ve won the duel? With a pirate?”

“Of course,” Zha Yao smirked. “An honest duel is nothing like a tavern brawl. When the two nobles meet on the field of honor, they are not throwing punches around, hoping to hit someone in the drunken crowd. Oh, no. The face one another, walk to close the distance, take aim and shoot bravely when they feel ready for it.”

Zha Yao pulled the pistols out of the bandolier in a lightning-quick motion, flourished them and mimicked shooting: “Boom! Boom! The pirate is dead!”

Cow Dung lifted his eyes from the now full powder-horn and stared at the pistols’ handles tastefully inlaid with precious white jade: “Didn’t you once say, Master, they cost you two annual harvests?”

“I did?” Zha Yao furrowed his brow, “I forgot, but… yes, yes, and they are worth that and more! I can hit as true at thirty paces, as another pistol would from ten. Ha-ha! I shot straight away, while the doofus thought he’d prove his bravery by holding his shot while closing the distance!”

“And your aim was true even from afar!” Cow Dung exclaimed with an obvious admiration.

“I’ve got the wretch right between the eyes, fair and square,” Zha Yao agreed. He stroked the pistols affectionately before putting them away. “Ah, what a night!”

Cow Dung licked his lips and then said shyly: “Master Zha Yao, here is your powder. And, if I may… you are the most deserving customer of ours. I wish… I wish…”

Zha Yao took the horn and asked magnanimously: “What do you wish for, kid?”

“That I could offer you powder that is as superior to all other black powders…” Cow Dung started.

“What, made with the sheep’s dung instead of the cows’?” Zha Yao chuckled. “Ah, kid, sometimes I wonder if the mages use the same mundane ingredients for their potions and spells as you apothecaries do for the black powder. Dung soaked in urine, charcoal, Sulfur… the result is as flashy as their enchantments, and as deadly.”

“Master,” Cow Dung interrupted with an unusual insistence. “Surely, as informed as you are, you know that they mix the secret ingredients in to make the explosions red, or green, or purple?”

“Well, yes…” Zha Yao replied impatiently.

“I believe I came upon the special ingredients to make the bullets fly faster. You see, the berries of the weeping tree, and the ground ash pearl, and then an enchanted scroll… well, never mind. I saw it explode, and it will work, Master Zha Yao. Only… only I am afraid to tell Master Apothecary Vasoun, as he’d already beat me a few times for wasting the ingredients for my experiments. He told me if he catches me again, he’d send me back to my family.”

Cow Dung hung his head. “But I was thinking of going to the Master Weapon-smith Nhgao. She is a reasonable woman, and all I need is for her to lend me a couple of the worst pistols she has to test my secret formula.”

Zha Yao guffawed: “How are you going to test it, kid? No sage can measure the speed of a flying bullet.”

“Sage, oh good Heavens, no! Of course not! I can’t ever afford a sage!” Cow Dung laughed nervously. “I can’t afford even the pistols if I saved for ten years.”

“But if I just put a couple of old jars the same distance away, and Nhgao and I should load two pistols, one - with a regular powder, and another – with my new powder, and then we shoot on the same count, I dare say we’ll be able to see which jar the bullet hits first!”

Zha Yao startled. The kid came from dirt, but Master Apothecary left his shop in his keeping and it was a clever plan. If that powder of his worked, and if someone of sufficient means could outfit his private army with muskets, even cannons shooting at a faster rate than anyone else in the realm… there was no telling just how far a man like that could rise.

“Listen, Cow Dung,” Zha Yao said in a friendly manner. “Nghao is an artisan, and it’s more likely that she is going to tell your Master on you than lend you the pistols.”

“Oh, I did not think of that,” Cow Dung replied dejectedly. “Well, nothing for it then but to save my wages…”

Then, a worry appeared in his eyes: “You won’t tell my Master….?”

Zha Yao laughed: “No, no. I will cover up for you this time.”

“Oh, thank you!” Cow Dung exclaimed, “Thank you!”

“I will even help you test your powder, kid.” Zha Yao said casually.

Cow Dung inhaled sharply, clearly at a loss of words. He looked like he was about to cry.

“On one condition though…”

“Anything, Master Zha Yao! ANYTHING!”

“If the test is successful, you will go into my employ to produce the substance exclusively for me.”

Cow Dung looked completely stunned by his largess. He tried to drop to his knees, and then reach for his sudden benefactor’s hand to kiss it with breathless thanks. It was almost embarrassing, but pleasant.

“Enough, enough.” Zha Yao took his hand away.

“I’ve set up the test site in the bamboo grove outside the Eastern gates,” Cow Dung confessed, “my Master just needs to come at the sunrise—“

“Sunrise?! Zha Yao exclaimed.

“We need light, Master,” Cow Dung pleaded. “And secrecy.”

“Oh, very well,” Zha Yao conceded.

The sunrise was glorious. Bamboo rustled in the first breeze. The conditions for the target practice were perfect. Cow Dung measured equal amounts of the regular powder and his special formula. It did look pretty, with a mysterious sheen.

The two men picked up their pistols, and Zha Yao explained the chemist’s apprentice how to pull the trigger, aim and fire. Then he took aim at an ugly clay jar. “Three,” he counted, “two… one… fire!”

The shot boomed, and the jar burst apart. The second jar stood there intact. Irritated by the peasant’s incompetence, Zha Yao rounded on Cow Dung ready to curse him for a fool for not understanding the simplest things--

Cow Dung calmly unloaded the gun into his head. “Wanted to call me a fool, did you? Well, you are not the first, and probably not the last.”

He smirked, and went about relieving the nobleman off his fine clothes and purse. “My parents, my brothers, my sisters, they all called me names, because I was so scrawny. They called me Cow Dung and put me to soaking the cow patties in urine for the chemist. Only they are still there, breaking their strong backs on the farm and popping out strong babies, and I’ve learned to make saltpeter so well, Master Vasoun took me to Xingji City to work for him.”

He rolled the naked body under an overhang of a creek’s bank. “I thought I was in luck, but what did I see of Xingji, working for the fat Apothecary from sunup to sundown, grinding, grinding, grinding, and breathing in the fumes… ? Nothing. So, you see, Lord Fool, I am glad you’ve come along, to provide for me.”

Cow Dung made a neat bundle with the guns hidden in the clothes and wrapped in a cheap blanket he’d secreted away along with a few more things in the grove the night before. He paused, and petted his guns: “Two annual crops, that’s a good life by the sea, in Sulan, for a poor boy born to shovel dung…”

He found it hard to remove his hand off the pistol’s smooth handle. “Oh, very well,” he chuckled and loaded the gun. The jar burst into a shower of shards. It was… glorious. Yet, he could not afford distractions. Cow Dung packed up and cleaned away anything that hinted on the existence of his impromptu shooting range. Now, even if the body was ever found, it would be assumed that the ignoble pirates took revenge on the aristocrat who shot their leader. Nobody in their right mind would connect the murder to a miserable run-away apprentice gone who knows where and why.

It was perfect.

Still, as Cow Dung walked hastily down the road away from Xingjin, hoping to find a meal and a bed in a village inn, strange and fanciful ideas crowded his mind. He thought how easy it was to shoot those guns, and how satisfying killing was to him. The pistols, they seem to make him an instant equal to a battle mage who studied scrolls for years, and a burly swordsman trained in his craft from the childhood.

He thought of the smuggler Thirty Claws throwing gold around like dirt. He indulged his imagination. Here he was, a famed pirate called the Bull of the Sothern Seas or some such ridiculous name, relieving despised noblemen and merchants from their lives and riches by shooting, and shooting and shooting their faces off. Once in a while he rolled his eyes and told himself to stop with this nonsense already. If he took the pistols for himself, and entered a life of a highwayman or a bandit or a mercenary, his reward would be an unmarked grave in a short order. That’s all there was to it. But he slipped right back into his daydreams.