The Blue-Eyed Shan Read Online Free Page B

handsome, with much silver ornamentation and bright-hued cotton trousers beneath their skirts; but Greenwood was a Shan for better or for worse.
    The journey took two days and they never trusted him a moment. They muttered “tommy,” and he was not sure if it was an echo of the old British army or a dark reference to his submachine gun. They spent the night at a country inn, a hovel, one long room with a trestle framework a couple of feet off the earthen floor and a row of rotting straw mattresses an inch thick. There would be rats, and a variety of insects in the bedding. A Kachin would surely stand sentry. They ate cold rice, cooked that morning, and bananas again, and drank from their canteens.
    Greenwood was a happy man, next day even happier: they arrived at Kunlong and he saw the Salween again. He was at six thousand feet, the air cool and clear, the mountains vivid, the forest etched. He saw the great union of the Salween and the Little White Yi, as they called it here, white water rushing, and he harked to the distant thunder of it and blessed General Yang; General Yang and his miracle, the bones of Peking Man; and even if it was not a miracle but a tragicomic mistake, God bless General Yang! The Salween again!
    He strolled back to town and nosed about, and yes, there was one here who would guide him as far as Pawlu, a Wa but a Tame Wa. Greenwood only said, “If you’re sure he’s tame,” at which the town Shan laughed. The Tame Wa’s name was Jum-aw and he was about seventeen, perhaps a hundred and five pounds, but he had a merry eye and he knew the hills. Yes, he had traveled as far as Meng-ting, also Yuan-ting, and he had seen a flying fox, and was good at snaring hares. He had also seen the pyaung, which was a kind of bison, though he had never killed one; and he had brought down many gyi with his father’s rifle.
    Greenwood sensed that matters were running too smoothly, but he could think of no sane way to induce a little bad luck now so that good luck would follow when he required it. Jum-aw showed him to the local inn, at which a functioning shower had been contrived from oil drums and a waterwheel. The innkeeper suggested saing steak—wild cattle, they were—with sweet potatoes and rice, and hot wine, and then a nice local girl. Greenwood declined the nice local girl, a vow, he said, though he was also much aware of the endemic low-level syphilis in these cosmopolitan crossroad towns. He showered, and dined in state, chatting in Shan with the waiter, stretching his vocabulary and flexing his grammar; and he went to bed replete and exhausted.
    In the morning he donned the cotton trousers, tunic and turban of a mountain Shan, and donated his khakis to a holy beggar. He wondered what would become of them, with his name tapes in the waistband and at the collar. He kept his combat boots. They were sturdy and comfortable, well broken in, and he had plenty of travel ahead of him.
    He knew a Shan woman would not have waited four years, and for the thousandth time he wondered what his daughter looked like now, and whether she would remember her outlandish father, who must once have seemed a god.

3
    Kunming
    The two Chinese officers gazed down into a crate of particolored bits and pieces—medals!—then shared a glance of incredulity at this kaleidoscope of human foolishness. “The Order of the Tripod,” General Yang intoned.
    â€œThird class.” Mayor Wei scooped out a handful and let them trickle.
    â€œRibbon and sunburst both.”
    â€œThere must be a thousand of them.”
    The general made clown’s teeth. His smile was a national joke and a national resource, sunny, benevolent, enthusiastic; mah-jongg players called him “Old Thirty-two Tiles.” His eyes crinkled, his nostrils swelled, his ears winged out; it was the smile to which other smiles aspired. “How prudent! Apparently there is no genuine emergency for which the local