Interesting Times

somersaulted down the room, screaming, a sword in either hand; Cohen waited in an attitude rather similar to that of a baseball batter.
    “I wonder,” said Mr. Saveloy, “if you have ever heard of the term ‘evolution’?”
    The two met. The air blurred.
    “Or ‘survival of the fittest’?” said Mr. Saveloy.
    The scream continued, but rather more urgently.
    “I didn’t even see his sword move!” whispered Six Beneficent Winds.
    “Yes. People often don’t,” said Mr. Saveloy.
    “But…they’re so old!”
    “Indeed,” said the teacher, raising his voice above the screams, “and of course this is true. They are very old barbarian heroes.”
    The taxman stared.
    “Would you like a peppermint?” said Mr. Saveloy, as Hamish’s wheelchair thundered past in pursuit of a man with a broken sword and a pressing desire to stay alive. “You may find it helps, if you are around the Horde for any length of time.”
    The aroma from the proffered paper bag hit Six Beneficent Winds like a flamethrower.
    “How can you smell anything after eating those?”
    “You can’t,” said Mr. Saveloy happily.
    The taxman continued to stare. The fighting was a fast and furious affair but, somehow, only on one side. The Horde fought like you’d expect old men to fight—slowly, and with care. All the activity was on the part of the ninjas, but no matter how well flung the throwing star or speedy the kick, the target was always, without any obvious effort, not there.
    “Since we have this moment to chat,” said Mr. Saveloy, as something with a lot of blades hit the wall just above the taxman’s head, “I wonder: could you tell me about the big hill just outside the city? It is quite a remarkable feature.”
    “What?” said Six Beneficent Winds distractedly.
    “The big hill.”
    “You want to know about that? Now? ”
    “Geography is a little hobby of mine.”
    Someone’s ear hit Six Beneficent Winds on the ear.
    “Er. What? We call it the Big Hill…Hey, look at what he’s doing with his—”
    “It seems remarkably regular. Is it a natural feature?”
    “What? Eh? Oh…I don’t know, they say it turned up thousands of years ago. During a terrible storm. When the first Emperor died. He…he’s going to be killed! He’s going to be killed! He’s going to be—How did he do that?”
    Six Beneficent Winds suddenly remembered, as a child, playing Shibo Yangcong-san with his grandfather. The old man always won. No matter how carefully he’d assembled his strategy, he’d find Grandfather would place a tile quite innocently right in the crucial place just before he could make his big move. The ancestor had spent his whole life playing shibo . The fight was just like that.
    “Oh, my,” he said.
    “That’s right,” said Mr. Saveloy. “They’ve had a lifetime’s experience of not dying. They’ve become very good at it.”
    “But…why here? Why come here?”
    “We’re going to undertake a robbery,” said Mr. Saveloy.
    Six Beneficent Winds nodded sagely. The wealth of the Forbidden City was legendary. Probably even blood-sucking ghosts had heard of it.
    “The Talking Vase of Emperor P’gi Su?” he said.
    “No.”
    “The Jade Head of Sung Ts’uit Li?”
    “No. Wrong track entirely, I’m afraid.”
    “Not the secret of how silk is made?”
    “Good grief. Silkworms’ bottoms. Everyone knows that. No. Something rather more precious than that.”
    Despite himself, Six Beneficent Winds was impressed. Apart from anything else, only seven ninjas were still standing and Cohen was fencing with one of them while rolling a cigarette in the other hand.
    And Mr. Saveloy could see it dawning in the fat man’s eyes.
    The same thing had happened to him.
    Cohen came into people’s lives like a rogue planet into a peaceful solar system, and you felt yourself being dragged along simply because nothing like that would ever happen to you again.
    He himself had been peacefully hunting for fossils during the school holidays when he had, more or less, stumbled into the camp of those particular fossils called the Horde. They’d been quite friendly, because he had neither weapons nor money. And they’d taken to him, because he knew things they didn’t. And that had been it.
    He’d decided there and then. It must have been something in the air. His past life had suddenly unrolled behind him and he couldn’t remember a single day of it that had been any fun. And it had dawned on him that he could join the Horde