The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 17 – Part 6

Every sentence of the manual held a profound meaning and every word some hidden mystery. How could Guo Jing grasp it all at once? So he told Zhou Botong of the four-word rule Hong Qigong had given him when teaching him the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing, “Memorise it, don’t use it.” That suited Zhou Botong perfectly. He declared Hong Qigong’s method excellent, and recited a line at a time for Guo Jing to repeat after him, over and over again. After a few dozen times, Guo Jing could recite it fluently, though he did not understand what it meant, and after a few dozen more it was firmly fixed in his memory.

The last section of the second volume of the manual was more than a thousand characters of strange text, all like incantations, a jumble of gabble that made no sense at all. In all his years in the cave Zhou Botong had puzzled over it hundreds of times without finding the faintest clue. He thought it would be very hard to memorise, so the best thing was to have Guo Jing learn it thoroughly first, and he made him learn every word of it by heart. He could only teach it a line at a time, reading the text himself, memorising a line and then teaching it. Two lines at once were beyond him, for once he had the second line, he had forgotten the first.

When Guo Jing asked what these incantations meant, Zhou Botong said, “For now, Heaven’s secrets must not be revealed. Just learn them by heart.”

Learning by heart a thousand-odd characters of meaningless gibberish was a hundred times harder than reciting any other part of the manual. Anyone clever and quick-witted would have tried to get to the bottom of what it meant, and would certainly never have managed to recite it. But Guo Jing had a dogged, stubborn will he was born with. Whether it made sense or not, he paid no attention at all and simply put his head down and learned it by rote. After reading it more than a thousand times, he actually had that whole long, tortuous, outlandish text firmly in his memory.

Once Guo Jing had learned by heart the outline of neigong¹ in the first volume and the strange text in the second, Zhou Botong had him slowly practise neigong as the manual described. Guo Jing found that the methods followed the same line of reasoning as those Ma Yu² had taught him, only deeper and subtler, and he thought that since Zhou Botong was Ma Yu’s shishu,³ his learning was naturally deeper. That day in Prince Zhao’s Estate, when Mei Chaofeng⁴ sat on his shoulders to fight her enemies, she had still kept pressing him for the secrets of Daoist neigong, which showed she knew nothing of the Daoist mysteries. So he was all the less inclined to suspect that the text he was learning had anything to do with the Nine Yin Manual.⁵ He did see that Zhou Botong’s face often wore a mischievous, teasing look, but he took it for the man’s nature, and never dreamed that he was playing an enormous joke on him.

That morning, when Guo Jing had got up and done his training, he lifted the lid of the food box the mute servant had brought with breakfast and saw the sign of a hidden letter on one of the mantou again. Too impatient to finish eating, he took the mantou into the wood, broke it open and took out the wax pill. One glance threw him into a panic. The letter read,

“Jing gege,⁶ the Western Venom has asked Papa for my hand for his nephew. He wants me as his nephew’s wife, and Papa has already ag…”

The letter was unfinished. Things must have been desperate, and she had sealed it into the wax pill in a great hurry. From the way the letter read, the word after “ag” could only be “agreed”.

Guo Jing was in turmoil. The moment the mute servant had cleared away the food box and gone, he hurried to show the letter to Zhou Botong.

Zhou Botong said, “Whether her father agrees or not, that’s no concern of ours.”

Guo Jing said anxiously, “That won’t do. Rong-er promised herself to me long ago. She must be frantic.”

Zhou Botong said, “Once you’ve got a wife, there are a great many fine skills you can’t practise. That’s a terrible pity. I… I often regret it myself, but never mind about that. Good brother, listen to me. You’re better off without a wife.”

The more Guo Jing talked with him, the more they talked at cross purposes, and he could only fret uselessly.

Zhou Botong said, “Back then, if I hadn’t lost my virginity and so couldn’t practise some of my shixiong’s⁷ most formidable skills, how could Old Heretic Huang ever have kept me prisoner on this devil of an island? Look at you. You’ve only been thinking about a wife, and already your mind is wandering. Your training is sure to go badly today. And if you really married Old Heretic Huang’s daughter, ah, what a pity, what a pity! When I think back, all I did was… ah, never mind about that. In a word, if a woman gets her hooks into you, it’s bad enough that you can’t train properly, but you’ll wrong your friends too, and offend your shige.⁸ And they didn’t kill me, they even wanted to give her to me. Of course I didn’t want her. But even though I didn’t want her, I can’t forget her. I don’t know how she is now… In a word, never set eyes on a woman’s face, and still less touch her body. If you teach her acupoint⁹ skills and let her stroke the acupoints all over your body, then you’re done for… And marrying her, that’s even more out of the question…”

Guo Jing listened to him droning on about all the evils of taking a wife and grew more and more fretful. He said, “Whether I marry her or not can wait. Big Brother, the first thing is to find some way to rescue her.”

Zhou Botong laughed. “The Western Venom is a bad lot, and I don’t suppose his nephew is any better. Old Heretic Huang’s daughter may be pretty, but she’s bound to take after her old man, heretical through and through. Let the Western Venom’s nephew marry her. He’ll have a hard time of it, and he’ll never master any boyhood skills either. Two birds with one stone, no, two losses with one stone, the worst of both worlds. Wouldn’t that be splendid?”

Guo Jing sighed and walked into the grove. He sat on the ground and stared blankly ahead, thinking, Even if I lose my way and die on Peach Blossom Island, I must still go and find her.

Suddenly he heard two shrill cries overhead, and two white shapes came swooping down. They were the two white eagles Tolui¹⁰ had brought from the great desert. Guo Jing was overjoyed. He held out his arm for the eagles to perch on, and saw a bamboo tube tied to the male eagle’s leg. He quickly untied it. Inside was a letter, and it was from Huang Rong. In brief, it said that things had come to a head and the Western Venom would be coming any day now with betrothal gifts for his nephew. Her father was keeping her very strictly. He would not let her take a single step out of her room, and would not even let her cook for Guo Jing any more. If it came to the point and there was truly no escape, she could only repay him with her life. The paths of the island were treacherous and full of traps, and on no account must he come looking for her.

Guo Jing sat stunned for a while. Then he drew his golden dao¹¹ and carved six characters on the bamboo tube: Together we live, together we die. He tied the tube to the white eagle’s leg and flung his arm aloft. The twin eagles climbed into the sky, wheeled several times, and flew away to the north.

Now that his mind was made up, he was quite calm. He sat down on the ground and trained for a while, then went back to hear Zhou Botong expound the manual.

A few more days went by with no news from Huang Rong. Zhou Botong had him read and recite over and over again, and made him learn by heart the methods of training the martial arts in the second volume and the ways of breaking an opponent’s finest skills as well. But he was not to practise them yet, in case he saw through the trick. To know how to train and yet not train was a hard thing to do. But Guo Jing was honest and obedient by nature. In the great desert he had trained exactly as the Six Eccentrics of Jiangnan¹² taught him, following every detail without a single question, and he did the same now. However his sworn brother taught him, so he did. After reciting it some hundreds of times in all, he knew both volumes of the manual inside out, and even that long, strange passage of “Mohe Boluo” this and “Jiedi Guluo” that and “Hahu Wenboying” the other, he could recite without a word wrong.

Zhou Botong was secretly impressed. He thought, When it comes to this silly boy’s plodding knack for learning by rote, the Old Wild Child is put to shame. I bow to him.

That night the sky was as clear as if it had been washed, and the moonlight lit up the island and the sea around it. The two of them sat down on the ground to chat. Suddenly they heard a rustling in the grass some way off. Zhou Botong cried out in alarm, “Snakes!”

The word was barely out of his mouth when a strange noise rose all at once, as if a whole host of snakes were coming. Zhou Botong turned pale, spun round and fled back into the cave. His martial arts might have reached the realm of the miraculous, but the sound of snakes and creeping things on the move frightened him out of his wits.

Guo Jing heaved several great boulders across the mouth of the cave and said, “Big Brother, I’ll go and have a look. Don’t come out.”

Zhou Botong said, “Be careful. Hurry there and hurry back. No, I say there’s no need to go and look at all. What’s there to see in poisonous snakes? How… how can there be so many snakes? In fifteen years on Peach Blossom Island I’ve never seen a single snake before. Something must have gone wrong! Old Heretic Huang boasts of his great powers, yet he can’t even keep his little Peach Blossom Island clean. Tortoises and turtles, poisonous snakes and centipedes, every sort of thing has crawled up onto it.”

Footnotes

1. 内功 — nèigōng. Literally internal cultivation. The practice of developing neili through breathing and meditation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 马钰 — Mǎ Yù. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 师叔 — shīshū. Junior lineage uncle. The shidi or shimei of one’s shifu. Shī means teacher. Shū means father’s younger brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 梅超风 — Méi Chāofēng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 九阴真经 — Jiǔyīn Zhēnjīng. Literally true scripture of the nine yin. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 哥哥 — gēge. Literally elder brother. After a given name it marks intimacy, not kinship. ↩

7. 师兄 — shīxiōng. Male senior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Xiōng means older brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 师哥 — shīgē. Male senior, the colloquial form of shixiong. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Gē means older brother. ↩

9. 穴道 — xuédào. Acupoints, the nodes along the body’s meridians through which qi flows. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 拖雷 — Tuōléi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 刀 — dāo. A single-edged blade, usually curved and broad. ↩

12. 江南六怪 — Jiāngnán Liù Guài. Literally six eccentrics of Jiangnan. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩