The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 19 – Part 5

In her sleep Huang Rong dreamed that she was in Prince Zhao’s mansion in Zhongdu,¹ fighting a host of champions single-handed, and then that she was on a road beyond the northern frontier, meeting Guo Jing by chance. They had barely exchanged a few words when she caught sight of her mother. She strained to make out her face, but could never see it clearly. Then, all at once, her mother soared into the sky. She chased after her on the ground, but her mother rose higher and higher. Panic gripped her heart, and then she heard her father’s voice, calling her mother’s name. The voice grew clearer and clearer.

Huang Rong woke from her dream, but still she heard her father’s voice, coming through the felt curtain. It took her a moment to collect herself and realise she was not dreaming, and that her father too had come into the burial chamber.²

When she was small, her father had often carried her here to her mother’s memorial and talked on and on about the little things of the life the two of them led. In recent years he had come less often, but hearing his voice now, she was not surprised.

She was still sulking with her father and refused to go out and call to him. She would wait until he had left. Then she heard her father say, “I made you a vow that I would find the Nine Yin Manual³ and burn it for you, so that your spirit in heaven would know what was really written in the text you racked your brains over in vain. For fifteen years I could find no way to do it, and only today have I fulfilled that vow.”

Huang Rong thought in astonishment, Where did Father get the Nine Yin Manual?

Then he spoke again. “It isn’t that I set out to kill your son-in-law. They insisted on taking that ship themselves.”

Huang Rong started violently, thinking, Mama’s son-in-law? Does he mean Jing gege? What happens if they take that ship? She held her breath and listened. Huang Yaoshi went on, turning the same ground over and over, telling his wife how lonely and wretched he had been since her death. Hearing her father pour out his true feelings, Huang Rong could not help but grieve. She thought, Jing gege and I are both only children in our teens, and our love is true and constant. Why worry that we won’t meet again some day? Whatever happens, I won’t leave Father. She had got this far in her thoughts when she heard her father say, “Old Wild Child’s⁴ martial arts are higher than mine now, and I can no longer kill him. He destroyed both volumes of the Manual with his palm force, and I thought the vow I made you could never be kept. But as if ghosts and gods had arranged it, he insisted on sailing in the painted ship⁵ I built to go and join you…”

Huang Rong thought, Every time I wanted to go and play on that ship, Father sternly forbade it. How can he have built it to go and meet Mama?

The truth was that Huang Yaoshi had loved his wife deeply, and she had died for his sake, so at the time he had been set on following her in death. He knew his martial arts ran so deep that neither hanging nor poison would kill him quickly, and that after his death his body would be at the mercy of the mute servants on the island. So he went to the mainland, seized some skilled shipwrights and had them build this painted ship. Her keel was no different from any ordinary ship’s, but the timbers of her bottom were not nailed together with iron. They were bound with raw gum and rope. Moored in harbour she was a splendid painted ship, but once she sailed out to sea and the waves pounded her, she was bound to sink.

He had meant to lay his wife’s body in the ship and sail out to sea, and when the waves rose and the ship broke apart, to play the Azure Sea Surging Melody⁶ on his jade flute and be buried with his wife beneath the great waves, a hundred thousand feet deep. Only an end as free and gallant as that would be worthy of the greatest master of martial learning of his age. But each time he was about to put to sea, he could neither bear to take his daughter with him nor bear to leave her behind, and in the end he built the tomb and laid his wife’s coffin there for the time being. The ship, though, he had repainted every year, and she was always like new. He would wait until his daughter was grown and safely married, and then do it.

Huang Rong knew none of this, and her father’s words left her bewildered. Then she heard him go on, “Chaofeng may have given me back the lower volume of the Manual, but what you wrote down from memory back then was not all correct. All that gibberish, those strange words and weird sentences, you didn’t understand them, so how could you remember them? Now Old Wild Child knows the true text of the Nine Yin Manual backwards, and the boy surnamed Guo can recite it without a word wrong. When I sink the two of them in the sea, it will be just like burning two living copies of the Manual. Your spirit in heaven has powers like an immortal’s, far wiser and more perceptive than you were in life. Compare it with what is in their two minds, and you can be at peace. Only that old beggar Hong has thrown his life away for nothing, which is rather hard on him. In a single day I have killed three masters for your sake and kept the vow I made you. When we meet again, you are sure to say that your husband is as good as his word and has left undone not one thing he promised his beloved wife. Heh heh!”

After a while he went on, “In fact Jing-er didn’t lie. Old Wild Child said he had borrowed the lower volume from Mei Chaofeng and copied it out and learned it by heart, which is utterly absurd. In the lower volume Chaofeng had, the strange passages were jumbled and incomplete, with a good many words and lines missing, but the text Jing-er recited was whole, with every gap filled. And those lines Chaofeng wrote, ‘Had I but taken heed when first we met’ and ‘If not with the flowing water, then with the wind’, she wrote before she went blind. If Jing-er had borrowed it to copy, he would have seen them, and he would have taken them for part of the text and recited them too, like the simpleton he is. But he didn’t recite them. Old Wild Child was plainly talking nonsense, so saying that Jing-er knew all along it was the Nine Yin Manual must have been a slander on him as well. Rong-er has fallen for this honest little simpleton, and now that he’s died at sea, she’ll be heartbroken! Ah, who in this world is not heartbroken? Little joy and much sorrow, the soul is ever breaking! I didn’t kill Jing-er on purpose. Rong-er, Rong-er, I have done you no wrong!” He seemed to have sensed that his daughter was in the burial chamber, and these last words sounded as if they were meant for her.

Huang Rong listened in mounting horror. A chill rose from the depths of her heart. Though she could not fathom what it was all about, she knew the painted ship must contain some extraordinary and deadly contrivance. She had always known what her father could do, and she feared that Guo Jing and the other two had already fallen victim to it. Torn between terror and grief, she wanted to rush out at once and beg her father to save the three of them, but fear had turned her legs to water. For a moment she could not take a step, nor make a sound. She heard her father give a long, desolate laugh, half song, half sob, as he left the tomb passage.

Huang Rong pulled herself together and thought of one thing only, I must go and save Jing gege, and if I can’t save him, I’ll die with him. She knew how strange her father’s temper was, and how his love for her mother verged on madness, and that pleading with him would be useless. She ran out of the tomb passage and down to the shore, jumped into a small boat, shook the mute boatmen awake and ordered them to set sail at once. Suddenly she heard hoofbeats as a horse came galloping up, and at the same moment, faintly, the sound of her father’s jade flute. Huang Rong looked towards the shore and saw Guo Jing’s little red horse galloping back and forth in the moonlight. Shut up on the island with no room to stretch its legs, it must have come out to run in the night. She thought, How am I to find Jing gege in this boundless sea? The little red horse may be a marvel, but once it leaves dry land it’s no use at all.

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As Hong Qigong, Zhou Botong and Guo Jing rushed out of the cabin, the deck gave softly under their feet and the water was already over their shins. In alarm they leapt up the mast together. Hong Qigong even hauled two of the mute sailors up after him. Looking down, they saw the deck churning with waves. Seawater was pouring into the ship in great rolling floods.

The disaster had come without warning, and for a moment the three of them were at a loss.

Zhou Botong said, “Old Beggar, Old Heretic Huang⁷ really does have a trick or two. What has he done to this ship?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Hong Qigong. “Jing-er, hold on to the mast, don’t let go…”

Before Guo Jing could answer, there were several tremendous rending crashes, and the ship split in two down the middle. The two mute sailors, terrified, lost their grip on the boom and plunged straight into the sea.

Zhou Botong tucked himself into a somersault and flipped backwards into the water. Hong Qigong shouted, “Old Wild Child, can you swim?”

Zhou Botong popped his head above the waves with a grin. “After a fashion…”

The rest was blown away by the sea wind in their faces. The mast was tilting further and further and would soon topple into the sea.

Hong Qigong shouted, “Jing-er, the mast is still joined to the hull. We’ll break it off together. Come on!”

The two of them struck out with all their palm force, both at once, at the middle of the mainmast. Stout as it was, how could it withstand the full strength of the two of them together? A few blows, and with a boom it snapped in two. Clinging to it, they fell into the sea.

They were far from Peach Blossom Island now. Waves rose like mountains on every side. There was no sign of land. Hong Qigong groaned inwardly. He thought, Adrift on this ocean with no ship to rescue us, and nothing to eat or drink, we couldn’t last ten days or a fortnight, however great our martial arts. He looked back. Even Ouyang Feng’s ship had vanished without a trace.

From far to the south came a peal of laughter. It was Zhou Botong.

“Jing-er, let’s go over to him,” said Hong Qigong. The two of them clung to the broken mast with one hand and swam with the other, making towards the sound. The swells were enormous. After several dozen feet of progress, a wave swept them back. Hong Qigong called out in a ringing voice, “Old Wild Child, we’re over here.” His neili⁸ was deep, and though the wind howled and the waves roared, his voice carried far.

They heard Zhou Botong shout, “Old Wild Child’s turned into a drowned dog. This is old dog stewed in brine.”

Guo Jing could not help laughing, and thought, Even in danger like this he’s in the mood for jokes. He really does deserve the name Old Wild Child. The three of them had tumbled from the mast one after another, and the waves had pushed them several hundred feet apart. Hong Qigong and Guo Jing struggled through the water, and after a long while slowly closed the distance to Zhou Botong.

They saw that Zhou Botong had lashed a plank of the ship’s hull beneath each foot with rigging rope. He was employing his qinggong⁹ to stride across the surface of the sea. But the waves were so big that, though he rose and fell with them as if quite at his ease, he could not go forward or back just as he pleased. He was having such fun that he paid no heed at all to the danger he was in.

Guo Jing looked around. The ship had long been swallowed by the waves. The sailors had surely all been lost to the sea. Then Zhou Botong let out a great cry of alarm. “Aiya, good grief, this is bad! Old Wild Child’s going to be smashed to pieces this time.”

Hong Qigong and Guo Jing heard the alarm in his voice and cried together, “What is it?”

Zhou Botong pointed into the distance. “Sharks, a whole army of sharks.”

Guo Jing had grown up in the desert and knew nothing of the danger sharks posed. He turned and saw that Hong Qigong’s expression had changed. He wondered what manner of monstrous creature a shark might be, that it could unsettle even his shifu¹⁰ and Big Brother Zhou,¹¹ both men of the utmost composure.

Hong Qigong summoned his palm force and chopped twice at the end of the mast, cutting off half its length, and the half split down the middle into two stout clubs. Out of the white mist on the sea came a sudden splash, and a fish’s head as big as a bushel basket broke the surface. Two rows of white teeth, sharp as blades, flashed in the sunlight, and the head plunged beneath the surface again.

Hong Qigong flung one of the clubs to Guo Jing, shouting, “Aim for the head!” Guo Jing reached into his robe and drew his golden dao.¹² “I have my dao,” he called. He flung one of the clubs far out towards Zhou Botong, who caught it.

By now four or five tiger sharks were circling round and round Zhou Botong, though, not yet sure how things stood, they did not dare attack. Zhou Botong bent down and swung his club, and with a thud he burst a tiger shark’s skull open. The other sharks, catching the scent of blood, surged towards the kill.

Guo Jing saw the sea churning, thousands upon thousands of sharks it seemed. He watched one shark tear a great chunk of flesh from a dead one in a single bite. The teeth were long and razor-sharp. Fear gripped him. Then he felt something bump against his foot. He jerked it back. The water beneath him shifted. A great shark surged up from below. Guo Jing pushed off the mast with his left hand, swung his body to the right, and thrust the golden dao down in the same motion. The blade’s tip was keen beyond compare. With a soft hiss, it pierced a hole in the shark’s skull. A plume of blood spiralled up through the water. The sharks swarmed in, tearing and snatching at the flesh.

Footnotes

1. 中都 — Zhōngdū. Literally central capital. The Jin dynasty capital, in present-day Beijing. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 圹室 — kuàngshì. A burial vault or tomb chamber. ↩

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

4. 老顽童 — lǎo wántóng. Literally old wild child. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 花船 — huāchuán. The painted ship Huang Yaoshi keeps at Peach Blossom Island. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 碧海潮生曲 — Bìhǎi Cháoshēng Qǔ. Musical technique that can disturb opponents’ minds through qi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 黄老邪 — Huáng Lǎoxié. Literally old heretic Huang. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 内力 — nèilì. Literally internal force. The kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 轻功 — qīnggōng. The martial art of body lightness. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 师父 — shīfù. Teacher responsible for technical instruction and moral guidance. Shī means teacher. Fù means father. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 大哥 — dàgē. Literally big brother. The address to an elder brother or an elder sworn brother. ↩

12. 金刀 — jīndāo. The golden dao Genghis Khan bestows on Guo Jing. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩