The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 23 – Part 3

That evening the four of them spread straw on the ground and slept as best they could. Next morning Huang Rong and Guo Jing prepared breakfast, and the four ate together with Silly Girl.¹ Huang Rong twisted the iron bowl to close the back of the cupboard, and put the broken bowls and the rest back inside as before. Silly Girl looked on as though she saw nothing, not caring in the least, and only played with the pointed knife. Huang Rong took out a small ingot of silver and gave it to her. Silly Girl took it and tossed it carelessly onto the table. Huang Rong said, “When you’re hungry, take the silver and buy rice and meat to eat.” Silly Girl giggled, as though she half understood.

A wave of desolation swept over Huang Rong. She was sure the girl must be closely bound up with Qu Lingfeng,² his kin if not his disciple. Her six or seven moves of the Azure Wave Palm Technique³ must have come from Qu Lingfeng, yet they had only the outward form, not the school’s real art. No doubt Qu shige,⁴ never having had her father’s leave, had not dared to pass the true art on to anyone. The girl’s palm-work was as muddle-headed as the girl herself. She wondered whether Silly Girl had been simple-minded from birth, or whether some later fright or injury had harmed her mind. She had half a mind to ask around the village, but Zhou Botong kept urging them to leave, so she let it go. The four of them set off with the cart towards Lin’an.⁵

Lin’an had always been one of the most splendid and thriving places under heaven, and now that the Song court had crossed the river south and made its capital there, people had flocked to it from all quarters, adding still more to the charm of its hills and waters. The four entered the city from the east through Houchao Gate and made straight for Lizheng Gate,⁶ the main gate of the Imperial City.

Hong Qigong was sitting in the mule cart, and the other three, gazing ahead, saw gold-studded vermilion doors, painted beams and carved balustrades, and roofs covered all over with copper tiles chased with soaring dragons and phoenixes, towering and magnificent, a splendour that dazzled the eye. Zhou Botong yelled, “What fun!” and strode forward to go in.

The imperial guards before the gate saw one old man and two young people with a mule cart, making a great racket outside the palace, and four of them were already coming at them with axes in hand to seize them. Zhou Botong, who loved nothing more than a commotion, thought the guards in their bright armour, big strapping fellows every one, were more fun still, and he swayed forward, ready to take them on. Huang Rong cried, “Quick, go!” Zhou Botong glared at her. “What’s there to be afraid of? Do you think these babies can eat the Old Wild Child?” Huang Rong said urgently, “Jing gege, we’ll go off and have our own fun. If the Old Wild Child won’t do as he’s told, we’ll have nothing more to do with him.” She cracked the whip and drove the cart west at speed, with Guo Jing following close behind. Afraid they would leave him behind and go off somewhere good to play, Zhou Botong forgot the guards and ran after them, shouting. The guards took them for country bumpkins who knew no better, and stayed where they were, roaring with laughter.

Huang Rong drove the cart to a quiet spot and, seeing no pursuit, stopped at last. Zhou Botong asked, “Why didn’t we just force our way into the palace? Could those wine-sacks and rice-bags have stopped us?” Huang Rong said, “Of course it wouldn’t be hard to force our way in. But I ask you, are we going there to fight, or to eat in the imperial kitchen? Go charging in like that and the whole palace will be in uproar. Will there be anyone left to make Yuanyang Wuzhen Kuai⁷ properly for Shifu?”

Zhou Botong said, “Fighting and catching people is the guards’ job. It has nothing to do with the cooks.”

There was a good deal of sense in that, and for the moment Huang Rong had no answer, so she simply bluffed it out. “The palace cooks just happen to do the cooking and the catching both.”

Zhou Botong felt it made no sense, but he only goggled at her with nothing to say. After a long while he said, “All right, let’s say I’m wrong again.” Huang Rong said, “What do you mean, let’s say? You are wrong, plain and simple.” Zhou Botong said, “All right, all right. No saying, no saying.” He turned to Guo Jing. “Brother, every woman under heaven is a terrible shrew, and that’s why the Old Wild Child will never marry, whatever happens.” Huang Rong laughed. “Jing gege is good, so nobody would be a shrew to him.” Zhou Botong said, “So I’m not good?” Huang Rong laughed. “You, good? If you can’t get a wife, it must be because people can’t abide your antics and the way you’re forever making trouble. Tell me, why is it you can’t get a wife?” Zhou Botong put his head on one side and pondered, but he could not answer. His face went red, then white, and all at once he seemed to have a heart full of cares. Huang Rong had seldom seen him look so solemn, and it rather surprised her.

Guo Jing said, “Let’s find an inn first and go to the palace tonight.” Huang Rong said, “Yes! Shifu, once we’re settled, I’ll make you two small dishes to sharpen your appetite, and tonight you can eat to your heart’s content.” Hong Qigong was delighted and cried his approval again and again.

The four of them took rooms at Jinhua Lodge,⁸ a large inn at the west end of Imperial Street. Huang Rong summoned all her skill and cooked three dishes and a soup for Hong Qigong, and sure enough the aroma reached all the neighbours. The guests at the inn kept asking the staff which famous cook could make such fine food. Zhou Botong, still smarting at Huang Rong’s saying he could not get a wife, was sulking and would not come to eat. The other three knew his childish temper, laughed it off and paid it no mind.

After the meal Hong Qigong lay down to sleep. It was still early in the day, and Guo Jing asked Zhou Botong to come out and see the sights, but he was still sulking and would not answer. Huang Rong laughed. “Then be a good boy and keep Shifu company, and I’ll buy you something to play with when I get back.” Zhou Botong said happily, “You’re not fibbing?” Huang Rong laughed. “Once a word is spoken, a team of four horses can’t catch it.”⁹

That spring Huang Rong had left home and travelled north. She had spent a day sightseeing in Hangzhou, but as it lay close to Peach Blossom Island she had been afraid her father would find her and had not dared stay long, so she had not enjoyed herself properly. Now, with the day long and nothing pressing, she and Guo Jing walked hand in hand to the shores of West Lake.¹⁰

She saw that Guo Jing was downcast and knew he was fretting over their shifu’s injury. “Shifu said there is someone in the world who could cure him,” she said, “only he won’t let me ask who. From the way he spoke, it seems to be Emperor Duan,¹¹ but Emperor Duan reigns as emperor in the Kingdom of Dali, ten thousand li away. Somehow or other we must find a way to beg him to heal Shifu.” Guo Jing said joyfully, “Rong-er, that really is good news. But can we get him to?” Huang Rong said, “At the meal today I went the long way round trying to sound Shifu out. He was just about to tell me, but unluckily he caught on and stopped at once. I’ll get it out of him in the end.” Knowing her resourcefulness, Guo Jing felt much relieved. Huang Rong added, “Otherwise, we could go to Peach Blossom Island and follow the methods in the Healing Chapter¹² of the manual, use neili¹³ to help Shifu regulate his breathing and circulate it through his jingmai.¹⁴ That might well cure him.”

As they talked they reached Broken Bridge¹⁵ by the lakeside. “Broken Bridge in Lingering Snow” was one of the celebrated scenes of West Lake, but now it was high summer and the water below the bridge was thick with lotus blossoms. Huang Rong saw a small wineshop by the bridge, quite elegant and clean. She said, “Let’s have some wine and look at the lotus.” Guo Jing said, “Excellent.” They went in and sat down, and the serving boy brought wine and dishes. The food was choice and the wine good, and as they drank and gazed at the lotus their hearts grew light. By the window on the east side Huang Rong noticed a screen shrouded in green gauze, which the owner plainly set great store by. Her curiosity roused, she went over to look, and saw a poem to the tune Wind Enters the Pines¹⁶ written on the plain screen beneath the gauze:

All spring I squander coin on buying flowers,
Drunk by the lakeside day after day.
My white steed knows the West Lake roads by heart,
And neighs his pride past the wine-house door.
Song and dance amid the scent of red apricot,
Swings in the shade of the green willows.
Ten li of warm wind, a day for beauties,
Flowers weigh their cloud-soft hair askew.
The painted boat bears the fragrance home,
What feeling lingers, I leave to lake water and lake mist.
Tomorrow, propping up the dregs of my drunkenness,
I’ll come to seek the hairpins dropped along the paths.

Huang Rong said, “It’s a fine poem, I’ll grant you that.” Guo Jing asked her to explain what it meant, and the more he heard, the less he liked it. He said, “This is the capital of the Great Song. These scholars and officials spend all their time drinking wine and admiring flowers. Have they given up all thought of recovering the Central Plains?”

Huang Rong said, “Indeed. One might say these people have no hearts at all.”

Suddenly a voice behind them said, “Hmph! What do you two know, to come here talking such nonsense?” They turned round together and saw a man dressed as a scholar, about forty years old, sneering coldly all the while. Guo Jing bowed with clasped hands and said, “I don’t understand. Would you enlighten me, Mister?”

The man said, “This is the proudest work of Yu Guobao,¹⁷ a student at the Imperial Academy in the Chunxi reign. When Gaozong, the Retired Emperor,¹⁸ came here to drink and saw this poem, he praised it highly, and that very day he rewarded Yu Guobao with an official rank. It was such a stroke of fortune as a scholar meets once in an age. How dare you two sneer at it!”

Huang Rong said, “So an emperor has looked at this screen, and that’s why the owner has covered it in green gauze?”

The man gave a cold laugh. “More than that. Look at this line on the screen, ‘Tomorrow, propping up the dregs of my drunkenness.’ Haven’t two characters been changed?” Guo Jing and Huang Rong looked closely, and sure enough the character fu, “prop up”, had first been xie, “carry”, and zui, “drunkenness”, had been jiu, “wine”. The man said, “What Yu Guobao first wrote was ‘Tomorrow, carrying the dregs of my wine.’ The Retired Emperor laughed and said, ‘The poem is good, but this line is a little mean.’ So he took up the brush and changed two characters. Only a wisdom bestowed by Heaven itself could turn iron into gold like that.” He wagged his head from side to side, lost in admiration.

Guo Jing was furious. He cried, “That Gaozong emperor, he’s the fatuous ruler who promoted Qin Hui¹⁹ and had Grandfather Yue²⁰ killed!” His foot flew up and kicked the screen to splinters, and with a backhand grab he seized the sour pedant and sent him flying. There was a splash, and the smell of wine filled the room. The man had gone into a wine vat head first, his feet in the air.

Huang Rong cheered loudly and laughed. “I’ll change those two lines too. ‘Today the dregs of wine are set to rights. Into the vat, sir, and sink there dead drunk!’”

The scholar was just poking his head up out of the vat, streaming with wine, when he heard the last line, and he said, “The character ‘zui’ is an oblique tone. It doesn’t rhyme.”

Huang Rong said, “Your Wind Enters the Pines can’t rhyme it, but my Man Enters the Vat can!” She pushed his head back down into the wine, then overturned the table and set about smashing everything in sight. The other drinkers and the owner had no idea what it was all about, and they fled out of the place. Warming to their work, the two smashed every vat, pot and pan, and at last Guo Jing brought out the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing,²¹ and with a few pushes and shocks of his palms, all his strength behind them, he snapped the wineshop’s main pillar. The roof came crashing down, and in an instant the place was a ruin of broken timbers and tumbled walls. The two of them laughed aloud and went off north hand in hand. Nobody knew where these two young madmen had sprung from, and who would dare go after them?

Guo Jing laughed and said, “That was a fine fight just now. It’s cleared the bitterness from my chest.”

Huang Rong laughed. “Whenever we see somewhere we can’t stand the look of, let’s go and smash it up.”

Guo Jing said, “Good!”

Since leaving Peach Blossom Island, nothing had gone right for them. They had each other now, but their shifu lay grievously wounded with no cure in sight, and their hearts had been heavy. Wrecking the wineshop had at least given their gloom some vent.

They strolled along the lake. On rocks and trees, in pavilions and on walls, poems were written everywhere, and if they were not verses on spring outings, they were pieces presented to courtesans. Guo Jing could not make them out, but he could see they were all “wind and flowers, snow and moon”, and he sighed. “If we had a thousand pairs of fists between us, we’d never smash them all. Rong-er, what did you waste your time learning this rubbish for?”

Huang Rong said, “There is good poetry too, you know.”

Guo Jing shook his head. “To my mind fists and feet are more use.”

Chatting as they went, they came to Feilai Peak.²² Before the peak stood a pavilion, and the plaque above it bore the three characters Cuiwei Pavilion,²³ written by Han Shizhong.²⁴

Guo Jing knew Han Shizhong’s name, and the sight of this great general’s hand, the man who had fought the Jin, gladdened his heart. He hurried into the pavilion.

In the pavilion stood a stone stele, carved with a poem:

Years of dust lie thick upon my campaign robe,
I come on purpose seeking blossoms up Cuiwei.
Fine hills, fine waters, I cannot see enough,
But my horse’s hooves press me home by the bright moon.

Huang Rong said, “This was written by Han Shizhong too.”

Guo Jing said admiringly, “That’s a fine poem.”

Guo Jing could not really tell a good poem from a bad one, but since this was in Han Shizhong’s hand and spoke of a “campaign robe” and “horse’s hooves”, it was bound to be good.

Huang Rong said, “Grandfather Yue wrote it, Yue Fei himself.”

Guo Jing started. “How do you know?”

Huang Rong said, “I heard my father tell the story. In the winter of the eleventh year of Shaoxing,²⁵ Grandfather Yue was murdered by Qin Hui. The next spring Han Shizhong, who missed him, built this pavilion specially and had the poem carved on the stele. But Qin Hui’s power was overwhelming then, so it would not do to write openly that Grandfather Yue had composed it.”

His thoughts on the great general of former days, Guo Jing traced the carved strokes on the stele with his finger.

Footnotes

1. 傻姑 — Shǎgū. Literally silly girl. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 曲灵风 — Qū Língfēng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 碧波掌法 — Bìbō Zhǎngfǎ. Basic Peach Blossom Island palm technique containing fundamental principles. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

5. 临安 — Lín’ān. Capital of Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1276) known for its cultural refinement and West Lake scenery. Modern day Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. See Wikipedia. ↩

6. 丽正门 — Lìzhèng Mén. The main southern gate of the Southern Song imperial palace in Lin’an. ↩

7. 鸳鸯五珍脍 — Yuānyāng Wǔzhēn Kuài. Literally mandarin-duck five-delicacy mince, a dish of the Song imperial kitchen. ↩

8. 锦华居 — Jǐnhuá Jū. Literally Brocade Splendour Lodge. An inn on Imperial Street in Lin’an. ↩

9. 一言既出，驷马难追 — yī yán jì chū, sì mǎ nán zhuī. Literally once a word is out, a team of four horses cannot catch it. A promise once given cannot be taken back. ↩

10. 西湖 — Xīhú. The lake at Lin’an, modern Hangzhou. See Wikipedia. ↩

11. 段皇爷 — Duàn Huángyé. Literally Imperial Lord Duan. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

12. 疗伤章 — Liáoshāng Zhāng. Literally healing chapter. A section of the Nine Yin Manual on the treatment of internal injuries. ↩

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

14. 经脉 — jīngmài. Literally meridians. Energy channels through which qi flows. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 断桥 — Duànqiáo. Literally broken bridge. One of the most famous sights of West Lake. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

16. 风入松 — Fēng Rù Sōng. Literally wind enters the pines, the name of a ci tune. ↩

17. 俞国宝 — Yú Guóbǎo. A Southern Song poet and student at the Imperial Academy. ↩

18. 太上皇 — Tàishànghuáng. The title of an emperor who has abdicated in favour of his successor. Gaozong gave up the throne in 1162 and lived on as Retired Emperor until 1187. ↩

19. 秦桧 — Qín Huì. Southern Song chancellor (1091—1155) who pressed for peace with the Jin and is remembered as the traitor behind the execution of Yue Fei. See Wikipedia. ↩

20. 岳爷爷 — Yué Yéye. Literally Grandfather Yue. A term of popular veneration for Yue Fei. ↩

21. 降龙十八掌 — Xiánglóng Shíbā Zhǎng. Literally eighteen dragon-subduing palms. Hong Qigong’s palm technique. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

22. 飞来峰 — Fēilái Fēng. Literally the peak that flew here. A limestone peak by West Lake, said to have flown there from elsewhere. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

23. 翠微亭 — Cuìwēi Tíng. Literally pavilion of the green haze of the hills. A pavilion on Feilai Peak by West Lake. ↩

24. 韩世忠 — Hán Shìzhōng. The celebrated Song general who fought the Jin armies. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

25. 绍兴 — Shàoxīng. The Shaoxing era (1131—1162) of Emperor Gaozong of Song, whose eleventh year is 1141. ↩