The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 29 – Part 1

The recluse of the Black Marsh

From the eagle’s back Guo Jing called out again and again, summoning the Little Red Horse to follow on the ground. In the blink of an eye the twin eagles had flown far away. Large as the two birds were, with a rider on each back they could not fly far. Before long their strength gave out, and they sank lower and lower until at last they came down. Guo Jing leapt from his eagle and rushed over to Huang Rong, to find that she had passed out on hers. He hurriedly loosened the sash binding her and worked her meridians to restore her circulation. It was a good while before Huang Rong slowly came round, and even then she was so dazed she could not utter a word.

Dark clouds now covered the sky, hiding the moon and stars until not a glimmer of light remained. Guo Jing had snatched his life from the jaws of death, and as he thought back on what had just happened, his heart still quaked. He stood in the open wilds with Huang Rong in his arms, heaven and earth vast and empty around him, with no idea what to do. Nor did he dare call the Little Red Horse, for fear that Qiu Qianren¹ would hear and get there first.

He stood rooted for a long while, then, having no choice, set off at random. Every step came down on low scrub and tall grass. Where was there any path? At every step thorns hooked and pricked his calves, but he felt no pain. As he went on, the darkness around him grew blacker still. However wide he strained his eyes, he could see nothing. He went more slowly, one step at a time, afraid that a single misstep would pitch him into a gully or a pit, yet he dared not stop either, for fear the men of the Iron Palm Keep² would catch up.

In this way, carrying Huang Rong, he toiled on for more than two li.³ Suddenly a great star appeared on his left, glittering at the edge of the sky. He fixed his eyes on it, hoping to get his bearings, and saw that it was no star at all, but a lamp.

Where there was a lamp, there must be a house. Guo Jing’s spirits rose. Carrying Huang Rong on his back, he quickened his pace and headed straight for the light. After a li or so at speed, he found black trees all around him in the darkness. The light, it turned out, came from inside a forest. Once inside, he could no longer walk in a straight line. The path wound east and twisted west. Before long he lost sight of the lamp, and in the dense wood he could not tell one direction from another. He sprang up a tree to look out, only to find the light now lay behind him. Ahead one moment, it was suddenly behind the next. Guo Jing made for it again and again until his head swam and his eyes blurred, yet he never came any nearer. Where the two eagles and the horse had got to, he had no idea. By now he knew that the forest paths themselves were playing tricks on him. He would have leapt across from treetop to treetop, but in the dark he could not see where to land, and he feared the branches would scratch Huang Rong. Yet if he found no lodging, he could hardly sit in this black forest and wait for dawn. He thought, I can’t keep blundering about like a headless fly. Let me steady myself first. So he stood still, evened his breathing and rested a moment.

By now Huang Rong had come to her senses. As Guo Jing carried her this way and that, charging blindly about, she could see nothing of her surroundings, but she had already worked out the paths through the forest. She said softly, “Jing gege,⁴ bear off at an angle, ahead and to the right.”

“Rong-er, are you all right?” Guo Jing asked, overjoyed.

Huang Rong gave a faint “Mm,” too weak to say more. Guo Jing did as she said and bore off ahead and to the right. Huang Rong counted his steps in silence. When she reached seventeen, she said, “Now eight steps to the left.” Guo Jing obeyed. Huang Rong went on, “Now turn round and walk thirteen steps backwards.”

One directing, the other following, the two of them wound their way on through a forest too dark to see a hand before their faces.

From the way Guo Jing had dashed back and forth just now, Huang Rong had realised that the forest paths were laid out by human hand. Huang Yaoshi’s⁵ arts of the Five Elements⁶ and the Strange Gates⁷ were subtle beyond compare, and he had passed no small share of them to his daughter. The more bewildering the paths, the more surely she could call them out with her eyes shut. Had they been natural tracks, in a place she had never been, she could not have made out even the plainest, most ordinary path in such darkness.

Now left, now right, sometimes even backing several paces, they seemed to be winding ever further out of their way. Yet in less time than it takes to drink a cup of tea, there was the lamp, right before their eyes.

Guo Jing was overjoyed and dashed forward. Huang Rong cried out, “Don’t rush in!”

Guo Jing yelped, but his feet had already sunk into the mud right up to the knees. He drew a quick breath and sprang backwards, wrenching both feet free by main force. A reek of foul mud stung his nostrils. Looking ahead, he saw two thatched huts wrapped in a pale bank of mist, and the lamplight shining out from them.

He called out loudly, “We are travellers passing through, gravely ill. We beg the master of the house to do us a kindness, lend us somewhere to rest and spare us a mouthful of broth.”

For a long while the hut stayed silent. Guo Jing called again, but still no one answered. Only when he had said it a third time did a woman’s voice answer from inside the hut, “If you can reach this place, you must have the skill to enter. Do you expect me to come out and welcome you?” Her tone was icy. Plainly she did not care to be troubled by outsiders.

At any other time Guo Jing would sooner have slept out in the forest than deliberately make a nuisance of himself, but now tending Huang Rong’s injury came first. Before them stretched a great expanse of mud, and he did not know how to cross it, so he talked it over with Huang Rong in a low voice.

Huang Rong thought for a moment, then said, “This house is built in the middle of a mud marsh. Look carefully. Is one of the two huts square and the other round?”

Guo Jing strained his eyes to look for a while, then said happily, “Yes! Rong-er, you know everything.”

Huang Rong said, “Walk to the back of the round hut. Face the lamp and take three steps straight, four steps diagonally to the left, three steps straight again, then four steps diagonally to the right. Alternate straight and diagonal steps like this. Do not make a mistake.”

Guo Jing did as she said. Sure enough, wherever his feet came down, a wooden post had been driven in. But some of them wobbled and swayed, leaning this way or that. Had his qinggong⁸ not been superb, he would have toppled into the marsh after only a few steps.

Concentrating hard and holding his breath drawn up, he went on, three straight, four aslant. At the hundred and nineteenth step he had come round to the front of the square hut. It had no door. Huang Rong whispered, “Jump in from here. Land on the left.” With Huang Rong on his back, Guo Jing vaulted over the wall and came down on the left. He was startled, and thought, Everything is just as Rong-er foresaw.

Inside the wall lay a courtyard, divided in two. The left half was solid earth, the right half a pond.

Guo Jing crossed the courtyard and walked towards the main hall. In front of the hall was a moon gate, again with no door. Huang Rong murmured, “Go in. There are no more tricks inside.” Guo Jing nodded, then said in a clear voice, “A passing traveller presumes to enter uninvited. I do so only out of necessity. I beg our gracious host’s forgiveness.” He paused a moment after speaking, then walked into the hall.

At the front of the hall stood a long table, and on it seven oil lamps were set out in the shape of the Big Dipper.⁹ A grizzled woman was crouched on the floor. Wrapped in a hemp robe, she was staring at a scatter of bamboo slips on the ground, plainly sunk in thought. Though she heard them enter, she did not look up.

Guo Jing set Huang Rong gently on a chair. In the lamplight he saw her face drawn and haggard, utterly drained of colour. His heart ached for her. He wanted to ask for a bowl of broth, but the old woman was so absorbed in her work that he feared breaking her concentration, and for a moment did not dare to speak.

Huang Rong sat for a while and her spirits improved somewhat. She saw that the bamboo slips on the ground were each about five inches long and a quarter of an inch wide, and knew them for counting rods. Looking again, she saw they were laid out in four rows, for quotient, dividend, divisor and auxiliary, and silently counting the rods, she could tell the woman was computing the square root of fifty-five thousand two hundred and twenty-five. The Quotient row had already reached two hundred and thirty, and the old woman was moving the rods, about to calculate the third digit. Huang Rong blurted out, “Five! Two hundred and thirty-five!”

The old woman started and looked up, her eyes flashing as she glared at Huang Rong. Then she bent her head again and went on moving the rods. In that moment Guo Jing and Huang Rong saw that her face was fine and lovely and that she could be no more than forty or so. Too much brooding, they supposed, had greyed her temples early. The woman worked the rods for a while, and sure enough the answer came out as “five.” She looked up at Huang Rong once more. The astonishment on her face vanished as quickly as it had come, replaced again by anger, as if to say, So it’s only a little girl. A lucky guess, that’s all. What is so remarkable about that? Don’t disturb me at my work. She wrote the five characters for “two hundred and thirty-five” on a sheet of paper, then set out another problem.

This time she sought the cube root of thirty-four million twelve thousand two hundred and twenty-four. She had just laid out the rods in six rows, for quotient, dividend, square divisor, edge divisor, corner and lower divisor, and reached a “three”, when Huang Rong said softly, “Three hundred and twenty-four.”

The woman gave a snort. How could she believe it? She worked the calculation for a long while, about the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, and when she finished, the answer was indeed three hundred and twenty-four.

The woman straightened her back and stood. Her forehead was creased with wrinkles, but her cheeks were smooth as congealed cream, fair and tender. Her face was divided at the eyes, the upper half old and the lower half young, as though more than twenty years lay between them. She stared straight at Huang Rong, then suddenly pointed towards an inner room and said, “Come with me.” She took up an oil lamp and walked in.

Guo Jing supported Huang Rong and followed. The inner room’s walls formed a circle. The floor was covered with fine sand, upon which many horizontal and vertical symbols and circles were drawn, along with characters such as “Supreme,” “Celestial Origin,” “Terrestrial Origin,” “Human Origin,” and “Material Origin.”¹⁰ Guo Jing could make nothing of it. Afraid his feet might tread upon and ruin the symbols in the sand, he stood at the doorway and did not dare enter.

Taught by her father from childhood, Huang Rong knew a good deal of calendrical reckoning, and at the sight of the symbols on the ground she knew them all for hard problems of the numerical arts, the “Celestial Origin method”¹¹ of the calculating classics. It is an intricate method, but once its principle is grasped there is nothing very hard about it. (Note: this is what modern algebra calls equations in several unknowns and of higher degree. China’s ancient calculating classics recorded the method long ago, the four characters for Heaven, Earth, Man and Thing being the four unknowns X, Y, Z and W of Western algebra.) Huang Rong drew the bamboo staff from her belt and, leaning against Guo Jing, wrote in the sand as she thought. In a short while, she had solved all seven or eight problems laid out there.

These were problems the woman had pondered for months without solution. Now she was utterly astonished. She stood dumbfounded for a long while, then suddenly asked, “Are you a human being?”

Huang Rong smiled faintly. “The Celestial Origin and the Four Origins? Hardly worth mentioning. The calculating classics have nineteen Origins in all. Above ‘Human’ are Immortal, Bright, Sky, River, Rampart, Layer, Height, Summit, and Heaven. Below ‘Human’ are Earth, Below, Low, Diminish, Fall, Vanish, Spring, Dark, and Ghost. It is only when one calculates to the nineteenth Origin that things become somewhat difficult!”

The woman blanched in dismay. She swayed a little, then all at once sat down hard on the fine sand, clutching her head in both hands and racking her brains. After a while, she raised her head, her face bright with joy. “Your method of calculation is naturally a hundred times finer than mine. But let me ask you this: arrange the nine digits from one to nine in three rows, so that whether you add horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, each set of three numbers totals fifteen. How would you arrange them?”

Huang Rong thought to herself, My father laid out Peach Blossom Island. How deep and subtle are the shifts of the Five Elements there, generating and overcoming one another? The Nine Palaces method is the very foundation of the island’s formations. How could I not know it? Then she recited softly, “The meaning of the Nine Palaces takes the sacred tortoise as its model. Two and four are the shoulders, six and eight are the feet. Three on the left, seven on the right. Nine is worn on the head, one trodden underfoot. Five dwells in the centre.”

As she spoke, she drew, sketching a Nine Palaces diagram in the sand.¹²

The woman’s face went ashen. “And I thought it was a secret method all my own,” she sighed. “Yet all along there has been a rhyme for it, handed down for anyone to know.”

Huang Rong laughed. “Not only the Nine Palaces. Even the four-by-four diagram, the five-by-five, all the way up to the hundred-number diagram, there is nothing strange in any of them. Take the four-by-four. Set the sixteen numbers out in order in four rows. First, swap the four corners: one exchanges with sixteen, four with thirteen. Then swap the inner four corners: six with eleven, seven with ten. Add up any horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line, and the total is always thirty-four.”

The woman followed her method and drew it out. Every sum was exactly right, without a single error.

Footnotes

1. 裘千仞 — Qiú Qiānrèn. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 铁掌帮 — Tiězhǎng Bāng. Literally iron palm guild. Qiu Qianren’s sect, renowned for its palm techniques. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 里 — lǐ. A traditional unit of distance, about 500 metres or one-third of a mile. ↩

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

5. 黄药师 — Huáng Yàoshī. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 五行 — wǔxíng. The Five Phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, a framework of Chinese metaphysics, medicine and martial theory. ↩

7. 奇门 — qímén. Literally strange gates. A branch of Chinese cosmology and divination concerned with the arrangement of space and time, applied to strategy and battle formations. ↩

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

9. 天罡北斗阵 — Tiāngāng Běidǒu Zhèn. Literally Big Dipper formation of the Heavenly Ladle. A Quanzhen formation of seven, laid out on the stars of the Big Dipper. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 天元、地元、人元、物元 — tiānyuán, dìyuán, rényuán, wùyuán. Literally the celestial, terrestrial, human and material origins. The four unknowns of traditional Chinese algebra, used much as x, y, z and w are today. ↩

11. 天元术 — tiānyuán shù. Literally method of the celestial element. A Chinese algebraic method for setting up and solving polynomial equations in one unknown. ↩

12. 九宫 — jiǔgōng. Literally nine palaces. A magic square of the numbers one to nine, used in Chinese cosmology and divination. ↩