The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 31 – Part 6

Her feet were using the Whirlwind Leaf-Sweeping Leg¹ of Peach Blossom Island.² Her steps were quick and her footing uncannily precise, but Yinggu could already see that her skill there was not of the first rank and nowhere near the unfathomable changes of her bamboo staff. Besides, though the girl’s injuries had healed, her vital strength had not yet returned. If Yinggu went for her lower body, she could win within a few dozen moves.

By the time she had made her reckoning, only seven or eight lamps were left burning, all of them in the north-east corner, flickering in the night wind, while the other three corners were pitch black. Suddenly Huang Rong’s staff launched two swift attacks. Yinggu started, picked out a gap between the spikes in the dim yellow light, and stepped back a pace. Huang Rong pushed off the ground with her staff, skimmed flat through the air and swept her long sleeve, putting into the sweep the force of the Sky-Splitting Palm,³ and the seven or eight lamps went out at once.

Yinggu groaned inwardly, and thought, I have a way to beat her now, but among these spikes any step could drive one through my foot. How am I to fight?

Out of the darkness came Huang Rong’s voice. “Have you memorised where the spikes are? Let’s have thirty moves here, and if you can hurt me, I’ll let you go in and see Emperor Duan.⁴ How’s that?”

Yinggu said, “You set out the spikes, and who knows how long you’ve practised here. How could anyone else memorise where all these lamps are in the blink of an eye?”

Huang Rong, young and eager to win, and sure of her own extraordinary memory, laughed. “What’s so hard about that? Light the lamps, pull up the spikes and plant them again wherever you like, then put the lamps out and we’ll fight. How about it?”

Yinggu thought, This is no test of martial arts, it’s a test of memory. This sharp little imp is clever beyond words. With my great revenge still not taken, how can I stake my life on a memory contest with her? Then an idea came to her, and she said, “Very well, that’s fair enough. This old woman will play your game.” She took out her tinder tube,⁵ shook it alight and lit the lamps.

Huang Rong laughed. “Why call yourself an old woman? With a face like a flower and the moon, you’re lovelier than a girl of sixteen. No wonder Emperor Duan was so infatuated with you back then, and in all these decades it hasn’t faded one bit.”

Yinggu was pulling up the bamboo spikes one by one and moving them. At these words she stopped short, then said with a cold laugh, “Infatuated with me? I was two years in the palace, and when did he ever take any notice of me?”

Huang Rong was puzzled. “But didn’t he teach you martial arts?”

Yinggu said, “Teaching me martial arts counts as taking notice of me?”

Huang Rong said, “Ah, I know. Emperor Duan was cultivating the Innate Skill,⁶ so he couldn’t get too fond of you.”

Yinggu snorted. “What do you know? Then why did he father the Crown Prince?”

Huang Rong tilted her head and thought for a moment. “The Crown Prince was born before he started cultivating the Innate Skill.”

Yinggu snorted again and said nothing more, but went on pulling up spikes and moving them. Each time she planted one, Huang Rong fixed it in her memory, not daring to let her attention slip for an instant. Her life hung on it. If she misremembered a position by so much as a few inches, then once the fighting began a spike would go straight through her foot. Yinggu, meanwhile, kept turning Huang Rong’s words over in her mind.

After a while Huang Rong spoke again. “When Emperor Duan wouldn’t save your son, that was because he loved you too, you know.”

Yinggu said, “So you know all about it? Hmph. Because he loved me?” Her voice was full of venom.

Huang Rong said, “He was jealous of the Old Wild Child.⁷ If he didn’t love you, why would he be jealous? He had already decided to save your son, and then he saw the ‘Four shuttles ply’ mandarin-duck brocade⁸ on the baby’s dudou.⁹ ‘Alas, before we grow old, our hair has already turned white.’ You wanted to grow old with the Old Wild Child, and it truly broke Emperor Duan’s heart. At that moment all he wanted was to die!”

Yinggu had never dreamed that Emperor Duan had felt so much for her, and she stood lost in thought.

Huang Rong said, “I think you should just go back.”

Yinggu said coldly, “Not unless you can stop me.”

Huang Rong said, “Very well. If we must have a bout, I’ll just have to risk my life to keep a junzi company. If you get through, I won’t stand in your way again. But what if you don’t?”

Yinggu said, “Then I’ll never come up this mountain again, and our bargain that you keep me company for a year is off too.”

Huang Rong clapped her hands. “Splendid. Being with you is fun enough, but a year living in a mud swamp would be hard to bear.”

While they talked, Yinggu had moved fifty or sixty of the spikes. Then she kicked out the lamps one by one, saying, “No need to move the rest.” In the darkness her five fingers formed a claw and drove fiercely at Huang Rong.

Remembering the positions, Huang Rong darted aside and set her left foot down exactly between two spikes, and her staff flicked out at Yinggu’s left shoulder. But Yinggu did not strike back at all. She strode straight ahead, there was a long string of cracks, and with dozens of spikes snapped under her feet she walked on into the rear courtyard.

Huang Rong was taken aback, and then she understood. She thought, She tricked me! When she moved the spikes she put force into her fingers and secretly snapped them all. So eager had she been to win that she had never foreseen this move, and she was furious with herself.

Yinggu burst into the rear courtyard and pushed open the door. On a hassock in the middle of the room sat an old monk, his silver beard hanging to his chest and his thick monk’s robe wrapped right up to his cheeks, his eyes lowered in meditation. The four disciples, the fisherman, the woodcutter, the farmer and the scholar, stood in attendance on either side with several old monks and young novices.

The woodcutter went up to the old monk, pressed his palms together and said, “Shifu, Imperial Consort Liu has come up the mountain to call on you.”

The old monk nodded slightly but did not speak.

Only one oil lamp burned in the meditation room, and no one’s face could be seen clearly. Yinggu had long known that Emperor Duan had become a monk, but she had never imagined that after ten years and more the bold, heroic emperor would have become so frail an old monk. Remembering what Huang Rong had just said, it seemed that His Majesty had not been so lacking in feeling for her after all. Her heart softened, and her hand on the hilt of the dagger slowly loosened its grip.

She looked down, and there before Emperor Duan’s hassock lay the baby’s dudou made from the brocade handkerchief, with a jade bracelet resting on it, the very bracelet His Majesty had given her long ago. In an instant it all passed before her eyes, scene after scene: entering the palace, learning martial arts, meeting Zhou, the heartbreak, the birth of her son, his death. At the last she saw only her baby’s face, racked with pain and pleading for help. Tiny as he was, his eyes had seemed to hold a thousand words, as though reproaching his mother for not easing his suffering even a little.

All at once her heart turned hard. She raised the dagger, gathered force into her wrist, and drove the blade into Emperor Duan’s chest up to the hilt. She knew how formidable his martial arts were, and this one thrust might not kill him. Besides, as the point went into the flesh, something had felt a little odd. She wrenched at it to pull it out and stab again, but the dagger was wedged fast in his ribs and for the moment would not move. The four disciples cried out together and rushed at her.

For more than ten years Yinggu had trained single-mindedly, and she had practised this thrust to the chest who knew how many thousands, tens of thousands of times. She was sure Emperor Duan would be well guarded, so even as her right hand drove the blade home, her left had already loosed a string of palm strikes to cover her left, her right and her back. Her tug had not freed the dagger, and seeing how dangerous things had become, she sprang for the door. Glancing back, she saw Emperor Duan with his left hand pressed to his chest, plainly in great pain.

Her great revenge was taken, yet she felt no joy at all. Instead she suddenly thought, I took a lover and bore his child, and he never said a word of reproach. He was willing to let me go with Zhou Botong and be properly married. It was that wretch the Old Wild Child who didn’t want me, not he who wouldn’t let me go. He let me go on living in the palace, and far from putting me to death, he provided for me more generously than ever. When I went into hiding in the Black Marsh,¹⁰ he sent men to plant woods for me and bring me grain and things, and all these years he has seen that I wanted for nothing. He has truly always been very good to me.

All along she had remembered only that Emperor Duan would not save her son’s life, and her heart had been full of nothing but hatred. Only now, with her blade in his chest, did she think of all his kindness. She gave a long sigh and turned to go out of the door.

As she turned, she gave a shrill cry, and every hair on her body stood on end. An old monk stood in the doorway, his palms pressed together before his chest. The lamplight fell full on his face, the high-bridged nose, the square mouth, the eyes shining with kindness. He wore a monk’s habit, but there was no mistaking him for anyone but Emperor Duan, who had once reigned over Dali.¹¹

Yinggu stared as if at a ghost, and a thought flashed through her mind like lightning, I must have stabbed the wrong man. Her eyes swept the room. The monk she had stabbed was slowly getting to his feet. He took off his monk’s robe, gave a tug under his chin with his left hand, and pulled off the whole white beard.

Yinggu gave another shrill cry. The old monk was Guo Jing in disguise.

This was the plan Huang Rong had laid. Guo Jing had sealed Great Master Yideng’s acupoints¹² precisely so that he could take the blade in his place. He had attacked the Sindhu monk¹³ first for fear that his martial arts might be formidable, never guessing that the man knew no martial arts at all. While Huang Rong was in the courtyard explaining the three problems to Yinggu in detail, barring her way with the Dog-Beating Staff Technique¹⁴ and laying out the lamps and bamboo spikes, the four disciples had hurriedly washed the mud off Guo Jing and shaved his head. The white beard under his chin was Yideng’s own, shaved off and stuck on. The four disciples felt that this was making sport of their shifu and grossly disrespectful, and they were uneasy that Guo Jing had to run so great a risk, but there was no other way to save their shifu’s life. Had one of the four played the part, he was not skilled enough and would surely have been stabbed to death.

As Yinggu lunged with the dagger, Guo Jing, quick of eye and hand, put out two fingers from inside the monk’s robe and pinched the flat of the blade on either side. But Yinggu’s thrust was uncommonly vicious, and for all the strength of Guo Jing’s fingers, the point still went half an inch into his flesh. Luckily it did not touch his ribs, and there was no great harm done. Had he worn the Soft Hedgehog Armour,¹⁵ it would have stopped the blade, but Yinggu was exceptionally sharp. If her dagger had struck armour she would certainly have known, and the root of the trouble would never be removed. Having failed this time, she would come back for revenge another day.

The Golden Cicada Sheds Its Shell¹⁶ had all but succeeded when Yideng suddenly appeared, to the astonishment not only of Yinggu but of everyone else. Although a finger had sealed Yideng’s acupoints, his neigong¹⁷ was undiminished, and Guo Jing, afraid of hurting him, had sealed only the least important points. In the next room Yideng had quietly circulated his neigong and slowly released his own acupoints, and he had reached the door of the meditation room at exactly this moment.

Yinggu’s face went the colour of ash. She thought, I’m surrounded this time. There’s no hope for me.

Yideng said to Guo Jing, “Give her back the dagger.”

Guo Jing dared not disobey, and handed it over. Yinggu took it blankly, her eyes on Yideng, and thought, I wonder what way he’ll find to torment me.

He slowly loosened his monk’s robe, opened the undershirt beneath it and said, “None of you is to make trouble for her. See her safely down the mountain. There now, come and stab me. I have waited for you a long, long time.” His eyes rested on Yinggu, and his face was kind.

He said it very gently, yet to Yinggu the words came like thunder and lightning. Seeing even a touch of tenderness in his eyes, the love of former days came flooding back, and in an instant all her hatred was gone. She said, “It is I who wronged you!” Her hand opened, the dagger fell with a clang, and covering her face with both hands she fled. They heard her footsteps fade into the distance until at last there was no sound at all.

The others stared at one another, dazed and silent. Suddenly there were two thuds, and the scholar and the farmer fell to the ground, one on his face and the other on his back. The poison was in their fingers, and they had held out by sheer force of will, but now that they saw their shifu unharmed, the relief was too much and they could hold out no longer.

The woodcutter cried, “Quick, fetch Shishu!¹⁸”

Before he had finished, Huang Rong had already come in with the Sindhu monk.¹³ He was a master at curing poisons. He took out medicine and gave it to the two men, then slit their fingertips to let the black blood out, his face grave, muttering, “Amali, hashitu, sigu’er…”

Yideng understood Sanskrit, and knew that the two men’s lives were not in danger, but the poison had gone deep and it would take two months of treatment to cure them.

By now Guo Jing had changed out of the monk’s robe and bound up the wound in his chest, and he knelt and kowtowed to Yideng to beg his pardon. Yideng quickly reached out to raise him and sighed. “You risked your life to save me. It is I who am at fault, truly at fault.” He turned to his shidi¹⁹ and said a few words in Sanskrit, briefly telling him what Guo Jing had done.

The Sindhu monk said, “Sili xing, ang yi nade.”

Guo Jing started. He knew these two phrases by heart, and he went straight on reciting what came next. “Sire que xu, ha hu wen bo ying…”

When Zhou Botong had taught him to recite the Nine Yin Manual,²⁰ the last section had been nothing but these strange words. Guo Jing had no idea what they meant, but he had swallowed them whole and knew them perfectly, and now they simply came out of his mouth.

Yideng and the Sindhu monk were both astonished to hear him speak Sanskrit, and still more amazed when they heard that what he was reciting was the secret method for training the highest neigong. Yideng asked how this had come about, and Guo Jing told him the whole story.

Footnotes

1. 旋风扫叶腿 — Xuànfēng Sǎo Yè Tuǐ. A Peach Blossom Island kicking art, paired with the Peach Blossom Falling Petals Palm. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 桃花岛 — Táohuā Dǎo. Huang Yaoshi’s island in the East China Sea. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 劈空掌 — Pīkōng Zhǎng. Literally air-splitting palm. A palm strike that reaches its target without contact. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

5. 火折子 — huǒzhézi. A tinder tube: rolled paper or fibre treated with saltpetre, kept smouldering in a tube and revived with a puff of breath. ↩

6. 先天功 — Xiāntiān Gōng. Literally skill of the primordial. A neigong method. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 周伯通 — Zhōu Bótōng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 鸳鸯锦帕 — Yuānyāng Jǐn Pà. Literally mandarin duck brocade handkerchief. ↩

9. 肚兜 — dùdōu. Literally belly pouch. An undergarment covering the chest and belly, tied with strings at the neck and waist, often worn by children. ↩

10. 黑沼 — Hēi Zhǎo. Literally black marsh. ↩

11. 大理国 — Dàlǐ Guó. Kingdom in southwest China, modern-day Yunnan, ruled by the Bai people of the Duan Clan from 937 to 1253 CE. See Wikipedia. ↩

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

13. 天竺僧人 — Tiānzhú sēngrén. Literally monk of Tianzhu, the old name for India. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩ ↩²

14. 打狗棒 — Dǎgǒu Bàng. The jade-green bamboo staff carried by the Guild Chief of the Beggars’ Guild as the token of his office. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 软猬甲 — Ruǎnwèijiǎ. A vest set with tiny barbs, proof against blades and fists, treasured on Peach Blossom Island. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

16. 金蝉脱壳 — jīnchán tuōqiào. Literally the golden cicada sheds its shell. Escaping by leaving an empty husk behind for the enemy to watch, one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. ↩

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

18. 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. ↩

19. 师弟 — shīdì. Male junior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Dì means younger brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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