The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 39 – Part 1
Translation by Jenxi Seow
Right and wrong, good and evil
Guo Jing rode hard for several days and put the danger well behind him. He made his way south at a gentle pace. The weather was warming, the grass growing longer by the day, and all along the road lay the wreckage of war, cities breached, homes in ruins, bones strewn across the way. All that he saw and heard was enough to chill the heart. One day he rested in a ruined pavilion and found several lines inscribed on the wall: “A Tang poet wrote: ‘The waters murmur on, the sun goes slanting down, no hen or dog is left, only the cawing crows. A thousand villages, ten thousand hamlets, cold as on the Cold Food Festival, not a wisp of cooking smoke, only flowers everywhere.’ Our Central Plains, these rivers and mountains fair as brocade, has become, of all things, the battleground of barbarian hordes. The misery of the people is worse even than this poem tells.” Guo Jing stared at the words, lost in thought, and grief welled up in him until the tears came.
He wandered aimlessly, not knowing where he ought to go. In the space of a single year his mother, Huang Rong and his revered shifu, the people dearest to him in all the world, had left it one after another. Ouyang Feng had killed his shifu and Huang Rong, and he ought to go after him for revenge, yet the moment he thought of the word “revenge”, the horror of the slaughtered cities of Khwarezm rose up before him. His father had been avenged, he told himself, but so many innocent people had died for it. How could his heart be at peace? It seemed that this business of revenge was not necessarily right after all.
All manner of things came crowding into his mind. All my life I have trained hard at the martial arts, and now that I have come this far, what of it? I could not even protect Mother and Rong-er, so what use was all that training? I have set my whole heart on being a good man, but whom have I ever made happy? Mother and Rong-er died because of me, and Huazheng meizi1 will be unhappy all her life because of me. I have brought misery on a great many people.
Wanyan Honglie, Muhammad and their kind are bad men, of course. But what of Genghis Khan? He killed Wanyan Honglie, so he ought to be a good man, and yet he ordered me to attack the Great Song. He kept Mother and me for twenty years, and in the end he drove her to her death.
Yang Kang and I were sworn brothers, and yet the two of us were never of one heart. Mu Nianci jiejie is a good person, yet why did she give her heart so utterly to Yang Kang? Tolui anda and I are of one mind, but if he leads an army south, must I meet him in battle and fight until one of us is dead? No, no. Everyone has a mother. Every one of us was carried for ten months and raised through years of hardship. How could I kill another woman’s son and leave her weeping? He could not bear to kill me, and I could not bear to kill him. And yet am I simply to let him slaughter the people of my Great Song?
Martial arts are learned to beat men and kill men, so it seems I have been wrong these twenty years, all of them. I studied hard and trained hard, and all it has come to is harming people. Had I known, I would have done better never to learn a single move. But if not martial arts, then what? What am I alive in this world for, when all is said and done? And in the decades to come, what am I to do? Is it better to live, or to die early? If I live, my troubles are already without end, and there are bound to be more of them hereafter. But if I am to die early, why did Mother bear me at all? Why did she wear herself out raising me? Round and round he turned, and the more he thought, the more confused he became.
For several days he could not eat in the daytime or sleep at night. He paced back and forth across the open wilderness, thinking of nothing but these things. And he thought, Mother and all my revered shifus always taught me that a man must hold to yi and keep his word, and so, though I loved Rong-er with all my heart, I never broke my betrothal to the Great Khan’s daughter. And what came of it? Mother and Rong-er died for nothing on my account, and are the Great Khan, Tolui and Huazheng any happier for it? The Seven Xias of Jiangnan, my seven revered shifus, were all chivalrous men, and not one of them came to a good end. Hong shifu was such a good man, yet he was grievously wounded past healing. Ouyang Feng and Qiu Qianren have committed countless wrongs, yet they roam at their ease. Is there any justice of Heaven in this world, or not? Has the Old Man of Heaven eyes at all? Does he care nothing for right and wrong?
He walked at random through the open country. His little red horse followed slowly behind, pausing now and then to crop a mouthful of grass by the roadside, and all the while he was turning it over in his mind, To save the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Samarkand, I caused Rong-er’s death. Was that right or wrong? Those people were no kin of mine, no friends, strangers I had never set eyes on. For Rong-er’s sake I would die without regret. I begged the Great Khan to spare those hundreds of thousands of wretched souls. The Great Khan was furious, and nearly had my head cut off. My comrades-in-arms and subordinates all resented me bitterly, because they had toiled to breach the walls and defeat the enemy, only to be robbed of the joy of sacking the city by a single word from me. For the sake of people I did not know, I lost Rong-er, nearly lost my own life, and offended the Great Khan, my subordinates, and my good friends. Was that not the height of stupidity? Stupid it certainly was, but was it right or wrong?
My six shifus, Hong shifu, my mother, they all taught me that a man must act with xia and yi, that he must rescue those in peril, that he must not fold his arms and look away from another’s danger for his own advantage. When someone slaughters the innocent and harms the common people, a man must cast aside his life and rush to their aid. When the Jin invade our country and harm our compatriots, one must rise to resist for the sake of the nation and the people, setting aside one’s own life and fortune. If the city the Great Khan meant to massacre were Lin’an, if the city he meant to purge were Jinan, if those he had ordered killed were all the common people of my Middle Kingdom, and these thousands upon thousands about to die were all my own countrymen, then to save them with no thought for Rong-er or for my own life would of course be right. A true man must have the heart of the humane and the righteous. As Hong shifu always says, “Where yi demands it, you act, and if you die, you die!” It is no great matter. Yet Khwarezm is not the Middle Kingdom, and the men, women, old and young of Samarkand are not people of the Middle Kingdom. Their speech is not like mine, their writing is not like mine, the colour of their eyes and hair, their faces, all different from mine. What have they to do with me? Why could I not bear it when I saw Mongol soldiers raising spear and dao to kill them? Why did I stake my own life on it and cost Rong-er hers? Was I badly wrong? When I see someone in peril, should I throw myself into saving him only if it is my parents, my shifus, my friends or my beloved Rong-er? Are people who are nothing to me not worth saving?
Hong shifu would even reach out to save villains as great as the Western Venom and his nephew when they were in peril at sea. What should be done, should be done. People of the Middle Kingdom should be saved, but foreigners are human too, and should be saved as well. Whether it does you any good afterwards is no concern of yours. Hong shifu knew full well that saving the Western Venom would do him harm, and he saved him all the same. Sure enough, the Western Venom later struck him down so gravely that he nearly lost his life, and he never regretted it in the least. He always told us: when a man is in danger, you must rescue him. What follows, you do not calculate. He said that what we call xia and yi, what we call right and wrong, it all rests on this single word, xia, and this single word, yi. Right is right, and good is good. A man of xia and yi does what he does seeking nothing more than peace of conscience. If one haggles over success or failure, profit or loss, benefit or harm, how much return, how much damage, that is doing business, not doing good. Every act of “good” must be to another’s advantage, though not necessarily to one’s own. In life we speak of yiqi. “Yi” means “what yi demands”, do what should be done. Yes! Shifu taught well! When people of the Middle Kingdom are in danger, they should be saved. When foreigners are in danger, they should be saved too! What should be done must be done, without asking whether it benefits oneself or how much profit it brings.
If I were dying of thirst in the great desert, and a herder of Samarkand rode past me on his camel with water aplenty in his skin, would he not give me a drink? Strangers though we are, he would give me some all the same. That is “what yi demands”!
I saved the people of Samarkand, and Rong-er died because of it. Was that right or wrong? No. Rong-er was not killed by me. Ouyang Feng chased her into a marsh, into the quicksand. I staked my life to save her, but I could not. I would have given my own life in exchange for hers. But she did not know it when she died. Now that she is dead, if her spirit is in Heaven, she must surely know. It was not so that I could marry Huazheng that I begged the Great Khan to spare the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people in Samarkand. She knows it is her I want to marry. She knows, she knows! It came to him that once Huang Rong was dead, whether she was in Heaven or in the underworld, she would understand everything. She would know that he had truly loved her and would not blame him wrongly. And if she were not dead, so much the better, and it would not matter if she did blame him wrongly. Best of all if Rong-er is not dead. Let her resent me and blame me in her heart, it does not matter. If she never has anything to do with me again, I will accept it. If she goes and marries someone else, I will accept that too. So long as she is not dead! Once he had seen his way through this, much of the tangle of his anguish came loose.
One day he came to a small town in Jinan Prefecture, in Shandong. He found a seat in a wineshop and sat alone drinking away his melancholy. He had just finished three cups when a man came bursting through the door, pointed at him, and launched into a stream of curses. “Tartar thief, you’ve destroyed my home and killed my family. Today I’ll fight you to the death.” With that he swung a fist straight at Guo Jing’s face.
Guo Jing started. His left hand flipped over and caught the man’s wrist. He gave a gentle pull, and the man pitched headlong to the ground. He knew no martial arts whatsoever. Guo Jing saw that he had accidentally thrown the fellow hard enough to split his scalp and draw blood, and was deeply sorry. He reached out at once to help him up, saying, “Big Brother, you have the wrong man!” The man only howled and cursed, “Tartar thief!” More than a dozen men came crowding through the door from outside, throwing punches and kicks at him. These past few days Guo Jing had been haunted by the thought that martial arts brought only harm, and had made up his mind never to fight again. Besides, these men were strangers who knew no martial arts and were simply lashing out blindly. He dodged left and right and did not return a single blow. But the crowd outside grew thicker and thicker, jammed into the small wineshop, and in the end he still took quite a few hits.
He was about to summon his strength to push the men aside and force his way out when he heard a voice calling loudly from the doorway, “Jing-er, what are you doing here?” Guo Jing looked up and saw a man in a Daoist robe, his long beard flowing, none other than Changchunzi Qiu Chuji. His heart leapt with joy, and he called out, “Daoist Elder2 Qiu, I don’t know why these people are beating me.” Qiu Chuji thrust his arms out and shoved the crowd aside, then seized Guo Jing by the arm and pulled him out.
The mob surged after them, shouting and cursing, but Qiu Chuji and Guo Jing strode swiftly away. Guo Jing whistled for his little red horse, and in moments the two men and the horse were out in open country, leaving the crowd far behind and out of sight. Guo Jing told Qiu Chuji how the townspeople had gathered to beat him for no cause at all. Qiu Chuji laughed. “You are dressed as a Mongol. They simply took you for a Mongol Tartar.” He went on to explain that the Mongol and Jin armies had been locked in battle across Shandong. The local people had long suffered under the Jin, and at first they lent their strength to the Mongols. But the Mongol troops proved as cruel as the Jin, swapping one tyranny for another: burning, killing, and pillaging until the common people were wretched beyond endurance. When a great column of Mongol troops passed through, the people dared do nothing, but any soldiers who strayed from the main body were often beaten to death by the locals.
Qiu Chuji asked, “Why did you let them kick and beat you? Look at all the bruises you have taken.” Guo Jing gave a long sigh and told him everything: the Great Khan’s secret orders to march south against the Song, how the Great Khan had driven his mother to her death, and all the rest.
Qiu Chuji was aghast. “If Genghis Khan means to attack the Song, we must hurry south at once, so the court can prepare its defences in good time.” Guo Jing shook his head. “What good would that do? The only result would be mountains of corpses on both sides, and the common people’s families ruined.” Qiu Chuji said, “If the Song falls to the Mongols, the common people will suffer even more, and without end.” Guo Jing said, “Daoist Elder Qiu, there is much I cannot fathom. I must ask you to show me the way.” Qiu Chuji took his hand and led him to a locust tree, where they sat down beneath it. “Tell me, then!” he said.