The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 1 – Part 4

The woman gave a cold laugh. “If your shifu had any real ability, she should have settled accounts with Lu Zhanyuan long ago. Now that she knows he’s dead, she comes to bully his family instead. Has she no shame?”

The young nun flicked her right hand, and three silver needles shot out, two at the woman, the third at Lu Liding where he stood in the courtyard. It came so suddenly that no one could have foreseen it. The woman struck the needles aside with her jian. Lu Liding gave a low, angry shout and caught the third between two fingers.

The young nun gave a faint, cold smile and flipped down off the roof, and the patter of her light footsteps sped away.

The woman leapt back into the courtyard. Seeing Lu Liding holding the silver needle, she cried urgently, “Drop it, quickly!”

Lu Liding threw it down as she said. The woman slashed a strip off her own sash with her jian and at once bound his right wrist tight.

Lu Liding was alarmed. “The needle was poisoned?”

The woman said, “Deadly beyond anything.” She took out a pill and gave it to him to swallow. Lu Liding felt his forefinger and middle finger go numb and then begin to swell. The woman quickly slit the pads of both fingers with the point of her jian, and black blood oozed out drop by drop.

Lu Liding was horrified, The skin on my fingers wasn’t even broken. I only touched the needle, and it’s this bad. If the point had so much as pricked me, how could I still be alive?

He bowed to the woman. “I had eyes but failed to see Mount Tai. May I presume to ask your honoured surname, madam?”

The woman said, “My husband’s family name is Wu. He is called Wu Santong.”¹

Lu Liding stiffened. “So you are Madam Wu. I have heard that Senior Wu is a disciple of Great Master Yideng² of Dali in Yunnan. Is that so?”

Madam Wu said, “It is. Great Master Yideng is my husband’s shifu. I have learned a little crude martial skill from my husband, and it was truly showing off an axe at the master carpenter’s door. Lord Lu must have found it laughable.”

Lu Liding thanked her again and again for coming to his aid. He had once heard his brother say that of all the martial masters he had met in his life, the disciples of Great Master Yideng of Dali were the most formidable. Great Master Yideng had once been the sovereign of Dali, and after giving up the throne to become a monk he was attended by four great disciples, the “Fisherman, Woodcutter, Farmer and Scholar”.³ The Farmer among them was named Wu Santong, and there was bad blood between him and Lu Liding’s brother, though how the grudge had arisen his brother had never said. Yet Madam Wu, far from treating him as an enemy, had stepped in and driven off the Scarlet Serpent Immortal’s disciple. What lay behind it was hard indeed to fathom.

Everyone went back into the main hall. Lu Liding took his daughter in his arms. She had come round, and though her face was ashen she was bearing the pain without a tear, and his heart ached for her.

Madam Wu sighed. “Now that the demon’s disciple has gone, the demon herself will be here at once. Lord Lu, I do not mean to belittle you, but you and your wife, even with me beside you, are no match for her at all. Yet I see no use in running. We must leave it to Heaven and wait for her here.”

Lady Lu asked, “Just what kind of person is this demon? And what deep grudge does she bear against our family?”

Madam Wu glanced at Lu Liding. “Has Lord Lu not told you?”

Lady Lu said, “He says he only knows it involves his brother and sister-in-law, and that it concerns matters of romantic love, but even he does not fully understand.”

Madam Wu sighed. “That explains it. I am an outsider, so there is no harm in my telling it. More than ten years ago your brother-in-law, Elder Master Lu, travelled to Dali. The demon, the Scarlet Serpent Immortal Li Mochou, is a name that turns the whole wulin⁴ pale with fear today, but more than ten years ago she was a lovely, gentle, good-hearted girl, and she had not yet left the world. It must have been a debt from some past life, for when she met your brother-in-law, love took root in her. Then, after many entanglements and changes of fortune, your brother-in-law married He Yuanjun. And speaking of your sister-in-law, I cannot avoid speaking of my husband. It shames me to tell it, but things are too pressing today for anything else. This He Yuanjun was once our sworn daughter.”

Lu Liding and Lady Lu gasped in unison.

Madam Wu gently stroked the injured boy’s shoulder and gazed at the candle flame as she spoke. “Your sister-in-law, He Yuanjun, was left alone in the world as a small child. My husband and I took her into our home and acknowledged her as our sworn daughter, and we loved her dearly. Later she came to know your brother-in-law, and the two of them fell in love and wanted to marry. My husband, for one thing, did not want her married off so far away, and for another he held a deep prejudice: men of Jiangnan, he said, were crafty and deceitful and not to be trusted at all, and nothing would make him consent. But Ayuan slipped away with your brother-in-law in secret.

“On their wedding day, my husband and Li Mochou both came to make trouble for the newlyweds. Among the guests at the feast was an eminent monk of the Tianlong Monastery⁵ in Dali, who stepped in and held the pair of them in check, and called on them, for his sake, to leave the couple in peace for ten years. My husband and Li Mochou were forced to promise that they would not trouble the newlyweds for ten years. My husband was so bitterly enraged that ever since he has been half out of his mind, and nothing his shifu, his friends or I could say would ever ease him. He was forever counting the days of those ten years. By my reckoning, today is the very day the ten years are up. Who would have thought that your brother-in-law and Ayuan… ah, they could not even have their ten years of happiness.” She bowed her head, her face desolate.

Lu Liding said, “In that case, the one who dug up the graves and stole my brother and sister-in-law’s remains was your husband.”

A look of shame crossed Madam Wu’s face. “From what the two young mistresses of your house said just now, it was indeed my husband.”

Lu Liding said indignantly, “Then what your husband has done is very wrong indeed. This was never a feud in the first place, and besides, my brother and his wife are dead. Even had there been a real blood feud, death ends all. Why come and steal their bodies? Is that how a hero and a brave man behaves?”

In terms of seniority, the Wu couple were his elders, but Lu Liding was so outraged that he abandoned all propriety in his speech.

Madam Wu sighed. “Lord Lu’s reproach is justified. My husband’s mind is not sound. His words and actions often defy reason. I brought these two children here today precisely to prevent my husband from coming here and committing some outrage. In this world, I fear I am the only person he still fears, and even then, only to a degree.” She turned to the two children. “Kowtow to Lord Lu and Lady Lu, and beg forgiveness on your father’s behalf.”

The two boys knelt and bowed.

Lady Lu hurriedly helped them up and asked their names. The one whose forehead had been cut was called Wu Dunru.⁶ He was the elder brother. The younger was called Wu Xiuwen.⁷ They were a year apart, one twelve and the other eleven, and though they were the two sons of a famed martial family, both had been given gentle, scholarly names. Madam Wu explained that she and her husband had had children late in life and, knowing only too well the perils of the wulin, had hoped their sons would give up the martial path for letters. But both boys still loved martial arts, and their names had nothing to do with them.

Having explained the circumstances, Madam Wu sighed sorrowfully, thinking to herself, This is as much as I can say. The rest is not for outsiders’ ears.

The truth was that when He Yuanjun had reached seventeen or eighteen, she had grown into a graceful, lovely young woman, and Wu Santong’s feelings towards her seemed no longer purely those of a sworn father for a sworn daughter. As a chivalrous hero of the wulin he could not, of course, say or do anything improper, and the feeling had already knotted itself up inside him, so that when he suddenly saw her fall in love with a young man from Jiangnan, his rage passed beyond his control. As for his claim that “men of Jiangnan are crafty and deceitful and not to be trusted at all”, besides his hostility towards He Yuanjun’s sweetheart, it also came from an incident years before, when he had tried to trick Guo Jing⁸ and had been tricked in turn by Huang Rong,⁹ and had ended up stuck with the ox and the great rock that Guo Jing had been holding up shifted onto his own shoulders, unable to get free. Though he had later made peace and friends with Guo Jing and Huang Rong, the notion that “men of Jiangnan are crafty and deceitful” had stayed branded in his mind.

Madam Wu continued, “I never imagined that instead of my husband, it would be the Scarlet Serpent Immortal who came to bring calamity upon your household…”

At that moment, a voice suddenly rang out from the rooftop: “Ru’er, Wen’er, come out here!”

The voice had come utterly without warning. There had been no sound of footsteps on the roof tiles whatsoever before the call. Lu Liding and his wife started in unison, knowing it was Wu Santong. Cheng Ying and Lu Wushuang also recognised the voice as that of the strange visitor who had eaten the lotus seedpods.

A figure flickered, and Wu Santong swooped down from the roof, seized his two sons one in each hand, and carried them up and away. Madam Wu cried, “Hey, hey, come and greet Lord Lu and Lady Lu. And the two bodies you took, where are they? Bring them back at once…” But Wu Santong paid her no heed and was already far away.

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Wu Santong ran wildly for a while, then plunged into a forest. Suddenly he set down Xiuwen and, carrying only Dunru, the one with the head wound, vanished without a trace, leaving his younger son alone in the woods.

Wu Xiuwen shouted, “Father, Father!” But his father, carrying his brother, was already hundreds of feet away, and Wu Xiuwen heard him call from far off, “Wait there. I’ll come back for you.”

Wu Xiuwen knew his father had always done things topsy-turvy, so he was not particularly surprised. Though he was frightened to be alone in the forest in the dark, he reckoned his father would soon be back, so he sat down by a tree to wait. A long time passed, but his father never came. He leaned against the trunk, and after a while his eyes closed at last and he fell asleep.

He slept till daybreak. Half awake, he heard a few clear, high cries overhead. He opened his eyes and looked up. Two enormous white hawks were wheeling and soaring in the sky, their outspread wings a full ten feet across. He had never seen hawks so big. He stared at them, puzzled and delighted at once, and called, “Brother, come and see the big hawks!” For the moment he had forgotten that he was alone, and that the brother who had never left his side was no longer there.

Then from behind him came two low whistles, soft and clear, as if from a girl’s lips. The two great hawks circled a few more times and slowly came down. Wu Xiuwen turned and saw a girl step out from behind a tree and beckon to the sky. The two hawks folded their wings, dropped, and stood beside her.

The girl glanced at Wu Xiuwen and stroked the backs of the two hawks. “Good eagles, clever eagles,” she said.

Wu Xiuwen thought, So these two great hawks are eagles.¹⁰ The twin eagles held their heads high and looked about them, splendid beyond words, and standing on the ground they were taller than the girl.

Wu Xiuwen went closer. “Does your family keep these two eagles?”

The girl pursed her lips slightly with a look of disdain. “I don’t know you. I’m not playing with you.”

Wu Xiuwen took no offence and reached out to stroke an eagle’s back. The girl gave a soft whistle, and the eagle suddenly swept out its left wing with tremendous force. Wu Xiuwen was caught off guard and was sent tumbling head over heels.

Wu Xiuwen rolled over and scrambled to his feet, gazing at the twin eagles with envy. “These eagles are wonderful, the way they do what you tell them. When I get back I’ll ask my father to catch a pair for me to keep and play with.”

The girl said, “Hmph, as if your father could catch them.”

Rebuffed three times running, Wu Xiuwen felt rather foolish. He looked at her properly. She wore a gown of pale green gauze, and a string of bright pearls hung at her neck. Her skin was fair and soft beyond compare, like cream, so dewy it seemed it might drip, her eyes were lively and her fine brows long and slender. Small boy though he was, Wu Xiuwen could see she was exceedingly pretty, and he felt drawn to her without meaning to be. Yet her cold, stern air made him shrink back all the same.

The girl stroked the eagle’s back with her right hand while her eyes rolled over Wu Xiuwen. “What’s your name? Why are you out playing all alone?”

Wu Xiuwen said, “My name is Wu Xiuwen. I’m waiting for my father. What about you? What’s your name?”

The girl pouted and gave a snort. “I don’t play with wild children.” She turned and walked away.

Footnotes

1. 武三通 – Wǔ Sāntōng. His name meaning “three penetrations” or “three communications”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 一灯大师 – Yīdēng Dàshī. Literally one-lamp master; a Buddhist honorific title. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 渔樵耕读 – Yú Qiáo Gēng Dú. Four great disciples who followed Emperor Duan Zhixing into monkhood, representing the four idealised occupations of traditional Chinese culture: fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, and scholar. Wu Santong is the Farmer. ↩

4. 武林 – wǔlín. Literally martial forest. Those who actually practise, teach or study martial arts. Wulin sits inside the jianghu and is narrower than it: every member of the wulin belongs to the jianghu, but a pedlar or physician of the jianghu who never trained is no part of the wulin. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 天龙寺 – Tiānlóng Sì. Famous Buddhist temple in Dali. In Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils it preserves the Duan family’s most advanced martial arts, including the Six Meridians Divine Sword. ↩

6. 武敦儒 – Wǔ Dūnrú. His name meaning “earnest scholar”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 武修文 – Wǔ Xiūwén. His name meaning “cultivate literature”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 郭靖 – Guō Jìng. His name meaning “tranquillity” or “pacification”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 黄蓉 – Huáng Róng. Her name meaning “lotus” or “hibiscus”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 雕 – diāo. A great bird of prey, larger than the hawk (鹰), rendered eagle in prose; the same character as the Condor of the novel’s title. ↩