The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 10 – Part 8

When the man first saw him burst into tears, he was taken aback. The more heartbroken Yang Guo’s weeping grew, the stranger he found it, and when it seemed the weeping would never end, he suddenly threw back his head and let out a long, ringing laugh. Weeping and laughter crashed against each other back and forth across the gorge, until great slabs of snow came tumbling down from the mountainside.

Hearing the man laugh, Yang Guo’s tears stopped instantly. “What are you laughing at?” he demanded angrily.

The man laughed. “What are you crying about?”

Yang Guo was about to answer with something harsh, but he remembered how unfathomable this man’s martial skill was and choked his anger down at once. He bowed low with great respect. “I, Yang Guo, pay my respects to you, Senior.”

The man had a bamboo staff in his hand. He flicked it lightly against Yang Guo’s arm, and though Yang Guo felt no great force coming at him, his body went flying backwards in spite of himself. A throw like that should have left him sprawling, unable even to crawl to his feet. But Yang Guo had trained in the reversed neigong, practised head down and feet up, and in mid-air he went with the throw, turned a somersault and landed neatly on his feet.

This took both of them by surprise. At Yang Guo’s present level of martial skill, to send him somersaulting with a single move was something not even the likes of Li Mochou or Qiu Chuji could ever have done. And the man, seeing the youth turn a backward somersault and still land standing firm, could not help looking at him with new eyes. He asked again, “What are you crying for?”

Yang Guo looked him over. He was an old man, white of beard and hair, his clothes in rags, and he seemed to be a beggar. It was night, but the white snow on the ground gave enough light to show his face glowing ruddy and full of vigour, and Yang Guo was filled with respect. “I’m a man with a bitter lot,” he answered. “There’s no point in my being alive. Better to die and be done with it.”

The old beggar heard the bitter grief in his words, the bellyful of resentment, and nodded. “Who’s been bullying you? Quick, tell your old grandad.”

Yang Guo said, “My father was murdered, but I do not know who killed him. Then my mother died of illness. In this world, no one pities me, no one cherishes me.”

The old beggar gave a grunt. “That really is a pity. Who is the shifu who taught you your martial arts?”

Yang Guo thought, Auntie Guo is my shifu in name, but she never taught me a scrap of martial arts. The stinking Daoists of the Quanzhen Order make me furious just to think of them. Ouyang Feng¹ is my sworn father, not my shifu. My martial arts were taught me by my aunt, but she said she wants to be my wife, and if I call her my shifu she’ll be angry. Patriarch² Wang Chongyang and Granny Lin handed down their teachings in the stone chamber, but how could I call them my shifu? I’ve had plenty of shifus, and not one I can speak of. The old beggar’s question had touched the sore place in his heart, and all of a sudden he burst into loud sobs again. “I’ve no shifu, I’ve no shifu!” he cried.

The old beggar said, “All right, all right! If you won’t say, never mind.”

Yang Guo wept, “It’s not that I won’t say, it’s that I have none.”

The old beggar said, “None is none. Is that worth crying over? Do you know the Five Ugly Men of Sichuan?”

Yang Guo said, “I do not.”

The old beggar said, “When I saw you walking alone in the night, I thought you were an accomplice of the Five Ugly Men of Sichuan. Since you are not, that is very good.”

This man was none other than the Nine-Fingered Divine Beggar, Hong Qigong.³ Since handing on the post of Guild Chief of the Beggars’ Guild to Huang Rong, he had drifted east and west on his own, seeking out the rarest delicacies under heaven. Guangdong was warm, and nowhere had more rare and wonderful recipes. Once he reached Lingnan⁴ he had found his place, and for more than ten years he had not gone back north to the Central Plains. In that land of the Hundred Yue they made soup of venomous snakes and stewed old cats in lidded pots. There were spotted fish that looked like mice and giant prawns they called dragons, fat oysters braised with old ginger, water beetles steamed with paddy worms, shark fin from the Xisha Islands and conch called East Wind, suckling pig roasted till the skin crackled and masked palm civet simmered till the meat glowed red. To Hong Qigong it was like ascending to heaven, a joy without end.

Whenever he happened upon some injustice he would quietly help the weak and the wronged and put the wicked to death, and at his level of skill no one ever knew how he came or went. Sometimes he would eavesdrop on the talk of Beggars’ Guild disciples. So he learned that under Huang Rong and Lu Youjiao⁵ the Guild was at peace. Within, the feud between the Dirty Clothes and Clean Clothes factions⁶ had been settled. Without, the threat from the Jin and from the Iron Palm Keep⁷ had been removed. With nothing to tie his venerable self down, he spent his days doing nothing but opening his mouth wide to chomp and his throat wide to gulp.

That year the Second Ugly Man of the Five Ugly Men of Sichuan had gone on a killing spree in Guangdong and murdered a good many decent people. Hong Qigong hated evil as if it were his own personal enemy, and he had meant to dispose of the man in passing. But he reflected that killing this one would be easy, while finding the remaining four would be hard. So he followed him in secret, waiting for all five to gather so that he could wipe them out at a stroke. He had never imagined that the trail would lead him from the south to the north, more than a thousand li, all the way up Mount Hua. Now four of the five had assembled, with only the Eldest Ugly Man still to come, and here in the snow in the dead of night he had run into Yang Guo.

Hong Qigong said, “Let’s leave that for now. I can see you’re hungry too. We’ll talk when we’ve eaten our fill.” He scraped away the snow, gathered dry sticks and broken branches and lit a fire. Yang Guo helped him collect firewood. “What are we cooking?” he asked.

Hong Qigong said, “Centipedes!”

Yang Guo thought he was joking. He only smiled faintly and asked no more. Hong Qigong laughed. “I’ve gone to all this trouble, chasing the Five Ugly Men of Sichuan all the way from Lingnan to Mount Hua. If I don’t find a few rare flavours to eat, how could I do right by this?” He patted his belly as he spoke. Yang Guo saw that the old man’s frame was lean and hard all over, except for this big belly, which was round and fat and rather in the way. Hong Qigong went on, “The north face of Mount Hua is the coldest, most yin⁸ place under heaven, and the centipedes it produces are the fattest and most tender. Guangdong is hot, and everything there grows fast. The pork is too fatty, the greens are too stringy, and the centipede meat is coarse.” Hearing him speak so earnestly, as if he really were not joking, Yang Guo was utterly mystified.

Hong Qigong set four stones round the fire, took a small iron pot from his back and set it on the stones, then scooped two handfuls of snow into it. “Come and gather centipedes with me,” he said. A few bounds, and he was up a cliff twenty feet high. Seeing how sheer the cliff was, Yang Guo dared not leap after him. Hong Qigong called, “Good-for-nothing boy, get up here!” Nothing galled Yang Guo more than being looked down on. At these words he gritted his teeth, drew up his breath and went straight up, thinking, What is there to be afraid of? If I fall to my death, then I fall to my death. With his courage roused, his qinggong flowed more freely than ever. He kept close behind Hong Qigong, and even the steepest, slipperiest places he somehow managed to scramble up.

In the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, the two had climbed to the summit of a peak where no man ever set foot. Seeing such daring and such qinggong in the boy, Hong Qigong took a great liking to him. For all his wide experience, he could not tell where the youth’s martial arts came from. He meant to question him, but his mind was on good food. He went to a large boulder and began scooping away the earth beside it and flinging it aside, and before long a dead rooster came to light in the soil. Yang Guo was astonished. “Eh? How did a big rooster get here?” Then he understood. “Ah, you hid it here yourself, sir.”

Hong Qigong smiled faintly and lifted the rooster. In the gleam of the snow Yang Guo saw it plainly: the rooster’s body was covered with more than a hundred great centipedes, nine or ten inches long, banded in red and black with gaudy markings, all clinging on with their jaws and writhing. Yang Guo had drifted about the jianghu since he was a boy and was not normally afraid of poisonous vermin, but at the sudden sight of so many great centipedes even he shuddered. Hong Qigong was very pleased with himself. “Centipedes and chickens are natural enemies,” he said. “Yesterday I buried a rooster here, and sure enough, it drew every centipede from all around.” He took out a coarse cloth bundle, wrapped up the chicken and the centipedes together, and slid down from the peak in high glee.

Yang Guo followed behind, his flesh creeping. Is he really going to eat centipedes? From the look on his face, he isn’t just trying to scare me. By now the pot of snow water had come to a rolling boil. Hong Qigong opened his bundle, took the centipedes by their tails and tossed them into the pot one by one. The centipedes thrashed for a while, then were all scalded to death. Hong Qigong said, “When a centipede dies, it spits out every last drop of its venom and its piss. This pot of snow water is now deadly poison.” Yang Guo tipped the poisoned water into the depths of the gorge.

Hong Qigong took out a small knife and cut off the centipedes’ heads and tails. With a light squeeze the shells fell away in his hand, baring the flesh, snow-white and translucent, like large prawns and very pretty to look at. Yang Guo thought, Done like this, who knows? Perhaps it really can be eaten. Hong Qigong boiled two more pots of snow water and rinsed the centipede meat again, until not a trace of venom remained. Then from his pack he took seven or eight iron boxes, large and small, holding oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and the like. He heated oil in the pot and tipped the centipede meat in to fry, and at once a rich smell came wafting into their nostrils. Seeing him gulp down mouthful after mouthful of drool, his greed written all over his face, Yang Guo was astonished and amused at once.

When the centipedes were fried a light gold, Hong Qigong added his seasonings and stirred them through. He reached into the pot, picked out a centipede and put it in his mouth. He chewed it gently a few times, his eyes half closed, and heaved a sigh, feeling there was no greater joy under heaven than this. He took the wine gourd from his back and set it to one side. “When you eat centipedes, don’t drink wine. It numbs the tip of your tongue and wastes the lovely flavour.” He ate more than ten at one go before he turned to Yang Guo. “Eat! What are you standing on ceremony for?”

Yang Guo shook his head. “I won’t eat.”

Hong Qigong stopped short, then burst into a roar of laughter. “Right enough. I’ve seen plenty of heroic fellows who wouldn’t so much as knit their brows at having their heads cut off and their blood spilled, but not one of them dared eat a single centipede with this old beggar. Heh heh. So you’re a coward after all, boy.”

Stung by this, Yang Guo thought, I’ll shut my eyes and swallow a few without chewing. I won’t let him look down on me. Using two thin twigs as chopsticks, he picked a fried centipede out of the pot. Hong Qigong had already guessed what he meant to do. “Shut your eyes and gulp down a dozen at one go without chewing,” he said, “and that’s just playing the shameless rogue. It isn’t what a hero and a brave man would do.”

Yang Guo said, “So eating poisonous vermin makes a man a hero and a brave man?”

Hong Qigong said, “Under heaven there are plenty of men who brag without shame that they’re heroes and brave men, but you’d be hard put to find more than a handful who dare to eat a centipede.”

Yang Guo thought, Short of dying, nothing much matters. He put the centipede in his mouth and bit down. With that one bite his mouth was filled with a wonderful savour, crisp and fragrant, sweet and rich. Never in his life had he tasted anything so extraordinary. He chewed a few more times, swallowed it down in one gulp and reached for a second. “Marvellous, marvellous,” he kept saying.

Seeing him eat with such relish, Hong Qigong was delighted, and felt that here was a boy after his own heart. The two of them grabbed and snatched against each other until every one of the hundred-odd great centipedes was gone. Hong Qigong licked round his lips for the last of the juices, wishing he had another hundred centipedes to put in his belly. Yang Guo said, “I’ll go and bury the rooster again and lure some more centipedes for us to eat.”

Hong Qigong said, “That won’t work. For one thing, the rooster’s fierce nature is spent. For another, there are no fat centipedes left anywhere near.” All of a sudden he stretched, yawned and toppled over backwards into the snow. “I’ve been chasing those villains for five days and five nights without sleep. Now that I’ve had a good meal for once, I mean to sleep a good three days. Even if the sky falls, don’t wake me. You look after me, and don’t let any wild beast bite off half my head while I’m not looking.” Yang Guo laughed. “As you say.” Hong Qigong closed his eyes, and before long he was sound asleep.

Yang Guo thought, This senior really is an extraordinary man. Will he truly sleep for three days? Whether he does or not, I’ve nowhere to go anyway, so I may as well wait three days for him. The centipedes of Mount Hua are the coldest things under heaven, and after eating them Yang Guo felt a ball of coolness in his belly, just as when he had slept on the Cold Jade Bed⁹ in the old days. He found a rock to sit on and worked at his neigong for a long while, until his whole body felt at ease. Snow as thick as goose down was still falling all across the sky, and Hong Qigong’s head and body were covered in a layer of white, like a quilt of cotton wool. A living body is warm, and snow melts when it meets warmth. How could it settle on his face? At first Yang Guo was quite baffled, but then a thought came to him and he understood. That’s it. In his sleep he’s quietly working some divine skill and drawing all the warmth inside his body. A living man, perfectly well, and asleep he’s like a corpse. Neigong of this depth is truly astonishing, truly enviable. Aunt had me sleep on the Cold Jade Bed in the hope that one day I too would build up neigong as deep as this. Ah, the Cold Jade Bed, the Cold Jade Bed!

Footnotes

1. 欧阳锋 – Ōuyáng Fēng. His name meaning “blade” or “cutting edge”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 祖师 – zǔshī. Literally ancestral master. Founder of a school, the source of a lineage rather than a rung on it. ↩

3. 洪七公 – Hóng Qīgōng. Literally Hong the Seventh Lord; the numeral seven marks seniority among sworn brothers. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 岭南 – Lǐngnán. Region south of the Five Ridges, encompassing present-day Guangdong and Guangxi. ↩

5. 鲁有脚 – Lǔ Yǒujiǎo. His name meaning “having feet”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. Dirty Clothes and Clean Clothes Factions (污衣派/净衣派). Two internal factions within the Beggars’ Guild. Dirty Clothes faction insisted on maintaining traditional beggar customs including wearing filthy rags, while the Clean Clothes faction preferred to dress neatly despite being beggars. This ideological conflict was a major source of internal strife. ↩

7. 铁掌帮 – Tiězhǎng Bāng. Martial arts organisation based at Iron Palm Peak, known for the Iron Palm technique. ↩

8. Yin (阴). In Chinese cosmology, yin is the dark, cold, feminine principle that complements yang. Mount Hua’s northern face, perpetually shaded from the sun, is described as the most yin place under heaven — extremely cold, which produces centipedes of exceptional quality. ↩

9. 寒玉床 – Hán Yù Chuáng. Bed carved from rare deep-cold jade found by Lin Chaoying. Training on it greatly accelerates neili cultivation by forcing the practitioner to circulate qi constantly to resist the cold. ↩