The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 10 – Part 9

Dawn was about to break. Hong Qigong lay entombed in a grave of snow, nothing to be seen but a hump in the ground with no human shape to it. Yang Guo felt no weariness. Everything around him was dark and gloomy. Suddenly, from the mountainside to the north-east, he heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of feet treading snow. Peering hard, he saw five dark figures racing towards him, swift of movement, with daos glinting on their backs. A thought struck Yang Guo. Most likely these are the Five Ugly Men of Sichuan the Esteemed Senior spoke of. He hurriedly hid behind a large boulder.

Before long the five men had run up to the boulder. One of them gave a startled grunt and cried, “The old beggar’s wine gourd!” Another said in a shaking voice, “He… he’s on Mount Hua?” Alarm showed on all five faces, and they huddled together and conferred in low voices. Then suddenly all five split up at once and ran for the foot of the peak. The path along the summit was narrow to begin with, and one of them had gone only a few steps when he trod on Hong Qigong. Feeling something soft underfoot, he let out a loud cry. The other four stopped and gathered round. They scraped away the snow and saw Hong Qigong lying on the ground, apparently long dead. The five were overjoyed. They felt for his breath, and there was none, and his body was ice-cold all over. The five whooped and shouted and capered about, a hundred times more delighted than if they had stumbled on some rare treasure.

One said, “This old beggar’s been on our trail the whole way and made our lives a misery, and here he is, dead.” Another said, “Hong Qigong, the old scoundrel, his martial skill was formidable. How could he just drop dead like that?” A third said, “However good your martial skill, does that stop you dying? Think about it, how old was the old scoundrel?” Another said, “He wasn’t all that old. With neigong as strong as his, he shouldn’t have died so soon.” Another said, “Thank heaven King Yama¹ took him, or he’d have been hard to handle.” The first man said, “Come on, everyone, let’s hack the old scoundrel a few times to vent our spleen! For all that the Nine-Fingered Divine Beggar Hong Qigong was the greatest hero of the age, in the end he got chopped into a bloody seventeen or twenty-eight pieces by the Five Heroes of Sichuan.”

Yang Guo thought, So this senior is Hong Qigong. No wonder his martial skill is so formidable. He had heard Xiaolongnü speak in idle talk of Hong Qigong’s name and of great techniques such as the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing,² but even Lin Chaoying in her day had known little of Hong Qigong’s looks or temper, and Xiaolongnü naturally knew less still. Yang Guo had Jade Bee Needles ready in his hand. He thought that the five would be hard to take on all at once. He would have to wait his chance to loose his hidden weapons by stealth, and once he had wounded two or three, the rest would be easy to deal with. But then he heard the man talk of hacking Hong Qigong to vent their spleen, and fearing they would hurt Hong Qigong before he could loose his needles, he gave a great shout and sprang out from behind the boulder. He had no weapon, so he snatched up two sticks and launched a rapid string of moves, thrusting at each of the five in turn. The five moves were extraordinarily fast. It was a pity he had shouted first and put the Five Ugly Men on their guard, or one or two of them would surely have been hit. Even so, they were badly flustered, and only by leaping, dodging and parrying did they escape.

The five turned round and saw nothing but a ragged youth holding two bits of dry firewood, and eight or nine tenths of their fear left them at once. The Eldest Ugly Man shouted, “Stinking brat, are you one of the Beggars’ Guild’s little beggars? Your old beggar of an ancestor has gone west. Down on your knees and kowtow to your five grandads, quick.”

From the way the five had dodged just now, Yang Guo had already roughly gauged how deep their martial skill went. All five used heavy, thick-backed daos. They had learned their martial arts from the same shifu, and though some were more skilled than others, their style was one and the same. One against one he was sure to win, but if all five came at him together he could not hold them off. Hearing the Eldest Ugly Man tell him to kowtow, he said, “Yes, yes. I’ll kowtow to you five, sirs.” He stepped forward and went down in a bow. This kneeling bow was the move “Forward Respect, Backward Crouch”,³ which Grandma Sun⁴ had once used against the Quanzhen Daoist Zhang Zhiguang,⁵ flinging a porcelain bottle at him when he least expected it and very nearly blinding him. Now, after “Forward Respect, Backward Crouch”, Yang Guo followed with “Pushing Open the Window to Gaze at the Moon”.⁶ Both his hands swept out sideways, and the two sticks struck out to left and right.

On his left was the Fifth Ugly Man, on his right the Third. “Pushing Open the Window to Gaze at the Moon” was a vicious move. The Third Ugly Man, the more skilled of the two, quickly raised his dao on end to parry. The stick struck the back of the blade, the web of his hand burned, and he nearly lost his grip on the dao. But the stick caught the Fifth Ugly Man across the shin with a crack. The bone did not break, but the pain was so bad he could not stand. The other four were enraged, and four daos came whooshing down at him. Yang Guo was nimble on his feet and dodged this way and that, and for the moment the four could do nothing with him. After they had fought a while, the Fifth Ugly Man came limping back into the fight, beside himself with fury and fighting as if his life depended on it.

Yang Guo’s qinggong was far better than any of theirs, and had he wanted to run, it would not have been hard. But he was worried about Hong Qigong. He feared that if he went even a step away, the five would kill him. Yet he could not beat the five of them together, and in moments he was in danger again and again. So he stooped, lifted Hong Qigong in his arms, and with the stick whirling in his right hand he forced his way out and ran more than a hundred feet. The Five Ugly Men of Sichuan came after him.

Yang Guo felt how icy cold Hong Qigong’s body was in his arms, and he began to panic. He thought, However deeply he sleeps, he can’t possibly fail to wake. Can he really be dead? “Esteemed Senior! Esteemed Senior!” he called. Hong Qigong did not stir in the least. He was no different from a corpse, except that he was not stiff. Yang Guo felt his chest. His heart seemed to be beating faintly, but there was no breath at all.

In that brief pause the Eldest Ugly Man had caught up. But he had seen how formidable Yang Guo’s martial skill was, and wary of him, he dared not close in alone. By the time he had waited for the Second and Fourth Ugly Men to join him, Yang Guo was another hundred feet and more away. The Five Ugly Men of Sichuan saw him climb towards the summit. There was only one path up that peak, and they thought, Do you think you can fly up into the sky? So they were in no great hurry, and followed him up step by step.

The higher the path went, the more dangerous it became. Rounding a bend, Yang Guo saw that the path ahead was extremely narrow, barely wide enough for one man to pass, and beside the narrow way was an abyss a hundred thousand feet deep, wreathed in cloud and mist so that no bottom could be seen. He thought, I’ll hold them off right here. He quickened his pace across the narrow stretch, laid Hong Qigong down beside a large boulder and turned straight back. The Eldest Ugly Man had already reached the mouth of the narrow path. Yang Guo charged straight at him, shouting, “You ugly freak, do you dare come on?”

The Eldest Ugly Man was terrified that if Yang Guo crashed into him they would both go over into the gorge, and he hastily backed away. Yang Guo planted himself at the mouth of the path. By now the morning sun was rising and the snow had stopped. As far as the eye could see, the whole mountain was decked in jade and the ground spread with crystal, and the sunlight on the white snow was lovely beyond compare.

Yang Guo clapped the human-skin mask over his face. “Who’s uglier,” he shouted, “you or me?” The Five Ugly Men of Sichuan were certainly no beauties, but they were not freakish beyond belief either. The “Ugly” in their name referred rather to their conduct. Now they saw Yang Guo pass his hands over his face and suddenly become someone else, his skin waxen yellow, his features dead and wooden, like a corpse crawled out of its grave, and the five stared at one another, every one of them appalled.

Yang Guo slowly backed to the narrowest point of the path and took up the “Kui Xing Kicking the Dipper” stance,⁷ his left foot on the ground, his right kicking up to the sky, his body swaying gently in the dawn wind. In that instant a heroic spirit filled his breast. Let the enemy charge at me with a thousand chariots and ten thousand horses. I’ll hold this pass alone, just like this.

The Five Ugly Men wondered uneasily, Where did the Beggars’ Guild dig up such a strange youth? Seeing how treacherous the ground was, they dared not charge the narrow path. They put their heads together and decided, “We’ll stay here and take turns going down the mountain for food. Within two days we’ll have him starved and worn out.” Four of them stood in a row across the mouth of the narrow way, and the Second Ugly Man went down the mountain to fetch food.

And so the two sides were locked in a standoff. Yang Guo dared not cross over, and the four Ugly Men dared not come across.

Footnotes

1. King Yama (阎罗王). Judge and ruler of the underworld in Chinese Buddhist and folk mythology. Five Ugly Men invoke him here as the equivalent of Death itself. ↩

2. 降龙十八掌 – Xiánglóng Shíbā Zhǎng. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. Forward Respect, Backward Crouch (前恭后踞). Deceptive combat technique where the practitioner begins with a respectful bow (appearing to surrender or show deference) before suddenly launching an attack from the crouched position. Name reflects the contrast between the obsequious front and the predatory rear. ↩

4. Grandma Sun (孙婆婆). Elderly caretaker of the Ancient Tomb who rescued Yang Guo when he fled the Quanzhen Order. She was killed by Hao Datong while protecting Yang Guo, and with her dying breath she entrusted him to Xiaolongnü’s care. ↩

5. 张志光 – Zhāng Zhìguāng. Quanzhen Daoist whom Grandma Sun attacked using the “Forward Respect, Backward Crouch” technique. He was nearly blinded when she threw a porcelain bottle at him. ↩

6. Pushing Open the Window to Gaze at the Moon (推窗望月). Combat technique involving a sudden two-handed sweeping attack. Name evokes the image of flinging open window shutters to look at the moon, suggesting a wide, outward-expanding motion. ↩

7. Kui Xing Kicking the Dipper Stance (魁星踢斗势). Martial stance named after Kui Xing, the Daoist god of examinations and literature, who is often depicted standing on one leg with the other kicking upward toward the Big Dipper constellation. In martial arts, it is a one-legged stance with the other leg raised, combining balance, readiness, and dramatic presence. ↩