The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 15 – Part 8

The two of them stood frozen for a moment. Then Cheng Ying, hearing their voices, came out too. “When did you see this?” she asked. “Before it was light,” said Lu Wushuang, and the words were hardly out before she blushed scarlet: thinking of Yang Guo, she had been pacing beneath his window since the small hours. Cheng Ying pretended not to notice. “Luckily we didn’t run into her. The sun will be up soon, and the witch won’t come today. There’s time enough to think out what to do.” The three of them went into Yang Guo’s room to talk it over.

“The other day she got a taste of Shagu’s poker,” said Lu Wushuang. “Why isn’t she afraid any more?” “Shijie’s poker moves are only those few, round and round,” said Cheng Ying. “She must have gone away, thought it over carefully, and worked out a way to break them.” “But Fool’s wounds are healed,” said Lu Wushuang. “With the two fools fighting side by side, won’t they be unstoppable?”

Yang Guo roared with laughter. “Fool plus Shagu makes one great muddle. What’s unstoppable about that?”

The three of them talked for a while but hit on no clever plan. Still, they reckoned that with four of them fighting together, even if they could not win, they could at least hold their own, and tomorrow they would simply fight her with all they had. “The two fools will take her on together from the front,” said Yang Guo, “and you two cousins attack from either side. Let’s go and find Shagu and practise it first.”

But when they called for Shagu there was no answer. She had gone, no one knew where. All three grew worried and split up to search the hill, front and back. After searching a while, Cheng Ying suddenly found Shagu lying on the ground among a jumble of rocks, her breath no more than a thread. Horrified, she opened Shagu’s clothes to look, and saw on her back the faint print of a blood-red palm. She had been struck by Li Mochou’s Scarlet Serpent Divine Palm. Cheng Ying hurriedly called the other two over, then took out the wonder-working medicine of her school, the Nine Flower Jade Dew Pills,¹ and gave them to Shagu. Yang Guo remembered the method recorded in the Secret Manual of the Five Venoms for treating this poison palm, and quickly set his neili² working to knead her acupoints.

Shagu giggled foolishly. “Bad woman. Behind. Hit me. Shagu. Backhand. Hit her.” Shagu’s backhand palm was one of the three moves Huang Yaoshi had taught her. Li Mochou’s sneak attack had found its mark, but the backhand had caught her on the forearm and very nearly broken the bone, and in shock and pain she had fled at once, not daring to press on and take Shagu’s life.

The three of them brought Shagu back and sat facing one another in gloom. Of the four of them, they had lost one of their best fighters, and tomorrow she would be all the harder to hold off. Shagu was badly hurt, and if they tried to get her away, Li Mochou would be sure to catch them. Yang Guo looked at Cheng Ying, then at Lu Wushuang, and idly picked up a silk thread from the sewing basket and snipped it into pieces with a pair of scissors. Shagu, lying on the bed, suddenly shouted, “Cut it, the bad woman’s broom! Cut the broom!” She did not know the word “whisk”, so she called it a “broom”.

A thought struck Yang Guo. The witch’s whisk is a soft thing, and she wields it like a god. No treasured dao or keen jian can hurt it. But if we really had a great pair of shears for a weapon, and with one snip cut it in two, that would be wonderful. With that thought he shook the silk thread in his left hand as though a whisk were striking, put out the scissors in his right and cut the thread in two. Then, imagining the whisk’s line of attack, he went after it with the scissors, working out moves as he went.

Cheng Ying and Lu Wushuang watched for a while and saw what he had in mind, and their faces lit up. “Seven or eight li north of here there’s a blacksmith’s shop…” said Cheng Ying. “Good idea,” Lu Wushuang broke in. “Let’s have the blacksmith hammer out a great pair of shears for us.” Yang Guo thought, There’s no time to learn a weapon like this properly. I’ll just have to make it up as the fight goes, but that’s still a hundred times easier than learning the Jade Flute Swordplay. There’s nothing else for it anyway, so we may as well try. He thought, too, that if one of them went alone to order it at the smithy and Li Mochou suddenly struck, it would be deadly dangerous. Just now the four of them could not afford to be parted for a moment. So Cheng Ying and Lu Wushuang padded the horse’s back with bedding, laid Shagu across it, and they all went to the blacksmith’s shop together.

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After the Mongols had destroyed the Jin, their iron cavalry had pushed into Song territory. This was the northern edge of the Great Song’s lands, and most of the towns were held by Mongol troops and lay in ruins. The smithy was a crude, bare place. Just inside the door stood a great iron anvil, and the floor was strewn with coal dust and scraps of iron. On the walls hung a few ploughshares and sickles. The place was silent and empty.

Yang Guo looked about and thought, What sort of weapon could anyone make in a place like this? “Is the master smith at home?” he called. After a long while an old man came out of a side room. His hair and beard were grizzled, and he looked about fifty. Years of stooping over the anvil had hunched his back, his eyes were red and narrowed from the smoke and fire, and their rims were crusted with yellow matter. His left leg was crippled, and he propped himself on a crutch under his armpit. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.

Yang Guo was about to answer when he heard hoofbeats, and two riders came charging up to the shop door. One was a Mongol squad leader, the other a Han Chinese, whether an interpreter or a village headman they could not tell. “Where’s Feng the blacksmith?” the Han man shouted. “Come here and hear your orders.” The old smith came forward and bowed. “That’s me.” “Orders from the commander,” said the man. “Every blacksmith in the town is to report to the county seat within three days, to serve with the army. You report to the county seat tomorrow. Do you hear?” “I’m so old…” said Feng the blacksmith. The Mongol squad leader raised his whip, brought it down across his head, and jabbered a few words. “If you’re not there tomorrow,” said the Han man, “mind your head doesn’t part from your shoulders.” With that the two of them galloped off.

Feng the blacksmith heaved a long sigh and stood staring blankly. Cheng Ying, seeing how old and pitiful he was, took out ten liang³ of silver and laid them on the table. “Master Feng,” she said, “at your age, and lame as well, if they send you to the Mongol army, won’t it just be throwing your life away? Take this silver and get away!” Feng the blacksmith sighed. “Thank you for your kindness, miss. An old smith who’s lived as long as I have, life or death hardly matters. What’s to be pitied is that the countless souls of Jiangnan are about to meet with catastrophe.” In fact he was not so very old, only fifty or so, but he was so listless and feeble, so stooped and bent, that he looked twice his age.

All three of them started. “Why?” they asked together. “If the Mongol marshal is rounding up blacksmiths, it must be to make weapons,” said Feng the blacksmith. “The Mongol army has always been well supplied with weapons. If they want to make a great many more, they must mean to march south and attack the Great Song.” The three of them found his words far from common and his reasoning sound. They were about to ask more when Feng the blacksmith said, “What did the three of you want made?”

“Master Feng, you have troubles of your own,” said Yang Guo, “and we shouldn’t bother you. But we need it urgently, so we must ask you to take the trouble.” Then he described the shape and size of the great shears. It was an odd thing to ask for, yet to their surprise Feng the blacksmith showed no sign of astonishment when he heard it. He simply nodded, worked the bellows to get the forge going, and put two pieces of fine steel into the fire to melt. “Can it be made tonight?” asked Yang Guo. “I’ll work as fast as I can,” said Feng the blacksmith, and he pumped the bellows hard until the coals in the forge glowed blood-red. This place was close to the north, yet Feng the blacksmith spoke with a Jiangnan accent.

Shagu lay slumped over the table, half sitting, half lying. Yang Guo and the two girls all came from Jiangnan, and though they had left it young, to hear that their home was about to meet with catastrophe filled all three of them with gloom. Gazing into the forge fire, each of them thought how, in such chaotic times, a human life was cheap and misery and hardship were everywhere. Tomorrow would bring them danger, but the whole world was in the same plight, and their fear and dread grew a little fainter.

After more than a shichen,⁴ Feng the blacksmith had finished melting the iron. With the tongs in his left hand he lifted the red-hot bars onto the anvil, raised a great iron hammer in his right and began to beat them. Old as he was, his arms were strong, and he swung the hammer as though it cost him no effort at all. He hammered for a long time, and they watched him bend the two bars into the rough shape of a great pair of shears, which slowly took form. “Fool,” Lu Wushuang said happily, “it’ll be done tonight after all.”

Suddenly someone behind them said coldly, “Making a great pair of shears to cut my whisk, are you?” The three of them spun round in alarm, and there stood Li Mochou in the doorway, lightly swaying her whisk.

The weapon was not yet made, and the dread enemy had arrived. Cheng Ying and Lu Wushuang each drew her long jian. Yang Guo had his eye on an iron bar beside the forge, ready to snatch it up the moment she made a move.

Li Mochou sneered. “Making shears to cut my whisk, trust you children to think of that. I’ll sit here and wait until your shears are made. There’ll be time enough to fight then.” She pulled up a bench and sat down, treating the three of them as if they were not there.

“Nothing could be better,” said Yang Guo. “The way I see it, that whisk of yours is bound to end up snipped in two by our shears.”

Li Mochou saw Shagu slumped over the table, her back faintly rising and falling, and thought, That woman took a blow from my palm and can still sit up. She’s tougher than she looks. “Where’s Huang Yaoshi?” she asked coldly. At the name “Huang Yaoshi” Feng the blacksmith gave a start. He looked up and glanced at her, then lowered his head and went on hammering. “You know perfectly well my shifu isn’t here,” said Cheng Ying. “Why ask? If you knew he hadn’t gone, you wouldn’t dare come, not with all the courage under heaven.”

Li Mochou snorted and took a sheet of white paper from inside her robe. “Huang Yaoshi has stolen a name he never earned, and all he has to rely on is taking a great many disciples and winning by numbers. Hmph! And of all those disciples of his, which one is any real use?” She flung the paper out, her arm moved slightly, and a silver needle flew after it and pinned the paper to a pillar. “Let this stay here as proof,” she said, “so that when Old Heretic Huang comes back, he’ll know who killed these two precious disciples of his.” She turned to Feng the blacksmith and snapped, “Hurry up with that hammering. I’m in no mood to wait long.”

Feng the blacksmith narrowed his red eyes and looked at the paper. On it were written the sixteen characters, “The Master of Peach Blossom Island, disciples in great number; five against one, a laughingstock to the jianghu.”⁵ He raised his head and gazed up at the roof, lost in thought. “Get on with it, won’t you?” said Li Mochou. Feng the blacksmith lowered his head. “Yes, yes. Nearly done, nearly done.” He put out the tongs in his left hand, plucked needle and paper together from the pillar and dropped them into the roaring fire of the forge, and in an instant the white paper was ash.

They were all astonished. Li Mochou was furious, and raised her whisk to strike him on the crown of his head. But then a thought came to her: An old blacksmith in a little town like this, and so bold. Could he be no ordinary man? She had already risen, and now she slowly sat down again. “And who might you be, sir?” she asked. “Can’t you see?” said Feng the blacksmith. “I’m an old blacksmith.” “Why did you burn my paper?” said Li Mochou. “What was written on it was wrong,” said Feng the blacksmith. “Better not have it pinned up in my shop.” “What was wrong with it?” Li Mochou demanded harshly.

Footnotes

1. 九花玉露丸 – Jiǔhuā Yùlù Wán. Peach Blossom Island healing medicine. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 内力 – nèilì. Kinetic manifestation of qi. The force that martial artists cultivate and wield. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 两 – liǎng. A traditional unit of weight used for silver, roughly 37 grams. ↩

4. 时辰 – shíchén. Two hours; the day divided into twelve. ↩

5. 江湖 – jiānghú. Literally rivers and lakes. The itinerant world beyond settled society and official reach, holding not only martial artists but the trades that travel with them. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩