The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 19

The old woman beneath the earth

In the instant that his foot touched the water, Yang Guo¹ felt a leap of joy: he knew his life was safe, for now. Otherwise, dropping straight down from a height of several hundred feet, the two of them could not have escaped death. The fall had been hard and drove them deep, and he felt himself sinking on and on, as though he would never stop. He held his breath until the plunge slowed, then, with Gongsun Lü’e² held in his left arm, stroked upward with his right. He had barely broken the surface and gulped a breath when a rank, fishy stench struck his nostrils, and in the same moment the water to his left heaved and churned, as if some enormous water creature were bearing down on them.

A single thought flashed through his mind, That villain of a Valley Master has trapped the two of us down here. What good can come of it? His right palm chopped hard to the left. With a resounding crack it struck something hard, the water surged in great waves, and riding the force of the blow he swept Gongsun Lü’e away to the right.

He was no swimmer. He could last underwater only because his neigong let him hold his breath.³ All was pitch black. He heard rapid splashing to his left and behind him, and as his right palm swept out it came down suddenly on a broad expanse of something cold and rough, like the scales of some water beast. He started violently. Can there really be venomous dragons in this world?⁴ He threw his strength into his hand and sprang upward, driving the creature down under the water. He drew a deep breath and was making ready to dive again when, to his surprise, his right foot came down on solid ground. He had not expected it, the force in his leg was all wrong, and he landed so hard that pain shot through his right leg.

In his relief he paid no heed to the pain. He reached out and felt about: it was rock at the edge of the deep pool. Afraid the creature would come at them again, he hurried to carry Lü’e up to higher ground, and only when he was seated firmly did his fright begin to ease. Gongsun Lü’e had swallowed several mouthfuls of water and was half senseless. Yang Guo laid her face down across his knees and let the water slowly run out of her. Then came a scrabbling on the rocks, the fishy reek grew stronger, and several of the creatures crawled up out of the pool.

Lü’e rolled over and sat up, threw her arms round Yang Guo’s neck and cried in alarm, “What is that?” “Don’t be afraid,” said Yang Guo. “Get behind me.” Lü’e did not move. She only clung to him the harder and said in a trembling voice, “Crocodiles. Crocodiles!”

When he was living on Peach Blossom Island,⁵ Yang Guo had seen plenty of crocodiles, and he knew them for savage, merciless beasts, worse even than the tigers and wolves of dry land. Whenever he and Guo Fu⁶ and the Wu brothers came across them in those days, they had never dared to provoke them and had always given them a wide berth. He had never dreamed he would meet them again here, in a deep pool under the earth. He settled himself firmly and listened hard. From the sound of their feet he could tell there were three of them, crawling closer step by step.

Lü’e said softly, “Big Brother Yang, I never thought you and I would die in the same place.” There was even a note of gladness in her voice. Yang Guo laughed. “Even if we must die, we’ll kill a few crocodiles first.”

By now the leading crocodile was less than ten feet from Yang Guo’s feet. “Hit it, quick!” cried Lü’e. “Wait a little longer,” said Yang Guo. He stretched out his right foot and let it dangle over the edge of the rock. The crocodile crawled a few feet closer, opened its great jaws and bit down savagely at the foot. Yang Guo drew the foot back and lashed out with a kick that caught the beast full under the jaw. It went somersaulting back into the pool. There was a great splashing as the crocodiles below stirred and thrashed, and meanwhile the other two had crawled closer.

Though Yang Guo carried the deadly poison of the Passion Flower,⁷ his martial skill had not suffered in the least, and that kick had carried several hundred jin of force.⁸ But a crocodile’s hide is hard as armour. The tips of his toes still ached faintly from the blow, while the crocodile, back in the pool, swam about as freely as ever. He thought, With bare hands I can never deal with so many of these brutes. If this goes on, Miss Gongsun and I will be eaten sooner or later. How can I find a way to kill every last one of them? He reached out for a large stone to use as a weapon, but the rock was slick and bare, without so much as a grain of sand on it. He heard the two crocodiles crawl closer still, and asked quickly, “Do you have a jian on you?”

Gongsun Lü’e said, “On me?” She remembered that in the Alchemy Chamber she had taken off her dress and was left in nothing but her underclothes,⁹ and here she was nestled in Yang Guo’s arms. She was overcome with shame and burned hot all over, yet in her heart there was a sweet gladness she could hardly contain.

Yang Guo’s whole attention was on the crocodiles, and he noticed nothing amiss with her. He could hear that two of them were no more than ten feet in front of him and two more behind. He could have struck them back into the pool with his palms, but they would only come again a moment later, which would gain him nothing while his neili¹⁰ drained steadily away. So he gathered his strength and held it. When the two in front had crawled to within three feet, he struck out suddenly with both palms, and with a crack, crack the blows landed on both heads at once. Crocodiles are clumsy at turning, and they did not know to dodge as his palms came down, but their armoured hide was thick and the blows only stunned them for a moment before they slid back into the pool. In that same instant the two behind reached him. Yang Guo kicked one off the rock with his left foot, but he kicked too hard, his hold on Lü’e slipped, and she tipped sideways and slid down towards the water.

Lü’e cried out in alarm, pressed her right hand to the rock and heaved herself up, and Yang Guo put a palm under her back and lifted her to safety. That little delay was enough. The last crocodile was upon him, its huge jaws gaping to clamp down on his shoulder. It was too late now for a punch or a kick. He could have leapt aside, but when those jaws snapped shut they might well close on Lü’e. In that desperate moment he shot out both hands, seized the upper jaw in one and the lower in the other, summoned his neili and gave a great shout. There was a loud crack, the jaws tore apart, and the crocodile died on the spot.

Though Yang Guo had killed the brute with his bare hands, the fright had left his back soaked in cold sweat. “You’re not hurt?” asked Lü’e. Yang Guo heard both tenderness and concern in her voice, and something stirred faintly in his heart. “No,” he said. Only his arms ached a little from the violence of the effort. Lü’e could tell that the dead crocodile lay on the rock without moving, and she was full of admiration. “How did you kill it with your bare hands? And how can you see so clearly in the dark?” “I lived with my aunt¹¹ in the ancient tomb for many years,” said Yang Guo. “So long as there’s the faintest glimmer of light, I can see.”¹² Speaking of Aunt and the ancient tomb, he could not hold back a long sigh. All at once a violent pain swept through his whole body, beyond all bearing, and he could not stop himself crying out aloud, and in the same moment his foot flew out and kicked the dead crocodile into the pool.

Two crocodiles were climbing up onto the rock. At his howl of agony they took fright and leapt back into the water.

Gongsun Lü’e quickly took hold of his arm, and with her other hand she gently stroked his forehead, hoping to ease his pain a little. Yang Guo knew the poison in him was deadly. Even without this peril he had only a few days left to live. He had heard Valley Master Gongsun say the pain would go on for thirty-six days before he died, but pain like this was more than flesh could bear, and after a few more bouts he would surely give way and take his own life. Yet once he was dead, who would protect Lü’e? That would be cruel beyond words. He thought, She is in this danger entirely because of me. However much it hurts, I must hold on. If only the Valley Master has a little of a father’s feeling left, and in the end relents and fetches her out. As he turned this over in his mind he forgot Xiaolongnü¹³ for a while, and the pain eased at once. “Miss Gongsun, don’t be afraid,” he said. “I think your father will come and get you out soon. It’s only me he hates. He has always doted on you, and by now he must be bitterly sorry.”

Gongsun Lü’e wept. “When my mother was alive, Father truly did love me dearly. After she died he grew colder to me day by day, but he… but he… in his heart, I know he doesn’t hate me.” She fell silent for a moment, and then all at once many strange, inexplicable things came back to her. “Big Brother Yang, I’ve just thought of something. Father has always been afraid of me.” “Afraid of you?” said Yang Guo in surprise. “Now that is strange.” “Yes,” said Lü’e. “I always felt that when Father saw me there was something unnatural in his face, as if he were hiding something important and dreaded my finding out. All these years he has kept out of my way as much as he could, so that he need not see me.”

She had noticed her father’s strange looks before, and though she had wondered at them, whenever she thought of it she had always put it down to grief at her mother’s death, which had changed his temper. But this fall into the crocodile pool had plainly been a trap of her father’s making. When he moved the three furnaces in the Alchemy Chamber, he had of course been working the trapdoor. If he hated Yang Guo and wanted him dead, Yang Guo was already poisoned by the Passion Flower and needed only to be left untreated to die. Besides, at that moment he was already falling towards the crocodile pool, beyond all hope of escape. Why, then, had her father pushed her into the pool as well? Where was there a shred of a father’s love in that push? It was no slip of the hand in a moment of fury. There had to be a plot behind it, some wicked purpose. The more she thought, the more it hurt, but the clearer it became. Many of her father’s peculiar words and deeds had baffled her at the time, and she had explained them away with the words “odd and eccentric”. Looking back now, they all plainly sprang from a single word: fear. But why he should be afraid of his own daughter, she could not begin to guess.

Footnotes

1. 杨过 – Yáng Guò. His name meaning “fault or transgression”; his courtesy name Gaizhi means “to correct it”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 公孙绿萼 – Gōngsūn Lǜ’è. Her name meaning “green calyx”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 内功 – nèigōng. Literally internal skill. Practice of developing neili through breathing, meditation and qi cultivation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 毒龙 – Dúlóng. Literally venomous dragon; a malevolent water dragon of Chinese legend. ↩

5. 桃花岛 – Táohuā Dǎo. Huang Yaoshi’s island stronghold, continued from LOCH era. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 郭芙 – Guō Fú. Her name meaning “lotus”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 情花 – Qínghuā. Flower of the Passionless Valley whose thorns poison those who entertain thoughts of love. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 斤 – jīn. Traditional Chinese unit of weight, approximately 500 grams or 1.1 pounds. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 丹房 – Dānfáng. Alchemy Chamber, one of the four chambers of the manor in Passionless Valley. ↩

10. 内力 – nèilì. Literally internal force. Kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi; generates tangible effects such as deflecting weapons or scaling walls. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 姑姑 – gūgu. Literally paternal aunt, used here as a term of respectful address for a young woman of the older generation. Yang Guo uses this to address Xiaolongnü, his shifu. ↩

12. 古墓 – Gǔmù. Underground tomb complex beneath Zhongnan Mountain, home of the Ancient Tomb School. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 小龙女 – Xiǎolóngnǚ. Literally little dragon maiden. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩