The Return of the Condor Heroes Chapter 5 – Part 2

The two of them came out of the tomb gate and into the forest, and suddenly they heard someone outside call in a clear, ringing voice, “Zhen Zhibing,¹ disciple of the Quanzhen Order,² by command of my shifu, begs to pay his respects to Miss Long.” The voice came from far off, plainly from beyond the forbidden ground. Zhen Zhibing was Qiu Chuji’s³ second disciple, a formidable martial artist and a man of real ability, highly regarded within the Quanzhen Order.

“There are people outside looking for you,” said Granny Sun. “Don’t go out yet.” Alarmed and furious, Yang Guo was shaking all over. “Granny, don’t worry about me. What a man does, he answers for himself. I killed a man by accident, so let them kill me to pay for it.” With that he strode out. “I’ll go with you,” said Granny Sun.

Granny Sun led Yang Guo by the hand through the trees to the open ground in front of the forest. In the moonlight they saw six or seven Daoists standing in a row, and four Daoist lay workers carrying the badly wounded Zhao Zhijing and Lu Qingdu.⁴ When the Daoists saw Yang Guo, they murmured among themselves and, all of one accord, took several steps forward. Yang Guo shook off Granny Sun’s hand, strode up to them and said loudly, “Here I am. Kill me or cut me to pieces, it’s all up to you. There’s no need to go bothering other people!”

The Daoists had never imagined that so small a boy could be so stiff-necked, and they were all taken aback. One of them darted forward, seized Yang Guo by the back of the collar and dragged him over. Yang Guo gave a cold laugh. “I’m not running away. What’s your hurry?” This Daoist was Zhao Zhijing’s eldest disciple. He had watched his shifu stung by the jade bees on Yang Guo’s account and writhing in agony, and nobody knew yet whether his life could be saved. He had always held his shifu in the deepest respect, and he thought it the very height of lawlessness for a disciple to defy his own shifu so. When Yang Guo answered him back, he punched him on the head without a second thought.

Granny Sun had meant to talk the Daoists round with fair words, and seeing Yang Guo dragged off by force had already been hard enough to bear. When she suddenly saw him struck, how could she hold down the rage in her heart? She strode forward, gave her sleeve a shake and swept it across the Daoist’s hand. He felt a burning, searing pain in his wrist and let go in spite of himself. Before he could shout at her, Granny Sun had already picked Yang Guo up, turned and walked away.

She might look nothing but a doddering, feeble old woman, but she had snatched the boy with astonishing speed. The Daoists were still staring blankly when she was already ten feet or more away with Yang Guo. “Put him down!” three of them roared, and rushed after her together. Granny Sun stopped and looked back with a cold laugh. “What do you want?”

Zhen Zhibing knew that the people of the Tomb of the Living Dead had ties with his own school going back a long way, and he dared not give offence lightly. First he called the others to order. “Spread out, all of you. No discourtesy before a senior.” Only then did he step forward and bow. “Your junior Zhen Zhibing pays his respects, Senior.” “What do you want?” said Granny Sun. “This child is a disciple of our Quanzhen Order,” said Zhen Zhibing. “I beg you, Senior, to give him back.” Granny Sun’s brows shot up. “You’ve beaten him like this in front of my very eyes,” she said harshly. “Once you’ve dragged him back to your temple, who knows how you’ll torment him? Give him back? Never!” Zhen Zhibing swallowed his anger. “This child is unruly beyond words. He has defied his shifu and flouted his forebears, and made a mockery of the rules of our school. In the wulin,⁵ people set great store by respect for their teachers. If our humble Order punishes him, that is surely no more than he deserves.” “Defied his shifu and flouted his forebears?” Granny Sun said angrily. “That’s only one side of the story.” She pointed at Lu Qingdu lying on his stretcher. “The boy fought this fat Daoist because your own Quanzhen Order made it the rule. He didn’t want to fight, and you forced him into the ring. Once it comes to blows, naturally somebody wins and somebody loses. If this fat Daoist is no good himself, whose fault is that?” Her face was ugly enough to begin with, and now, swollen purple with anger, it was more frightening still.

Zhen Zhibing knew in his heart that Yang Guo was not really to blame for hurting Lu Qingdu, but he could not let the Order lose face before an outsider. “The rights and wrongs of this affair,” he said, “we shall of course lay before our Grand Shifu, the Head of the Order,⁶ and he in his wisdom will judge it fairly. I beg you, Senior, to hand the child over.” Granny Sun gave a cold laugh. “And what’s so fair about your Head of the Order? From Wang Chongyang down, the Quanzhen Order has never had a single good man in it. If that weren’t so, why, living as close as we do, would we never have had anything to do with each other?” Zhen Zhibing thought, It’s you who won’t have anything to do with us, so how can you blame the Quanzhen Order? And now you’ve even reviled the Perfected One⁷ who founded our Order. That’s going too far. But he had no wish to start a war of words that would sour the peace between the two houses, so all he said was, “I beg you, Senior, to be gracious. If our humble Order has given any offence, we shall come to your door at the Head of the Order’s bidding and make our apologies.”

Yang Guo put his arms round Granny Sun’s neck and whispered in her ear, “Granny, don’t let him fool you.”

For eighteen years Granny Sun had brought Xiaolongnü up, and deep in her heart she had always longed to raise a boy as well. Now, with Yang Guo so affectionate towards her, she was overjoyed, and her mind was made up. Whatever happens, I won’t let them snatch this child. “If you’re so set on taking the boy,” she cried, “just how do you mean to torment him?” Zhen Zhibing was taken aback. “I was a fellow disciple of this child’s late father,” he said. “I could never be hard on a dead friend’s orphan. You may set your mind at rest, Esteemed Senior.” Granny Sun shook her head. “This old woman never listens to outsiders’ prattle. I’ll take my leave.” With that she set off towards the forest.

Zhao Zhijing lay on his stretcher. The jade bee stings tormented him with a numbness and itching he could hardly bear, but his mind was perfectly clear. Listening to Zhen Zhibing and Granny Sun bandy words on and on without settling anything, he grew angrier and angrier, and all at once he sprang up out of the stretcher, landed in front of Granny Sun and shouted, “This is my disciple. Whether I beat him or scold him is up to me. Is there any rule in the wulin that says a shifu may not discipline his own disciple?”

Granny Sun saw that his face was swollen up like a pig’s head. From what he said, she knew he must be Yang Guo’s shifu, and for a moment she had no answer, so she fell back on bluster. “Well, I won’t let you discipline him. What are you going to do about it?” “What is this child to you?” Zhao Zhijing shouted. “What right have you to meddle?” Granny Sun was stumped for a moment. Then she said loudly, “He’s no disciple of your Quanzhen Order any more. This child has taken our Miss Xiaolongnü as his shifu, and whether he’s good or bad, nobody under heaven but Miss Xiaolongnü has any say over him. You’d best stop meddling in other people’s business, the sooner the better.”

The Daoists broke into an uproar. It had always been a rule in the wulin that no one might take another shifu without leave from his own. Even if the new teacher’s skill were ten times greater, one could not change allegiance on a whim and fly off to a higher branch. To do so was the gravest of betrayals, and everyone in the wulin would scorn it. Years before, when Guo Jing⁸ studied under Hong Qigong⁹ after becoming a disciple of the Seven Freaks of Jiangnan,¹⁰ he had never once called Hong Qigong “Shifu” until Ke Zhen’e¹¹ and the others gave their formal consent. Only then were he and Hong Qigong shifu and disciple in name. Now Granny Sun, cut short by Zhao Zhijing and left with no answer, had said the first thing that came into her head. She had never had dealings with anyone of the wulin and knew nothing of these rules, and she had no idea she had broken one of its gravest taboos. Most of the Quanzhen Daoists had felt sorry for Yang Guo and thought Zhao Zhijing had handled things badly, but to hear that Yang Guo dared openly to renounce his school, a thing unheard of since the Quanzhen Order was founded, made every one of them furious.

Zhao Zhijing’s stings flared now with fierce pain, now with a maddening itch. It was almost more than he could bear, and he felt it would be a relief simply to die. He gritted his teeth and asked Yang Guo, “Yang Guo, is this true?”

Yang Guo had never known his own limits. Seeing Granny Sun quarrel with Zhao Zhijing to protect him, he would have owned to a thousand, ten thousand unpardonable crimes had she laid them at his door, let alone a mere change of shifu, which was exactly what he wanted. Never mind taking Xiaolongnü as his shifu: had she said he’d taken a pig or a dog for his shifu, he would have owned to that too without a moment’s hesitation. “You stinking Daoist,” he shouted, “you thieving, dog-brained, goat-bearded ox-nose. You never taught me a scrap of martial skill, and you beat me like this. How are you fit to be my shifu? That’s right. I’ve taken Granny Sun as my shifu, and I’ve taken Aunt Long as my shifu too.”

Zhao Zhijing’s chest all but burst with rage. He flew at the boy, both hands clawing for his shoulders. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Granny Sun swore, and swung out her right arm to block, knocking against Zhao Zhijing’s wrist. Zhao Zhijing was one of the best of the Quanzhen Order’s third-generation disciples. In martial attainment he and Qiu Chuji’s favourite disciples, Yin Zhiping¹² and Zhen Zhibing, each had their own strengths, and badly hurt as he was, he still came on with tremendous force. Their arms met, and each of them was driven back two steps. Granny Sun spat. “Not bad, you mangy Daoist. You’re no weakling, I’ll grant you.” Zhao Zhijing’s first grab had missed, and he struck with a second. This time Granny Sun did not dare take him lightly. She turned aside to dodge, and a kick shot out from under her skirt, unseen and without warning. Zhao Zhijing heard the rush of air and was about to dodge when the jade bee stings flared with an itch he could not bear. “Ow!” he yelled, clutching his head and crouching low, and even as he yelled, Granny Sun’s foot caught him in the ribs. Zhao Zhijing went flying, still yelling “Ow! Ow!” in mid-air from the itching.

Zhen Zhibing darted two steps forward, caught Zhao Zhijing in his arms and handed him to the disciples behind him. This ugly old woman’s moves were strange, he saw, and Zhao Zhijing, whose skill was about equal to his own, had been beaten in a single exchange, so he knew that he himself could hardly win either. He gave a whistle, and six Daoists closed in from either side to form the Big Dipper Formation,¹³ with Granny Sun and Yang Guo enclosed in the middle. “Forgive us!” Zhen Zhibing cried, and the two Daoists at the Tianshu¹⁴ and Yaoguang¹⁵ positions, left and right, came at her.

Footnotes

1. 甄志丙 – Zhēn Zhìbǐng. His name meaning “aspiring to the third stem”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 全真教 – Quánzhēn Jiào. Daoist martial-monastic order founded by Wang Chongyang, one of the most influential orthodox factions. Same as LOCH reference. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 丘处机 – Qiū Chǔjī. His name meaning “dwelling in opportunity”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 鹿清笃 – Lù Qīngdú. His name meaning “pure and sincere”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 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. While they talked, more than ten more Daoists had arrived by ones and twos. They all stood behind Zhen Zhibing, whispering among themselves and wondering who this loud-mouthed, ugly old woman could be. ↩

6. 掌教 – zhǎngjiào. Head of the Order; the office of the leader of a religious order such as Quanzhen. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 真人 – zhēnrén. The Perfected One; literally true person. Honorific title for a Daoist master of the highest attainment. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

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

10. 江南七怪 – Jiāngnán Qī Guài. Group of seven martial artists from Jiaxing who followed their own code of honour. They took a bet to find and train Guo Jing and spent years in the Mongolian steppes fulfilling the vow; their integrity and loyalty were legendary. ↩

11. 柯镇恶 – Kē Zhèn’è. His name meaning “subduing evil”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

12. 尹志平 – Yǐn Zhìpíng. His name meaning “aspiring to peace”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 天罡北斗阵 – Tiāngāng Běidǒu Zhèn. Quanzhen battle formation based on the Northern Dipper. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

14. 天枢 – Tiānshū. Literally heavenly pivot. The first star of the Big Dipper (Dubhe in Ursa Major), the lead position in the formation. ↩

15. 摇光 – Yáoguāng. Literally swaying light. The seventh star of the Big Dipper (Alkaid in Ursa Major), the tip of the Dipper’s handle. ↩