The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 12 Part 2

Zhang Wuji¹ closed the medical canon, set it down reverently on the table, and said, “Mister Hu, this Ziwu Canon of Acupuncture and Moxibustion of yours is vast and deep, and nine parts in ten of it are beyond me. I beg your guidance. What does it mean, to ‘command the changes of yin and yang and the five phases’?”

Hu Qingniu² explained a few sentences, then all at once saw through him. “You mean to ask how Chang Yuchun³ is to be cured? Heh, heh. Other things I will speak of. This one I will not.”

There was nothing to be done. Zhang Wuji could only go and search the medical books himself, and Hu Qingniu let him read as he pleased and did not forbid it. Day and night Zhang Wuji delved, forgetting sleep and food. Not only did he go through the dozen and more of Hu Qingniu’s own writings, but the other classics too, the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, Hua Tuo’s Chart of Inner Illumination, Wang Shuhe’s Canon of the Pulse, Sun Simiao’s Prescriptions Worth a Thousand in Gold and its Supplement, Wang Tao’s Arcane Essentials from the Imperial Library, and the rest, he turned page by page, and whatever bore on the treatment of the Heart-Severing Palm⁴ he read closely and pondered deep. Each day, at the hours of chen and shen, Hu Qingniu plied needle and mugwort on him to draw off the yin-poison.

Several days passed thus, and Zhang Wuji read on wildly, without rhyme or reason. Though he now had a belly full of medical lore and prescriptions, the art of medicine is a deep one. Young and slight of learning as he was, how should he master it within a few days? He counted on his fingers: it was his sixth day in Butterfly Valley.⁵ Hu Qingniu had said that if he himself treated Chang Yuchun’s hurt within seven days it could be wholly healed. Otherwise, even were the man cured, his martial arts would be lost for good. Chang Yuchun had now lain six days and six nights on the grass beyond the door, and this day, of all days, it began to rain. Hu Qingniu saw him laid out in a muddy pool of standing water, and still paid it no heed. Zhang Wuji was in a fury. Of all the medical books I have read, he thought, bar your own writings, every one of them says a physician must hold the benevolent heart that would succour the world and cherish the people. You possess a whole body of skill, yet you see a man dying and give no aid. What manner of fine physician is that?

Come nightfall the rain fell heavier still. Lightning flashed, and one thunderclap trod upon the heels of the last. Zhang Wuji set his teeth. Even if I ruin Big Brother Chang, there is no help for it now. From Hu Qingniu’s medicine cabinet he took eight gold needles, went to Chang Yuchun’s side, and said, “Big Brother Chang, these days I have spent all my heart and strength poring over Mister Hu’s medical books. I cannot claim to have mastered them, but time presses, and we can wait no longer. I can only take the risk and set the needles in you. We two shall live or die together, and if by ill fortune something should go amiss, I will surely not live on alone.”

Chang Yuchun laughed aloud. “Young Brother, what talk is this? Set your needles in me, and quickly. If by heaven’s grace I am saved, so much the better. It will put my shibo⁶ Hu to shame. And if two or three needles finish me, that is better than lying out and suffering alive in this muddy pit.”

Zhang Wuji’s hands trembled. He felt out Chang Yuchun’s acupoints with care, and, quaking, drove a gold needle into the Guanyuan. He had never trained in acupuncture, and his hand was clumsy in the extreme. He did no more than ape, stroke for stroke, the method by which Hu Qingniu needled him each day. Hu Qingniu’s gold needles were wrought of soft gold, and could not be used without deep and profound neili.⁷ Zhang Wuji bore down a little too hard, and the needle bent on the instant and would go in no further, so that he had to draw it out and stick it again. Needling an acupoint never draws blood, but with all his fumbling and bungling, blood came welling at once from Chang Yuchun’s Guanyuan. The Guanyuan lies in the lower abdomen, hard by the vital parts of the body, and the flow would not stop. Zhang Wuji’s heart leapt in alarm, and for a moment his hands and feet failed him utterly.

Then, from behind him, came a burst of laughter. Zhang Wuji turned his head to see Hu Qingniu, hands clasped behind his back, at his ease and smiling broadly, watching him with both hands dyed with blood. “Mister Hu,” Zhang Wuji cried in his distress, “Big Brother Chang’s Guanyuan bleeds without stopping. What am I to do?” Hu Qingniu said, “Of course I know what to do. But why should I tell you?” Zhang Wuji drew himself up. “We trade a life for a life now. Save Big Brother Chang, and quickly, and I will die here before your eyes.”

Hu Qingniu said coldly, “I said I would not treat him, and I will not, and there is an end. Hu Qingniu merely sees death and gives no aid. I am no Wuchang come to hasten men to the grave. What good is your death to me? Were ten Zhang Wujis to die, I would not save one Chang Yuchun.”

Zhang Wuji knew that further words would only waste his time. He went in, found some honey, and smeared it over the bleeding Guanyuan, and so staunched the flow. The gold needles are too soft, he thought. I cannot use them. There were no other gold needles to be found, nor so much as a bronze needle or an iron one, and after a moment’s thought he went out, broke off a bamboo twig, and pared it with his small knife into several smooth bamboo splints, which he set into the four acupoints Zigong, Zhongting, Guanyuan, and Tianchi. The splints, hard yet with a spring to them, drew no blood when they went in. After a while, Chang Yuchun brought up several great mouthfuls of black blood.

Whether his wild needling had heaped injury on injury, or whether the bamboo needles had told and forced out the stagnant blood within, Zhang Wuji could not say. He looked round at Hu Qingniu and saw that, for all the mockery on his face, there was in it too a shade of quiet approval. Then Zhang Wuji knew that his few strokes of the bamboo needle had not been wholly wrong. He went into the room, turned the medical books over and over, racked his brains, and drew up a prescription. The books had taught him which drug cured which ill, but as to what raw rehmannia or bupleurum looked like, or what manner of thing achyranthes or bear’s gall might be, he knew not a single one. Steeling himself, he handed the prescription to the page-boy who brewed the medicine and said, “Make up a dose of this, if you please.”

The page-boy took the prescription in to Hu Qingniu and asked whether he should brew it. Hu Qingniu gave a snort. “Absurd. Absurd.” He laughed coldly three times, and said, “Brew it as it stands. If he drinks it and does not die, then there are no dead men in the world.” Zhang Wuji snatched the prescription back and cut every drug in it by half. So the page-boy brewed it to the letter, into one thick bowlful.

Zhang Wuji carried the bowl to Chang Yuchun’s lips, and said through his tears, “Big Brother Chang, whether this dose brings weal or woe, I honestly do not know…” Chang Yuchun laughed. “Splendid, splendid. This is what they call a blind physician doctoring a blind horse!” He shut his eyes, tilted back his neck, and drained the great bowl to the last drop.

That night Chang Yuchun’s belly griped as though cut with knives, and he vomited blood without cease. Through the crashing thunder and pouring rain Zhang Wuji tended him, and the whole night long they toiled at it together. By the next day’s dawn the great rain had stopped. Chang Yuchun’s vomiting of blood had lessened, and the colour of the blood had turned from black to purple, and from purple to red.

“Young Brother,” said Chang Yuchun, delighted, “your medicine has not killed me after all, and my hurt is a great deal lighter.” Zhang Wuji rejoiced. “So my medicine will serve?” Chang Yuchun laughed. “My late father foresaw this very day, and so he named me ‘Yuchun’, ‘ever meeting spring’, to say that I should ever meet with a master-hand like you, whose touch brings the healing spring again. Only your physic seems a shade high-handed. Drunk down, it is as though a few dozen little knives were slashing and gouging at my innards.”

Zhang Wuji said, “Yes, yes. It does seem the dose was a touch too heavy.”

In truth the measure he had given was not “a touch” too heavy but several times over, and with no tempering or harmonising drug to attend it: nothing but headlong, furious assault. He had found the right drugs for the complaint in Hu Qingniu’s books, but of the way of prescribing, the principle of sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy,⁸ he understood not a jot, and had Chang Yuchun not been of so hardy and vigorous a frame, well beyond the common run, he would long since have failed to bear it and given up the ghost.

Hu Qingniu, having finished his washing, came strolling slowly out, and at the sight of Chang Yuchun ruddy of face and hearty of spirit he could not help a start. One clever and bold, the other strong of body, he thought. Between them, they have cured this Heart-Severing Palm injury after all.

Zhang Wuji then wrote out a further prescription to restore and nourish the body: ginseng, deer-antler velvet, fleeceflower root, poria, and every manner of great tonic he set down upon it. Of the medicines Hu Qingniu’s house held in store, there was not one that was not of the choicest, and their potency was uncommonly rich and deep. After a dozen days or so of such nourishing, Chang Yuchun was radiant with vigour, and his martial arts were wholly as they had been. He said to Zhang Wuji, “Little brother, the hurt on my body is healed. There is no sense in your sleeping out in the open with me day after day. Let us part here.”

In this month and more Zhang Wuji had shared adversity with him, and each had staked his life for the other, so that they had become friends to the death. To part now was hard indeed, but knowing that Chang Yuchun could not stay at his side for ever, he could only agree, with tears.

“Little brother, you must not grieve,” said Chang Yuchun. “In three months I shall come to see you again, and if by then the cold poison in your body is wholly gone, I will take you up Mount Wudang⁹ to be reunited with your grandshifu.”¹⁰

He went into the thatched cottage to take his leave of Hu Qingniu. “Your disciple’s hurt is healed,” he said. “It was Brother Zhang who did the treating, but all of it was guided by shibo’s medical books, and I have taken no small quantity of shibo’s precious medicines besides. My thanks to you, shibo.” Hu Qingniu nodded. “That is nothing to speak of. Your hurt is healed. All it has cost you is some forty years of your span, no more.” Chang Yuchun asked, “What?” Hu Qingniu said, “By your frame, you should have lived past eighty at the least. But that lad’s medicine was in error, and the force of his needling was wrong. Hereafter, whenever the sky brings rain and thunder, your whole body will ache, and at about your fortieth year you will be off to call on King Yama.”¹¹

Chang Yuchun laughed aloud, and said with feeling, “A great man who would succour the age and repay his country, if he can raise up some work and deed of merit, then thirty years is enough, let alone forty. But live a mediocre life, and though you pass a hundred, you have only wasted the more grain.” Hu Qingniu nodded, and said no more. (Note: the History of Ming, “Biography of Chang Yuchun”: “[Chang Yuchun] died of a sudden illness, aged only forty.”)

Zhang Wuji saw him all the way to the mouth of Butterfly Valley, and only when Chang Yuchun had again and again urged him to turn back did the two part, wiping away their tears. In his heart Zhang Wuji secretly resolved: In my muddled ignorance I mistreated Big Brother Chang, and so cost him forty years of his life. His body was harmed in my hands. Can it not, some later day, be bettered in my hands as well? I must contrive, come what may, to heal him back to what he was.

From that day on, Hu Qingniu daily set needle and drug to Zhang Wuji to disperse the cold poison in his body, while Zhang Wuji, tireless, read the medical books and committed the pharmacopoeia to memory, and whatever puzzled him he put to Hu Qingniu. This fell in wonderfully with all that Hu Qingniu loved, and he would set out the answer in full detail. At times Zhang Wuji would put some odd or fanciful question, and it would strike from Hu Qingniu a spark of thought that had never come to him before. He had meant at first, once Zhang Wuji was cured, to set his hand to killing him, but by now he felt that were this youth to die, the valley would lose the one congenial companion it had, and he no longer wished the boy to heal soon and so die soon.

Footnotes

1. 张无忌 – Zhāng Wújì. His name meaning “Without Envy” or “No Misgivings.” Son of Zhang Cuishan and Yin Susu, and the protagonist of the tale. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 胡青牛 – Hú Qīngniú. His name meaning “Green Ox.” The Butterfly Valley Healer, a physician of the Ming Order, nicknamed “Sees Death, Offers No Aid” for refusing to treat any who are not of the order. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 常遇春 – Cháng Yùchūn. Fighter of the Ming Order who befriended Zhang Wuji; historically a founding general of the Ming dynasty. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 截心掌 – Jiéxīn Zhǎng. Lit. “Heart-Severing Palm.” A palm technique whose force strikes inward at the heart. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 蝴蝶谷 – Húdié Gǔ. Lit. “Butterfly Valley.” The secluded valley home of Hu Qingniu, on the shore of Nüshan Lake in northern Anhui. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 师伯 – shībó. Senior lineage uncle. Shixiong or shijie of one’s shifu. Shī means teacher. Bó means father’s elder brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

8. 君臣佐使 – jūn chén zuǒ shǐ. Lit. “sovereign, minister, assistant, envoy.” The classical principle by which the ingredients of a formula are ranked by role: the chief drug, its aids, and those that guide or harmonise. ↩

9. 武当山 – Wǔdāng Shān. Sacred Daoist mountain in Hubei Province, later home to the Wudang Order founded by Zhang Sanfeng. See Wikipedia. ↩

10. 太师父 – tàishīfù. One’s shifu’s shifu, here Zhang Sanfeng. Rendered Grand Shifu. See §IV.11e. ↩

11. 阎王 – Yánwáng. King Yama, lord of the underworld and judge of the dead in Chinese and Buddhist belief. ↩