The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 12 Part 5

Two years before, he and Chang Yuchun¹ had seen Ji Xiaofu² rescue Monk Peng³ by force, deep in a forest at dead of night, and it had left Zhang Wuji⁴ with the sense that this Aunt Ji was a very good person indeed. As for why she should be unwed and yet with a child, and whether she had done a wrong to Sixth Uncle Yin⁵ and the rest, he was still young, and understood nothing of the loves of men and women. Hearing of such things, they passed him by like a spring breeze past the ear, and left not a trace behind. It was Ji Xiaofu, guilty in her own heart, who fell into an agony of confusion whenever she chanced upon one acquainted with Yin Liting, and felt she could sink into the ground for shame. In truth Zhang Wuji had heard of the matter two years before, from the mouth of Ding Minjun,⁶ and being certain that Ding Minjun was a wicked woman, he reckoned that the wicked things she told of might well not be wicked at all.

He saw now how Ji Xiaofu’s daughter stood at her mother’s side, her brows and eyes fair as a painting, her great lacquer-black eyes rolling round and bright as she watched him in curiosity. The girl bent her mouth to her mother’s ear and whispered, “Ma, is this little boy the doctor? Do you hurt a little less now?” Hearing her call her “Ma,” Ji Xiaofu’s face reddened once more, but things had come to such a pass that there was no hiding it, and, with a most awkward look, she said, “This is Brother Zhang. His father is a friend of Ma’s.” Then, low, to Zhang Wuji, “She… she is called ‘Buhui.’” She paused, and added, “Her surname is Yang. She is called Yang Buhui!”⁷ Zhang Wuji smiled. “Very good, little sister, your name is a little like mine. I am Zhang Wuji, and you are Yang Buhui.”

Seeing that Zhang Wuji’s manner was as easy as ever, with no hint of reproach in it, Ji Xiaofu felt her heart ease a little, and said to her daughter, “Wuji gege’s skill is very great. Ma hardly hurts at all now.”

Yang Buhui’s lively great eyes rolled a turn or two. Then all at once she stepped up, threw her arms about Zhang Wuji, and kissed him on the cheek. Save for her mother she had never in her life set eyes on an outsider, and now, in the dread of her mother’s grievous hurt, to have Zhang Wuji ease that pain filled her with gratitude. Her way of showing her mother joy and thanks had always been to fling herself into her arms and kiss her face, and so now she did the same to Zhang Wuji.

Ji Xiaofu chided her, smiling. “Buer, you mustn’t. Wuji gege will not like it.” Yang Buhui opened her great eyes wide, not seeing the reason of it, and asked Zhang Wuji, “You don’t like it? Why won’t you let me be good to you?” Zhang Wuji smiled. “I do like it, and I will be good to you too.” And he bent and gently kissed her soft cheek in his turn. Yang Buhui clapped her hands. “Little doctor, cure Mama’s hurts all better, quickly, and I’ll give you another kiss.”

Zhang Wuji found this little sister innocent and full of life, and most endearing. In all his dozen years and more, the people he had known were uncles far older than himself, and though Chang Yuchun called him brother, he was eight years the elder. That day on the boat he had met Zhou Zhiruo⁸ in passing, and they had been together not a day before they parted. Beyond that he had never made a single small friend of his own. If I truly had so delightful a little sister of my own, he thought now, I could take her about to play whenever I liked. He was but fourteen, and the child was still strong in him. Only, being early acquainted with hardship, he had in truth had few chances for play and merriment.

Ji Xiaofu, seeing the wounds of Jian Jie⁹ the Sacred Hand Sangharama and the others in so ragged a state, plainly none of them tended, was unwilling to take the advantage of them. “These few came before me,” she said. “See to them first. I am much better now.” Zhang Wuji said, “They came to seek Mister Hu’s¹⁰ cure. Mister Hu is himself gravely ill and cannot treat them, yet these men will not leave. Aunt Ji, you did not come to seek Mister Hu’s cure. I have stayed here long, and have a little smattering of the healing art. If you will trust me, I will look at your hurt.”

Wounded, and directed hither, Ji Xiaofu had come to Butterfly Valley¹¹ at the first as Jian Jie and the rest had, to seek Hu Qingniu’s cure, but now, hearing Zhang Wuji’s words and seeing the state of Jian Jie’s party, it was plain that “Sees Death, Offers No Aid” Hu Qingniu had refused to treat them. And since Zhang Wuji’s needling of a moment ago had told at once, she saw that, young though he was, his medicine was in truth of a high order. “Then I thank you,” she said. “If the great master-hand will not treat me, to be treated by the little master-hand is all one.”

Zhang Wuji brought her into the side room and cut open the clothing over her wound, and saw three blade-cuts upon her shoulder and arm, the arm-bone broken, and the bone of the upper arm split in one place into fragments. So shattered a bone is, in surgery, a most difficult thing to knit again, but to a disciple of the Butterfly Valley Healing Sage it was a common enough matter, and so he set the bone and dressed the hurt, laid on medicine to knit the flesh and quicken the blood, and wrote out a prescription, bidding the page-boy brew it according to the prescription. It was the first time he had ever set a bone for anyone, and his hand was not yet deft. He laboured over it a shichen¹² or so before at last he had it bound up sound, and said, “Aunt Ji, sleep a while. When the numbing drug wears off, the wound will pain you sorely.” Ji Xiaofu said, “My thanks to you.” Zhang Wuji went to the storeroom and found some dates and dried apricots, and brought them for Yang Buhui, but the child, having gone the whole of the past night without sleep, was by now nestled fast asleep in her mother’s arms. So he put the dates and apricots into her pocket, and returned to the hall.

The blood-spitting disciple of the Huashan School rose and made Zhang Wuji a deep bow. “Little master, since Mister Hu is ill, we can only trouble the little master to treat us. We are all deeply grateful for the great kindness.” Since learning the healing art, Zhang Wuji had never once put it to use save on Chang Yuchun and Ji Xiaofu, and seeing these fourteen men, some hurt in the inner organs, some with limbs broken, no two injuries alike, he did recall the old saying, “what one learns, one puts to use,” and felt indeed an eagerness stir in him to try his hand. But remembering Hu Qingniu’s words, he answered, “This is Mister Hu’s own house, and I too am his patient. How should I dare to take it upon myself?”

The man read his look, and saw that his refusal was not firm, and so praised him the more, and set a tall hat upon his head. “From of old, your famous physicians have all been gentlemen of fifty or sixty years. Who would have thought that so young a famous physician should have so fine a skill? Truly it is a rare thing in this world. We do hope you will show us your hand.” A stout fellow of the surname Liang, in the guise of a rich merchant, said, “We fourteen all have some little name in the jianghu.¹³ Treated by the little master, we shall go out and noise it abroad, and all the jianghu will know that the little master’s medicine is as the work of a god, and in a day and a night, the little master’s fame will be known throughout the land.”

Zhang Wuji, young after all and unversed in the ways of the world, could not, at these two men’s blowing and puffing, help a little gladness. “What good is being known throughout the land?” he said. “Since Mister Hu will not act, there is nothing I can do. But you are all gravely hurt, so let it be this way: I will do a little to ease your pain.” And he took out golden-wound medicine to staunch the bleeding and dull the pain of each.

But when he came to examine each man’s wound in close detail, the more he looked the more astonished he grew. For each man’s hurt was not merely different from the next. Each had been dealt in some outlandish way, of a kind never once set down in the injury-lore Hu Qingniu had taught him. One had been forced to swallow dozens of steel needles smeared with poison. One had had his liver shaken and hurt by an inner force, yet the vital acupoints for treating a liver injury, the Xingjian, the Zhongfeng, the Yinbao, the Wuli, had all been gouged open with a sharp knife, so that plainly the doer too was versed in medicine, and had meant to leave no place from which a cure might begin. One had two long iron nails driven into the two lobes of his lungs, and coughed and hawked blood without stop. One had both rows of his ribs broken through, yet with heart and lungs untouched. One had had both hands cut off, and the left hand grafted to the right arm and the right hand to the left, flesh and blood joined, an unnatural, ill-matched thing. And another was swollen blue over his whole body, and said he had been stung all at once by a score and more kinds of venomous creature, centipedes, scorpions, wasps and the rest.

Zhang Wuji had looked at no more than six or seven of them before his brows were knit deep. These men’s hurts are so bizarre that I cannot cure a single one, he thought. Why should the doer have racked his wits to torment people so?

Then a thought struck him. Aunt Ji’s shoulder and arm wounds are ordinary enough. Can she have taken some strange inner injury besides, or why is she the one exception? He hurried into the side room and felt at Ji Xiaofu’s pulse, and was startled at once: it beat now strong, now weak, now rough, now smooth, plainly the sign of hurt to the inner organs, but why it should turn so was truly past his fathoming.

The strangeness of the fourteen men’s hurts he did not take greatly to heart, for the Kongtong¹⁴ folk among them, he thought in secret, had had a hand in pressing his parents to their deaths, and to suffer such queer punishment now was no more than their desert. But Ji Xiaofu’s injury he must save. And so he went to Hu Qingniu’s door and said low, “Mister Hu, are you asleep?” Hu Qingniu said, “What is it? Whoever it may be, I will not treat him.” Zhang Wuji said, “Yes. Only, these men’s hurts are strange in the extreme.” And he told over, one by one, each of their outlandish injuries.

Behind the cloth curtain Hu Qingniu listened most closely, and where a thing was unclear he bade Zhang Wuji go and look again and come back to tell him. It took Zhang Wuji the better part of a shichen to describe the hurts of all fifteen in full detail. Hu Qingniu answered “Mm, mm” without cease, plainly turning it over in his mind, and after a long while he said, “Hmph. These strange hurts do not stump me either…”

Then, from behind Zhang Wuji, a voice cut in. “Mister Hu, the master of the Golden Flower bade me tell you this: ‘You call yourself the Healing Sage in vain: of these fifteen kinds of strange wound and outlandish poison, I dare say you cannot cure so much as one.’ Ha, ha. Sure enough, you can only hide yourself away and feign sickness.”

Footnotes

1. 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. ↩

2. 纪晓芙 – Jì Xiǎofú. Her name meaning “Dawn Hibiscus.” A disciple of the Emei Order, once betrothed to Yin Liting of Wudang. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 彭莹玉 – Péng Yíngyù. “Monk Peng,” a monk of the Ming Order. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 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. ↩

5. 殷梨亭 – Yīn Lítíng. The sixth of the Seven Xias of Wudang, who fell in love with Ji Xiaofu. After her death, his consuming desire for revenge against Yang Xiao drove him to devise this suicidal sword technique. ↩

6. 丁敏君 – Dīng Mǐnjūn. Shijie of Ji Xiaofu in the Emei Order, styled the Poison-Handed Wuyan (毒手无盐); 无盐 alludes to the legendary Zhong Wuyan, an ugly but virtuous woman of antiquity. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 杨不悔 – Yáng Bùhuǐ. Her name meaning “No Regret.” Daughter of Ji Xiaofu and Yang Xiao. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 周芷若 – Zhōu Zhǐruò. Her name from two fragrant plants, angelica and pollia. Girl Zhang Wuji met briefly aboard a riverboat. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 简捷 – Jiǎn Jié. Bald elder of the Kongtong School, styled the Sacred Hand Sangharama (圣手伽蓝); 伽蓝 (Sanskrit saṃghārāma) is a Buddhist temple, and 伽蓝神 its guardian spirit. Epithet casts him as a temple-guardian of divine skill. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 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. ↩

11. 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. ↩

12. 时辰 – shíchén. Traditional Chinese unit of time equal to two hours; the day was divided into twelve shichen. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 江湖 – jiānghú. Literally rivers and lakes. Itinerant world beyond settled society and official reach, holding not only martial artists but the trades that travel with them, including pedlars, physicians, fortune-tellers, entertainers, boatmen, beggars, outlaws and the like. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

14. 崆峒派 – Kōngtóng Pài. Kongtong School, a martial school based in the Kongtong Mountains of the northwest. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩