The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 12 Part 7

That morning, looking into Ji Xiaofu’s¹ face, Zhang Wuji² saw a faint layer of black between her brows, as though the hurt had relapsed and the poison he had dissolved were flaring up anew. Hastily he felt her pulse, and had her spit up a little saliva, which he mixed into a dose of Lily Powder to test, and it was true: the poison in her body was turning stronger. He racked his brains and could not fathom it, and so went into the inner hall to ask Hu Qingniu.³ Hu Qingniu sighed, and told him the cure. Zhang Wuji applied it, and it answered indeed. But then Jian Jie’s⁴ bald pate broke and festered once more, foul with rot. Within a few days the hurts of all fifteen were shifting and changing without end: plainly eight or nine parts in ten healed, and then, in the space of a single night, of a sudden turned bad again.

Zhang Wuji could not understand it, and whenever he asked Hu Qingniu, Hu Qingniu would only say, “These men’s hurts are no common thing. If a single treatment cured them, why should they have come all the way to Butterfly Valley⁵ to beg me so hard?”

That night Zhang Wuji lay in bed turning it over in his mind. A hurt relapsing is common enough, but not that all fifteen should do so, and moreover shift and change again and again. It is strange in the extreme. Past the third watch⁶ he was thinking of it still, and could not sleep. Then, of a sudden, he heard from beyond the window the faint crunch of feet upon leaves, someone treading softly past.

Zhang Wuji’s curiosity was roused. He put out his tongue and licked a hole through the window-paper, and peered out to see a man’s back flash by and vanish behind a scholar-tree. By his dress the man was, to the life, Hu Qingniu. Zhang Wuji was greatly startled. What is Mister Hu about? Has his smallpox healed? But Hu Qingniu, walking so, plainly did not wish to be seen, and after a while Zhang Wuji saw him make toward the thatched hut where Ji Xiaofu and her daughter lodged. His heart pounded wildly. Is he going to do Aunt Ji a wrong? No match for him though I am, this is a thing I cannot let pass. He sprang out through the window and, on tiptoe, followed behind Hu Qingniu, and saw him steal quietly into the hut. The hut, thrown up hastily and rough, had neither wall nor door, and served only to keep off the wind and rain. A man might pass in and out of it as he pleased.

In great alarm Zhang Wuji hurried round to the back of the hut, and, lying flat on the ground, peered in. Ji Xiaofu and her daughter lay nestled together on the straw mat, fast asleep, and Hu Qingniu drew a medicine pill from his robe and dropped it into Ji Xiaofu’s medicine bowl, then turned and went out. In that glimpse Zhang Wuji saw that the dark blue cloth still covered his face, so that he could not tell whether the smallpox was healed, and in that same instant the truth broke upon him, and a cold sweat started down his back. So Mister Hu comes stealing here at dead of night to lay his poison. That is why these people’s hurts will never heal.

Then he saw Hu Qingniu pass into the shed where Jian Jie, Xue Gongyuan,⁷ and the rest were lodged, plainly to steal in his poison there as well, and when a good while had passed and he did not come out, Zhang Wuji supposed that the poisons for the fourteen men were each a different one, and so took the longer. He stepped softly into Ji Xiaofu’s hut, took up the medicine bowl and smelled it. The bowl had held a dose of Eight Immortals Decoction, for her to drink the moment she woke at dawn, but now there was an added, pungent reek to it. Just then he heard the lightest of footfalls sweep past outside, and knew that Hu Qingniu was returning to his room.

Zhang Wuji set down the bowl and called softly, “Aunt Ji, Aunt Ji.” Ji Xiaofu’s martial arts were no mean thing, and her hearing keen. Even in deep sleep the faintest stir would wake her. Yet Zhang Wuji called several times, and still she did not wake. He had to reach out and shake her gently by the shoulder, and shook her seven or eight times before Ji Xiaofu came to at last, and asked in fright, “Who is it?” Zhang Wuji said low, “Aunt Ji, it is I, Wuji. That bowl of medicine has been poisoned. Do not drink it. Pour it into the stream, and let nothing in your manner betray you. We will talk it over fully tomorrow.” Ji Xiaofu nodded. Fearing that Hu Qingniu might notice, Zhang Wuji returned to his own room, and climbed in once more through the window.

The next day, when all had breakfasted, Zhang Wuji and Yang Buhui⁸ went chasing butterflies in the valley, farther and farther afield, and Ji Xiaofu, knowing his purpose, came following after. These days Zhang Wuji had often taken Yang Buhui out to play, and the others, seeing the three go far, thought nothing of it. Something over a li⁹ on, they came to a hillside, and Zhang Wuji sat down upon the grass. Ji Xiaofu said to her daughter, “Buer, leave off chasing butterflies. Go and find some wildflowers, and weave three flower-crowns, one for each of us to wear.” Yang Buhui, delighted, went off to pick her flowers.

“Aunt Ji,” said Zhang Wuji, “what feud lies between you and this Hu Qingniu, that he should poison you?” Ji Xiaofu was taken aback. “I have never so much as met Mister Hu. To this very day I have not once set eyes on his face. How should there be talk of a ‘feud’?” She mused a moment, then went on, “When my father and my shifu¹⁰ spoke of Mister Hu, they called him only divine in medicine, the foremost healer of the age, and grieved only that, being of the Ming Order,¹¹ he had strayed onto the heretic path. My father and my shifu are not acquainted with him either. He… why should he wish to poison me?”

Zhang Wuji told her how he had seen Hu Qingniu steal into her hut the night before to lay his poison, and added, “In your bowl of Eight Immortals Decoction I caught the sharp reek of iron-thread grass and bone-piercing fungus. These two herbs have their use in healing hurts too, but their venom is fierce, and the dose must never be heavy. Above all they war with the eight healing drugs in the Eight Immortals Decoction, and do your body great harm. It will not kill you, but it will keep you lingering, past all quick cure.” Ji Xiaofu said, “You say the other fourteen are the same. That is stranger still. Grant that my father, or the Emei Order,¹² had somehow given Mister Hu offence, but the fourteen cannot all have done the like.”

Zhang Wuji said, “Aunt Ji, this Butterfly Valley lies far out of the way. How did you find your way here? And who is this owner of the golden flower¹³ that wounded you? These matters are no concern of mine, and I ought not to ask so much. But the thing before us is passing strange, so do not take it amiss.”

The colour rose in Ji Xiaofu’s face. She caught his meaning, that he feared the matter might touch upon her bearing a child unwed, a thing awkward for her to tell, and so she said, “You have saved my life. What should I still keep from you? And you have been so good to Buer and to me. Young as you are, all the bitterness in me, there is none in this world I might pour it out to, save you.” And at this the tears fell from her eyes.

She took out a handkerchief and wiped them away. “Something over two years ago, I fell out with a shijie¹⁴ over a certain matter, and after that I dared not go before my shifu, nor return home…” Zhang Wuji said, “Hmph, that Ding Minjun¹⁵ the Poison-Handed Wuyan is rotten to the core! Aunt Ji, you need not fear her.” Ji Xiaofu was surprised. “Why, how do you know of it?” And Zhang Wuji told how that night he and Chang Yuchun¹⁶ had hidden in the forest, and had seen her rescue Monk Peng.¹⁷ Ji Xiaofu sighed softly. “If you would not have a thing known, do not do it! How is one to hide from the eyes and ears of all the world?” Zhang Wuji said, “Auntie, Sixth Uncle Yin¹⁸ is a good man, but if you do not care for him, what harm in your not marrying him? The next time I see Sixth Uncle Yin, I will ask him not to press you. Marry whom you love, and there’s an end!”

Hearing him speak so naively, making so light of the world’s affairs, Ji Xiaofu could not help a bitter smile, and said slowly, “Child, it was not that I meant to wrong your Sixth Uncle Yin. At the time I had no choice, and yet… and yet I do not regret it either…” Looking at Zhang Wuji’s innocent, guileless face, she thought, This child’s heart is a sheet of blank paper. These loves of men and women, better not to tell him of them, and besides, the thing before us can hardly bear upon it. And she said,

“After I broke with Ding shijie, I went back to Emei no more, but took Buer and lived in seclusion in Shungeng Mountain,¹⁹ some three hundred li and more to the west of here. For two years and better I kept company only with the woodcutters and farm folk, and was carefree and content enough. Half a month ago I took Buer into the town to buy cloth, meaning to sew her a few new clothes, but on the corner of a wall I saw, drawn in white chalk, a ring of Buddha-light and a little jian, the chalk-marks very fresh. This is my Emei Order’s sign for the summoning of fellow disciples, and seeing it I was of course greatly alarmed. I mused over it a long while, and thought: though I had fallen out with Ding shijie, the fault was not mine, and I had done no deed that betrayed my teacher or my order, and today, perhaps, fellow disciples were in some peril, and I could not but go to their aid. And so, following where the sign pointed, I traced it all the way to Fengyang.²⁰

“In the town of Fengyang I saw the sign once more, and taking Buer, I came to the wineshop of the Linhuai Pavilion,²¹ where seven or eight folk of the wulin²² were already waiting above-stairs, among them Jian Jie the Sacred Hand Sangharama⁴ of the Kongtong School,²³ and Xue Gongyuan of the Huashan School²⁴ with two of his shixiongs and shidi, but not one fellow disciple of Emei. Jian Jie and Xue Gongyuan I had met before, and asking after it, I found that they too had seen their own orders’ summoning-signs and hurried here each to the tryst, but that as to what the matter was, none of them knew.

“We waited until near dusk, and no fellow disciple of Emei came. But a few others arrived one after another, some of the Shenquan School,²⁵ some of the Beggars’ Guild,²⁶ all saying they had had their own orders’ summons to gather at the Linhuai Pavilion. Yet every one of them had been bidden by another, and not one was the bidder. We talked it over, and all of us grew suspicious: could it be that we had been played upon by some enemy?

“The fifteen of us gathered at the Linhuai Pavilion were of nine schools and orders in all. Each order’s summoning-mark is of course a different one, and all are kept close secret. Unless one is of the order oneself, one would not, at sight of it, know its meaning. If some enemy had indeed laid a scheme in secret, could he truly know the hidden signs of all nine orders? I, for my part, first, having Buer with me, feared to fall into some danger, and second, in truth I had no wish to meet my fellow disciples, and since it was plainly no fellow disciple of Emei seeking aid, I rose to go down the stairs.

“All at once I heard a tap-tap upon the staircase, as of someone knocking the steps with a staff, followed by a fit of coughing, and a hunchbacked old woman, her white hair like silver, came up. She walked a few steps and coughed a few times, and seemed to labour sorely at it. A little girl of eleven or twelve years supported her by the left arm. Seeing the old woman so aged, and gravely ill besides, I stepped aside and let her go up first.

“That little girl was clear of spirit and fine of bone, and fair of face. The old woman leaned her right hand upon a staff of white wood, and wore clothes of coarse cloth, so that she seemed some poor old body, but the string of prayer-beads in her left hand shone golden and glittering. I looked closely, and every bead was a plum blossom cast in gold…”

At this Zhang Wuji could not help breaking in. “Was that old woman the owner of the golden flower?” Ji Xiaofu nodded. “Exactly! Yet who, at the time, could have thought it?” And she drew from her robe a small plum blossom cast in gold, in nothing different from the one Zhang Wuji had carried in to show Hu Qingniu. Zhang Wuji was greatly astonished. All these days he had been turning over in his mind this “owner of the golden flower,” fancying him he knew not what fearsome, hideous, and savage figure, but by Ji Xiaofu’s telling it was a gravely ill old woman, and that was far beyond anything he had looked for.

Footnotes

1. 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. ↩

2. 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. ↩

3. 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. ↩

4. 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. ↩ ↩²

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. 三更 – sāngēng. Third of the five night watches, around midnight. Retained in pinyin. ↩

7. 薛公远 – Xuē Gōngyuǎn. Disciple of the Huashan School under Xianyu Tong. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

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

9. 里 – lǐ. Traditional Chinese unit of distance, approximately 500 metres or a third of a mile. ↩

10. 师父 – shīfù. Teacher or master responsible for technical instruction and moral guidance. Shī means teacher. Fù means father. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

11. 明教 – Míngjiào. Literally the religion of light. Also known as Manichaeism, a dualistic religion of Persian origin that became the backbone of several rebel movements in Chinese history. In the wuxia tradition, it serves as the organising force against the Mongol Yuan dynasty. ↩

12. 峨嵋派 – Éméi Pài. Emei Order, the Buddhist martial order founded by Guo Xiang on Mount Emei; 派 renders as “Order” for its religious character. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

13. 金花 – jīnhuā. “golden flower”: a plum blossom cast in gold and thrown as a hidden weapon, the mark of the mysterious enemy who wounded these fifteen fighters. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

14. 师姐 – shījiě. Female senior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Jiě means older sister. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 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. ↩

16. 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. ↩

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

18. 殷梨亭 – Yīn Lítíng. The sixth of the Seven Xias of Wudang. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

19. 舜耕山 – Shùngēng Shān. Shungeng Mountain, said to be where the sage-king Shun once ploughed; in modern Anhui. See Wikipedia. ↩

20. 凤阳 – Fèngyáng. Lit. “phoenix sun.” A prefectural town in what is now Anhui Province. See Wikipedia. ↩

21. 临淮阁 – Línhuái Gé. Linhuai Pavilion, a wineshop in Fengyang. ↩

22. 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. ↩

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

24. 华山派 – Huàshān Pài. Huashan School, a martial school based upon Mount Hua, one of China’s Five Sacred Mountains. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

25. 神拳门 – Shénquán Mén. Shenquan School, meaning “Divine Fist School.” See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

26. 丐帮 – Gàibāng. Largest martial arts organisation in the jianghu, led by successive Chiefs and with members throughout China. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩