The Heavenly Sword & the Dragon Sabre Chapter 13 Part 3

Hu Qingniu,¹ with a flick of his hand reversed, first sealed the acupoints at his wife's back and waist, and said, “Shimei,² your husband is a useless man. I truly cannot cure the deadly poison of your three vermin and three herbs.³ There is nothing for it but to follow you down to the courts of the dead, and be husband and wife with you at the Yellow Springs.” So saying, he reached into her bosom and drew out several packets of medicine, and just as he had foreseen, they were three venomous creatures and three poisonous plants, dried over a fire and ground to powder.

Wang Nangu⁴ could not move her body, but she could still speak. “Shige,⁵ you must not take the poison!” she cried. Hu Qingniu paid no heed. He poured the gaudy, many-hued powders into his mouth and swallowed them down with his spittle.

Wang Nangu went white with terror. “How can you take so much?” she cried. “That much venom would poison three oxen dead.”

Hu Qingniu gave a faint smile and sat down in the chair at the head of Wang Nangu’s bed. In a moment he felt as though a thousand knives were stabbing all at once within his belly. He knew the heartbreak grass⁶ had taken effect first. A moment more, and the venoms of the other five began, one after another, to work.

“Shige,” cried Wang Nangu, “there is a cure for these six venoms of mine.” Hu Qingniu, trembling all over with pain, his teeth chattering, shook his head. “I… I do not believe it… I… I am about to die.” “Quick, take the Bezoar and Dragon’s Blood Pills⁷ and the Jade Dragon Storax Powder,⁸ then scatter the poison with needles,” cried Wang Nangu. “And what would be the use of that?” said Hu Qingniu. “The poison I took was a light dose,” said Wang Nangu urgently, “but you have taken far too much. Treat it at once, or it will be too late!”

“I have loved you and cherished you with all my heart and soul,” said Hu Qingniu, “yet you have always striven and contended against me. I find no meaning in living in this world. I would sooner die, and have done with it all… aiyo… aiyo…” These groans were no pretence: by now the venoms of centipede and spider had struck at his heart and lungs each in turn, and Hu Qingniu’s senses grew ever dimmer until at last he knew nothing at all.

Wang Nangu wailed aloud: “Shige, Shige, it is all my fault. You cannot die… I will never match myself against you again.” Decades though the two of them had quarrelled and vied without cease, their love for each other ran deep and true. Wang Nangu did not fear to seek death herself, but when her husband poisoned himself to his own death, she fell into a great terror and anguish, and, her acupoints sealed, she could raise no hand to save him.

Hearing Wang Nangu’s cries, Zhang Wuji⁹ rushed into the room. “Shimu,¹⁰ how am I to save Shifu?”¹¹ he asked.

Seeing him come in, Wang Nangu beheld her very saviour. “Quick, give him the Bezoar and Dragon’s Blood Pills and the Jade Dragon Storax Powder, and prick his Yongquan and Jiuwei acupoints with a gold needle… “¹²

At that very moment, a few coughs suddenly carried in from beyond the door, uncommonly clear in the stillness of the night. Ji Xiaofu¹³ darted into the room, her face like white paper. “The Golden Flower Granny…¹⁴ the Golden…” Before the last words were out, the door and window swung open of themselves though no wind stirred, and a hunch-backed old woman, leading a girl of eleven or twelve, stood already within the room. The Golden Flower Granny had come.

The Golden Flower Granny saw Hu Qingniu clutching his belly with both hands, his face all black, his breath faint, on the very point of death, and could not help a start. “What is he doing?” she asked.

Before anyone could answer, Hu Qingniu’s legs stiffened and he swooned away as if dead. Wang Nangu wept aloud: “Why have you so debased yourself, to die by poison? Shige, Shige, you are the very root of my life…” The Golden Flower Granny had come once more from Spirit Snake Island¹⁵ to the Central Plains¹⁶ for two purposes: besides seeking out and avenging herself on the foe who had poisoned her husband to death, she meant to make trouble for Hu Qingniu, yet, at the very moment she appeared, Hu Qingniu had just taken a deadly poison. She too was a great master of poison-craft, and from the colour of Hu Qingniu’s and Wang Nangu’s faces she knew that they were poisoned past all cure. Fancying that Hu Qingniu had poisoned himself to death out of fear of her, she reckoned her great vengeance accomplished, sighed, and said, “A wicked karma, a wicked karma!” Then, taking the little girl by the hand, she went out of the room. No sooner had she left the thatched cottage than her coughing was heard more than a hundred feet away, the swiftness of her movement passing all belief.

After the better part of a shichen’s¹⁷ labour, Hu Qingniu slowly came round. Wang Nangu wept for joy, crying again and again, “Young Brother, it is wholly to you we owe our two lives.” Then she wrote out a prescription and bade the serving-boy decoct it, to drive the deadly poison from their bodies.

Wang Nangu’s method of drawing out poison was not especially fine. By her prescription the venom could not, in truth, be wholly cleared. Zhang Wuji, following the prescription Hu Qingniu had earlier written on the table with his finger, changed the ingredients, and Wang Nangu never knew.

“The Golden Flower Granny believes Mister Hu has died by poison,” said Zhang Wuji, “and will trouble you no more, so a grave danger is lifted from your heart.” Yet, recalling how the Golden Flower Granny had come like a phantom and gone like a phantom, he shivered still to think of it.

“People say this Golden Flower Granny is most careful in all she does,” said Wang Nangu. “Gone though she is today, she is sure to come again another day to look into things. My husband and I must flee at once. Young Brother, I beg you: raise two graves, and inscribe upon the stones the names of us both, husband and wife.” Zhang Wuji agreed. When Hu Qingniu and Wang Nangu had drunk the antidote decoction, they made a few preparations. They gave each of the two medicine-boys ten liang¹⁸ of silver and told them to go home. Then the couple boarded a mule-cart and left under cover of darkness.

Zhang Wuji saw them right to the mouth of Butterfly Valley.¹⁹ The old man and the boy had met day upon day for more than two years, and now, parting all at once, both felt the pang of separation. Hu Qingniu took out a hand-written medical book. “Wuji,” he said, “this book holds the essentials of a lifetime’s close study. I have always kept it secret and never shown it to you, and now I give it to you. You bear within you the Xuanming Divine Palm,²⁰ whose yin poison is hard to purge, and I am truly sorry for it. I only hope that by studying this book you may hit upon a way to drive out the poison, and then there will yet be a day for us to meet again.” Zhang Wuji thanked him and took it. Said Wang Nangu: “You saved the lives of my husband and me, and made the two of us whole again. By rights I too should pass to you the skills of my whole life. But what I have studied all my days is the art of poisoning and wounding men, and it would be no use to you to learn it. I only hope you may soon be well. Some day I shall find a way to repay you.”

Zhang Wuji did not return to the cottage until the mule-cart had vanished from sight. Early next morning he heaped up two graves beside the huts, then went out of the valley to engage a stonemason, who set up two gravestones: one inscribed “Grave of Mister Hu Qingniu, the Medicine Immortal²¹ of Butterfly Valley,” the other “Grave of Madam Hu, née Wang.” When Jian Jie²² and the others saw that Hu Qingniu and his wife had died together, they knew at last that his talk of grave illness had been no lie, and all of them sighed.

With Wang Nangu gone, no more poison was laid in secret, and under Zhang Wuji’s care the sick and injured mended day by day. In about ten days they took their leave one after another with their thanks. Ji Xiaofu and her daughter had nowhere to go in any case, and so stayed on to keep him company a few days more.

In these few days Zhang Wuji gave his whole mind to reading the medical book Hu Qingniu had written, and found its contents broad and deep, subtle and profound, a masterwork worthy of the Medicine Immortal indeed. He read it but eight or nine days, and his medical skill was already greatly advanced, yet as to how to expel the yin poison within his own body, he could find not the slightest clue. He read it over and over, several times through, and in the end gave up hope, thinking, If Mister Hu had known the art to cure me, how could he have failed to? And if he did not know it, how could the book contain such a record? At this thought his every hope turned to ashes. He closed the book, went out of the hut, looked at the two false graves, and thought, Within a year I too shall truly lie asleep beneath the earth. And what will be written on my gravestone?

Lost in the thought, he suddenly heard a few coughs behind him. Zhang Wuji started, turned his head, and saw the Golden Flower Granny, leaning upon the lovely young girl, standing tremulously a few dozen feet away.

“Boy,” asked the Golden Flower Granny, “what are you to Hu Qingniu? Why do you sigh here?”

“I bear within me the yin poison of the Xuanming Divine Palm… “ said Zhang Wuji. The Golden Flower Granny came closer, seized his wrist, felt his pulse, and said in wonder, “The Xuanming Divine Palm? Does such an art truly still exist in the world? Who struck you?”

“The man was got up as an officer of the Mongol soldiery,” said Zhang Wuji, “but who he really was I do not know. I came to Mister Hu to beg a cure, but he said I was not of the Ming Order²³ and would not treat me. Now he has died by poison, and my hurt can never be healed, so the thought of it grieves me.”

Seeing him handsome and refined, likeable, yet afflicted with this incurable hurt, the Golden Flower Granny said again and again, “A pity, a pity!”

Three sentences suddenly welled up in Zhang Wuji’s heart: “Of the span of life and death, what can be forced? How do I know that to delight in life is not a delusion? How do I know that to hate death is not like one who, lost abroad in childhood, has forgotten the way home? How do I know that the dead do not regret their former craving to live?”

These lines are from the Zhuangzi.²⁴ Zhang Sanfeng²⁵ was a devout Daoist, and though his seven disciples were not themselves Daoist priests, they had all read to fluency the Nanhua Classic of Zhuangzi, a treasured scripture of the Daoist school. When Zhang Wuji had grown to five years old on Ice Fire Island,²⁶ Zhang Cuishan²⁷ taught him his letters and his reading, and for want of any books, could only trace the characters upon the ground, teaching him the Zhuangzi until he knew it by heart. The sense of these four lines is this: “The length of a man’s life is not to be forced. How am I to know that to covet life is not a delusion? How am I to know that a man’s fear of death is not like the fear of a child lost abroad who knows not to return to his native land? How am I to know that the dead do not regret their former striving to live?” Zhuangzi’s meaning was to make plain that life is not necessarily a joy, nor death necessarily a bitterness, and that between life and death there is in truth no great difference. A man alive is but “dreaming a great dream”. Dead, he has “awakened to a great waking”, and perhaps, once dead, he may feel how foolish he was while living, and wonder why he did not die the sooner. Just as, after a sad and terrible nightmare, one wakes and frets that the evil dream went on far too long.

Footnotes

1. 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. ↩

2. 师妹 – shīmèi. Female junior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Mèi means younger sister. Used here by Hu Qingniu as an affectionate address to his wife. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 三虫三草 – sān chóng sān cǎo. Three vermin and three herbs; a compound poison made from three venomous creatures and three poisonous plants. ↩

4. 王难姑 – Wáng Nángū. Wife of Hu Qingniu, styled the Poison Immortal. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 师哥 – shīgē. The colloquial form of shixiong; 哥 is the spoken word for older brother, as opposed to the literary 兄. Both refer to a male senior fellow disciple of the same shifu. Used here by Wang Nangu as affectionate address to her husband. ↩

6. 断肠草 – duàncháng cǎo. Literally gut-severing grass; the heartbreak grass (Gelsemium elegans), among the deadliest of poisonous plants. ↩

7. 牛黄血竭丹 – Niúhuáng Xuèjié Dān. Bezoar and Dragon’s Blood Pills, a potent antidote compounded by Hu Qingniu. 牛黄 is ox bezoar, 血竭 the resin known as dragon’s blood, and 丹 an elixir pill. ↩

8. 玉龙苏合散 – Yùlóng Sūhé Sǎn. Jade Dragon Storax Powder, a medicinal powder; 苏合 is storax (styrax resin), and 散 a powder. ↩

9. 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. ↩

10. 师母 – shīmǔ. Wife of one’s shifu. Shī means teacher; mǔ means mother. ↩

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

12. 涌泉穴 (Yǒngquán, on the sole of the foot) and 鸠尾穴 (Jiūwěi, below the breastbone) are acupoints needled here to disperse the poison. ↩

13. 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. ↩

14. 金花婆婆 – Jīnhuā Pópo. Golden Flower Granny, the mysterious hunchbacked old woman whose plum-blossom golden flowers strike from her prayer-beads. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

15. 灵蛇岛 – Língshé Dǎo. Spirit Snake Island, in the East Sea; the stronghold of the Golden Flower Granny. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

16. 中原 – Zhōngyuán. Literally “Central Plains,” the heartland of Chinese civilisation along the Yellow River valley. Historically refers to the cultural and political centre of China. See Wikipedia. Zhang Wuji felt at Hu Qingniu’s chest. The heart was still faintly beating. He hurriedly fetched the Bezoar and Dragon’s Blood Pills and the Jade Dragon Storax Powder and got them into him, then pricked his Yongquan, Jiuwei, and other acupoints with a gold needle to scatter the poisonous breath, and afterwards treated Wang Nangu by the same method. ↩

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

18. 两 – liǎng. Unit of weight for precious metals, approximately 37.5 grams. Used as currency denomination in ancient China. ↩

19. 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. ↩

20. 玄冥神掌 – Xuánmíng Shén Zhǎng. Xuanming Divine Palm, a fearsome art that drives a bone-chilling yin poison into its victim. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

21. 医仙 – yīxiān. Medicine Immortal, Hu Qingniu’s epithet, honouring his all-but-miraculous skill in healing. ↩

22. 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. ↩

23. 明教 – Míngjiào. 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. ↩

24. 庄子·逍遥游 – Zhuāngzǐ · Xiāoyáoyóu. Literally Zhuangzi: Carefree Wandering. Opening chapter of the Zhuangzi, a foundational text of Daoist philosophy attributed to the 4th-century BCE sage Zhuang Zhou. Passage Zhang Cuishan quotes describes a vast, mysterious northern ocean at the edge of the world, an image that resonates powerfully with their predicament. See Wikipedia. ↩

25. 张三丰 – Zhāng Sānfēng. His name meaning “Three Peaks.” Legendary founder of the Wudang Order and creator of taijiquan; Zhang Wuji’s grandshifu. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

26. 冰火岛 – Bīnghuǒ Dǎo. Literally ice fire island. Remote volcanic island in the polar seas where Zhang Wuji spent his early childhood with his parents and Sworn Father. ↩

27. 张翠山 – Zhāng Cuìshān. His name meaning “Verdant Mountain.” Fifth disciple of Zhang Sanfeng and member of the Seven Xias of Wudang. His epithet is the Silver Hook Iron Brush. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩