Poetry Chants, Saber Howls – Chapter 11

Winds and Clouds Turn Without Warning, a Rain of Blood Tasted; the Goose Cut Off, the Fish Sunk Deep—Where to Seek Them? (Part 3)

South of Hongzhou city, cloud and mist unrolled in slow drifts. Mountains folded their arms around a deep, secluded gorge; a stream like a jade sash ran clear to its very bed; and amid graceful woods and jade-bright groves, a few thatched huts stood half-concealed.

Xie Miao sat on the front steps of a hut, head bent, watching a handful of ants make their slow way through the grass.

            

She couldn’t be blamed for being this bored. She had now been in Longevity Valley more than a month, and life here had proved nothing like her imaginings. The Valley Master, Dharma Master Jiuru, was a woman of quiet gravity who rarely smiled, and apart from the few routine questions about how her body felt that came with each day’s needling, she could hardly be persuaded to part with one word more. Then there was the old woman who saw to their meals and odd chores — no knight-errant of the martial world, merely an ordinary village woman Jiuru had hired from a hamlet beyond the hills. Kindly as she was, the two of them had precious little to say to each other.

Dwelling in the valley, Xie Miao had found, was even stuffier than dwelling at home.

Her one cause for joy was that Master Jiuru’s healing art was genuinely extraordinary. Day after day she worked her needles on the girl, and day after day Xie Miao drank down a bowl of broth brewed from herbs she could not begin to name. Thirty-odd days on, little by little, she could clearly feel herself far healthier than she had ever been.

            

At the very least, a few extra steps of walking no longer left her fighting for breath.

However many times she asked how much longer a complete cure would take, the answer never came. But hope was in sight now, her spirits were light, and she couldn’t help dreaming: perhaps within this very year she would go back to Chang’an, and then she and Fuli would roam every last one of its one hundred and eight wards together.

And so her gratitude toward Jiuru welled up from the bottom of her heart.

            

However cold the woman might appear, Xie Miao’s reverence toward her held unbroken from first to last.

Take this very moment: from the hut next door came the soft creak of a door, and a nun clad in a plain manyi robe stepped slowly out. She passed Xie Miao without so much as a sidelong glance — whereupon Xie Miao rose at once, pressed her palms together, and gave Master Jiuru the Buddhist salute of reverence — a gesture she had once studied in secret, watching the high monks who came to Prince Rui’s Mansion to perform rites.

“Master, are you going out?”

            

“To receive someone.” That was the whole of Jiuru’s answer. She walked on, and before long her figure had vanished into a wash of green.

The paths of Longevity Valley wound in coils and turns, and the Eight Trigrams Qimen Array lay spread over them besides. Whenever a patient wished to come for treatment, the one who had vouched for them contacted the Valley Master in advance to fix a date, and the master herself went out to receive them. So cumbersome was the whole business that, short of falling ill with some strange malady no ordinary physician could cure, truly nobody was willing to make the journey.

Which was why, in the month and more since Xie Miao entered the valley, she had been its only patient — and why she was honestly rather glad, today, when a fellow sufferer arrived at last.

            

After a while, Master Jiuru led the patient in. Xie Miao sat meekly to one side, not daring to intrude, yet watching without a blink as Jiuru set her fingers to the man’s wrist and made her diagnosis. More than an hour passed before his spirits rallied somewhat — whereupon his heart burst into flower on the spot, and he heaped praises on Master Jiuru without stint.

Jiuru heard him as though hearing nothing, and went off to decoct medicine at the little stove. Who could have known the man’s temperament was the outgoing sort? He minded her coldness not at all and simply prattled on: this debt of life was beyond any repaying, but he did know that not far from this place, in the city of Mingzhou, there stood a thousand-year-old monastery called “Baoyuan Temple” — the second greatest Buddhist temple in the jianghu today, after only Shaolin Temple. Days ago its abbot had passed into nirvana, and a successor had yet to be chosen. Might the Master be willing to go there, and deliver all beings from suffering?

For this man was the young master of a martial clan, with connections wide indeed, and his offer was no idle chatter — say the word, and he could truly have brought it about. It was at this point that Jiuru finally raised her eyes a fraction, frost seeming to sheathe the space between her brows:

            

“One more word from you, and you leave the valley this instant.”

The man went rigid. Only then did he remember the stories — the Master of Longevity Valley was solitary by temperament, one who loved quiet and hated clamor — and what he had meant as repayment had in all likelihood given her nothing but disgust. He summoned a sheepish smile and hurried on: “Peace, Master, this one was muddled. What scenery could Baoyuan Temple boast beside Longevity Valley? The jianghu is nothing but fighting and killing from morning to night — wind of blood and rain of slaughter — a dreary business through and through. You’ve fled the world and left its dust behind, aloof beyond it all; you stand above vulgar creatures like me by who knows how much.”

At that, Xie Miao — who had been playing the obedient audience for a good long while — could not hold her tongue. “The jianghu has its perils and its storms, granted. But surely it isn’t without its enjoyments altogether? If it were so utterly dreary, why would you and your kind be willing to stay in the jianghu, being these ‘vulgar creatures’?”

            

The question stopped him dead.

He frowned, thinking to himself: all this talk of mine was aimed at nothing more than praising Master Jiuru — but as for why I walk the jianghu… He turned it over for a while and, for the first time in his life, found himself at sea. Knowing nothing of the girl’s origins, seeing that her clothes were anything but common and that she kept company at Master Jiuru’s side, he took her for the successor of Longevity Valley; he dared not give offense, and so had no choice but to answer her.

“The tide of the jianghu is bound fast to the flourishing and the fall of the state.”

            

That was the famous maxim of Shen Shaoyan, Tower Master of Canghai Tower. He had decided to borrow it.

“If the court is enlightened and all is well under heaven, then however many grudges and love-feuds the sects play out, however much they cut one another down, it all stays within bounds — it never shakes the whole martial world. But let the court’s governance rot and disorder spread under heaven, and it will inevitably come flooding into the jianghu as well. And the way of things today is, in truth, already grown dark. Master, dwelling here among green hills and bright waters, free and unhurried — you are truly a person of great wisdom.”

Xie Miao had listened to the first sentences and found them sound; she was just about to nod along when his last words reached her ears. She went stiff, pursed her lips, and spoke her displeasure: “His Majesty governs with tireless diligence. Since he took the throne, the realm has known peace, all within the four seas have submitted, the common people live and work in contentment, and everyone hails Yongyou as an age of flourishing. How can you say the way of things is dark?”

            

“That was before. These past few years, who can say what’s come over our Sage — water must have leaked into his skull — he’s done one muddled thing after another.” The way of the knight-errant is to defy prohibitions with force of arms¹, and jianghu folk were therefore far bolder than the common run; besides, before him sat one recluse from beyond the world and one small child, and surely neither would carry his words beyond the hills. So he gave a cold little laugh and went on: “Never mind the rest of it — take two months ago. All within the four seas submit, you say? If not for brave tiger-generals waging his wars along every frontier, where would our dynasty’s four seas have found their submission? He wrongly put loyal ministers and fine generals to the sword — how does that pass for the acts of an enlightened sovereign?”

“Wrongly put to the sword?” Xie Miao’s face went blank with bafflement. “Which loyal ministers? Which fine generals?”

“You don’t know? Ah — but of course. A little girl like you — what would you know of the great affairs of court?” He had no notion that Xie Miao was a county princess of the imperial house — only that she had been dwelling of late in this deep mountain gorge, and so was cut off from all news. He settled down to tell her of the calamity that had shaken the empire two months past: “Ling Bingzhong — surely you’ve heard the name? Days ago, word came out of Chang’an: he and Crown Prince Xie Bo entered the palace in armor, plotting rebellion. But actually—”

            

“What did you say?!” Xie Miao sprang to her feet. The man still had half a sentence held on his tongue — but actually, all the world finds this case altogether too strange; there must be some injustice in it — and it died there unspoken.

Shock and panic rang unmistakably through the young voice, and the man was thoroughly nonplussed. More than that: even the nun who had sat apart all this while by the window on the far side of the room, watching the medicine pot simmer, deaf and indifferent to every word of their talk, stirred faintly — her gaze turning toward the girl.

Her face had drained white as chalk. The healthy color so painstakingly coaxed back over these weeks washed clean away in a single instant. “Where did you hear such news? Vice Director Ling is loyal to sovereign and country — he has won our dynasty so many hard-won battlefield merits! He couldn’t have… he couldn’t have… You must have heard it wrong!”

            

“The whole empire is talking of it by now — ask after it on any street you please. How could I have heard it wrong? You know it yourself: Ling Bingzhong won the dynasty all those battlefield merits. Well then — there’s our Sage’s muddled deed for you.”

Xie Miao still shook her head, refusing to believe. “But… but Vice Director Ling is the Sage Emperor’s own foster son. Even out of regard for that bond, His Majesty would never have struck him down without so much as telling black from white.”

“The Crown Prince was the emperor’s own son, and he had him killed just as easily as that — what does a foster son count for?” The man burst out laughing. “Young lady, I can see your speech is anything but common; young as you are, you know a deal of the world. Surely you know the saying — of all households under heaven, none is more merciless than the imperial one. And above all the house of our Great Chong: fathers slaughtering sons, brothers slaughtering brothers. Are the precedents so few?”

            

Xie Miao truly did not know.

Precisely because she had been born into the imperial house of Great Chong, the elders would never have breathed a word of that century of blood-soaked strife to a little maiden not yet come to her hairpin ceremony²; and not one maid or manservant of Prince Rui’s Mansion would ever have dared let a loose tongue wag in her presence.

To hear it now, all at once, was like standing through a mountain’s collapse, heaven and earth overturning. Her head swam; a long moment passed before she could ask again: “You’re saying that Un… that His Highness the Crown Prince and Vice Director Ling are already dead?”

            

“That’s right. It’s said the reigning emperor had them put to death by imperial decree.”

“Then… then Vice Director Ling’s daughter — what of her? How is she now?”

“Ling Bingzhong’s daughter? How should I know? But rebellion is the crime that carries nine-fold familial extermination — his daughter can hardly have escap—”

            

For the second time, the man’s words broke off unfinished. Even though he was no physician, with not the first notion of medicine, he could see that the child before him had gone frighteningly pale — that her body was swaying, on the very edge of collapse.

Not from grief alone.

From pain.

            

As if ten million steel needles, every one fine as an ox’s hair, had been driven in the same instant into the heart inside her chest — a pain so dense and seeping there was no enduring it. Her body sank slowly down; her right hand crept unbidden to her heart; her head gave one last violent lurch, and with a heavy thud everything went dark — she had lost consciousness, crumpled upon the floor.

“Young lady, you-you-you—” The man went white with fright, hands and feet thrown into disarray. “Master, come and see! She-she-she — what’s happened to her?!”

He needn’t have cried out. A gray shadow flashed, and Jiuru was already before Xie Miao, reaching out to take her pulse. A moment later she gathered the girl up in both arms and turned toward the inner chamber, speaking without so much as a backward glance: “In half an hour, once that pot of medicine has finished simmering, take it yourself.”

            

A heart ailment was no trifling sickness. For now, the whole of her strength must go to saving this child’s life.

---