by Jin Yong
Qiu Chuji smiled. They were indeed competitive. “So you will agree to my suggestion, no matter what?”
Zhu Cong and Gilden Quan were confident they stood a chance at victory, whatever perverse or clever trick the Taoist came up with. “You decide!”
“The word of a gentleman . . .” Qiu Chuji said.
“. . . is as true as a horseman’s whip!” Jade Han finished.
Ke Zhen’e made no reply.
“If my terms are deemed unsuitable, I will of course admit defeat,” Qiu Chuji continued. It was an obvious tactic, playing to their vanity.
“Just give us the rules,” Ke Zhen’e said.
Qiu Chuji sat back down. “The method I have devised may seem protracted, but it is a true test of skill rather than brute force or momentary bravery. Every martial artist is trained to fight with fist and blade, there is nothing special about that. And besides, we have our good reputations to protect. We are not mere thugs.”
If we’re not going to fight, then what? the Seven Freaks wondered. Another drinking contest?
“This challenge, seven against one, will not only determine who has more skill, but also determination and stamina, as well as tactical intelligence. By the end, we will know who is worthy of the name ‘hero’.”
The Seven Freaks were boiling over with anticipation.
“Tell us!” Jade Han said.
“If the challenge involves mixing together elixirs of immortality or charms to drive away ghosts we must accept defeat now,” Zhu Cong said, smiling.
Qiu Chuji smiled back. “And I wouldn’t want to compete with Brother Zhu in a contest of pickpocketing and filching.”
“Tell us!” Jade Han was growing ever more impatient.
“At the heart of our dispute lay a misunderstanding. All because the lives of two descendants of loyal patriots are in danger. It is to this matter we must return.”
Qiu Chuji began relating the story of how he met Skyfury Guo and Ironheart Yang, the fight in the snow and his pursuit of Justice Duan to this very temple. The Seven Freaks were just as disgusted with the corrupt Song court as with the brutal Jin, and vowed their allegiance to the brothers Guo and Yang.
“The woman Commander Duan kidnapped was Skyfury Guo’s widow, Madam Li. You saw her, I am sure.”
“I remember her voice – I could never forget it,” Ke Zhen’e said.
“Good,” Qiu Chuji continued. “I know not where Ironheart Yang’s widow is to be found, however. But I have met her, and you have not. So, my suggestion is—”
“We find Madam Li and you find Madam Bao, and whoever succeeds first will be determined the winner. Am I right?” Jade Han interrupted.
“Finding them may not be easy, but it is hardly a test worthy of determining a hero. No, my proposal is more complicated.”
“What is it?” Impatience was now getting the better of Ke Zhen’e.
“Both women are pregnant. We will find them, make sure they are safe and help them with the birth. As the children grow and mature . . .”
The Seven Freaks were astonished at where this was going.
“Then what?” Ryder Han urged.
“We will train them. Once they have reached the age of eighteen, we and other invited masters of the wulin will gather at the Garden of the Eight Drunken Immortals. First we will feast, and then our disciples will fight each other.”
The Seven Freaks looked at each other.
“Were we to fight and the Seven Heroes defeat me, the glory of the victory would be tainted by the fact that you outnumber me. But in passing our skills on to one disciple each, we will better see whose skills are worthy of earning them the title ‘Master’.”
“So it shall be!” Ke Zhen’e cried, thumping his staff against the temple floor.
“But what if Madam Li has already been killed by Commander Duan?” said Gilden Quan.
“That is a matter for fate,” Qiu Chuji replied. “If the heavens have favoured me, then so be it.”
“Fine,” Ryder Han rejoined. “We will have helped those poor widows and their unborn children even if we lose, which is the noblest course of action.”
“Exactly, Brother Han,” Qiu Chuji said, gesturing his approval. “I would be most grateful if the Seven Heroes took care of my dead brother Guo’s child and raised him to adulthood.” He turned and bowed to each one in turn.
“You have been exceedingly clever with this plan,” Zhu Cong said, “as it will involve eighteen years of hard work.”
Qiu Chuji’s countenance changed and he started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jade Han challenged.
“The Seven Heroes have a reputation for generosity and a willingness to help others in need,” Qiu Chuji said. “Heroes with a strong sense of justice, they say.”
“And?” Ryder Han and Zhang Asheng demanded in unison.
“But I see now this was a gross exaggeration.”
The Freaks were incensed and Ryder Han slammed his fist on the bench. But Qiu Chuji continued before he could interrupt.
“Since time immemorial, martial heroes have sworn allegiance to one another. They have been prepared to die for friendship. ‘In times of peril, who cares for mine own flesh.’ Justice was the only honourable consideration, for who could baulk at giving their life for such a noble cause? Could you imagine Jing Ke or Nie Zheng hestitating over such a matter? The Yang and Guo families are in grave distress and in need of our assistance, and you quibble over the details of our contest?”
Zhu Cong’s cheeks were hot with shame. He was an educated man and knew well the righteous conduct of ancient men described in the biographies from Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. “Yes, Your Reverence is correct to point this out. I was mistaken. We will do just as you suggest.”
“Today is the twenty-fourth day of the third lunar month,” Qiu Chuji began, standing up. “We shall meet again on this very same day, eighteen years from now, at noon, at the Garden of the Eight Drunken Immortals. With the other heroes of the wulin as our witness, we will see who among us is truly deserving of the title ‘Master’.” And with a flick of his sleeve, he left.
“I’m going to look for Justice Duan,” Ryder Han announced. “We can’t let him go to ground, or we’ll never track him down.”
As the only one not to have sustained any injury, he marched out of the door, swung himself up onto his famous golden steed, Wind Chaser, and went in pursuit of Commander Duan and Lily Li.
“Brother, brother!” Zhu Cong called after him. “You’ve never laid eyes on them before!”
But it was too late; Ryder Han was impatient by nature and his horse true to its name.
2
JUSTICE DUAN GRABBED AT LILY LI, SLIPPED OUT OF THE temple and began running. Some distance thence, he looked back, and was relieved to see no-one following them. He slowed the pace and made for the river. There he spotted a small boat, jumped down onto the bow and, brandishing his sword, ordered the ferryman to start moving. The land south of the Yangtze was criss-crossed with a spider’s web of rivers. Canals and boats were the usual mode of transportation, just as northerners travelled the plains by horse and carriage. No boatman would dare disobey an official, so the man unfastened the moorings and pushed the boat out away from the city.
What a mess! Duan’s thoughts were an internal tussle. If I go back to Lin’an, my uncle will surely have me killed. I’d better go north. With any luck the Taoist and the Seven Freaks will have perished from their injuries and my uncle from his anger. Then I will be able to return and resume my post.
He instructed the boatman to follow the river northwards. Duan changed out of his official’s clothes and forced Lily Li to do the same.
They swapped boats several times on their way north. After ten days they arrived in Yangzhou, where Duan stopped at an inn. But just as they had settled in, he heard someone outside asking the innkeeper if a Commander Duan had come this way. He peered through a crack in the door. There stood an extraordinarily ugly, stum
py man accompanied by a pretty young girl. They spoke with heavy Jiaxing dialects. The Seven Freaks, he deduced. As luck would have it, the Yangzhou innkeeper was struggling to understand them, giving Duan enough time to grab Lily Li and slip out the back door. She tried to call out, but Duan silenced her, boxing her around the ear despite the searing pain in his arm. He then dragged her back to the water.
They were back on the Grand Canal within minutes and on their way north again. This time, they did not stop until they arrived at the garrison post of Liguo on the shores of Lake Mount Wei, just inside the borders of Shandong province.
Lily Li spent every waking hour wailing and cursing her captor. Duan was no gentleman, to be sure, but he never had any improper intentions, as far as she could discern; she was a somewhat plain country girl with unbound feet, who was by now much swollen with child. Instead, they bickered and scuffled, and never had a moment’s peace. He may have been a commanding officer in the Song army, but his martial arts were poor, and fighting Lily Li with only one arm was taking all his strength.
Within days, however, the short man and the pretty girl had caught up with them. Duan wanted to hide in their room, but knowing her rescuers had come, Lily Li started screaming. Duan seized a cotton quilt and stuffed it into her mouth, hitting her as he did so.
Lily Li was proving to be a liability. He would be better off killing her, he reflected. After they heard Ryder Han and Jade Han leave, Duan drew his sabre.
Lily Li had been waiting for a chance to avenge her husband, but Duan tied her hands and legs every night before bed. She saw a murderous glimmer in his eyes, and whispered to herself, “Dear husband, please protect me and help me kill this villain. I will be with you soon.”
She reached into her shirt and removed the dagger Qiu Chuji had given her. She had hidden it so well that Duan was unaware of its existence.
Duan sneered and raised his sabre. Lily Li was prepared. She summoned her strength and ran at Duan, dagger first. A gust of cold air skimmed Duan’s cheeks. He twisted his weapon, hoping to knock the dagger from her grasp. Yet its blade was so sharp that it sliced crisply through the sabre’s blade. The tip of Lily’s dagger chipped off and ricocheted in the direction of Duan’s ribcage. He stumbled backwards as it slashed open the front of his shirt, and scored his flesh with a bloody stripe. Had Lily used just a little more force, the blade would have eviscerated him. He grabbed a chair and held it in front of him. “Put the dagger down and I won’t hurt you!”
Too exhausted to fight anymore, and with the baby kicking inside her, Lily crumpled in a heap on the floor, panting. But she held the dagger firm.
Duan manhandled her onto another boat and together they headed further northwards to Linqing, Dezhou, and on to Hebei province.
Lily Li was not making escape any easier. She screamed and shouted nonsense when they stopped at inns or travelled in boats, attracting considerable attention. She would tear at her clothes and pull strange faces. Had she gone mad? At first Duan believed it must be so. But after a few days he realised she was leaving a trail of clues for her rescuers. Summer had passed and an autumn chill cooled the air. They were by now far into the Jin-controlled north, but Duan was running out of silver and his enemies were still close behind.
They travelled until they reached the Jin Empire’s capital, Yanjing. There they would find a quiet place to hide, and Duan would get rid of her. The Seven Freaks would never find them in such a large city.
But before they reached the city gates, a group of Jin soldiers stopped them and commanded them to carry supplies. The soldiers were travelling north with an emissary, charged with presenting the northern Mongolian tribes with Jin imperial ordinances. Ordinary Han Chinese citizens were being forced to act as porters. Lily was dressed in men’s clothing, but as she was so short was given a lighter pole. Duan was left to stagger under his one-hundred-jin load.
Duan tried protesting their treatment, but reply came in the form of several lashes across the head. This was not an alien situation to Duan, it was just that previously he had been the one holding the whip. A crucial difference.
Octobers in the north were bitter, the sky swirled with snow and sand, and shelter was hard to come by. They lined up alongside the three hundred Jin soldiers, and together they trudged through open country. One by one they caught the faint sound of shouting carried on the wind from up ahead, and in the distance they could make out a cloud of sand kicked up by a throng of horses.
They fast approached: a defeated tribe from beyond the Gobi, swathed in furs. The Jin ranks dispersed, throwing their weapons behind them. Those without horses escaped on foot, but were soon crushed in the stampede.
Lily Li dropped her pole and ran in the opposite direction to the others. She could not see where Duan had gone, but no-one was taking any notice of her.
She ran and ran, until after some distance she felt a stabbing pain in her stomach. She collapsed behind a sand dune and fainted. There she remained until long after nightfall, when she woke to what in her confusion sounded like the cries of a baby. Her mind a fog, she wondered if she might in fact have passed into the afterlife, but the wails were getting louder. With a sudden jerk, she felt something warm between her legs. There was a break in the snow and a bright round moon peered from behind the clouds. She was awake now, and her chest was heaving with heavy sobs. Her baby was born.
She sat up and took the baby into her arms. A boy. Still crying, she bit through the umbilical cord and wrapped him tight to her bosom. His eyes shone in the moonlight, beneath two thick eyebrows. His cries were strong and carried far. These were no conditions for giving birth, but the sight of her baby gave Lily Li a strength she had never before known. She rolled over onto her knees, and pulled them both into a small ditch nearby to take shelter. There she cried for her baby’s father, lost forever.
They made the ditch their home for the night. The next day, when the sun was high in the sky, Lily Li summoned the courage to move. She looked out across the steppe at the dead men and horses scattered everywhere. Not a survivor to be seen.
She found some food in the knapsack of a dead soldier, as well as a knife and flint. She sliced some flesh from a horse and cooked it over a fire. Then she skinned another, wrapping one hide around the baby and another around herself. She and the baby lived like this for ten days, eating horse meat preserved in the snow, until she had regained enough strength to take her child and make her way east in the direction of the rising sun. The hate and anger she had been carrying with her was now transformed into love, and on she walked, doing her best to protect her son from the cutting desert winds.
She walked for days, the ground around her gradually turning ever greener. As the sun began to set, she saw two horses approaching on the horizon. The riders pulled on their reins and stopped to ask if she needed assistance. They were Mongolian shepherds, and did not know Chinese, but instinctively they understood the young mother’s story. They brought her back to their gers and gave her food and a place to rest. They were moving camp the next morning in search of fresh pasture, but before departing they gave her four lambs for her new family.
And so it came to pass that Guo’s son was born and raised on the Mongolian steppe.
3
YEARS PASSED. LILY LI NAMED THE BOY GUO JING AS QIU Chuji had suggested. He was a slow developer, speaking his first words only at the age of four, but he was strong and able to herd cattle and sheep all by himself. Mother and son depended on each other for survival, living a simple yet back-breaking existence. They learned Mongolian, but when together, still spoke in the Lin’an dialect of Chinese. The boy’s soft voice saddened his mother. “You should also be able to speak your father’s Shandong tongue, but I never learned it in the short time we had together,” she would say.
It was October, the air was growing colder. Guo Jing, now six years old, rode each day out to pasture, accompanied by his sheepdog. Just as the sun was at its highest, a large black bird appeared in the sky. It hovered abo
ve the herd briefly, then swooped. One of the young sheep broke free and ran.
Guo Jing jumped onto his pony and galloped seven or eight li before at last catching it. Just as he was about to turn back with the sheep, a deep rumble came echoing across the steppe. Was it thunder? He was not sure what it was, but it frightened him. It grew louder, until a horse’s neigh rose above it, followed by more horses and men shouting.
He had never heard anything like it. He hurried the sheep up a small hill and into a nearby clump of bushes. Safely hidden, he ventured a glimpse out.
Through the plumes of dust an army was racing towards him. Guo Jing watched as the commanding general barked an order, and the army broke into two and within seconds assumed formation. They wore splendid white turbans, into which they had stuck coloured feathers.
A brief silence, then a blast of horns from the left. Another army. Three rows charged forward. The young man leading them, an elongated figure in a red cape, held his sword high. The two armies clashed and a bloody battle commenced. The advancing army had fewer men and were beaten back before long, but support was quick to arrive and the fighting grew ever more fierce. And just as the battle appeared to be waning, a blast of horns came again from the east, shaking the remaining men into new life.
“The Great Khan Temujin has arrived! The Great Khan has arrived!”
The fighting continued, but now the soldiers kept looking over in the direction of the horns.
Guo Jing followed their gazes eastward. A cloud of sand swelled, until through it broke a group of riders, holding high a pole from which hung white hair. Their cheers grew louder, bolstering the riders’ allies and scattering the hitherto tight formations of their foe. Guo Jing watched from deeper under cover as the banner approached the very hill upon which he was standing.
A tall, middle-aged man was prominent among the riders. He wore a helmet made of shiny metal and his chin laid growth to a brown tuft of beard. Guo Jing did not know this was the leader of the Mongolians, the Great Khan Temujin, later to be known throughout history as the mighty Genghis Khan; he did not even know what the word “khan” meant. But he understood the man’s power, and it frightened him.
