“I came across you two days ago, Ma No. Admit it, it was you, wasn’t it, it was you! By a pond, between two willow trees. You were the crane that wouldn’t leave me, that strutted up and down in front of me on proud legs, on scarlet legs, and speared frogs.
You wore white, and looked craftily out of yellow eyes in your blood red head. And then after you’d eaten there in front of me and I’d left you in peace, you flew up into the air and voided your black clung onto my tunic and my shoes.
“You wicked shade, you kuei, you shan’t annihilate me, I say. You shan’t, I tell you! The kuei must get past me first.”
Wang, his damaged knee drawn up, brandished the sword. He spoke in a harsh whisper, with abhorrence, into the cowering priest’s upturned birdface. With blind relish he threw every sentence over the priest like a handful of crushed peppers. Behind the words an iron fury sounded.
Ma No’s hatred for this man swelled immeasurably. Now and then he pursed his mouth scornfully, gathered himself for a desperate leap, fell gloomily back, steeled himself, not stirring, determined not to stir from the spot.
“If my brother Wang meets the King of the Fireflies in his dreams tonight, he’ll have no cause to thank him. A wise old man from Han times taught that a path trodden in anger will be of no avail. My brother Wang wears a battle sword at his side. He declares he must wear a sword and is unable to approach the holy Tao. My brother should observe my miserable calm, how I prefer to be struck than strike. His sword seems to me like a possessed soul that leads its master into a swamp. As always, Ma No from P’ut’o-shan will never raise a sword, and no one can ever persuade him to do so. He’s too weak for the frenzied spirit of a sword. Ma No follows the Tao as if he were just now coming around the cliff of Shen-yi, as if he were just now hearing for the first time the words of a man who spoke like Boddhisatva, the words of Wang Lun: ‘A frog can’t devour a stork. Against fate there is only one remedy: Not to struggle, to be as weak and docile as the white water. We shall climb a peak more beautiful than any I have yet seen, the Peak of Supreme Bliss.’
“Ma No’s climbing straight up to this peak. And since Ma No is not without lust after women, he’s climbing with the women. But he must attain the peak, will attain it. You can turn aside from me, Wang Lun; but women are sweet to me, my eye lingers on them as on the colours of orchids, I’ve never prayed so purely as I have since one of them lay beside me on this bag of straw. No trance on P’ut’o-shan such as I saw and I lived through, no ecstasy has ever been so full of power as mine since that profane moment. The thirst in my mouth is no more wicked than the lust of my hands and my loins. Sakyamuni was wrong. Of that I’m certain. If up on Nank’ou I told you otherwise of the golden Buddhas and you accepted it, then I taught you bad things, and it’s only right they should rebound on me, though they shan’t mislead me, Wang Lun. We’re no longer taking the same road, Wang Lun. Don’t torment yourself and don’t torment me.”
Wang Lun sat in stony calm on the cart. The long battle sword lay in the moss on broken Buddha-heads. It was clear to Wang what must happen; it was clear to Ma No. They said nothing more about it.
He asked Ma No to have cold water brought for his knee and to summon a doctor in the morning. Ma and two men dragged bundles of grass into the hut. Before they lay down to sleep, they gazed gravely at each other and bowed. They stood side by side. Then they threw themselves down.
Wang stayed four days among the Broken Melon, who were mobilizing for a trek farther southwards. He observed them, got to know the majority of these adherents. He did not argue with them, spoke tersely, his manner very distracted, of the hard road of the Truly Powerless. When they asked him why a man who, like them, wanted to bow unresisting to fate should wear a soldier’s jacket and carry a battle sword, he answered smiling that lots of people put masks on to frighten away evil. On the day of Ch’ü Yuan, the fifth day of the fifth month, the five venomous creatures rampage: serpent, scorpion, centipede, toad and lizard; on that day anxious mothers rub flowers of sulphur in wine onto their children’s ears and noses and paint the character for “tiger” on their foreheads; but they don’t mean their children are wild tigers.
Between the day when he left the Naok’ou mountains in a snowstorm and this summer month, a transformation had taken place within him. Ma No had noticed as they sat in the storeroom in Pat’a-ling how a feeling of pity for these brothers who trusted him settled on Wang. He made his eventful journey through Chihli and Shantung. The more he suffered, the farther he was driven from the role of a gentle Truly Powerless preparing a cloak of purity for his soul. His attitude hardened to that of protector of his brothers. He must fight for the outcasts of his native land.
Close by Chinan-fu temptation accosted him. He couldn’t resist the compulsion that sank painfully, joyously into his breast; made, face smeared with charcoal, for the high road that leads to Chinan-fu from the east. Strode on alone for a while, waited for a wagon train that he could use to smuggle himself into the city. None came at this time of day, for the oil carts, trains of wagons bearing fruit, vegetables and coal usually entered Chinan-fu in the earliest hours of morning. Before Wang, strangely reckless, had quite reached the eastern gate of the city he was spotted by two constables, who recognized his tall figure and rolling gait, followed him and together with a gatekeeper seized him as he was about to saunter through the East Gate, slowly and unconcerned, just like a citizen of Chinan-fu.
Through the barred window, as big as his hand, of the cellar into which they threw him Wang could see the broad winding street, its shops, shouting hawkers and colourful bustle, once the stamping ground for his games, tricks, and swindles. On the left must be the market to which the street with the temple of the great Patron of Music, Han Hsiang-tzu, led. Straight ahead was the way to the inn, to Su-ko’s house, now a heap of ashes. Then the training ground of the provincial troops.
And now temptation fell on Wang: to remain here, to await trial, endure the sentence of death by a thousand cuts. He couldn’t account for the fervent longing that ambushed him. He wanted to die surrounded by this bustling and haggling, among the clappers and gongs and the shouts of hawkers, here on his home ground. In the cellar he pondered his changed situation. How months ago he’d left his companions in the Nank’ou mountains, how barely two weeks before he’d dined at Ch’en Yao-fen’s sumptuous table, and how the T’ouszu lost his life, and Su-ko, and how he’d cheated, raged and robbed. And it seemed to him all past bearing, and pleasant, a stroke of luck, to suffer greatly here, to suffer right to the bitter end.
In their haste to arrest him the constables and the gatekeeper had locked him up without taking away his sword. The three of them were delighted to have this notorious murderer in their cellar. The two constables were already in the yamen and hurrying to the town headquarters to inform the Taot’ai and the general of their extraordinary catch and make sure of their reward, before it occurred to the old gatekeeper on his bench that Wang had a sword with him. From his windowsill he took a little cudgel that a cattle drover had left behind that morning, hid it in his sleeve and went barefoot down the steps. He’d steal Wang’s sword; if it was valuable, sell it; otherwise produce it at the yamen and be rewarded for his bravery.
He opened the cellar padlock. Mice ran between his bare chilblained feet, scampered up his trouserlegs. Wang sat on the floor and looked at the old man. The gatekeeper stepped closer, asked how he felt, was he ill, studied his expression. The sword lay where it had been thrown, away from Wang towards the door.
Wang thanked him; it was good to be in Chinan again. And how was the landlord of the inn and which market was now the most popular.
The landlord was doing very nicely—now the gatekeeper saw the sword, edged Sidelong towards it, felt with his hands backwards for the handle—and the Goldbeaters’ Market, which used to be so much the favourite, had lost its floral gaiety ever since the guild of flower sellers declined to meet the high stall rents. They did all their trade nowadays in the spacio
us yard of their own guildhouse.
It was astonishing, said Wang, how quickly the town changed. But the gatekeepers stayed the same. They stole whatever came into their hands. Only he oughtn’t to steal this sword, if he’d be so good as to refrain. For it belonged to a man in eastern Shantung, whose name he’d mention if his friend could keep a secret and take the sword back to him for a large consideration.
The gatekeeper fawned before the prisoner, whispered that he could be relied on. And if Wang wanted an honourable, albeit secret, burial in a tolerably propitious location, let him only say the word before the constables got back with the transport cage; he’d already helped lots like that.
From outside came loud complaints and scolding. Wang looked through the bars. A beggar beadle was laying into two paupers with his long staff. A mandarin with a blue button looked out from his palanquin and beckoned to the men, who had begged fraudulently at his house, away from their home patch, and twice in one day.
Wang sighed, squatted down again, said thoughtfully that after all the town hadn’t changed much. Shook himself resolutely, and then he went up to the gatekeeper and lifted him by the shoulders. When the old man struck him on the breast with the cudgel, Wang said it’d be best if he saved himself the trouble, laid the squawking man on his face, outside at the open door yelling into the town threatened the beggar beadle and the blue button with his whirling sword, disappeared from the walls of Chinan-fu.
There’s no sense in dying. You can’t just let it go on. The beadle’s wrong, and the beggars are wrong. They’ve all turned aside from the Tao. Someone must make a start with the right way.
There followed a weary trek. Wang tried to reach the region south of the Nank’ou mountains by the most direct roads. But news of him was spreading.
Drives were organized to hunt him down, following an order from the Tsungtu of Shantung that the Prefect of any district through which Wang passed without being apprehended would be liable to severe punishment.
Pursued and only gradually aware of the danger he was in, particularly when he observed that the fame of the Truly Powerless had spread throughout Chihli and Shantung and everyone knew he wanted to join up with the brothers in the northwest, Wang abandoned his tactic of solitary wandering. He saw it his duty to press through at all costs to the northern plains. A superstitious feeling bound him to his sword; Yellow Leaper was his steed. There were two countries in the world: one the little plain south of Nank’ou, the other everywhere else, water through which he swam on Yellow Leaper’s back.
Once when he had lain two days in a cave, afraid that if he ventured out he’d be captured by peasants who recognized him, he swore to himself: “Whatever happens outside the realm of my brothers is subject to its own, different, laws. I am poor and suffering only among them, I must go to them. I deny my laws to this land, these waves.”
Took up close by the gates with a band of evil characters whose speciality was to put whole villages to the torch, kidnap hostages and extort ransoms; who like the Chungus of Manchuria appeared everywhere in the summer, in winter scattered into the towns. The peculiar fate that ruled over this man of destiny arranged it so that at the very time he was taking command of a dangerous band and was pressing on with it from place to place, in western Chihli just such hordes were injecting the first fears into the sectarians’ idyllic dreams.
For a month and a half he buried memories of icy winter days; through the sweetest spring weather he advanced from crime to crime. He felt no unease. When, three days’ journey from a wood where the first groups of Truly Powerless were camping, the tearaways proposed an attack on a wealthy traveller, a scholarly Hutuktu who in grand style was making a tour of inspection of the lamaical monasteries of Chihli, Wang made up his mind to leave them.
He declined to take part in the enterprise. They surrounded him—it was early morning in a pretty little valley—took him to task, called him a coward. With unhurried movements he freed his back, explained that he’d catch up with his friends in three days, refused to take them along. They were waves; he wanted land. They began to mock the namby-pamby brothers, asked Wang where his begging bowl was, they had something to put in it, laughed.
Wang walked away. Two li farther on five of them barred his way, started jeering again, fidgetting the while suspiciously with their bows. When one of them pushed a severed queue into his greasy cap as a memento, Wang thought it right to gain the shore with one great bound.
He cursed the land he was leaving, spat on his sword as you spit on a corpse to waken it, raised it high with both hands, smashed it into the almsgiver’s breast. When he let go, he found himself alone on the road with the dead man. He drew the edge between his lips; the land he was leaving spurted hot towards him; he licked the auspicious blood.
Ran for hours without resting, Yellow Leaper leading the way. Until evening came, and he laid himself down without hunger in a wood. Two days passed during which frightened women who crossed the scarecrow’s path handed over fruit and uncooked rice, then at onset of evening he skirted a meadow from where singing and the chanting of sutras floated towards him. He recognized beside a fire the young hunchback from Nank’ou. They were a large band.
The night before he left Ma No’s troop, two girls came into his tent. They held yellow lanterns on bamboo staves which they shone on him, leaned the lanterns out of the way in a corner. They rolled the sleeping man off his pile of straw, rubbed his eyes for him, squatted alert side by side as he sat up, carefully exercised his injured knee and slowly began to smile.
He wore a long brown tunic, his coarse feet were bare. Each girl took one of his hands and raised him up, so that he took them both in his hands and supported himself on round submissive shoulders. Held thus, heads pressed together, they exchanged nervous glances. The younger in his left arm trembled and sought the other girl’s fingers. They both thought the terrible sorcerer was going to carry them away through the tent roof, or twine like a snake around their necks.
But Wang released them, one after the other stroked smooth the straightcut fringes on their foreheads. They were entranced. The younger one shook herself and ground her teeth. They pinched his arms that he held out between them. They felt his muscles, right and left, pulled themselves up by his elbows, swung, the elder grabbing just in time at the neck of his tunic, the younger tottering unsteadily on her shoulders. Suddenly the younger one, wobbling on Wang’s forearm, scratching and tapping at the skin on his breast, overbalanced, dragging the other girl down with her, bit his arm close to the wrist like a playful young puppy at a bone, slipped interestedly onto her feet and stood chewing and snapping at Wang’s unmoving yellow-brown left arm. She looked sidelong into the man’s face, waiting for him to twitch, astonished that he still didn’t flinch. His hardness hurt her teeth. Exhausted she smacked her lips, licked herself.
She was a native of Shensi, small, lithe, a chatterer. You could take her for a poodle or a rabbit. She told lies freely and happily, in a certain silly way, just as they came into her head. Along with the other girl she had been a house slave on the country estate of a family near Kuangp’ing, fled when her carelessness caused a fire in her mistress’ room, didn’t dare return, cheerfully let three begging sisters bring her along to the camp of the Broken Melon. She was lazy, said yes to everyone, was impervious to teaching.
The other, no bigger than her but fuller, with a longer nose, much more delicate than the younger girl, was no less a liar but in more of a swaggering, boastful way. She inclined easily to sentimentality and self-worship. Ever since her twelfth year she’d suffered occasional spells of strange humour that lasted months, gave herself up to romantic imaginings and thoughts of suicide. Later she liked to assume the expression of a blessed martyr, as if she’d had some tremendous experience, but when anyone pressed her admitted lightly that homeless, orphaned and bereft of family as she was she found the emptiness and hopelessness of her existence an absolute torment. She considered herself special, clung intimately, even pass
ionately, to her girlfriends, got on with them only for a matter of weeks, was considered clever, pretty and quarrelsome. Had she come into the house, not of an honourable gentleman but of a sharp man of business, she would have been sold long before into a theatrical troupe, where she could have developed her gifts to the best advantage.
Wang slipped into trousers and sandals. The girls wanted to help. They fussed chattering around him. The younger offered herself to him in excitement as she explained through a welter of questions that she was over fifteen and was glad to come across such a fearsome conqueror of demons. Oh, she was so looking forward to plucking flowers with him. Wang said he’d have to think about it, pushed them away one after the other as they danced around him. The younger one ripped her gown at the neck and under the shoulder. Pleased and bashful, she showed Wang the meagre roundness of her breasts. The sentimental girl stood pouting because the little one kept nudging her with her shoulder, told her to go away, hit her from behind over the nose.
When Wang grasped the little one by the shoulders, sent her spinning over the mossy ground so the girl became dizzy and lurching crazily split open her too tight trousers, the sentimental one scolded her: she didn’t learn that in the old master’s respectable house. Wang took her by the shoulder too. But she pulled herself free, said with downcast shining eyes that she’d like to make a proposition. She’d wrestle with the little one, or lift stones, or whatever the little one wanted. They should see which was best. The man set them on each other, then sat down in the straw. They had to crouch down beside him, he comforted them, stroked their glowing faces that they averted bitterly from one another.
He told as he petted them stories that he’d heard in Chinan-fu.
The ovenblack masses of the night loosened. A thin grey gas disjointed them and dispersed, dissipated them in space. The catalpa forest, uncovered, stepped forward like a ram with lowered horns.
The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Page 20
