The Past and the Punishments

by Yu Hua

  ance by years of brooding expectation. The time had come to cast Ruan Haikuo out of the house and onto the open road.

  And so it was that, on that bright morning, she began to speak once again of that momentous morning fifteen years before, of how she had seen her husband’s body lying lifeless in the weeds:

  “I couldn’t even see his eyes.”

  After fifteen years of speculation, she told her son, she had failed to determine who had killed his father:

  “But there are two men who may be able to help.”

  The men she spoke of had sung and sparred with Ruan Jinwu twenty years earlier at the foot of Mount Hua.

  Indeed, of all the swordsmen Ruan Jinwu had encountered throughout his long career, they had been the only two he had never managed to best in swordplay. One or the other, she continued, would certainly know exactly on whom he was destined to take his revenge for the death of his father.

  “The first man is called Master Blue Cloud, and the second is called White Rain.”

  Both Master Blue Cloud and White Rain had long ago

  retired from the strife and discord of the world of swordsmen. They lived as hermits, passing their days deeply absorbed in meditation. Despite their reclusion, or perhaps because of it, these two men alone held the keys that would unlock the secrets of the most intractable mysteries that still troubled the world of swordsmen.

  Ruan Haikuo sat motionless, transfixed by the sound of his mother’s voice. He knew all that was to transpire. He saw ash-gray roads stretching before him. He saw rivers so green they looked black. His mother’s shadow fluttered just outside the perimeter of these visions of the trials that lay before him. A moment later, his father’s fabled Plum Blossom Sword lay across his outstretched palms like a branch floating on the surface of a river. He took the sword from his mother’s icy fingers.

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  His mother told him the weapon was etched with ninety-nine plum blossoms. She told him that the blood of his father’s murderer would make a new flower bloom on the blade.

  Ruan Haikuo hung the sword at his back and strode out of the cottage. In the distance, the red morning sun was rising through an extraordinarily empty expanse of blue.

  Walking underneath the sky, he felt like a lonely gray magpie in flight.

  When he reached the road, he could not help but gaze back at the cottage. A color like that of the sun had begun to engulf its thatched roof. Flame danced in the morning breeze. In the sky behind the cottage, harsh morning light was burning redly through a bank of clouds. Ruan Haikuo stopped in his tracks, fearing for a moment that the clouds had somehow descended on the cottage and begun to burn.

  He heard the sound of cracking beams. He saw sparks whirl through the air like fountain spray. A heap of flame tumbled to the ground, flooding across the field in front of the cottage like water.

  As Ruan Haikuo turned and began to walk away, his legs fluttered in the morning breeze. The road ahead unscrolled before him like a mirage. He was all too aware of the warning conveyed to him by his mother’s self-immolation. In the months and years to come, there would be no home to which he could return.

  It was thus that, without so much as an inkling of the skills required of a swordsman, Ruan Haikuo shouldered the celebrated Plum Blossom Sword in order to find and take his revenge on the men who had killed his father.

  2

  In the seemingly endless journey that followed, the names Ruan Haikuo’s mother had entrusted to him in the 184 yu hua

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  moments before her death came to seem as empty as echoes in a mountain gorge. She had told him that he was to find them but had given no indication as to where they might be found. This was why Ruan Haikuo’s progress across lakes and rivers, through mountains and forests, and past tiny villages and bustling towns quickly took on an aimless and illusory cast. For Ruan Haikuo, however, it was just this sort of aimless rambling, with its constant promise of boundless horizons to come, that provided him with the inspiration to continue his journey.

  On that first morning, he had followed the road by the cottage for nearly ten miles before coming to a river. By the time he had crossed the little wooden bridge that spanned the water, though, he had already forgotten which direction he had planned to take. And, from that day on, he abandoned any attempt to navigate his way across the land.

  Instead, he simply meandered across the earth’s surface, moving in whatever direction his feet happened to take him. He passed through countless towns, but all of them were made of the same kinds of buildings, shaded by the same trees, and packed with the same sorts of people walking through the same kinds of streets. With each new town, Ruan Haikuo felt merely as if he had walked through another memory.

  One day, after more than a year on the open road, Ruan Haikuo came to a crossroads at dusk. This, of course, was not the first crossroads he had come to in the course of his journey. Nor was it to be the last. Each crossroads would either lead him closer to or take him farther away from Master Blue Cloud and White Rain. Throughout his journey, Ruan Haikuo had given the decisions presented by these junctures no more thought than if he were simply walking down a straight and uninterrupted road.

  This particular crossroads gradually drew toward him through the dimness of dusk. He saw wave after wave of mountains rolling into the distance ahead. Narrow rays of Blood and Plum Blossoms 185

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  red sunlight shot down through the gaps between the mountain peaks. A second road ran perpendicular to the mountain range across an expanse of muddy earth, its rough, pitted surface thrown into relief by the reddish glow of dusk. He decided to walk straight toward the mountains before he had even reached the crossroads. It was precisely because of scores of random decisions over the course of the past year that he had arrived at this particular spot in the first place.

  Sometime after he had come to this decision, however, he suddenly became aware of the fact that he was moving further and further away from the mountains. Instead of continuing past the crossroads as he had originally intended, he had unwittingly turned down the road that led across a desolate expanse of mud. The sun had already fallen below the horizon, and the sky was black as ash. When he turned to look behind him, he could barely make out the crossroads from which he had come. He continued to walk, thinking all the while of the moment he had turned at the crossroads.

  But try as he might, he was unable to remember it. It was as if it had never actually happened at all, for there was only empty space where the memory should have been.

  Despite the darkness, he was forced to continue his forward motion, for the landscape he had unwittingly begun to cross was not and seemingly never had been inhabited. It was only much later that he caught sight of a low, thatched hut in the distance. Soon, he saw candlelight emerge from within the cottage and flutter across the night, igniting afternoon sun in his heart. And as he approached the house, he sensed wave after wave of bright floral and vegetable aromas rolling toward him like mist dispersing underneath the morning sun.

  He walked to the door and stood for a moment, listening.

  The cottage was silent. Looking back at the boundless and desolate landscape through which he had come, he raised his hand to knock.

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  The door immediately emitted a squeal of surprise, and an incomparably lovely woman stood before him, her appearance there so sudden that it seemed as if she had been waiting quietly by the door for him to come.

  She seemed to know at a glance exactly why it was he had come and, without any further questioning, invited him to spend the night.

  Flustered, Ruan Haikuo silently followed her into the cottage and sat down at a table in the center of the room. In the soft gleam emitted by a single candle, he began to apprai
se the woman who stood before him. It seemed as if her face were caked with several layers of powder and rouge, rouge that gave the alluring smile pasted across her face a strange and hallucinatory cast. But a moment later, he discovered that the woman had disappeared, although he was unable to recall having seen her leave the room. In a short while, though, he heard the sound of her climbing into bed emerge from an adjacent room. Her bed creaked like

  branches swaying in the wind.

  She asked him, “Where are you going?”

  Although she was separated from him only by a thin

  wall, her voice seemed to have traveled across a vast distance in order to reach his ears. Suddenly reminded of how his home had collapsed in flames as his mother sat inside it and of the cold breeze that had whipped through his legs as he had begun his journey, he said:

  “I am looking for Master Blue Cloud and White Rain.”

  At this, he heard the woman sit up in bed with a start and say, “If you should find Master Blue Cloud, please ask him where I might be able to find a man named Liu Tian.

  Tell him that it is the Lady of the Rouge who requests his guidance.”

  Ruan Haikuo agreed to do as she asked. She settled back under her quilt. After a moment, however, she added, “You will remember, won’t you?”

  “I will,” Ruan Haikuo replied.

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  With this assurance, she slept. Ruan Haikuo, however, sat until the candle had burned down to the quick. Soon, dawn began to break. Ruan Haikuo slipped out of the cottage into the morning light, seeing for the first time that the cottage was surrounded by strange blooms and exotic plants, all of which were sending waves of strange and un-familiar fragrance wafting through the moist morning air.

  Regaining the road, Ruan Haikuo looked back in the direction he had come, only to see an incomparably desolate plain stretching toward the horizon. Wheeling in the opposite direction, he saw a jade green river wreathed by billows of dawn mist. Ruan Haikuo began to walk toward the river.

  Several weeks later, when Ruan Haikuo tried to recall his strange encounter with the Lady of the Rouge, the memory had already come to seem like an illusion. For even though Ruan Haikuo was a direct descendant of a celebrated swordsman, he had never lived or traveled in the company of his father’s brothers-in-arms. This was how he came to be ignorant of a warrior as singularly notorious as the Lady of the Rouge. Known throughout the land as the most powerful potentate of poison under heaven, her entire body was powdered with a poisonous essence concocted from the nox-ious blooms that she cultivated around her cottage. So deadly was her rouge that a single puff could kill a man in a matter of seconds from several yards away. This was why the Lady of the Rouge had refrained from speaking to him until she had moved into another room.

  3

  In the weeks after Ruan Haikuo took his leave of

  the Lady of the Rouge, he continued to roam across the land, drifting this way and that like a leaf floating helplessly across the surface of a pool. But as he wandered, he gradu-188 yu hua

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  ally began to draw closer and closer to the Black Needle Knight, without knowing how, why, or indeed that he was even doing so at all. The Black Needle Knight was a figure whose name was almost as widely celebrated among swordsmen and fighters as the Lady of the Rouge herself. After more than twenty years of valiant adventure and martial intrigue, the Knight had become known as a master of a secret weapon. When the Knight took aim, he never

  missed, even in the dark of night. His secret weapon was a strand of hair plucked from his own head, for once a hair left his scalp it would stiffen into a lethal black needle. Propelled into the dark of night, the black needle was completely invisible to its target and thus could not be deflected. After many years in the world of swordsmen, bald patches were beginning to appear on the Black Needle Knight’s scalp.

  Several months after his meeting with the Lady of the Rouge, Ruan Haikuo’s incessant motion finally brought him to a lively and noisy market street in a large town.

  Dusk was falling just as he arrived on the outskirts of the town. Here, the road forked. If he had arrived earlier, Ruan Haikuo may well have followed the road that led away from the town. The impending darkness, though, forced him toward it. After a night’s rest at an inn, he would resume his original route the next morning.

  The long months of travel had exhausted him, and as he strolled through the bustle of the market, he felt his frame flap in the breeze like an empty tunic. He drifted off to sleep as soon as he had found an inn, slumbering through the boisterous snatches of song and quiet murmurs coming from the balcony of the brothel across from his room. Just before the first light of dawn, he started awake like a window being blown open by a strong breeze. The moon was still shining through the window lattices onto his bed. He sat up in bed until he heard the clop of horses’ hooves outside.

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  With the thunder of the hooves came an image of the road he had left the evening before. The road, disappearing into a distant horizon, brought him to his feet. He left the inn.

  As it happened, Ruan Haikuo never actually returned to the road he had left the night before. Instead, a small path by the side of a stream beckoned to him through the mist and moonlight. He followed the sparkling water of the stream until sunlight broke through the mist. It was only then that he realized that he had somehow walked in an altogether different direction than he had planned. A peaceful little village lay a little further along the path. Ruan Haikuo walked toward the village. He saw an old mossy well and an elm tree by the village gate. There was a man sitting under the elm tree.

  As Ruan Haikuo approached, the man under the elm

  fixed his eyes on him without seeming to be looking at anything in particular. Ruan Haikuo walked straight over to the well. Another Ruan Haikuo looked up at him from within the tranquil water within. Ruan Haikuo picked up a bucket that was tied to a stone by the well and cast it down onto his face. The water alighted like a bird frightened by an arrow. As he pulled the rope back out of the well, his face rose inside the bucket. Ruan Haikuo took a few swallows of extraordinarily cold, clear water. Then he heard the voice of the man under the elm tree: “You’ve been traveling for quite a long time.”

  Ruan Haikuo turned to look at the man. The man gazed silently back at him, as if he hadn’t spoken to him at all.

  When Ruan Haikuo shifted his eyes back toward the well, the voice continued, “Where are you going?”

  Ruan Haikuo turned toward the man. Both the tree and the man underneath its canopy shimmered red in the light of the morning sun.

  “I’m going in search of Master Blue Cloud and White Rain.”

  The man stood and walked toward the well. He was tre-190 yu hua

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  mendously tall. More striking still were the patches of coarse black hair that grew from the crown of his head. Arriving by Ruan Haikuo’s side, this strangely authoritative figure said, “When you have found Master Blue Cloud, tell him that the Black Needle Knight asks where he might be able to find a man called Li Dong.”

  Ruan Haikuo nodded and said, “I understand.”

  Ruan Haikuo walked back down the little path by which he had come to the village. He walked hesitantly through the moist morning air, the words of the Lady of the Rouge echoing once again through his mind. Her request and that of the Black Needle Knight were like two leaves that had collided above his head, and the noise of their collision reverberated along the path.

  4

  Six months later, on the bank of a river choked with floating leaves, Ruan Haikuo found White Rain. Somehow, he had veered away from the highway he had been following at that point in his journey and aimlessly made his way toward the river. A ferryboat bobbed across
the water on its way toward the opposite bank. A fine mist rose from the water’s surface.

  An old man, clad in a white robe and grasping a long sword in his hand, approached him through the dense stand of withered trees that covered the banks. Despite the fact that the old man walked with quickness and vigor, his progress across the leafy bank was strangely noiseless. The old man’s long hair and flowing white beard floated toward him in the breeze.

  The ferryboat had reached the opposite bank. Three travelers clambered onto the deck, and the ferry began to float back toward them.

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  for the ferry, could not help but notice that Ruan Haikuo wore the Plum Blossom Sword slung behind his back. The obsidian luster of the hilt, framed by the rippling surface of the river, immediately evoked in him a cavalcade of memories. As the ferryboat began to approach the bank, White Rain began to recall the heroic figure Ruan Jinwu had cut some twenty years earlier at the foot of Mount Hua.

  As soon as the boat had landed, Ruan Haikuo stepped on deck. The boat lurched to one side with his weight and began to rock back and forth. As soon as White Rain had boarded behind him, however, the boat immediately became as steady underfoot as a boulder. Soon, they began to ferry toward the middle of the river.

  Although buffeted by waves that sent foam and water spraying in all directions, Ruan Haikuo soon realized that the boat was no less calm than the shore. At the same time, all his efforts to recall what it had felt like to stand by the bank a moment before were in vain. Ruan Haikuo stared back at the bank receding behind him, oblivious to the fact that White Rain’s attention was fixed on his sword. It was easy enough to see in Ruan Haikuo something of what Ruan Jinwu had looked like twenty years before. Ruan Haikuo ultimately could not measure up to his father – his features exhibited none of the splendid martial spirit and brash pride that had suffused those of Ruan Jinwu. Ruan Haikuo looked almost pathetically frail as he stared bewilderedly back at the bank of the river.