The Ming Storm

by Yan LeiSheng

  “When this town was built,” Zhang Yong said, “the lake of Precious Jade protected it from invasions. Today its people are oppressed. Peasants and farmers work the mountainsides. Young and old alike burn incense. Brother Yangming, no matter how much I do against these pirates, they still hold me at bay. I await troops returning from a long voyage, and they will be warmly welcomed.”

  He had quoted a passage from Passing Through the Dayu Mountains after reading it in Wang Yangming’s tent. What a shame that such a brilliant man bore such dark intentions.

  In the time when they were connected by bonds of friendship, they respected one another’s differences, although one achieved his aims with benevolence and conciliation, and the other often resorted to torture to achieve his own. Their fraternity, while unofficial, had been cemented during a night of discussion between the three – Yang Yiqing had also been present – on the future of the empire and their common desire to see China become a haven for all, as it always should have been. As great thinkers, they were not so naïve as to believe that realizing such a dream would be easy, but each thought himself capable of guiding it to this destination if he were given the means, or if he seized them.

  Even when Zhang Yong became the leader of the Eight Tigers, the age-old enemies of the Central Plain Brotherhood, Wang Yangming had still believed it possible to reconcile their visions, and why not, put an end to the conflict between their organizations at the same time. Sadly, he had lost all hope for this after the Great Rites controversy. Was today to be their last game?

  “Why so quiet, Brother Yangming? Did I make a mistake in citing the poet?”

  “No, on the contrary, I’m impressed by your memory. It commands respect. I was remembering the beginnings of our friendship, that was all.”

  “So, you imagine then that my visit is not a sudden whim, but a well-considered decision.” The atmosphere suddenly became tense, and the Tiger’s play style reflected the menace in his words. The counter he placed after speaking put his opponent on the back foot. But the latter was not so easily beaten: before responding, he placed a counter in defense.

  “Ah! What troubles you, my dear Zhang?”

  “What troubles me?” he chuckled before drinking a mouthful of tea. “The criminal Shao Jun!”

  “Oh, you have news of the imperial favorite?”

  Here Zhang Yong had used one of his favorite tricks to expose his enemies under the guise of discussion. He had suddenly cut straight to the heart of the matter to study the reaction of the person he spoke to. The Tiger’s eyes were sharp and piercing, his gaze peeling the mask off his victims like a knife peels fruit. The slightest nervous tremor, the tiniest wrinkle of worry, and Wang Yangming would betray himself. But he too was a master, and controlling his emotions was one of his specialties. He gave nothing away, the victor in this silent and motionless duel. Even when he spoke, his voice had been as light as possible, as if the exposure of his protegee meant nothing to him. As if, and that was the message he wanted to communicate, there were no connection at all between them.

  But Zhang Yong hadn’t finished yet.

  “Yes,” he answered. “The whore is surprising. She was spotted a few days ago near the Xiaoling mausoleum, where she injured several people before being arrested. We executed her the same day.”

  “How unfortunate! It’s a shame that Emperor Zhengde’s former favorite has fallen so low.”

  “I agree. But she reaped what she sowed. If she had come quietly, she could have ended her days in an imperial prison camp. But her master will receive no such mercy.”

  The Tiger’s voice had grown colder as he spoke.

  “Her master?”

  “But of course! Shao Jun grew up shut in the Forbidden City, she had never spent any meaningful time outside the palace before her disappearance. She had neither the resources nor the education needed to plan and implement the plot to assassinate the former Emperor on her own.”

  “But supposing this master exists, and also that they are so powerful, why would they choose to manipulate the imperial favorite?”

  “Perhaps precisely because no one would be able to trace it back to him, or because she would achieve his aims, whatever they were. When Shao Jun disappeared, I ordered that all members of her clan be eliminated, but I always suspected that their mentor had escaped us. And now I’m certain.”

  “Have you tracked him down?”

  “Gao Feng was killed by a sword thrust to the heart. I inspected his wound myself, and I’m sure that his killer stood between five foot five and five feet eight inches, just like you. Shao Jun is only five foot one, which suggests she didn’t kill my disciple. It was her master who was responsible!”

  “Oh? Wasn’t Gao Feng’s body found at Mount Wolong, behind Jishan University? The man you’re looking for must have been through my establishment!”

  “I think so too. Which was why I asked my best man to investigate all the men of this height at the university… Which was like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, when Wei Bin was killed, the number of suspects was significantly reduced.”

  “How so?”

  “Because the bitch led him into a trap after finding out about the Record of Blood Spilt for a Righteous Cause at the Imperial Academy, then disarmed him using the magnetized palm of the Buddha of Healing in the Temple of the Understanding of Law. A plan whose only flaw was to be too brilliant: it could only have been concocted by someone of great scholarship, which ruled out the imperial favorite.”

  “My dear Zhang Yong, one might think you were leading up to accusing me.”

  A cold wind swept across the small boat. The leader of the Eight Tigers caressed the pendant at his neck.

  “Brother Yangming,” he said, “you were one of the seven people I trusted the most, until I found this object on Shao Jun.”

  He placed the jade pendant on the table between them, the motif of waves and plants facing upwards.

  “This pendant?” asked Wang Yangming.

  Zhang Yong laughed coldly.

  “No, this is mine,” he responded.

  He turned the small stone over to reveal that the other side was engraved with the character Dao. Their famous night of passionate discussion had begun with a debate over the opening passage of the Zhongyong: “What Heaven confers is called ‘nature’. Accordance with this nature is called the Dao. Cultivating the Dao is called ‘education’.”

  Yang Yiqing had argued that people should conform to the nature conferred on them by Heaven at their birth, while Zhang Yong had been convinced that not only could nature be fought, but that it could not be accomplished painlessly. For Wang Yangming, only by increasing knowledge and its accessibility could humans overcome the limits of their nature. In his wisdom as the elder of the group, Yang Yiqing hoped that the three of them would be able to put aside their differences to work together for their shared objective and had thus had made three identical stones engraved with different characters to symbolize the bond which united them. That evening they had come to an agreement and agreed to eliminate Lin Jiu by having him accused of treason. The atmosphere at court changed immediately and dramatically, and the Ming empire prospered once more while Zhang Yong, up to then the discreet and unassuming Tiger, rose to lead the group and revealed the ferocity which had been bubbling under the surface. After Zhengde’s death, the Great Rites controversy corrupted the spirit of their accomplishments as well as their relationships.

  Gently caressing his pendant, Zhang Yong began to explain.

  “Before being demoted to being a warden at the Xiaoling mausoleum, Chen Xijian was the steward of the Leopard Quarter. It was thus inevitable that Shao Jun would go to find him, and so I devised a trap for her. And it would have been a success if that wretched underling hadn’t sought to take advantage of the situation when his kung-fu abilities didn’t live up to his ambitions.”

  He l
ooked Wang Yangming straight in the eyes.

  “When the imperial favorite gutted him, she must have dropped the bloody pendant on him, and the engravings on the stone were printed on him like a stamp on the clothing of the dead. Looking at it closely, you could make out a motif of plants and waves. It was then I knew that my adversary was one of my closest friends.”

  “So that is what made you suspect me…”

  “My doubts first turned towards Brother Yiqing, as it was in the fief of his young protege, the prince of Wei, that Shao Jun disappeared without a trace. However, when I visited him, he immediately showed me that he had his pendant. It was then I ordered Luo Xiang to leave for Tianzhou, but when I arrived myself, you had killed him too.

  “Did you know that in some circles he was known as ‘the man with three shadows?”

  Behind his impassive façade Wang Yangming was on high alert. For Zhang Yong to so openly speak of his underhanded affairs, he must have almost no doubts left, and was ready to play his final cards. With the approach of the now near-inevitable confrontation, the tension was growing palpable.

  “No, I didn’t know this nickname. How did it come about?”

  “He was one of a set of triplets who constantly exchanged roles. Surprising, isn’t it?”

  The question required no real answer, so the two men remained silent. Then, the leader of the Eight Tigers spoke with a mix of bitterness and weariness, “Brother Yangming, your greatness is equal to any king. Not even Brother Yiqing himself could live up to you. I know you consider both of us to be monsters completely lacking in human sentiment and emotion, but the affection I hold for you blinded me for so long. I never saw nor pursued the truth when I should have done because I denied it. Now my delusion is at an end. Your ability to remain impassive no matter the situation is worthy of both respect and admiration, but nothing is perfect: when I put my pendant on the table, your leg trembled very slightly, which rocked the boat almost imperceptibly and confirmed my suspicions.”

  There was nothing to add, so neither said any more. After a long sign, Zhang Yong continued.

  “Brother Yangming, I’d like your opinion and advice on a poem I’m writing.”

  Before Emperor Xuande charged the Imperial Academy with teaching them, the eunuchs had not had the right to learn to read or write. Even now, while most could recognize a hundred basic characters and a handful were properly instructed, those that could be considered to be scholars were as rare as phoenix feathers. Wang Yangming had of course known that Zhang Yong was lettered, but not that he knew how to write.

  “With pleasure,” responded the mentor. “Should we abandon our game?”

  “Not before we see who the victor is.”

  He placed another counter on the board, then said quietly, “Determination does not equal success after all.”

  Wang Yangming had long thought the opposite, convinced that his determination would be enough to save his friend from the darkness of his own soul, and it had taken the massacre during the Great Rites controversy to prove his error. The Tiger seemed to read him like an open book. He had left no escape route, either on the Go board and or this conversation. It was no longer a question of knowing if he would close the trap, but when. Unexpectedly, he chose that moment to sing his poem in a rough voice.

  “Youth is driven by the winds of ambition; with age all that remains is a violent breeze.”

  As he declaimed it, he traced the character for violent on the table, made from the hardest jujube wood. Then, as if the varnished surface were being struck by the carpenter’s chisel, chips of wood suddenly began to fly in all directions and the teapot vibrated to the rhythm of the lines and dots. The speed of Zhang Yong’s precise gestures sent his wide sleeves flying as if in a silent breeze, which had no effect on Wang Yangming, who remained as unperturbed as ever. In trust, the lines weren’t particularly profound. Their rhythm and structure were correct, and they could have been presented by a candidate for the imperial exams, but that was the extent of their merit.

  “My dear Zhang,” he said simply, “you have an admirable talent for poetry.”

  While Zhang Yong’s martial arts were intrinsically Buddhist, his own spirituality was yelikewen, a Christian faith painfully imported to China in the twenty-sixth year of the Yuan dynasty by the Jesuit Jean de Montecorvino and which had not been welcomed by the Nestorians, who had been present in the East since the Tang dynasty. The latter, who counted the descendants of Genghis Khan among their ranks, considered the yelikewens to be even more dangerous heretics than the Buddhists, and had quickly persecuted and exterminated them, before disappearing in their turn during the fall of the Yuans. Between his arrival in China and his death, Jean de Montecorvino been proclaimed bishop of Cambaluc – the old name for Beijing – and had been emulated in the highest spheres of power. His faith persisted over the generations, particularly among idealistic eunuchs like Zhang Yong, who claimed to be Templars with aspirations such as reviving the legendary order of holy knights.

  By studying the many Taoists works contained in the Imperial Academy, he had discovered that the way of the heart practiced by Wang Yangming had common origins with a tantric kundalini technique taught by Singgibandan, the Fire of the lotus. He had then spent over a decade perfecting his mastery of the technique at each of its various stages: hidden, inflamed, bright, obscure, and invisible. And so, while the two men’s philosophies were entirely opposed in some areas, their respective preferred internal energy techniques were actually from the same source, which made their confrontation especially fierce. It was invisible, and an uninformed spectator would have seen only two elderly scholars absorbed by their game of Go. In reality, while they played, Zhang Yong repeated a meditative mantra to himself – “Fluid as water, burning like fire, the mountain sheep walks without leaving a trace” – and on each repetition unleashed waves of neigong towards his adversary, who would have exploded on the inside if he hadn’t used the way of the heart to protect himself. The counter was just as ferocious, and sorely taxed Wang Yangming’s reserves of strength. Nonetheless, he in turn placed a counter as if nothing was wrong.

  “Brother Yangming,” Zhang Yong said, “compared to you, I’m not worth a Buddha’s fart. I shoot my bow time after time, but each arrow I shoot only serves to further expose my deficiency.”

  Expression dark, face streaming with sweat, he began to engrave the eight lines of Passing Through the Dayu Mountains on the table with the tip of his finger. For once, events were proceeding as he had planned. His opponent’s power was far beyond what he had expected, and if he continued to push so hard, he might cause his own downfall by exhausting his own resources. Yet he had to persevere, he had come too far to stop now. His face creased, and he seemed on the verge of coughing up blood. When he arrived at the end of the poem, he was visibly confused. His mind needed a tether in order to stay grounded. He began to write the character resolve on the table, and, without ceasing etching the wood with his right index finger, with his left hand he picked up a counter and slowly moved to place it on the board. When his hand was above the square he planned to occupy, he found he was unable to release the stone. Paralyzed by the effort, his body refused to let go.

  Wang Yangming weathered the storm with exemplary stoicism. He maintained his calm even when the tumult of the energies on the boat seemed to affect the atmosphere around the two men, draining it of color as if under the light of the moon. To him it was clear that his adversary, by attempting to write and play Go at the same time as attacking, was dividing his attention and depriving himself of the stability required for a neigong battle of this magnitude. His breathing was ragged, and his waves of energy increasingly irregular; Wang Yangming could have defeated him in the blink of an eye if he had wanted to take advantage of these interruptions to launch counter attacks. Only his sentimentality prevented him from doing so. In any case, it could not be clearer that Fire of the lotus would not be en
ough to overcome the way of the heart.

  Zhang Yong clenched his teeth and slammed his counter down. Crack! His imperfect control of the strength of his motion caused him to punch a gaping hole in the Chinese pine of the table beneath the board. The counters flew in all directions and clattered onto the deck of the boat. In losing control, he had no choice but to gather his remaining energy and release it in a final attack which would put an end to this battle between titans, one way or another. His internal wounds were growing more serious, and he knew he was losing, but refused to accept defeat without pushing himself to the ends of his abilities. Wang Yangming however, still displayed the same intolerable serenity as he had throughout their entire fight.

  “Really, my dear Zhang,” he said quietly, “does this game of Go merit such suffering?”

  A drop of blood formed at the edge of Zhang Yong’s mouth.

  “Brother Yangming,” he gasped, “your entire life you thought you were striving for good. It’s a delusion, each light casts its own shadow. Even if I die, a part of me will live on forever. You lost this fight before it even began.”