by Jin Yong
She’s only just recovered from her injury. Her primal qi is still impaired, Madam Ying reminded herself. If I focus on her footing, I can take her out in a few dozen moves.
Only a handful of lamps in the northeastern corner of the courtyard were left flickering in the night breeze. The rest of the temple grounds had been plunged once more into darkness.
The cane flashed twice. Madam Ying shuffled back, scanning the yellowish gloom for a safe place to take shelter. Taking advantage of her opponent’s retreat, Lotus vaulted high with aid of the Dog Beater and whirled a sleeve in the direction of the only source of light remaining. The fabric unfurled with the full force of Splitting Sky Palm. The last few lamps went out instantly.
How do I fight in the dark? Every step I take, I run the risk of my foot being impaled, Madam Ying said to herself. Then she groaned as she heard Lotus’s voice ring out once more.
“Now, let’s play! I hope you’ve memorized the position of the spikes. If you subdue me in thirty moves, I’ll let you see King Duan.”
“You’ve spent hours training here,” the older woman retorted. “I’ve only caught a glimpse.”
“In that case, light a lamp, rearrange the stakes, and then we’ll fight.” Lotus relished the thought of triumphing over Madam Ying on her terms.
So we’re competing on powers of recall, now … I haven’t come here to play games, Madam Ying told herself. I need to preserve my strength for taking vengeance. I know what to do …
“Very well. This old crone will play with the little fledgling.” She took out her own tinder and flint, and lit an oil lamp on the ground.
“Why do you call yourself an old crone?” Lotus was making conversation to slow Madam Ying down. “You’re more alluring than most girls of sixteen. I can see why King Duan was so smitten, back then, and why his heart is still yours, all these years later.”
Madam Ying had repositioned a dozen or so bamboo spikes by now, but she faltered at Lotus’s words. “Smitten? He barely noticed my existence in the palace.”
“Didn’t he teach you kung fu?”
“Ha, what a great honor!”
“I know why! He was practicing Cosmos neigong. He couldn’t get too close to you.”
Madam Ying snorted. “What do you know, little girl? Where do you think the Crown Prince came from?”
Lotus cocked her head, considering the question. “Hmmm … It was before Cosmos neigong.”
Madam Ying curled her lips and said no more, busying herself with the rearranging of the stakes, though the exchange continued to swirl around in her mind.
Lotus paid close attention, committing every new position to memory, since one false step, even by a couple of inches, would mean a bloody hole in her foot.
“King Duan didn’t save your son because he loved you,” Lotus said, out of the blue. “That’s the reason why.”
“What do you know? He loved me, did he?” Pure vitriol dripped from her words.
“He was jealous of the Hoary Urchin. Why would he feel that way if he didn’t love you? He would have saved your child, but he saw the handkerchief with the lovebirds wrapped over the baby’s belly. Pity the hair that grows gray before its time! You wanted to grow old with the Urchin and that broke King Duan’s heart. He wanted death to end his pain!”
Madam Ying had never imagined that a king could harbor such feelings for a consort. For a moment, she stopped what she was doing, lost to the past.
“You should turn back,” Lotus said, breaking the silence.
“Are you going to make me?”
“Your wish is my command. If you can get past me, I won’t stand in your way. But if you can’t…?”
“I’ll never come back. And you won’t have to live with me for a year.”
“Agreed! I must say, though I rather enjoy your company, I wasn’t looking forward to staying so long in that stinky mucky place.”
All the while, Madam Ying had not stopped repositioning the spikes. About three score of them had now been moved.
“I’m done.” She extinguished her lamp and slashed her claws at Lotus through the blackness.
Sensing the danger, Lotus swiveled at an angle, placing her foot down precisely between two spikes that Madam Ying had just re-deployed, then speared the Dog Beater at the woman’s shoulder.
Madam Ying took no notice of her counterattack. She marched forward—clack, clack, clack—crunching the spikes underfoot.
Argh! Lotus realized she had been outsmarted. The woman had snapped the sticks when she replaced them. How did I not foresee that?
7
A glimmer of light shone from a room at the far side of the rear courtyard. Madam Ying pushed open the doors.
An elderly monk sat on a prayer mat. He was wrapped in a thick kasaya that reached up to his cheeks, and a silvery beard flowed down his chest. His head was bowed, his eyes lowered. He was meditating. The four disciples, together with a handful of aged monks and young novices, stood to attention at his side.
The logger went up to the seated monk when Madam Ying entered and touched his palms together in a Buddhist greeting, “Shifu, Consort Liu is here.”
The monk gave a slight nod, but said nothing.
A single oil lamp burned in the chamber, but its wavering flame was too weak to highlight the details of the monk’s face. Madam Ying was aware that King Duan had cut himself off from the secular world, but she could not have predicted that a mere decade of seclusion would turn a strapping, regal man in his prime into this wizened, withered old thing. Lotus’s words came back to her mind.
Perhaps he did feel something for me, she whispered to herself, and her grip on the dagger slackened.
Spread on the floor in front of King Duan was her son’s undervest, refashioned from the love token she had bestowed on Zhou Botong. The handkerchief with the lovebirds. Her jade bracelet had been placed upon it. Her first gift when she entered the palace. Her time as a consort in the Dali court flashed before her eyes. Arriving at the palace. Learning kung fu from the king. Meeting the love of her life. Her heart being trampled by that very man. Though he left her, she bore him a son—his birth, his death … his pleading eyes as his insides were ripped apart by pain. He was just a toddler, but that look conveyed a thouand, ten thousand words, each of them reproaching his mother for doing nothing to ease his suffering.
Her heart hardened.
She raised the dagger. Strength coursed to her wrist.
She thrust. At his heart. Until the whole blade was buried in his chest.
The moment the knifepoint pierced his flesh felt a little strange to Madam Ying. Given King Duan’s martial sophistication, she knew one thrust might not be enough to finish him off. She tightened her grip on the hilt, ready to pull the dagger out and plunge it into his heart again.
She tugged. Once. Twice. The blade would not budge. Was it caught in his ribs?
Madam Ying had rehearsed this one stab to the heart tens of thousands of times. She wielded the deadly weapon in one hand, while the other wove an unremitting defensive pattern to protect her flanks and her back.
A king would inevitably be surrounded by dozens of guards.
She pulled again. The dagger simply would not shift.
The four disciples were lunging at her, howling, outraged.
She had done what she had set out to do. This was no place to tarry. She let go of the blade and leaped out of the room.
She stole one last look from the doorway.
King Duan was clutching his chest with one hand. He was in agony.
Revenge was hers at last, but she felt nothing. No elation, no relief.
He never uttered a word of reproach—about my faithlessness, about the son I bore my lover. Madam Ying was considering the past in a way she never had before. He freed me from my obligation and offered his blessings for my marriage to his rival. He didn’t try to stand in the way of my happiness—it was that whoreson Zhou Botong who spurned me. He even let me stay on in the palace. He could ha
ve punished me. He could have sentenced me to death. But he didn’t. Instead, he gave me a richer allowance from the palace treasury. He ordered men to plant trees to shield my hermitage in the black swamp. He has been sending food and supplies so I won’t go without. All these years, he hasn’t stopped looking after me. He has made sure I want for nothing. He has treated me very well—better than I deserve …
For more than a decade, the only memory she had kept of King Duan was his flint-hearted refusal to save her son’s life, the only feeling she had had for him was rancor, and yet, this one stroke of the knife had revealed all the kindness he had shown her.
Sighing, she tore her eyes from the dying king and dragged her mind from her memories to focus on her escape.
She came face to face with another monk standing in the courtyard just outside the room. Hands held together in a Buddhist greeting. Looking at her with affection.
She knew that high nose bridge and strong jawline well. The lamplight from the room might have been weak, but there was no mistaking that she was looking at her king.
Could he be a ghost?
No, he is real and he is King Duan.
Her skin prickled and she let out a scream.
Did I kill the wrong man?
Madam Ying turned to look at the monk she had just stabbed. He was climbing to his feet and shrugging off his vestments. He gave his beard a tug and it fluttered to the floor.
Guo Jing!
* * *
LOTUS’S GAMBLE was inspired by an age-old stratagem known as Cicada Sheds Skin, for, when that insect moults, the empty shell hanging on the branches still retains the outline of its shape, as though it had never left the tree. In her version, the hollow slough was Guo Jing, disguising himself as Reverend Sole Light so he could take Madam Ying’s blade on the monk’s behalf.
To put the plan in motion, Guo Jing ambushed the Martial Great, locking his pressure points. He also neutralized the monk’s brother-in-faith from Sindhu, in case he turned out to be well trained in combat, though in reality the man knew no kung fu at all.
Lotus’s role was to delay the vengeful woman long enough for the four disciples to dress Guo Jing as their shifu, which involved helping him wash off the mud from the lotus pond, shaving his head, attaching their master’s beard to the young man’s face and wrapping him in a monk’s habit.
The four men carried out Lotus’s instructions to the letter, but they were laden with guilt. Not only were they openly defying their shifu’s command to let Madam Ying take her revenge, they were also forced to manhandle him and remove his beard to provide Guo Jing with a credible disguise. The worst part of all was having to let the young man risk his life as the body double—all because of their own martial shortcomings. To falter even slightly when struck with Madam Ying’s dagger would mean certain death.
Guo Jing had devoted much thought to what he would do when the moment came. He took advantage of the swathes of fabric enveloping him to conceal his arms within the garment’s folds. He caught the flat surface of the blade between his fingers, but even his powerful inner strength could not hold back Madam Ying’s determined thrust. The point of the dagger sank half an inch into his chest, narrowly missing his ribs. He could have worn the Hedgehog Chainmail, but they could not risk Madam Ying realizing that she had driven the dagger into metal instead of flesh. Every last detail had to be carried out to perfection if they were to deceive her, for she would return if she thought her revenge had failed.
Sole Light’s appearance now upended Lotus’s meticulous plan.
It turned out that Guo Jing, wary of causing the monk harm, had only locked the least important of his pressure points. In spite of the day’s exertions and the aftereffects of the poison, Sole Light still had some command of his inner kung fu. While everyone was busy with Madam Ying, he was willing his energy around his body in an effort to free himself, returning to his chamber just as the woman was making her escape.
* * *
“GIVE THE dagger back to her.”
Reluctantly, Guo Jing handed the weapon over.
Ashen-faced, Madam Ying received it, unsure what this gesture meant.
What punishment will he mete out? she asked herself, staring at the blade in her hand. When she looked up, she was surprised to see him unwrapping his kasaya.
“Let her leave in peace,” he ordered his disciples as he pulled open his undershirt. Then he turned to Madam Ying, his countenance serene. “Here, plunge your knife where you will. I have waited a long, long time for this.”
His gentle tone struck her like a thunderbolt. She could even detect tenderness in his eyes. Once more, she was reminded of the magnanimity he had shown her, and the thought of it was washing away the bile she had wallowed in for so many years.
“I have wronged you.” The dagger slipped from her fingers, clattering to the ground.
She ran into the night, her face buried in her hands.
8
No one made a sound as they listened to Madam Ying’s fading footsteps, bewildered by her reaction. Without warning, the scholar and the farmer collapsed at the same time, one facedown, the other on his back. They had been holding the toxins from Madam Ying’s needle at bay with their inner strength, but now their shifu was safe, their bodies gave in.
“Please invite—”
Lotus was a step ahead of the logger, entering the room with the monk from Sindhu. The skilled healer gave the two men a theriac then sliced open their fingertips to let out blood blackened by venom. He looked at Sole Light with concern and spoke in a language only his brother-in-faith could understand: they were not in immediate danger, but the bane had taken root and would take two months of treatment to purge.
By now, Guo Jing had changed back into his own clothes and tended to his wound. He kowtowed, begging the Martial Great for forgiveness.
Sole Light reached out to help the young man to his feet. “You risked your life for me. I don’t deserve your generosity,” he said with humility, before turning to his brother-in-faith to explain what Guo Jing had done.
The Sindhu monk nodded with approval and said something that sounded very familiar to Guo Jing.
“Sirahstha hahoramanpayas…” the young man chimed in.
Sole Light could not believe his ears. He asked Guo Jing how he was able to recite these words, for they were in a curious form of Sanskrit inflected by the Chinese language. Guo Jing explained he had spoken out loud without thinking and that he was quoting a line from a nonsensical passage at the end of the Nine Yin Manual. He told the monk how Zhou Botong had tricked him into learning the whole Manual by heart, and then recited the jumble of random characters in full to illustrate his point.
Amazed by the words coming out of Guo Jing’s mouth, Sole Light said, “The Double Sun Immortal once told me that Huang Shang, the Master who wrote the Manual, had not only read every single Taoist Canon in existence, he was also a scholar of Buddhist scriptures and the Sanskrit language from which the texts were translated.
“What you have just shared is the conclusion to the Manual. It contains the most profound content in the whole treatise and is the key to interpreting cryptic elements in the preceding chapters.
“It also tells us why it was written in cipher. Huang Shang feared that his work might fall into the hands of unscrupulous men—for the techniques detailed in the Manual would make them unassailable. He considered destroying this concluding statement, but he couldn’t bring himself to obliterate his own work, so he rewrote it in a code that is drawn from the tradition of setting down Sanskrit words phonetically in Chinese characters.
“He realized that by doing so he would make it difficult for the Manual to be understood in full, for knowledge of Sanskrit has always been rare in the Central Plains, and even rarer among those with sophisticated martial skills. Of course, the reverse is also true: few from Sindhu know Chinese characters. He must have thought that if a martial Master were acquainted with both languages, they could hardly be a rascal knave, f
or they would be steeped in both Buddhist and Chinese cultures.
“This arrangement made the contents of the final portion nigh on incomphrensible: even Immortal Double Sun could not decipher it. Oh, the heavens’ intent is in sooth wondrous. You have no grasp of the Sanskrit language, yet you were able to memorize this long, incantation-like passage. A karmic coincidence!”
He asked Guo Jing to repeat the passages from the Manual’s final section again, slowly, line by line, so he could write down the meaning in Chinese. When he had finished, he said, “I hope you will stay with us for a little while. I’d like to study this text and share its wisdom with you.” Even a Master as learned and skilled in neigong as Sole Light had struggled to grasp the full profundity of the Nine Yin Manual.
Martial arts rooted in the Taoist school of thought had always been characterized by the supple quality of yin, and yet, this very belief system also propagated the idea that the proliferation of anything, even if it was fundamentally positive, would grow into something negative and ultimately be the cause of its ruination. This was the reason Huang Shang named his opus “Nine Yin”—yin to the utmost—as a reminder that, if the balance between yin and yang tips over to one extreme, it is inevitable that calamity will ensue.
In the Manual’s final statement, he summarized this understanding and detailed a technique that would ensure the mutual replenishment and harmonization of yin and yang, as a corrective to the Taoist overemphasis on the suppleness of yin in all matters martial. This metaphysical coda was of greater importance than all the kung fu that came before it.
Sole Light shook his head, marveling at the knowledge set down in the manuscript. “If I followed the method described here, I could restore my primal energy and recover my kung fu in less than three months—a process that would take at least five years without the Manual’s help.
“My martial arts stem from the Buddhist tradition, which is rather different from the Taoist internal-strength system, but the Manual explains that, at the very heights of martial learning, everything comes together—the distinctions between diverging schools are negligible.”