“Does your husband like you as well as ever?” she asked her daughter.
“If anything, more,” her daughter replied laughing. “He calls for me whenever he wants anything, and it is I who serve him. He gave me a new piece of silk for a coat before the shop was looted and now he says he wishes he had taken much more from the shop and given it to me. He says I am such a woman as he would have asked for had he had the chance to ask.”
“But does he go out at night?” Ling Sao asked again, pursing her lips. She did not tell her daughter so, but she knew that if a man speaks too well to his wife she must take care also, lest he speak out of an ill conscience of some sort and praise her to make amends.
“Never,” the daughter replied with pride, and so the mother’s heart was set at rest. For she never forgot that there were in the city women of a very different kind from her daughter. This daughter was an honest hearty woman who could never even put paint on her face without getting it askew so that anyone could see it, and she was already growing plump and her bosom was full for her last child, and Ling Sao knew that city women keep their bodies thin as snakes, and they have no breasts, and so daintily do they spread their paint and powder that they look almost as though they grew themselves like that except that all know there are no such women.
So at last the end came to a very pleasant day for Ling Sao and she made ready for the walk home again, and in her handkerchief she tied some cake her daughter gave her and she took a last swallow of tea and smelled the two children’s cheeks and squeezed their small bodies once more and called farewell to Wu Sao who had spoken only twice all day, once for food and once for tea, and nodded to her daughter, and so passed through the shop where Wu Lien was. But since there were other men there, too, she only bowed to show she knew her manners and then went down the streets.
Never, it seemed to her, had the city looked so prosperous as it did this evening. The shops were full and busy and the streets noisy with vendors and the people came and went laughing and talking. The wind had died down and the night was hotter than the day had been and already there were those who had moved their beds out on the street to sleep there and were now eating their evening meals where they could watch all that went past them. There was laughter everywhere and loud calling back and forth and no one stopped to ask if he knew another’s name, but he called anyway and made a joke and to Ling Sao it seemed that all were as merry as though they were of one blood.
“So we are of one blood,” she thought in comfort. “People of Han we are, and if these people in the city have their own smell, why, we have ours who live outside the city wall, but still we are all of one flesh.”
And so walking homeward and smiling to herself she fell to thinking of a thing she had heard, how foreigners have hair and eyes of any color they happen to be born with.
“I do pity them,” she thought, “for if it were I and I could not be sure if what I gave birth to would have black hair and eyes as humans do, how could I give birth? I would cast the child too soon, I know.”
So she went on home, and saw how all the fields were fertile. The rice fields were dried and the young rice was beginning to head and there was the promise of fine harvest. All was well with the land and when all was well with the land then everything was well.
At home she found them waiting for her, and each one had done as she had bid. The day away had made her glad to come home again and as she looked from one face to the other, each seemed better than she had remembered. Even Jade seemed better and she looked at that pretty young face and thought, “How can I blame my second son for loving her too well?” And of Orchid she thought, “A soft good soul and I must not be so hard on her.” And she took her own little daughter’s hand and looked at the calluses that the threads had made and said, “Tomorrow you shall not weave. Let the loom be idle a day, and rub some oil into these hands.”
When Ling Sao was mellow and kind the whole house seemed full of health and they all sat enjoying it like heat from a gentle fire or like sunshine that is not too hot or like wind that is not too cold. And thus while they sat and while they ate together, peace filled them, and they listened to all she had to tell and she talked and talked and yet with all her talking she forgot to tell them what Wu Lien had said.
One by one they went to bed until there were left only Ling Tan and she, and when they had made the home right for the night, the dog outside the gate and the third son’s bed made and he asleep in it, and the buffalo tied, they too went to bed. Not a sound was over the land except the quiet croaking of the frogs in the ponds. Side by side they lay, and since she had been away from him for a whole day Ling Tan felt his belly move with warmth toward her and he reached out his arms toward her.
“My good old woman,” he whispered. “You are the best old woman in the world.”
And so even to him she forgot to speak of war.
IV
HOW THEN COULD LING Tan be prepared for the next day? It was a day like any other. He had slept later than usual in the morning and discovering it he leaped out of his bed. His wife was already up and he heard his eldest son in the court, washing his face and rinsing out his mouth, and the mother was calling to the others to get up because it was day again. A day like any other it seemed, and so they sat down to their morning food, and he directed his sons each to his task for the day. If there was any difference at all it was merely that today he wanted the buffalo to plow and not go out to the hills for grass and so he told his youngest son:
“When you have eaten, take the beast and tie him to the plow. It is time for the second planting of green cabbages.”
There was no other difference. The day was clear, and the skies cloudless. Three days ago there had been rain and it was too soon to look for it again. He would plow today and plant tomorrow and the next day there might be rain.
So he went out to his work and his sons went with him and in the house the women set themselves to their tasks and as he went out he heard Ling Sao say to Jade, “Sit before the loom a while and I will show you myself how the threads go and what the shuttle does, and Pansiao, take care of my elder grandson for me.”
These were the only differences. He went out and while the sun moved upwards he pushed the plow from the back and his third son pulled the unwilling beast from the front and so the work went on. In the next field his sons went through the rice, pulling the weeds and hoeing the drying earth. When his eyes wandered up and down the valley he saw in every field men like himself and his sons. They were his neighbors and his friends at like work. The year was good. Rain and sun were in proportion to each other, and already the harvest was in full promise. He had nothing to wish for which he did not have, and what he had was enough for any man.
Then how could he be prepared for what he saw? It was at mid-morning that he heard the noise of flying ships. He knew the noise, for now and again he had heard it, but never had it been so loud as this. He looked up and he saw the sun shining upon the silver creatures in the sky, not solitary as he had always seen them before this, but many of them and moving with such grace as he had only seen before in wild geese, flying south across the autumn sky. For one moment he thought these were wild geese out of time. But they came not from north to south, but from east to west, and they came too swiftly for geese.
In a moment they were all but over his head. He had stopped as soon as he saw them and so had every other man working on his land, and they stood, their faces turned upward not in fear but only in wonder at such speed and such beauty. That these were foreign things all knew, for none but foreigners could make machines like them. Without envy and with only hearty admiration Ling Tan and his neighbors watched these silver birds high in the sky and small.
And then they saw a silver fragment come out of one and drift down while the ships went on. Down the silver fragment dropped slanting a little toward the east, and it fell into a field of rice. A fountain of dark earth flew up and this they all saw, still without any fear or knowledge. In simple
eagerness to see the thing they ran toward the field, Ling Tan and his sons among the rest, to look for the thing that had fallen. They could not find it. One or two bits of metal they did find, and there was the hole, and the man who owned the field laughed as he stared down into the hole.
“I have wanted a pond on my land for ten years and never had time to dig it and here it is,” he said joyfully, and they decided together that such was the purpose of these machines, to dig ponds and wells and waterways where they were wanted. Thirty paces the pond was one way and a little longer the other, and every man paced it off to make sure and envied the man in whose field it had fallen.
So busy were they in this that it was not until their first wonder was over that they thought to hear and to see what was now going on. Then one man did hear over the city these same sounds that had made this hole, and he looked up and saw over the city wall a good three miles away, the rolling smoke as though of great fires. One by one peaks of smoke rose into the still air, slowly, for there was no wind, and they curled upward like black thunder clouds.
“Now what?” Ling Tan called, but no one answered, for none knew. They stood together, so alike in their blue coats that one man looked like another, and watched. Eight fires over the city wall they counted and one small one to the side, and as for the flying ships, they thought them lost in the flames, until suddenly they came soaring back again out of the dark smoke, but this time very high, so that they were only as big as stars in the top of the sky, as they glinted against the sun. Then they turned with the sun and were lost.
Nothing could they make out of the smoke that still grew no less, and every man went back to his work with wonder in his heart. But it was not a market day and since the good weather held and it was time for the cabbage planting before rain came, no one took time to go that day to see what the smoke was and by sundown the smoke was pale and all but gone and so they went home to eat and to rest for the next day’s work.
“If the thing is big enough to talk about we will hear of it before we are dead, and so there is no use to go to the city for it,” Ling Tan said to his sons as they went home, and they all laughed. And at the supper table they envied together the man who had a pond dug easily in his land.
In the night, in that part of the night when the new moon sinks, when there is darkness until dawn begins to break, Ling Tan heard the dog growl. However deeply he slept he woke instantly if the dog growled, for the beast had been taught to warn the house if anyone came to it by stealth. He heard it bark loudly once or twice and then there was no more barking but he heard a hand beating at the locked gate. He lay a moment pondering what this could mean. If it were a stranger the dog would still be barking. It must be therefore that the dog was suddenly killed or else it was no stranger.
Now there is no man with his full wits in his skull who will get up in the black of the night and open his gate not knowing who stands at it, and so Ling Tan woke his wife and then held her fast to keep her from running out before he decided what to do. For she was an impetuous woman and, as she always said, she feared no man and if there were knocking at the gate her only thought was to open it and see who was there.
“By such haste many a good man full of healthy blood has been felled before he could open his eyes,” Ling Tan said, holding to her arm with both hands.
So after a moment’s talk while the noise on the gate grew louder they both got up together, and by this time the whole house was roused and their three sons were out of their beds too and so they all went to the gate together, Ling Tan carrying the lighted bean-oil lamp in his hand. Whether to speak or not was the next matter. He decided not to speak but to listen, and what they heard was the dog fawning and whining with joy and not anger.
“It may be he has been fed some sort of good meat,” Lao Ta whispered.
Then they heard a voice speaking, and to their astonishment it was a woman’s voice.
“Are my father and mother dead, too, that they hear nothing?” These were the words that came clear and loud over the earthen wall, and as soon as they were spoken all knew whose voice it was and Ling Sao ran forward and pulled at the gate.
“It is our eldest daughter,” she cried. “But why is she out of her good bed now?”
She threw open the gate and what she saw and what they all saw was beyond what they would have said could be. There stood the eldest daughter and Wu Lien, each with a child, and there was old Wu Sao, on her feet, but dazed as though she did not know where she was or what had happened to her, and they had besides a few bundles of clothing and a teapot and a piece of bedding and a basket of dishes and a pair of candlesticks and their kitchen god.
When the eldest daughter saw her mother and father she broke out into loud crying.
“We are all but dead,” she sobbed. “We might have been dead had we been ten feet nearer to the street. The two servants and the clerks lie buried in the ruins. The shop is half gone. We have nothing but our bare lives in our hands.”
They all pressed into the gate as they spoke and Ling Tan locked it quickly behind them. Bandits, he thought, bandits had broken into the city. It had not happened in a hundred years, but in ancient times it had happened that robbers out of the hills had swept down and into the city.
“Why were the city gates not locked?” he asked.
“How can city gates be locked against the sky?” Wu Lien asked. He set down the youngest child and looked at himself.
In the long walk the child had wet him up and down until he looked as though he had stood under a rain spout. He looked at himself miserably for he was a man chary even of a child on his knees until it had learned its manners.
“What do you mean?” Ling Tan asked him, holding the lamp high and staring down at him.
“The city was bombed—have you heard nothing?”
“Bombed?” Ling Tan repeated. The word was one he had never heard.
His daughter burst out. “The flying ships came over the city this morning. Well, we gave them no heed, for we were all busy at our affairs, and then I remember one of the clerks called out of the door that it was worth coming to see for there were so many of them. Heaven saved me for I was at that moment suckling the child and I did not run out as I would have done, and my man was still sleeping and so was his mother and the other child was playing at my feet but the two serving women ran out and then I heard such a noise—pu-túng! I jumped so that I tore my nipple out of the child’s mouth and the earth shook under my feet and such screaming as came from everywhere at once and I screamed and the lime flew from the walls of the house and a beam fell across the table. But that was not the half of the noise. The shop—father and mother—the shop trembled and the north wall fell into a heap, and half our goods are buried there, and the two clerks, and one of them newly married and the other such an honest young man that where shall we find one like him again?”
“What is the use even of an honest man if there is no shop to put him in?” Wu Lien groaned.
All this time Ling Sao’s mind was struggling with what came thus into her ears but it was not to be understood and so she gave it up and thought only of those things she could understand, how here in the dark of the night were her child and her little grandchildren and their father and the dazed old woman, all weary and hungry and frightened, and so she cried out:
“We shall find beds for you all, and, Jade, you must light the fire for tea, and, Orchid, drop some wheat noodles into water, and let them eat and sleep, and in the morning we can set ourselves to understanding what is wrong.”
To herself she said that it must be more mischief from those students who had first ruined Wu Lien’s shop, for she thought it was only his one shop in all the city that was now newly damaged from the skies.
But Jade knew better. She said not a word but she went into the kitchen and Lao Er followed her and bent behind the stove with her and she asked him, lifting her eyebrows:
“Is it not They?”
And he said, “Who but They?”
Long after the food had been eaten and the children quieted and under this roof all were sheltered somehow and asleep, Jade and her husband talked together.
“It means our land lost and our cities taken,” Jade said.
“It means that we may all die,” he said. He could not bear to think of Jade’s body dead and he leaned over her and enfolded her.
They lay without passion, for all their hearts were swelling not with love toward each other but with hate for what they could foresee and with rage because there was nothing they could do to prevent it.
“Why is it that we have not what all others in the world have?” Jade cried into the night. “Why have we not guns and flying ships and battlements?”
“They have been nothing but toys to us,” Lao Er answered. “They are of no worth to people like us who love only to live.” And then Jade did not answer and she thought sadly how sweet life was to her now when she was sure that she was with child. To live and to bear children, to enjoy each day as it came, seeing new life grow and to bring more life into being, this was good, and what folly to destroy that which took life to make!
“But if all the world is playing with such evil toys we must learn how to play with them, too,” she said at last.
“Still it is folly,” he said stoutly.
Long into the night they lay awake thinking of what they must do. They fell asleep at last without knowing.
… In the morning there was no thought of work. By the time everyone was so much as fed half the morning was gone, and the rest of the hours they stayed listening to what Wu Lien and the eldest daughter had to tell and even old Wu Sao kept muttering as she wiped her eyes, “It was too much noise—there was such a noise.”
Now at last Ling Sao understood what had happened in the city. It was no such small thing as one shop falling. Wherever the silver eggs had dropped and burst, all around fell into dust.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 7