The Real Story of Ah-Q (50 page)

‘ “The heavenly portents of the last few days have revealed all – everyone in the empire will now know the swords have been forged,” he told me softly. “Tomorrow, I must go and present them to the king. But that day will be my last. We must say goodbye for ever.”

‘I was astonished: I didn’t understand what he meant or what I should say. “But look what you’ve achieved…” I gasped uselessly.

‘ “Why should you understand?” he said. “Our king is by nature suspicious – and utterly ruthless. I have forged for him a sword that has no equal in the world – of course he will kill me, to stop me forging swords for other people that will equal, or surpass his.”

‘I wept.

‘ “Do not grieve for me. This is my destiny; your tears will change nothing. And I have long prepared for it.” His eyes flashed again as he placed one casket across my knees. “This is the male of the two swords,” he told me. “Take it. Tomorrow, I will present the female sword to the king. If I do not return, it means I have departed this world. You are five or six months pregnant, are you not? Do not waste time grieving for me: have the baby, bring him up well. When he becomes a man, give him the male sword and tell him to use it on the king’s own neck – to avenge me!” ’

‘Did Father come back?’ Mei Jianchi quickly asked.

‘No!’ she answered, with a cold stillness. ‘I asked everywhere, but there was no news. Eventually, I heard that the first blood the sword knew was that of its maker – your father. Afraid that the ghost would come back to haunt him, the king buried his head and body separately, the one at his front gate, the other in the gardens to the back.’

Mei Jianchi suddenly felt as if his entire body were a furnace, as if every hair were on fire. His fists clenched until the joints crackled in the darkness.

His mother stood up and lifted the floorboard at the head of the bed. After lighting another pine torch, she took out a hoe from behind the door and handed it to Mei Jianchi. ‘Dig!’

Though his heart was pounding, he set about his task, one light stroke of the hoe following after another, with calm precision. Around five feet down, the yellow earth began to change colour, to that of rotting wood.

‘Watch what you’re doing!’ his mother cautioned.

Bending over the hole he had just dug, Mei Jianchi carefully reached down to draw the rotten wood aside. A coldness met his fingertip: like the touch of ice. A sword of a pure, transparent blue emerged into view. After locating the hilt, he grasped it, and drew the sword out.

Suddenly, the moon and stars outside and the pine torch inside seemed to lose their brightness next to this inexorable blue light. The sword’s edges melted into the metal’s cold glow – as if the thing barely existed. Looking again, Mei Jianchi now made out a blunt-looking blade, some five feet in length – as dully rounded as a leek leaf.

‘You must no longer be weak,’ his mother ordered. ‘You must take revenge – with this sword!’

‘I am no longer weak. I will take revenge – with this sword!’

‘Then I am satisfied. Wear this blue coat and carry the sword on your back – no one will notice it against the background. Your clothes I have prepared here.’ She pointed to a battered old chest behind the bed. ‘Tomorrow you must start. Forget you ever had a mother!’

Mei Jianchi took out his new coat and tried it on – it fitted perfectly. He then refolded it, wrapped up the sword in it, placed it by his pillow, and calmly lay down. Feeling that he had overcome his old weakness, he determined to act as if everything were perfectly normal – to sleep, to wake up the following morning as usual, then to set out with calm confidence to hunt down his deadly enemy.

But he could not sleep. He tossed and turned, itching to sit up. He heard his mother heaving long, soft sighs of disappointment. The first cockcrow told him a new day had arrived: that he was fifteen years old.

Before the sun was risen in the east, a puffy-eyed Mei Jianchi walked out of the gate without a backwards look. His blue coat over his shoulders, the blue sword on his back, he advanced in great strides towards the city. Every leaf in the fir-tree wood hung with dew drops, still enclosing the night air within. As he emerged from the forest, however, the droplets were sparkling with new dawn light. In the distance, he could just make out the crenellated outlines of the grey city wall.

He slipped into the city in between onion-carriers and vegetable-sellers. The streets were already buzzing with activity: men blankly standing about in idle groups, while from time to time pale, mostly puffy-eyed women – hair uncombed, faces unmade-up – poked their heads outside.

Mei Jianchi grasped that something important was about to happen – some major event that everyone was anticipating eagerly, but patiently.

On he went. A child suddenly ran at him, almost colliding with the tip of the sword on his back. The sweat poured off him in fear. As he turned north, approaching the royal palace, the crowds thickened into dense files, their necks craned forward, wails of women and children bubbling up in their midst. Afraid of injuring someone with his transparent sword, he dared not push his way into the throng. Feeling the surge of yet more humanity behind him, he was forced to retreat to the back, where his view was blocked by other bodies and necks.

Suddenly, everyone fell to their knees like dominoes as, far off in the distance, a pair of horses approached. Then came soldiers holding truncheons, spears, swords, bows and flags, kicking up clouds of yellow dust as they went. A great four-horse carriage followed, carrying a team of musicians, striking bells and drums, or blowing on instruments he could not name. Then another carriage, its passengers – either old, or short and stout – decked out in bright clothes, every face slick with sweat. They were succeeded by another team of cavalry, wielding swords, spears and halberds. The kneeling crowds prostrated themselves. Now Mei Jianchi saw a large, yellow-canopied carriage drive by, a corpulent individual sitting in its middle, brightly clothed, his small head fringed with a greying beard. At his waist could be glimpsed a blue sword – an exact match with the one on Mei Jianchi’s back.

A feeling of intense cold was again succeeded by burning heat, as if he were on fire. Reaching over his shoulder for the hilt of his sword, he began to move forward into the gaps between the necks of the kneeling crowd.

But no more than five or six steps into his approach, he fell headlong – someone had grabbed hold of one of his feet. His fall was directly broken by a young man with a wizened face. Afraid, again, that the sword point may have wounded someone, he scrambled quickly up again – and took two hard punches below his ribs. Undeterred, he looked back at the road. But the yellow-canopied carriage and its cavalry escort were both long past.

Everyone at the roadside clambered to their feet. The wizened young man still had Mei Jianchi firmly by the lapels. The latter had apparently crushed the former’s solar plexus – the very centre of his life-force – and the victim now wanted a guarantee that his attacker would pay with his life if he died before the age of eighty. Idlers immediately gathered around to goggle at the fracas, but no one spoke out. Eventually, a few audience members began to laugh or heckle – all taking the part of the wizened young man. Mei Jianchi felt neither amusement nor anger – only vexation at the tediousness of it, at the difficulty of extricating himself. Time passed – as long as it would have taken to boil a pot of millet. Mei Jianchi’s body burned with impatience, while his audience showed no interest in abandoning the spectacle.

The circle of people around him rippled apart to allow a thin, swarthy individual with black beard and eyes to push his way in. Silently, he offered Mei Jianchi a cool smile, then flicked the wizened young man in the chin and looked him hard in the eye. The young man met his gaze, slowly relaxed his grip and slipped away, followed shortly after by Mei’s saviour. The spectators also duly dispersed. A few of them asked Mei Jianchi how old he was, where he lived – whether he had any sisters. He ignored them.

He now headed south. The city was so crowded, he thought to himself, that it would be easy to hurt someone by mistake; his best course was to bide his time, until the king returned, in the expansive, underpopulated area outside the southern gate – a perfect retreat in which to wait for revenge. Every conversation in the city seemed to be about the king’s trip to the mountains: about his insignia, his magnificence, the unfathomable honour of having set eyes on him, the abjection of their prostrations, how richly they deserved the accolade of model subject; and so on they went, like a veritable hive of bees out on their daily swarm. At last, near the south gate, everything grew quieter.

He left the city and sat down under a large mulberry tree, taking from his bundle two steamed rolls to satisfy his complaining stomach. As he ate, he suddenly thought of his mother and his eyes prickled, but the moment passed. His surroundings grew more peaceful with every step he took from the metropolis, until he could hear even the sound of his own breathing.

The darker it got, the more uneasy he became. He squinted into the distance, but there was no sign of the king’s return. One by one, villagers who had come to the city to sell vegetables returned home, empty carrying-poles across their shoulders.

Long after this trickle of humanity had disappeared into the night, the same dark man from before suddenly flashed out of the city.

‘Flee, Mei Jianchi! The king is after you!’ he hooted, like an owl.

Seized by trembling, Mei Jianchi strode off with him as if bewitched; soon, they began to run like the wind. When he stopped to catch his breath, he realized that he had reached the edge of the fir-tree wood. Far behind him lay the silver rays of the rising moon. In front, the stranger’s eyes gleamed phosphorescently in the darkness.

‘How do you know me?’ Mei Jianchi asked fearfully.

‘Ha! I’ve known you since the day you were born,’ the man’s voice said. ‘I know that you carry on your back the male sword and that you seek to avenge your father. I also know you will not succeed. You have already been informed on: your enemy has returned to the palace by the east gate and ordered your capture.’

Mei Jianchi’s heart ached.

‘So Mother was right after all,’ he murmured.

‘She knows only the half of it. She doesn’t know that I will take vengeance for you.’

‘You? You will right our wrong, O champion of justice?’

‘Don’t insult me with such language.’

‘Then, why do you take pity on a widow and a fatherless child?’

‘My child,’ he rebuked. ‘Justice, pity – once, these words were pure. Now, they are the debased capital of fiendish usurers. I know nothing of these things. All I seek is revenge on your behalf.’

‘Very well. But how is that to be had?’

‘I need only two things from you,’ said the voice below the phosphorescent pools. ‘Your sword and – your head!’

This singular demand seemed to invite suspicion of its maker, and yet Mei Jianchi discovered he was not surprised by it. For a while, he could find nothing to say.

‘Do not fear that I wish to trick you out of your life and inheritance,’ the voice continued grimly out of the darkness. ‘The decision is entirely yours. Trust me, and I will go forward on your behalf. Otherwise, I will leave well alone.’

‘But why do you want to avenge us? Did you know my father?’

‘I knew your father, just as I have always known you. But that is not my reason for coming to you tonight. Listen, ingenious child. I excel only in the taking of revenge. Your vengeance is mine; and so is his. I have no care for myself – my soul is thick with scars, inflicted by others and by my own hand; I hate myself for it.’

As the voice in the darkness fell silent, Mei Jianchi drew the blue blade out from behind him, then brought it down on his own neck. As his head tumbled on to the green moss over the ground, he handed the sword to the dark man.

Taking the sword in one hand, grasping Mei Jianchi’s hair with the other, he lifted the head up and planted two kisses on its hot, dead lips, then burst into cold, shrill laughter.

His mirth immediately scattered through the fir-tree wood. A whole wolf pack of phosphorescent eyes now flashed and surged near, accompanied by hungry panting. The first mouthfuls ripped apart Mei Jianchi’s coat; the second devoured his flesh and every last drop of blood, until only a faint crunching of bones was left.

Now, the great wolf at the front of the pack rushed at the dark man. With one flourish of the blue sword, the wolf’s head lay on the moss at his feet, before the rest of the pack. The first mouthfuls ripped apart the skin; the second devoured its flesh and every last drop of blood, until only a faint crunching of bones was left.

The man wrapped Mei Jianchi’s head in the remains of the blue coat, placed it – along with the sword – on his back, turned around and strode off through the night to the capital.

The wolves paused, shoulders hunched, tongues lolling, following his swinging gait with their burning green eyes.

And as he walked, he sang, his voice shrilling through the wood: