Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (15 page)

Not one word did they say until their rice was all measured and the money in their hands that day, and then Ling Tan asked:

“When must we expect this enemy?”

“In less than a month if they are not somehow hindered,” the eldest merchant replied.

“And do our rulers nowhere hinder their coming?” Ling Tan asked.

“The enemy has guns that we have not,” the merchant replied. “While we have been building all these new schools everywhere and making new roads the enemy has been making great guns and ships on sea and in the air and what have we to fight them with except our bare bodies?”

Ling Tan did not answer, but he led his sons home through the chill air of the late year and pondered all the way what the merchant had told him. Yes, their ancients had taught them that no good man would be a soldier and that the warlike man was the least of men and not to be respected, and so they had all believed.

“And so I do believe still,” Ling Tan thought to himself. “It is better to live than to die, and peace is better than war, and though there are some who deny this as robbers do, the truth remains what it is.”

But that day he began to look to the strength of his gate and to the fastening of its hinges, and he mended the holes in his wall, and he closed a small window in the kitchen that gave to the outside, and he made up his mind that if the enemy came, he would put all his family inside the gate and he would be the only one to show himself if one must come to the gate. He had a deep new fear of the unknown that was to come, and never were days so precious as these few days before the enemy drew near. He counted every hour of them as a man might count the last hours of his life, and saw more clearly than ever before the beauty of the hills and the dearness of his land. Even the faces of those in the house were more dear to him than they had ever been and he bought Pansiao a new coat of blue silk, and for Ling Sao ten feet of fine white cotton such as their own loom could not weave, and to his sons he gave ten silver dollars apiece and to each of his grandchildren he gave a silver coin, and to his eldest daughter some good linen cloth for herself. None of them knew what to make of these presents out of time, but he wanted them to feel his goodwill toward them and toward all in these last days of peace.

“I can do this for you now,” he said when they looked surprised, “and I cannot say whether or not I shall always be able to give you such tokens.”

They took the gifts gladly and yet they felt uneasy too, and as if somehow Ling Tan felt himself about to die.

“Are you well?” his wife asked him anxiously in the night. “It seems to me you do not eat so heartily as once you did and I feel a difference in you.”

“I am not changed,” he said, gravely, “I shall never change. The man I am now I shall be until I die, and I will not die soon.”

But he said this so strangely that she stared at him and made ready to say something and then shut her mouth. She knew that he was a man who knew what he did and why he did it, and before such a man a woman may keep silence and know that it will be well with her.

E
ARLY IN THE ELEVENTH
month the enemy was near the city. When the day was still, if Ling Tan lifted his head as he worked in a field he could hear like distant moaning the sound of battle. Now and again a deep roar broke out of the east, and none knew what it was until some coming back from the city one day said that it was the huge foreign guns the enemy had.

The stream of those who fled had ceased. All who could go were gone, and there remained only those who knew that whatever happened they must stay. Ling Tan made himself busy all day with the winter’s work, and at night he sat long to make straw sandals from the strong rice straw. There was one light snow, and under it the winter wheat grew green, but the snow was soon gone, and day measured off day and now each day brought its own bad news.

On the seventh day of that month the last of the rulers went away. There was an army left in the city to fight the enemy when it came but what army would be brave when its rulers were gone? The people groaned when they heard of it, and all around the city for twenty miles the villagers armed themselves with knives and ancient swords their fathers had left them and their pitchforks and old guns they had bought long ago in thieves’ markets to use in times when the bandits were bad. First they made ready to defend themselves against their own retreating armies, for well they knew that soldiers in retreat whatever their flag will take what they see, because they know that they will not pass that way again and what they do will be blamed on others. Ling Tan armed himself with an old broad-sword his great-grandfather had. It had lain at the bottom of a pigskin trunk for two lifetimes, but now Ling Tan brought it out and his wife polished it with ashes and he swung it a few times and found it could be used like a scythe, and he hung it on a nail near his gate ready to use. Thus half a month passed, and all knew that any day might be the last that they were free, and they learned to measure the time of the enemy’s coming by the daily growing clearness of the sounds of battle. Those roars of great guns were so near now that sometimes the dishes on the table jumped and the children cried.

In the last few days, the worst news that Ling Tan had heard came from the villagers nearest the city. For Ling Tan and his kin were lucky in this one thing, that their village was something more than three miles from the city. Within two and three miles the defending soldiers had burned the villages to prevent the enemy from plunder. Now bands of farmers and their families came by, their goods on their backs, and their small children swinging in baskets from carrying poles, as though it were a famine year, and they were hastening inland. When Ling Tan asked them why, they said:

“Our houses and our harvest are burned. Our land now is only scorched earth and why should we stay to be killed by the enemy?” And they hastened on their way.

That day, with the noise of battle loud in his ears, Ling Tan went out and looked on his land. Should he, too, scorch his earth? But where would he go with his household and among them so many women and little children and who would feed them if he burned his harvests of rice and grass? Deepest of all his unwillingness was the wish not to leave his land.

“If I could roll up the land and take it with me,” he told his wife in the night, “then I could go. But my land goes deep under the skin of the earth and it goes down through the bowels of the earth, and I will not give it up. I will stay here, whoever comes, and keep this land mine.”

“Then I will stay with you,” Ling Sao said.

Days passed and with the rulers gone the people held themselves the more steadfast knowing that they and they alone were left to stand against the enemy and upon each man himself now depended what would happen. So it had happened again and again in other times, for rulers anywhere are always the first to fly, and the people must stay behind to be steadfast. And the noise of the battle grew more strong, hour by hour.

On the tenth day of that month like wind blowing through the countryside it was known that in three days the enemy would come. Now though Ling Tan was lucky in that his land was on the farther side of the city, and so the enemy would not come first to him and then to the city but would march on the city from another side, yet he was unlucky in this, too, for the defending army broke and ran without law and order, seizing all as they ran, and they streamed through villages, wild and frightened men, anxious only to be away from there, and their leaders being gone already they did not care how they disgraced themselves before the enemy so that they saved themselves.

Against these Ling Tan must now lock his gate and though there were those who beat on it he had made it so strong that in their dire haste it did not pay them to wait to break it in. When they found this gate did not open readily they went on and fell upon some other place and so his house was safe. But the ruin they left in the village and in all the villages in that direction was shameful to see and plenty there were who cried out that the enemy could not be worse than this, and there were even some who said plainly that they wished the enemy would come in and rule, that at least then there might be order. For now the robbers and bandits began to spring up everywhere like evil weeds. When a man sold some of his harvest and had a little money, these roving homeless men heard of it as though they smelled it, and they came down in the night and took what they wanted. To all other sorrows, there was added this ancient sorrow.

Wu Lien was one who wished for order at any cost. After the last of the defeated armies had passed he came out and walked up and down the street of the village and groaned to see every little shop emptied of what it had and the bakery cleaned of its last loaf and all gone without a penny in anyone’s hand.

“Let no one say that there can be worse than what our own have done to us,” he said, and when he was back in the house he said, “as soon as the enemy has occupied the city I shall go and open my shop again for I believe we shall be better rather than worse with their coming.”

“If you are right, when they come, then I will say you are and take their rule for mine, too,” Ling Tan answered. For while the soldiers had fled past his house he had climbed up on a corner of roof where he could be hidden and yet look down, and he was so angered by what he saw and by their wild ruthless looks that it was all he could do to hold on and not fall upon them, even though he knew that when a man becomes a soldier he ceases to be a man and goes back to the beast he once was in some other life.

But at last there was an end even to these retreating men. In that silent time between the retreat of the defending army and the coming of the enemy Ling Tan called the villagers together in the tea house and there they took counsel as to how the enemy was to be met. They knew the time was short.

“Surely they will see that we are a defenseless village,” Ling Tan said, “and even an enemy will not fall upon those who have made themselves willing for their coming. Let us therefore think how to meet our conquerors courteously, not to welcome them falsely but to tell them that we are men of reason who can accept what has come in their life.”

To this all were agreed, and then some asked, “When and from what place will this enemy come and on what road shall we meet them?” and others asked, “How should we meet them?” For not one of these men had ever seen a foreign conqueror before and though they all hoped for good and each told the others the good things he had heard of foreigners, they did not know what should be said to them or what the behavior ought to be of those who were vanquished by them.

Then the ninety-year-old said out of his long wisdom, “What ways do we know but our own? Let us do as we would do to any new gentry coming to our village.”

Because of his great age all listened to him as he spoke, and they agreed that what he said was best. So it was planned that when they heard the enemy draw near they would go out in a body from the village, and that this oldest man should go first, and after him the others, and that tea should be prepared here and small cakes and fruits, and thus in decency and honor the conquest would take place. And as they planned there were some who said aloud that they hoped for order and peace at least, and that it would not be hard for the conquerors to be a little better than some of their own magistrates had been to them.

All having been decided, the inn keeper was called to the front of the tea house and it was told him to have tea and small cakes ready for the next few days and he said he would make some of his own small sesame cakes, and so they parted to wait.

In those next days while they waited there were those who went to the city and bought small enemy flags of paper for the people to hold in their hands when they went out to welcome the enemy, and to comfort themselves the villagers told each other that in the city they had heard, too, that foreigners were always better than their own people and in foreign countries there were more law and order than there were here and so in hope and fear all waited for the day of the enemy’s coming.

… Thus dawned the thirteenth day of the eleventh month. On the morning of that day when he rose Ling Tan knew what day it was. All sound of battle had ceased. The air was as still as it had been in the years before the enemy ever came to the coast. A quiet wintry morning it was and the first heavy hoar frost was white on the land. He had risen early, for he slept badly now every night, and alone he went to his gate and looked over his whitened fields. The winter wheat was green under the white and he thought, “Shall I cut that wheat or will there be another in my place?” Upon the thatched roofs of the village the frost was beginning to melt from the smoke slowly curling upward as women lighted their fires, and without answering his own question he went into his house where Ling Sao had lit her fire, too.

He went to her in the kitchen where so often in their life he had found her and there she was behind the stove.

“This is the day we dread,” he said.

“I know it,” she answered. She lifted her eyes to his face and he saw they were steadfast.

“I fear no man,” she said.

The old words came out of her with new meaning and he felt it.

“Nor will I fear,” he said quietly.

In silence he washed himself and rinsed his mouth and in silence one after another of the household came out and took his place at the table. Even the children who on other days cried and laughed and quarreled and made commotion today were silent, too.

When all had eaten Ling Tan spoke to them as the head of the house. “By the stillness over the land I know that the battle is over. Our army has retreated and perhaps even by this time the enemy has taken the city. But here we must all stay within the walls of our own house. None of you is to go out without telling me and especially no woman or any child is to go out for any reason. I myself will work only where I can see all roads and if I see a stranger coming I alone will speak, and none of you is to show his face except my eldest son and he only if he sees me distressed, and especially no woman is to show her face for any cause.”