Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (25 page)

At this the cousin’s wife bawled out to her husband, “I ever said learning was no use! See now, old man, if you had been strong enough to pull a ricksha what we might be doing, but no, your belly is full of ink, and I always swear that is why you smell so foul!”

The cousin could not bear this spoiling of his pride and he said, “But who would now read this letter to tell the news if it were not I?” He looked around at his fellows and they nodded to agree with him that he had the best of her there, and so he went on again:

“Your grandson was born on the last day of the thirteenth month, a little before his time because his mother had walked so far. But the child is well and strong and set your hearts free about him. When the times are good we will return with him and show him to you.”

“When will that be?” Ling Sao asked.

But the cousin went on: “If the times are worse we will then go on to the upper river reaches and from there I will write again. If you send us a letter, send it to the care of one named Liu, the eighth brother in the shop on the corner of the two streets Fish Market and Needle.” Here the cousin ended.

“Is that all?” Ling Tan asked.

“There is only his name and the farewell,” the cousin replied.

Now that the letter was over and their minds free again they all smelled the stench once more and Ling Sao asked her cousin’s wife how her son did, and at that the woman sighed and said he was already full of worms and the outlook was not good. She asked the company to come in and see what they thought and if there was any advice they had to give her, and so they all rose and went into the room where that young man lay, and there the stench was beyond bearing and they must hold their hands over their noses.

None could go close to the young man, now thin and yellow as though he had smoked opium for a lifetime, and they all sighed as the young man turned his dying eyes toward them and they made haste to go out again. Now the mother saw that none had any hope and she began to weep and while they went away she hid her face against the wall and wept. Nor would she be comforted when Ling Tan and his wife stayed to beg her not to weep at least until her son was truly dead, but she only sobbed:

“If I must weep I will weep, and he is as good as dead for his belly is full of maggots and next they will gnaw his heart, and what can I do?” And she refused comfort and so they left her.

As for the young man the little will he had clung to for living failed him when he heard her say this, and it was no more than an hour after that he turned his face to the wall and gave up his will and when next his mother went in to see him, all that was living in the body of her son were those maggots.

When Ling Tan heard of it he sighed and told his wife, “I think no good would have come from that young man, and doubtless he would have turned bandit with the other refuse, who rob us these days, and yet why should he die when there are other evil men alive? He had his life to live, too, and the enemy took it from him, and now day by day there is rising in me such a hatred for this enemy and for all men who bring war down on good and innocent people like us that I swear I cannot bear it if my hate does not come out of me somehow.”

Ling Sao was afraid when she heard this, and she begged him, “Do not be full of hate for if you are your blood will turn to poison and you will fall ill, and then what have I left?”

And he knew she was right, and he promised to turn his mind to such things as the plowing of the ground for spring again and so he did, thankful that the land was here still, and that he could feel the soothing round of work that land demands of the seasons.

What he did not know was that from the moment of her son’s death his third cousin’s wife hated not the enemy but him, for she still believed that had their son wed Jade he would now be alive, and she would mutter through the night to her husband, “Had Jade been his wife, she would not have let him go to the city that day, no, and he would not have wanted to leave home at all because of her, or at least I would have had a grandson by now, and that child Jade has would have been ours and not Ling Tan’s. It is by rights our grandchild and not Ling Tan’s, before the gods, and he has robbed us in the worst way a man can rob another, for he has robbed us of our flesh and blood, and now we have no one to worship our bones when we are gone, and so he has cursed us forever.”

Her husband twisted in the bed when he heard such words, for he knew that at bottom there was no reason in them and yet he was a man of peace and he did not want to bring her wrath down upon him, so he only sighed out that his head ached and he wished she would let him sleep, and with that she kicked him in the small of his back, and he was goaded beyond his own courage at this and he kicked her too, but a lesser kick, and he asked:

“Was I not his father and do I not sorrow? I sorrow more than you do because he was the only child you ever bore me, but I could have had a hundred sons in these years with all my wasted seed.”

At this his wife was so full of fury that she rained her kicks on him with both feet, for what he said was true enough. She was barren from a fever that fell upon her after her only son was born, and with her evil temper she would not have allowed a concubine to her husband even had he had the money for one, which he never had. And though now he kicked back once or twice she was too much for him and so he rose at last and went and laid himself down on a bench in their one other room and wondered to himself why women were as they were and he envied monks and hermits and all those men who need not a woman, and dreamed an old dream of his that one day he would walk away and be a monk himself.

Yet even this little dream of his was now spoiled, for many temples were emptied of their priests these days and soldiers filled them and he feared soldiers as he feared his wife, and so he lay on that narrow bench and felt how evil his life was, and he a quiet man who asked only a little peace around him. But there was no peace now anywhere, and none for him either, in his small life.

… In her own house Ling Sao felt the emptiness too great. She had been used to every room full of her children and grandchildren and at night sleepers in every room and at meals the table crowded, and she herself busy and managing, and now here were only the men and the two little children. And even these little children were silent and full of fear of what they did not know, but they would not stir outside the house and there they would sit hand in hand, the elder like a little old man, and they were thin and yellow and shrank if any noise fell upon their ears.

As to their father, he who used to be so easy and cheerful now seldom spoke a word to anyone, for the truth was this eldest son of Ling Tan’s was a man ill suited for these times. He was one who would have thrived in the good life they used to have and he would have grown into a quiet gentle older man, respected in the village for his wisdom, and the father of many children who would have loved him for his kindness, but in these times when nothing went well, he did not know what to do, and he fell into stillness so deep that it seemed almost witlessness sometimes. There was no hope of finding one to take Orchid’s place yet, and if sometimes he wished there were such a one there were other times when he was glad there was not, for fear of more children and more trouble, and so he went on as dully in his ways as the water buffalo did, doing what he was told and plodding back and forth upon the land.

Ling Tan looked at him often and he thought, “There is one whose life is spoiled by war as surely as any other’s has been,” and then Ling Tan would fall into one of his deep rages that he had now-a-days against all men on the earth who make war. As he plowed back and forth across his fields he raged within, looking at the half-ruined houses of his village and his own house that he dared not mend lest it tempt the roaming soldiers of the enemy, and all about him in the valley the villages were so. And on the other side of the city, where he had not seen it but only heard, the land was itself ruined, scorched and barren, that good fertile land which centuries of peace had made rich for food. Never had their own little wars despoiled the land except through taxes made too high and the land urged to greater bearing. And yet even so for this fruitage there must be more ordure put in and more enrichment, and so the land still held its good.

Back and forth all through that spring while Ling Sao fretted in the house Ling Tan raged in his heart against the men who made wars, wherever they were, and he knew from hearsay that such men were in other countries too, and he thought of the foreigners on the other side of his land and wondered if they suffered as he was suffering, and he thought:

“We men of peace and sense, whether here on top of the earth or hanging downward from it on the other side, we ought to band together and forbid life to all who would make war. Yes, when we see a child like that we ought to keep him locked, if he will not be taught.”

And the more he thought the more sure he was that only a certain kind of man made war, and if these men were somehow done away with, then there could be peace. Such were his thoughts these days, but what could he do, one man upon his land? And yet he said to himself, “Are there not others like me?”

This was a joyless spring, and one festival passed another and Ling Sao made no feasts, and none were made anywhere for how can a people rejoice when an enemy rules over them? The house was so silent that she grew full of fretfulness so that her very skin itched with it, and she would sit scratching herself in the evening because of her fretfulness. At last Ling Tan himself noticed it and he asked her one night in the third month of that luckless year:

“Why do you sit scratching yourself and rubbing your nose and jerking your arms like that?”

And she burst out with words as though a lid had been taken from a jar:

“Our house is like a grave and now I know we ought never to have let our second son and Jade go away from it. Our eldest son is helpless and what will these two poor children do if anything happens to you and me and we already old?”

He listened to this and marveled that for all their years together he could never know what would come out of this woman.

“Would you ask our second son and Jade to come back here?” he asked her gravely, “and shall we tell them to bring our grandchild back from free land to this land that is the enemy’s?”

“It is not the enemy’s so long as we live upon it,” she told him. “That is where you are wrong, old man. It is not ours only if we give up and go away and leave it. But that we will not do, and our sons should not either, because if we should die, how would the land be held?”

Now there was sense in what she said, and Ling Tan was too just to deny sense even to a woman when he heard it from her, and so he said:

“Speak on, old woman, and let me hear more,” and he lit his pipe to keep him calm, though tobacco was precious these days and would be until he had his own small crop cut.

“What I say is that our son ought to come back here and live as he used to do,” she said, “for we ought not to yield to the enemy. We are yielding when we let our sons go out and the enemy will think we are afraid if all the young men go out and only the old are left.”

There was truth in this again and he smoked a while and then he said, “But the outlook is so ill. It is true that women are more safe these days than they were before the new year since courtesans are plentiful, they say, and the worst of the enemy soldiers have gone on, but there are other ills ahead.”

“What ills?” she asked. Not once had she ever said again that she feared no man and never would as long as she lived, but what ill was worse than men?

“There are rumors that we farmers are to have bitter laws put on us,” he said, “and how can we refuse to obey the enemy when we have no guns?”

“If there are such ills ahead our sons should be here to help us bear them,” she told him, “and when you write the letter back to our second son, you tell him I said so.”

“Hah,” he said, and nothing more than that, but he sat a long time that night with the thought that his wife had put into his head. It was but a seed she dropped in that wilful half-childish way that women have, a truth she chanced upon not for itself but out of some simple wish she had doubtless to see her grandson. But his man’s mind could take the seed and fertilize it with his thought and bring it up to fruit and so he did.

“If it be true that this enemy will spread over the land like an evil plague,” he thought, “is it well that we all flee before it and let them have the land? Some flee because they dare not stay but there are those strong enough to stay and am I not one? She is wrong to say all my sons must be here, but she is right when she says this eldest son cannot live here alone, and he cannot. But my youngest son cannot be here for he will do better elsewhere, but is not my second son like me? If he is like me he ought to be here to hold the land with me. He and I and others like us, we must stay where we belong and hold as best we can what is ours and harry the enemy like fleas in a dog’s tail so that the beast can make no headway for stopping to gnaw his rear.”

He laughed silently at his own small joke and Ling Sao cried, “Why are you sitting there laughing to yourself like an old idiot in such days as these?”

“I am not ready to tell you yet,” he said and would not tell her, but the seed had sprouted in his mind and was putting out its leaves.

Yet so evil was that spring that his courage might have failed him to call back his second son had not the summer brought its own disaster to his house, and this disaster was worse than the new taxes the enemy put down upon the land and worse than the laws they made about the price of rice or what they said a man must plant and all such tyranny as Ling Tan had never thought could be upon the earth. And this was the disaster. In that year so many people had been killed that to bury all was not possible, and to rid the streets of bodies, such as could not be buried were thrown into the canals and into the river and when the river rose with spring and swelled into the canals, those bodies were thrown up again or brought down from other cities and left upon the banks, and sickness came upon the people from all this rotting flesh, and among the poor it came from eating crabs that fed on flesh, and so when the heat of summer came fluxes and fevers spread everywhere.