Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (31 page)

“But I only eat what I am given,” the daughter said.

“Who gives it to you?” Ling Sao asked.

“My husband.”

Then Ling Sao searched her daughter to know if she were innocent or not.

“How is he able to do this?” she asked.

The daughter began to weep. “I know you cannot understand how good he is,” she sobbed, “because he seems to yield for the time, you blame him. I told him it would be so. But he hates the enemy, too, and he says that each must resist in his own way and he says that he is able in a hundred ways to turn the advantage away from the enemy and to us, and he says what is the use of opposing what is already here? The enemy rules, and somehow we must live under that rule.”

“But not grow too fat under it,” Ling Sao said.

“We had better be fat than the enemy,” the daughter said in sudden anger. “Is the enemy worsted when we refuse to eat?”

“If you can eat,” Ling Sao said bitterly.

And Ling Sao looked at the two little fat children and to her own surprise she took no joy in them. She who could never see a child without wanting to cuddle it and smell its flesh looked at these two and did not want to touch them. Their flesh was not hers, she thought. They had eaten foreign food. But her daughter only saw that her mother looked at the children and she said proudly, “Have they not grown?”

“Yes,” Ling Sao said. “They have grown.”

And then she looked at her daughter between the eyes. “What will they think some day when our land is free again and their father’s name is among the names of traitors?”

At this the daughter began to weep again and to wish that she had not come home.

“We came at great inconvenience,” she sobbed, “and we came only to help you and to see if you were safe, and whatever you think of us we think as we ever did of you, and you will see some day that perhaps we can save even your lives.”

Ling Sao rose. “If I had anything in the house to give you and your children for courtesy I would prepare it for you,” she said, “but indeed we have nothing. We are not given plenty of meat and rice. What we have is only enough to keep us from starving. I cannot treat you courteously, therefore.”

This was to say that she would talk no more, and her daughter knew it.

“How can you be so hard when there are only you two old people in the house and we are all you have!” she said.

“We can live,” Ling Sao said proudly.

So Ling Tan outside the court saw the gate opened and his daughter and the children come out and Ling Sao made a small show of courtesy and she and Ling Tan stood there until Wu Lien and his household were gone, and there were no words said of their return.

When they were gone they barred the gate again and then Ling Sao shouted down the hole and the others came up. They talked a while of the visit and the more Lao Er heard the angrier he was. He made up his mind to creep into the city in one way or another, and see for himself what was there, and see whether indeed all had yielded to the enemy.

Jade, out of her reading of books, devised a beggar’s garment for him and with red clay they made a wound on his face that twisted his mouth to one side and seemed to blind an eye and a few days after that Lao Er went into the city pretending he was a beggar. Avoiding the main streets, he came and went and said little and saw much. What he saw grieved him, for everywhere opium was being sold. The ruined houses he overlooked, and the hungry people, since war brings them everywhere. Yet they could scarcely be wholly overlooked in this city which had only so little while ago been beautiful and rich and full of pleasure. Now the streets were silent. Thousands upon thousands of those who had once walked there in full life were dead. Houses that had been homes were empty and burned. Shops were closed, except those like Wu Lien’s which flourished on such times. But like a new and evil growth there were other shops, some hovels, some gaudy with paper and paint, some openly brothels and some not, but all selling opium. By such a hovel Lao Er paused and made as though he would go in and was waiting to get his courage, when a wretched man crawled by on a crutch, his right leg gone. He was yellow and dried and Lao Er could see that he had come to this place many times before. He laid hold of him and spoke to him as a stranger speaks.

“Does this place sell—that?” he asked and pointed to the sign.

The man nodded and Lao Er asked again, “But ought we to go in if the enemy sells it?”

The man looked at him. “What does it matter what happens to men like me?” he asked. “Nothing can give me back what I have had. The best of times and all the enemy gone will not give me back my leg, no, nor my good inn and my wife and my sons, and all that was once mine. I do not care even for victory. What can victory do for me?”

And Lao Er groaned and thought that such as this one were indeed the vanquished. He limped home by night and there he told what he had seen and how the markets had no food in them and how the marketmen told him the prices were scraping heaven because food was being sent out, and the people in the city were starving, but the enemy did not care, and for food they were giving the people cheap opium and so forgetfulness.

Now such mournfulness fell upon Ling Tan’s house as they had not yet had, for Ling Tan knew from his own mother what opium could do and how a whole soul could be changed and made something else by it.

“What is our refuge from this?” he mourned. “We can hide from the flying ships and we can build up houses that are burned, but what can be done if our people forget what has befallen them?” And to Ling Tan this seemed the worst evil that the enemy had yet done to them.

N
OW SECRET WAR IS
not open war, and of the two secret war is the harder to wage. As the winter passed, Ling Tan had to keep his face smooth and his eyes dull, and yet his mind had to be working and quick to spring to every advantage large and small. While his sons and those who were with them came and went by night and used the secret room as a fortress for their weapons, he had to seem to be an old farmer who knew nothing and saw nothing if the enemy came to inquire. And be sure they did come, for in the spring there began to be so many of the enemy found dead that a great anger rose among the enemy rulers. Guards were found shot upon the city wall, though the city gates were locked at night, and the wall was eighty feet high and how could any climb it?

Yet Ling Tan’s youngest son, and others like him, climbed that wall somewhere many a night. He thrust his bare strong feet into the crevices of the great old bricks and into vines and into the roots of small trees, and thus in darkness pulling and feeling he scaled that wall and crept along the shadows of the crenellated edge until he came to an enemy guard somewhere and then he shot him. The next moment he was hiding in the vines again and there he clung until if there were noise and clamor it had died away and then he climbed down and went home and before dawn he was back in the hills.

And the enemy who came to the countryside to search for food and goods found themselves surrounded by innocent dull villagers, men and old women together, fearful and timid, and then suddenly these same people brought out guns and knives and fell upon them and there was not one left even to tell what village it was, and all the enemy in the city knew was that too many times those who went out did not come back. Yet the villagers were wise enough not to fall upon any who came too strong for them. No, wherever they were, they waited for a sign from one they chose to be their leader and if the sign was made they moved in swiftness and in silence.

In the secret room under Ling Tan’s court there were strange weapons now, some guns new and bright and with foreign letters on them of the countries where they were made, and also some weapons so ancient that it was a marvel to think where they had first been made and where used. These came always from the men in the hills, many of whom in other times had been bandits and so had kept weapons they had from generation to generation of bandits under the many different warlords who had led them. Of all these weapons Ling Tan chose for himself a very strange old gun that had a wooden handle like a club at one end and at the other end it was set into iron, and the iron shaped into four tubes like the four fingers of a man’s hand, and at the base of each tube was a hole for the fire to be set to the powder. So simple was this weapon that Ling Tan could use for a missile any piece of iron he found, the heads of nails or the fragments of hinges and such things, and with four small charges of powder and a little cotton, he could fire four times at once. The wound thus made was very grievous.

Now in his village Ling Tan was the man chosen to give the sign of death to the enemy and this he did whenever the enemy came, and he did not mistake the power of the villagers. Twice in the winter and once in the spring he gave the sign and each time they were able to kill all the enemy so that not once did any escape to give a bad report of the village and so they were safe.

The anger of enemy rulers rose very high when month after month their loss grew more severe, especially in the hill villages that were far from the city. How could they rule the countryside if they did not dare to go out to it, and yet how could they send an army everywhere to gather in the food and goods they took? At last in the middle of the summer the enemy in great rage began to burn all those villages where they found men of the hills. Ling Tan’s village was not burned, for though at the very hour that the enemy searched it there were in the secret room some men of the hills, they did not find them, and so though they threatened they did not destroy.

But there were villages far in the hills where innocent people were burned in their houses by night and this for no cause except that the villages were in the hills and the enemy reasoned that there must be hillmen in them. And yet as mid-summer came on, Ling Tan’s sons told him, from somewhere there came out piteous creatures even from the burned villages, a few men and women, to till the blackened earth that was still theirs.

Under such cruelty the temper of the people could not but change. In the old days when men had been free, the very faces of men and women had been open and free and laughter was ready and quick and voices were merry and there was loud cheerful talking and cursing in every house, and none had need to hide anything from anyone. But now the villages were silent, and the faces of the people in the whole countryside grew grim and hard, because of the hardships of their life under this enemy and the bitterness of their hatred which they could not vent except by secret killing. This secret anger and this constant search for ways to kill could not but change men’s very hearts, and Ling Tan felt this change even in himself.

This enemy having always burned wood and wood only to cook their food, they knew no other fuel and so they cut down trees and they took out beams from people’s houses and lifted gates from their hinges, and whenever there was a need for wood they went out and took it where they saw it.

And they felled with all other trees in that spring the great old willow tree near Ling Tan’s house under which Lao Er and Jade had used to meet in the first year of their marriage. When Lao Er came and saw the huge beheaded stump he felt sorrow and he went back and said to Jade:

“They have cut down our tree, my heart.”

And she said sadly, “Were there once such peaceful days that we could meet beneath a tree?”

Now there chanced to come to Ling Tan’s village one day in the first month of the summer, a band of the enemy looking for wood. They were a band of some eight or nine men, but Ling Tan’s sharp eye, veiled with pretended dullness, saw that there were only five with guns and the others had no weapons. The villagers came to their doors as they always did, and their old women or their old men stood ready inside to hand them their weapons if Ling Tan gave the sign. This day, after considering the enemy, Ling Tan did give the sign, and in one body the villagers sprang out and fell upon the enemy and killed them all except one who was wounded by Ling Tan’s four-muzzled gun. He was able to crawl away into the bamboos at the south of Ling Tan’s own house. Here Ling Tan followed him, and the man rose on his hands and knees like a dog, and he turned a beseeching face to Ling Tan and in language that Ling Tan could understand he begged for his life. He was a man near to Ling Tan’s age and he said, gasping, “Let me live, I beg you, let me live! I have a wife and children. See, here they are!” He tried to find something in his bosom and could not.

But Ling Tan reached into the man’s own belt and took out a short knife he carried and without waiting a moment or indeed taking thought more than he could have for a snake or a fox he thrust it into the man’s belly. The man turned a dark sad look on him and died.

Then Ling Tan, who had killed an enemy three times before this, stood looking down on the man’s face and he thought:

“He has not an evil face, this devil.” He thought of what the man had told him, and the stain of his blood had not yet reached his bosom, and Ling Tan stooped and put his hand into the man’s pocket and took out a small silk case. He opened it and there were the pictures of a pretty woman and four children between eight and fourteen years of age. Ling Tan stared at them for a while and thought how they would never see again the man to whom they belonged.

At this moment Ling Tan knew how changed he too was, for he could think about this and could look at these faces and feel no sorrow. There was neither sorrow nor joy in him. What he had done he had done and he did not wish it undone, and if the chance came to him he would take it again tomorrow.

He had once been so soft at heart that he did not want to see fowls killed and Ling Sao had always to wring their necks behind the house where he could not see. “I do not like to kill,” he thought now, “and even today I would not kill for pleasure. But how is it I am able to kill at all?”

He went back to his house, pausing only to tell the villagers who were burying the dead that there was a dead body in the bamboos, for it was needful always to bury quickly lest these bodies be discovered. With the silk case in his hand he went into his house and put the case into his room. Yes, he was changed. Tonight he would eat as well as ever, and it would be nothing to him that because of him a man for whom a woman and children waited somewhere was now buried in the earth. There had been others, and the people in the village and he among them had often made jokes about these dead men and how they enriched the soil or poisoned it, and had wondered whether or not the same crops would come up next year. They were all changed. Before the enemy came it was never heard of that anyone was killed in this village, except perhaps a girl child too many and then only when it was new born and had not drawn the breath of life. Now they killed the enemy like lice in winter coats and thought no more of it.