Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (16 page)

Each bowed his head after he had spoken and so within those walls the long silent day began. The women went to their work and Wu Lien withdrew to his room and each son went to his task of winter work of weaving sandals and twisting ropes, but Ling Tan sat smoking his pipe. His mind did not move, and after a while he perceived that the reason was that he was listening, listening, and yet he could hear nothing. He waited a long time and at last it seemed to him that he must know what was happening and what the full meaning of this great silence was, and so at mid-morning he opened his gate a little. The frost was gone from his fields and the sun was warm. The dog, which he had thrust out of the gate so that it would warn him if any stranger came near, leaped fawning at his feet and whined for food. Not another living creature was to be seen. Each man had shut himself behind his own doors as Ling Tan had and from the city none came or went. As far as eye could reach the roads stretched empty.

He came out of his gate then, and stood a while, his pipe in his hand. He looked toward the city but he could see no sign of any great fire. The high city wall circled those who lived inside, and there was no sign to read of what they were suffering. But there was no sign of suffering either. And as he stood there others who had opened their gates a little saw him and slowly one or two and then others came out of their houses and five or six until cautiously there were twelve or thirteen men in the street looking at one another. They moved toward Ling Tan.

“Have any of you heard anything?” he asked.

“Nothing,” they said, and others shook their heads.

“Ought we not to discover something?” Ling Tan’s third cousin’s son asked.

“How can we?” Ling Tan asked. “Are you brave enough to go to the city and see what there is? You are the only one here without a wife and children and children’s children he must think of.”

“I will go,” the young man said. “I am not afraid,” and he shook back a lock of long black hair that hung over his eyes.

“Ask your father first,” Ling Tan said. “I will not have your going put on me if any harm comes to you.”

“My father lets me suit myself,” the young man said wilfully, and to prove it he went off as he was that very moment, and the rest of them stood and looked after him as his one person moved along the empty road to the city.

“I am glad he is not my son,” one said and all agreed with him.

Then because there was nothing else to say, they parted and each man went back to his own house and locked his gate again, and so did Ling Tan and thus noon came and afternoon. In all those hours the silence held except for a few times when a distant gun roared out.

By mid-afternoon Ling Sao was weary and the children who had been so quiet and good all day could be good no longer and they grew fretful and whined to go out of the courtyard to play, and Wu Lien who had heard from Ling Sao of the cousin’s going to the city began to want to go out of the gate and Ling Tan was afraid for him to go, because he looked a rich man and an enemy seeing him might think there were food and goods in the house that such a man came from.

“If there are many days like this, our walls will burst apart from within,” Ling Sao said, and so Ling Tan opened his gate a little and by now there had been other houses like his, and out in the street a few boys were playing and some of the gates were ajar, and a shop or two open. When he saw how peaceful all was, he called into his house:

“Let any who will come out on the threshing floor but no further than I can bid them back quickly if there is need to lock the gate.”

They came gladly and looked around and everyone was astonished to see that all was the same.

“I swear I thought to see the very color of the ground changed,” Orchid said laughing.

Ling Tan looked carefully everywhere himself and saw no one strange and nothing new and since after a while the afternoon was quiet he thought he would go to his cousin’s house and see if there had been anything heard of his cousin’s son. He walked down the street, and from the few open gates men called to him, and one or two laughed and said:

“If this is the way the enemy attacks us we can bear it!” and one said, “they leave us to ourselves, this enemy!”

Ling Tan agreed, meaning nothing, and went on to his cousin’s house. There he found his cousin’s wife all in a stir because her son was not yet home, and she had supper hot and she hated to waste the fuel to keep it so, and yet if he did not come there was nothing to do but wait. She seemed not afraid of any ill so much as of the waste of her fuel, and so Ling Tan told her to calm herself, because perhaps her son chose to come back by night. His cousin himself had eaten and sat picking his teeth and reading an old newspaper he had by him.

“It says here the enemy have sent down writings from their flying ships telling us all not to be afraid, because they bring only peace and order,” his third cousin said.

“If it is true then they are good,” Ling Tan replied, “and certainly today has been peaceful enough.”

Somehow the words gave him comfort, and as he let down his heart, suddenly he was tired and he yawned and remembered how badly he had slept. Now the day he had feared was over and they were all alive and he had seen not the shadow of an enemy and so he felt his heart loosen in his bosom.

“I think I can sleep,” he told his cousin, “I will go home, but if your son comes let me know.”

“I will,” his cousin promised and rose a moment for courtesy while Ling Tan went out, but his eyes were still on what he read for he was a man who valued what was printed on a paper more than anything a living mouth could say.

It was twilight when Ling Tan next looked out of his gate. He had eaten, and all his house had eaten and the children were in their beds, and he himself was about to go but he said to Ling Sao he would look out once more before he slept. When he opened the gate he thought he heard a moan. He listened and then he knew it was a moan, and his heart trembled with fear. He was about to shut the gate and lock it fast, not knowing whether what he heard was spirit or human, when a voice cried out faintly:

“Cousin!”

He threw the gate open at that and shouted for Ling Sao to bring the lamp and she came as soon as he called and they went out and there on the ground lay his third cousin’s son, that young man who had left so wilfully this morning to go to the city.

Ling Tan would not have known him except that the young man had what none other in the village had, a red satin short coat without sleeves which he wore every day because he loved it and he had bought it in an old clothes’ shop in the city before the last new year. This red satin Ling Tan now saw, but its brightness was dulled.

“Oh, my mother, how he is bleeding!” Ling Sao cried, and she gave the lamp to Ling Tan and was about to turn the young man over but her husband stopped her.

“Do not touch him,” he told her, “else his parents will say we made him worse. Hold the lamp and I will run to call them.”

He gave her the lamp back again and ran down the shadowy street to his third cousin’s house, and pounded with both hands on their locked gate and the dog inside helped him by barking and soon he heard his cousin’s wife’s voice asking who was there.

“It is I, Ling Tan,” he called back, “and your son has come back wounded, how we do not know, but he fell at our gate because it was the first gate he reached and there he lies. We have not touched him.”

The woman gave a great scream and called her husband, and the man came staggering out of his sleep, wrapping his coat around him, and he opened the gate, for the woman had forgotten to open it in her distress, and they all ran down the street together, the dog behind them, to where Ling Sao stood holding the lamp. By now the noise had roused Ling Tan’s sons, and there were others, too, who heard it and these came out of their houses, so that in a few minutes there was a crowd about the young man, but none touched him until his parents came. His father was frightened when he looked at him, but his mother bent and turned him over and thought him dead and then she screamed.

There the young man’s impudent face lay, pale and quiet in the flickering lamplight.

“What has wounded you, my son?” his mother cried in his ear, but he did not hear. “Oh, his red satin coat is spoiled and he will mind that!” she moaned, and then she struck off with her hand the dog who had followed them and now smelled the flowing blood and pressed forward eager to taste it, and the father was angry with the dog and gave him a great kick.

“I, who feed you,” he cried to the beast, “and you would drink my own son’s blood!” And he cursed the beast.

But moaning and cursing did not bring the young man back and at last Ling Tan said:

“We ought to lift him to his bed and call a doctor to see how deep the wound is.”

He said this gently and in the kindness of his heart but the mother turned on him and cursed him bitterly.

“Yes, but it was you who sent him to the city this morning—I heard of it! He would not have gone alone, and he went out of the house without thinking of such a thing, but then you said—”

Ling Tan burst out to defend himself then, and he looked around at his neighbors and sons and called upon them to witness for him.

“Did I not tell my cousin’s son I would not say he was to go and did I ask him if he went of his own will?”

“You did,” they cried in his defense, and so the woman was silenced.

But Ling Tan forgave her, knowing it was fear made her angry, and he stooped and lifted the young man’s head and bade his cousin take his feet, and the mother held his middle and so they carried the young man home and laid him on his bed and covered him. Yet where could they get a doctor? There might only be doctors in the city, if they had not fled, and who dared to go there, seeing how this young man had come back? None dared and they all went home except Ling Tan and he stayed by the young man’s bed with his cousin and his wife.

Now Ling Tan believed this young man was not dead, but only wounded and faint from loss of blood, for if he felt the hands and feet cold, he felt the body warm where the heart was, and so he asked his cousin for a little hot wine and he poured it into the young man’s mouth and though he heard no swallow, yet after a while when he looked the wine was gone, and so he poured more in and then that was gone. All the time he was doing this his cousin’s wife was moaning and reproaching herself and all of them, and out of her came a bitterness that Ling Tan did not know was there.

“He has never been the same since you paid us to let your son have Jade,” she mourned. “Ever since then he has not cared whether he lived or died, and we ought not to have listened to you, and you ought not to have asked it of us and tempted us with your silver. We are poorer than you and it is hard for us to refuse silver.”

This made him angry, for in times past he had done much for this cousin of his who read books instead of earning his own food, and many a winter Ling Tan had sent one of his sons here with a bundle of straw for fuel or a measure full of rice or a cabbage or two, and now he set down the wine cup on the table and he said:

“Curse me if I ever give anything to anybody again, for it seems to me that the surest way to get hatred for myself is to feed the hungry and to lend to those poorer than I am! How it is you can be so surly with me because I give you something to help you, I will not ask or care.”

This quarreling made his cousin anxious, for he did not ask where his food came from or his fuel, so long as he was left to his book, and so now he coaxed his wife, “Why do you anger a good man like this?” And he turned her anger on him, and she screamed at him that he was less than a man and she wished that she were a widow, and then she would sit and fan his grave dry night and day so that she could the sooner marry another and better man.

All this noise woke the young man from his faint, and in the midst of the fury he opened his eyes and spoke.

“Father!” he said.

They all stopped at the sound of that small voice from the bed, and the moment they saw him alive all the anger went out of them.

“Oh, my son, tell us how you were wounded!” his mother cried and she ran to his side.

The young man tried to tell her then but they had to bend to listen and to piece together his broken words and what they heard and put together was this, that he had been caught with others and stood against a wall and shot and left for dead. But he was not dead and in the night by crawling and moving he had crept into a street and there a rich Buddhist at this last moment escaping the city in a cart had taken pity on him and put him in the cart and left him near the village. But when the young man had crawled the distance to Ling Tan’s house he lost his wits again and remembered nothing until now.

“Why should they kill you?” Ling Tan asked astonished.

“We ran,” the young man gasped. “So fearsome were their soldiers I ran with the others—all who run are killed—”

The elders looked at each other and they were able to make nothing of this. Why should innocent men be killed because they were afraid?

At this moment the first light of dawn came into the small room and the young man moaned that his breast hurt him, and that was where the wound was. Yet when they touched him he screamed with pain and lost his wits again, and so they could only cover him and let him lie.

Thus it was when full dawn came and then Ling Tan knew that he ought to go back to his own house, and he told his cousin he would go and return later and so he left them.

That was a strange gray dawn, and made stranger by what Ling Tan now saw as he came toward his own house. For in the distance when he looked toward the city it seemed as though the gray land itself were moving. He stood still and stared, and then he saw that it was many people moving on foot out of the city gates toward his village. One instant he looked and then he went into his house and shut the gate and locked it.

“Where are you?” he shouted to Ling Sao, and at the sound of his voice she ran out. She had been combing her hair, and the great twist of it was between her teeth to hold it while she fastened the red cord that held it at her neck and so she was speechless.