The Real Story of Ah-Q (42 page)

All was confusion. Great cascades of water, crested with occasional sharp swells, smothered the earth – the ocean, she presumed. She waited, perplexed.

Eventually, all calmed, though the great waves still soared up as high as the mountains had previously risen; where once there might have been dry land, bone-like ridges of stone jutted out. Glancing out over the sea, she spotted a range of peaks rushing towards her, whirling about on the waves. Seizing hold of it before it could stub her toes, she discovered an accumulation of strange creatures cowering face down in the intervening valleys.

She drew the mountains in towards her, for closer examination. The ground around these beings was covered in expectorations of various substances – gold and jade dust, perhaps, intermingled with cypress leaves and fish, chewed to a pulp. One by one, they slowly raised their heads to meet Nüwa’s wide-eyed stare. It eventually dawned on her that these were her very own creatures – and yet they had changed. Some had covered their bodies in extraordinary ways, while others trailed long white hairs from their chins, matted by brine into tendrils resembling elongated poplar leaves.

She exclaimed, her skin prickling with startled fear – as if she had just touched a hairy caterpillar.

‘Save us, Goddess,’ one of the hairier specimens begged brokenly as he vomited, looking up at her. ‘Save us… your humble subjects… are questing for immortality. But this catastrophe… the rending of heaven and earth… By your mercy… you have come… please save our puny lives… grant us the elixir… the elixir of life…’ Then he went in for a curious jerking of his head to and from the ground.

‘What?’ she asked, in bafflement.

Then a great many of their number followed suit, opening their mouths now to vomit, now to chant ‘Goddess, Goddess’, all doing that strange thing with their heads. The noise quickly became vexing, and she began rather to regret getting involved, as they seemed a bothersome bunch. Looking helplessly around her, she was overjoyed to find a team of fabulous giant turtles frolicking in the ocean near by. ‘Take them somewhere safe!’ she ordered, resting the mountains on their carapaces. Nodding at her, they gathered into a shoal and swam off into the distance. But she had drawn the peaks towards her too violently, dislodging one of the white-haired creatures off his valley. Unable to climb back on or swim, he lay face down on the seashore, slapping at his face. Though there was something rather pitiful about him, Nüwa was too preoccupied to intervene further.

Heaving a sigh of partial relief, she looked back around her. The waters had receded some distance, exposing expanses of earth and rock. Yet more creatures seemed to be inlaid into cracks in the stone – some stiffly motionless, others moving about. She peered at one staring stupidly at her. Its body was entirely encased within iron plates, its face a mask of fear and dejection.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘Alas, heaven has cursed us,’ it told her despairingly. ‘When the treacherous Zhuan Xu rose up against our king, he fought back, as heaven willed. We did battle outside the city, yet heaven forsook our virtuous cause, and our forces were repelled.’

‘What?’ This, indeed, was a novelty.

‘Our forces were repelled and our king dashed his brains out against the Broken Mountain, smashing the Pillar of Heaven between earth and sky.
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Oh, woe, woe – ’

‘That’s quite enough of your nonsense.’ She turned towards another of the creatures – again encased in iron plate, but its face beaming with triumph. ‘How about you tell me what’s been going on here?’ She now realized how various the faces of her creatures were; perhaps she would get more sense out of this one.

‘The perfidious swine Kang Hui coveted the throne of heaven. Our king fought back, as heaven willed it. We did battle outside the city, and heaven did not forsake our virtuous cause. Our forces marched to victory, while Kang Hui met his end on the Broken Mountain…’

‘What?’ she spluttered, as confused as before.

‘The perfidious…’

‘Enough! You’re both as bad as each other.’ Flushing with anger, she turned on her heel and went elsewhere in search of an answer. Eventually, she spied a creature unencumbered by iron plate: naked except for a ragged cloth around his waist and covered in bleeding wounds. Though he was busy untying another tattered piece of cloth from another, apparently rigid specimen’s waist and wrapping it around himself, his face was devoid of expression.

Supposing that he was of a different species to those encased in iron plate, she hoped finally to extract a little intelligible information out of him.

‘What’s been going on?’ she asked.

‘What’s been going on,’ he echoed, barely looking up.

‘All this trouble?’

‘All this trouble?’

‘Has there been a war?’ she tried supplying an answer.

‘War?’ he asked back.

Turning her face to the sky, Nüwa took a deep mouthful of cold air. An enormous, deep gash ran across the heaven. She stood up and tapped it, her fingernail rapping dully against it, as against a cracked bowl. Frowning, she looked pensively about her for a while. Then, wringing the water from her hair, she threw it back over her shoulders and summoned up her energy to gather reeds. The first thing to be done, she had resolved, was to mend the sky.

Day and night she piled up reeds, growing thin with the work – for the earth was no longer as it had once been. Whenever she looked up, the cracked heavens lay above her. Looking down, she found only the rotting ruins of the earth, empty of all that had once gladdened her heart.

Once the tower of reeds stretched up to the breach in the heavens, she began to look for blue stones. First, she searched for stones of a pure azure that would match the sky; but there weren’t enough of them on earth. Disinclined to use up the mountains, she sometimes scavenged for fragments in more populated parts – where she met mockery or insult, or where the stones were snatched back, her hand bitten. Soon she resorted to mixing in white stones, and when she ran out of those, she tried orange and grey, until the crack was filled. Now, when all she had to do was light a fire to smelt them together, her eyes clouded over with fatigue, her ears buzzed; she could go on no longer.

‘I’ve never been so bored in my life,’ she panted, sitting on a mountain peak and resting her head in her hands.

The ancient forest on Kunlun Mountain still burned red on the western horizon. Glancing across at it, she decided to pluck a tree to light the pile of reeds. But as she reached out, something pricked her toe.

Looking down, she discovered another of those creatures of hers, even more bizarre-looking than the others. It was copiously draped in cloth, with perhaps an extra dozen strips of material hanging from its waist, while its head was covered in some other fabric. A small, black rectangular board sat on the crown of its head, while it prodded her foot with the flat object in its hand.

There it stood between her legs, looking up at her. The instant it saw her look down at him, it hurriedly passed the flat object up to her. It was, she discovered as she took it from him, a tablet of smooth, green bamboo, inscribed with two lines of tiny black specks – finer even than the patterns on oak leaves, she thought admiringly.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, prickling with curiosity.

‘Your wanton nakedness demonstrates a failure of morality, contempt for the rites, and breach of the rules,’ the creature recited fluently, pointing at the tablet. ‘Such conduct is for birds and beasts only. The laws of the land expressly prohibit it!’

Gazing down at the board on top of his head, Nüwa smiled at her own foolishness. Dialogue with these creatures, experience had taught her, was quite impossible. Giving up on the conversation, she placed the tablet on top of the headboard, then set about uprooting a vast burning trunk from the forest fire to introduce to her pile of reeds.

She heard a strange new noise – a sobbing sound. She glanced down: the tiny eyes beneath the rectangular board held two tears smaller than mustard seeds. Because the creature’s cries bore so little resemblance to the wails she had heard earlier, she had not realized that it, too, was weeping.

She lit the fire in several places.

It did not catch instantly, for there was still some dampness to the reeds, but after much crackling, countless tongues of flame began curling out, stretching up before falling back, eventually magnifying into double-headed flowers, then into a great pillar of fire, overshadowing the glow from Kunlun Mountain. A sudden strong gust of wind bellowed the column of flame into life, spinning it round. The variously coloured stones reddened, then bolted liquidly, eternally through the crack like malt sugar.

The wind and fire buffeted her hair in all directions, the sweat cascading off her. Her body stood in silhouette against the blaze, colouring the universe – for the last time – a fleshy pink.

The fire slowly travelled up the reeds, leaving behind it only a pile of ashes. When the heaven was once more its uniform, greenish blue, she reached out to feel it.

‘I’ll try again,’ she thought to herself, dissatisfied with its uneven finish, ‘when I’m feeling stronger.’

She bent down to gather up the reed ashes, dousing large handfuls of them in the floodwaters. Billows of steam hissed up from the residual heat, spattering her body with discoloured water. Soon, the wind joined in, picking up dust and painting her in grey.

She breathed her last.

The sun blazed light over a blood-red horizon, like a golden ball petrified in ancient lava. A frigidly off-white moon, the colour of pig-iron, hung opposite. As to which was rising, and which was setting – who could tell. The exhausted shell of her body lay lifelessly between them.

All around, a silence deeper than death reigned.

One bitterly cold day, the ground hummed with commotion: the long-delayed arrival of the imperial guards, who had been waiting for the fire and dust to subside. A yellow axe proceeded to the left of their phalanx, black to the right. A vast, ancient banner unfurled behind them as they dodged and feinted their way towards Nüwa’s corpse. Their caution was unnecessary: there was no trace of life. They cleverly chose to pitch camp on her stomach, as this was the most fertile place on her body. But then came a sudden change of heart: claiming they were Nüwa’s only true descendants, they now revised the text on their banner – the ancient characters drooping like tadpole tails – to ‘The Entrails of Nüwa’.
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The aged Daoist priest stranded on the seashore enlightened generations of disciples. Only on his deathbed, however, did he reveal that the magic mountains had been carried out to sea on the backs of giant turtles. And his disciples told their disciples, and so on it went, until an ambitious alchemist begged to inform the First Emperor of China, Qinshi Huangdi, who sent him off in search.

The alchemist found nothing; the emperor died. Emperor Wu of the Han dispatched his own search party – but still nothing was found.

It was probably just happy coincidence that the turtles nodded when they did – probably they understood none of Nüwa’s instruction. After swimming in aimless formation for a while, the shoal doubtless dispersed to sleep, leaving the magic mountains to sink. No one has discovered a trace of them since – only the occasional island of savages.

November 1922

It is an acknowledged truth that intelligent beasts can read the human mind. The moment that its master’s gate swung into view, the horse slowed its canter and, just like its rider, hung its head, letting it jolt at each step like a pestle pounding rice in a mortar.

The mansion was shrouded in evening mist, the thick black cooking smoke of dinnertime curling up from neighbours’ chimneys. Straight-backed, arms hanging down at their sides, eyes cast to the ground, Yi’s
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retainers stood outside ready to greet him, alerted by the approach of hooves. Yi listlessly dismounted next to a heap of rubbish, his retainers taking from him reins and whip. Before he crossed the threshold, he hesitated, glancing down at the full quiver of new arrows at his waist, and the three crows and tiny, shattered sparrow in his string bag. Steadying his nerve, he strode in, his arrows rattling in their quiver.

The moment he entered the inner courtyard, he saw Chang’e looking out of the round window. Her quick eyes, he knew, would have spied his haul of crows. Again, his nerves gave him pause – but he had to go on. The housemaids emerged to relieve him of his bow and arrows, and untie his net bag – all smirking at him, he suspected.

‘My lady,’ he called out, entering her room after wiping his hands and face.

Chang’e was still staring out of the round window into the dusk sky. Slowly turning around, she cursorily acknowledged his presence with the briefest of glances. She said nothing.

Yi was no stranger to such a reception – things had been like this between them for at least a year now. He approached, as he always did, and sat down on the ancient, threadbare leopard skin over the wooden divan opposite her.

‘No luck today, either,’ he prevaricated, scratching his head. ‘Except for the odd crow.’

‘Hmph!’ Raising her exquisitely arched eyebrows, Chang’e stood up and flounced out of the room. ‘Crow, crow and more crow! With fried-bean noodles! Who else d’you know has to eat crow and fried-bean noodles every day, from one end of the year to the other? What did I do to deserve this?’