Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (11 page)

So they endured instant by instant and the evil passed over their heads at last and went on and after what seemed like half the day there was silence again until they heard a new noise and now it was fire.

“Come,” Ling Tan cried to his son, “let us get to our home and out of this place.”

So he crawled out, and with his son’s hand in his they went out. And yet, when Ling Tan thought of going, how could he leave a fire blazing and remember the screaming of people caught in the ruins, and the weeping of those who saw their homes burned and those they loved dead?

“No, we must see what can be done,” he told his son. And so against all he knew of old wisdom which bade him leave distress to take care of itself lest he be held responsible for any life saved or lost, he led the way to the fire. Yet what could any mortal do against such ruin? A few men had buckets and poured out water, but the flames laughed and leaped at them, and so at last in their despair the people only stood and gazed into the flames and the fire went on until it reached a wide new road, and there grumbling and hissing, it died at last to smoke and then to ashes. Those new roads had caused the people grief enough when they were made, for the new rulers after the revolution had planned them so that they were straight and wide, and if there were homes in the way, then homes must be razed, and if there were shops then shops must go down and even temples. That was ruin, too, and the people complained bitterly, and they were helpless then as now, having no guns in their hands. Yet today they were glad, for the wide road stopped the fire, and they knew this ruin was worse than the other for it was done by the enemy.

Ling Tan went quietly away at last and his son with him. Never had they been more glad for fields and earth than now. Ling Tan said not a word, and so his son did not speak, but the younger behind the elder they walked the long way home. It was evening when they reached the village and as they went down its single street men called to Ling Tan to know what he had seen. Then he stopped and told them and they gathered there in the narrow cobbled road and listened to him. Not a word was said while he spoke, nor for a while after he had finished. Then an old man spoke, and he was the oldest man in the village, ninety when the new year came around again, and he said:

“The old ways were best, the old days, when we stayed in our own country and the foreigners stayed in theirs. There are those who say the foreigners are good, but I say this evil that has now come upon us comes from them and it is greater than all their good. I wish that we had never seen a foreign thing and that they had stayed where the gods put them, across the seas from us. The seas are not without their meaning, and the foreigners have broken the will of the gods when they crossed them.”

They heard him out because he was so old and then in sadness each man went into his own house. In Ling Tan’s house that night it was as though one of their own had died, there was such mourning and sighing. At last Ling Tan saw that he must take some sort of authority over these women and children, and over the men younger than he and so he told them to be silent, and to listen to what he was about to say.

They sat all of them together, and for once the men and women were not separate, because they all craved to be together. They were in the court where the table was. There had been food but little eaten, for who could eat? Around them sky and field were calm with summer and the night was hot and still. But none thought of anything except the evil that had fallen on them all and through no fault of their own.

Ling Tan looked around on these who were his, and his heart was soft in him as he saw their eyes all turned to him. “What can I do to save them?” he thought. From other troubles he could have saved them, from famine and flood, from sickness even perhaps, and from poverty and from the evils of usury and of cruel magistrates and all those evils that are common to man. But what could he do now?

“I cannot save you,” he said aloud, “for I cannot save myself in this new trouble that has come upon us. Today I saw with my own eyes what you, Wu Lien, told us about before. Now I know that what has been and today was, will be again tomorrow and we have nothing but our bare flesh against these foreign weapons. The gods made us human beings of soft and easily wounded flesh, for they dreamed us good and not evil. Had they been able to see what men would do to each other, they would have given us shells such as turtles have, into which we could have drawn our heads and our soft parts. But we were not made so, and the gods made us and we cannot change ourselves. We can only bear what is come and live on if we can, and die if we must.”

So he spoke, and he looked at each face that looked back at him. Then he began again, “You, my two elder sons, are men, and you, Wu Lien, are older than they. If you have anything to say, then say it.”

His two sons looked at Wu Lien to speak first, and so Wu Lien coughed and said:

“Certainly I have no way to save myself, and I can only ask your forgiveness that I have had to come here to your house and to bring my household with me. I am a man who only knows how to do business with others, but in this hour who is there with whom I can trade? In times of war such men as we must live as they can and where they can and hope for peace.”

Then Lao Ta said, “There are two things which can be done when fire comes down out of heaven, one is to escape it by running away from it, and the other is to let it come down and bear it. In this, my father, I say I will do what you do.”

“But I,” said the second son, “I will escape it.”

This Ling Tan heard and he finished what he had to say:

“If I were a man with no land, I would go also. If I were a young man even, perhaps I would go. I will say nothing to any who go. But as for me, I stay here where I was born and where I have lived. Whatever comes, whether the whole city falls or not, whether the nation falls as some said today on the streets that it must fall, here I will stay. Let those who wish stay with me, and those who would go, let them go.”

Then his second son felt himself reproached and he cried out:

“You blame me, my father!”

“I do not blame you,” Ling Tan replied, making his voice gentle. “No, more, I think it well that you go. If all who stay here die, then there will be you to carry on our name somewhere else and I only bid you come back to see whether we are alive or dead after the war is ended, and if we are dead then to burn incense to our names and claim the land.”

“I promise that,” the second son said.

In all this no woman spoke, for it was not a time for a woman’s voice, but each saw what her place was and prepared to take it. When they parted again, then each wife told her own husband what she thought. Wu Lien’s wife praised him for saying nothing and saying it so well, for she was pleased enough to stay here in the house where she had been born and she felt safe so long as she was not in the city, and Jade praised her husband because he had spoken so firmly. Only Orchid sighed and said she wished that she and her children could go away to some place where the flying ships could not come.

But her husband said to her, “If all the people in the east go to the west, will it not be to give the land here to the enemy? No, my father is right—we must stay by the land.”

“Well, at least Jade will be gone,” Orchid said. She did not like Jade because she would not gossip much or talk with her but when she had a little time she went and sat in her room and read her book. And she was jealous now that Jade had conceived, because until now she had been the only son’s wife to have children in this house and her secret hope had been that Jade would be barren. “Women who like to read are always barren,” she had often said and always thought, and now Jade had proved her wrong.

As for Ling Sao, she praised her husband heartily for staying where he belonged, in his own house and on his own land.

“Who would not have come here if we had gone away?” she said, “and maybe an enemy no further than our own village. Yes, and that woman and her stinking husband, your third cousin who is always picking at characters like a cock at grains of corn, they would be glad to come into our big good house, pretending to take care of it for us, and I had rather have robbers any day whom I could curse and have the law on instead of my kin that I must always speak well to and never say what I truly think however hateful they are.”

As for the third son, what he thought no one asked and he said nothing. When he thought of what he had seen in the city his food came up again into his mouth, but not from fear so much as anger. He plotted in himself in wild young ways how he might take revenge upon the enemy, and he lay awake at night weeping and biting his nails because he felt himself helpless and too young. But no one knew it. The younger daughter thought nothing at all because she did not know what to think, since she understood so little of what had been said and no one remembered her much more than the dog, to whom they were kind enough too, but without heed.

The next day the flying ships came back again and the day after that, and again on the next day and the next, and every day they came back and the city was scourged by death and by fire. But Ling Tan did not go there again, nor did any of his house. They stayed where they were and tended their crops and put by their food for the winter as they did in every other year. The only change they would allow the enemy was that when the ships came over their heads now they left the field and hid themselves in the bamboos. For one day a flying ship had dipped low like a swallow over a pool, and had cut the head clean from a farmer who stood staring at it. Then it went on again as though what it had done was play.

W
HEN ALL COULD SEE
that now death was to come every day except when it rained, then those who lived inside the city walls did two things. They filled the temples and prayed the gods for rain until they dared pray no more lest there be a flood, and then they went out of the city to find rooms in small country inns or a corner in a farmer’s house or they slept on the gravelands or somewhere under a tree. Never had Ling Tan seen such piteous sights as he now saw, women and little children and old people with all they could save tied up in bundles they carried and most of them on foot, for only a few of the rich could ride these days. He had seen people come down from the North in times of famine, but they were the poor and the farming people whom the land had failed for a little while, but it could not fail them every year and they always went back to it.

These now were rich and poor together and they did not know if ever they could go back. Sometimes he felt more sorry for the rich than the poor because the rich were so helpless and delicate and knew little of where to find food. All their lives food had been served to them by others and they did not need to ask where it was found or how it was made, and the poor did better than the rich in these days, used as they were to too little always. And best of all those bold poor did who risked their lives to stay in the city and to go into the emptied houses of the rich and take what they liked from them.

These people poured like a flooding river out from the city over the countryside. And the stream of people from the city was joined by a greater stream from the east. For as the enemy toward the east took the land foot by foot people fell back from before them and joined themselves to others like them and the great river of moving people began to flow inland toward the west, not knowing where they went and sure only of death if they stayed.

At first Ling Tan let his house be open to these people, and the women spent themselves in cooking for them and feeding them and crying out in pity for their sufferings. There were the wounded and the little children too who could go no further and must be left behind, and these had to be put with those willing to take them, and many died. But this was what saved Ling Tan, that none of these people thought his house was far enough from the enemy as they gained the land foot by foot. They were restless until they had pushed on beyond river and lake and mountain, into the inlands behind the high mountains where the enemy dared not go lest they be cut off.

Now here was the chance for Lao Er to go, too, and so he and Jade waited until there came by those with whom they wished to share travel, those who were not old or sick or burdened with too many little children. Day after day they waited to find whom they wanted and one day there came by a party of forty or more young men and women. The women had feet as free as men, which had never been bound, and Jade liked them as soon as she saw them. Their hair was cut short like hers and in their little bundles they all had books.

“We are students of a certain school,” they told her, “and our eyes are on the mountains a thousand miles from here where our teachers are gone already and there in caves we will go on with our learning and when this war is over we will come back ready to shape the peace well.”

Not one of these men and women talked of wasting himself in war, and this pleased Ling Tan very much. They stopped at his house not for a night, but only at a midday to ask for tea to drink with the bread they had with them, and so he heard them talk and he praised them:

“Those who have no learning have only their bodies and they are the ones who ought to fight if there must be fighting. But you who have wisdom stored in your skulls, you have a treasure which ought not to be spilled like blood, and it ought to be kept for the day when we must have wisdom to tell us how we ought to live. In times like these wisdom is useless because nothing can save us except the chance that we are saved. But when the folly of war is ended, then we must have wisdom.”

And in the shade of the willows outside his gate, for the court was too small for so large a crowd, Ling Tan put many questions to these young men and even to the women, for to his amazement one answered as well as the other, and after a while he forgot whether it was man or woman who answered him. And from them he found out for the first time what had happened at the coast and why the enemy had attacked them at all, and long was their talk together.