Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (17 page)

In his terror Ling Tan pulled it out of her mouth.

“The enemy is coming,” he gasped. “Bid all get up and put on their clothes and be ready for what is to come.”

He himself ran out of the house and in doubt and yet not knowing what else to do except what they had planned, he roused the men of the village and bade the ninety-year-old to put on his best garments and his third cousin to put on his scholar’s robes and he roused the inn-keeper of the tea house and told him to get his cauldrons boiling for tea and his cakes set out on the tables, and in a very few minutes they were all standing in the street, shivering with fear in the misty chill of that wintry morning. And for some reason which Ling Tan did not know himself the tears welled into his eyes at the sight of this handful of village men in their best clothes and the bent old man at their head and all with little enemy flags in their hands going out to meet the conquerors they had never seen. His heart misgave him and yet what could he do but go with them?

Down the road in the mists they could now see strange huge shapes.

“Let us go,” he said, and he went slowly at the old man’s side, and they went along the cobbled road of their village and beyond the last house to where the fields lay, and they held up their little flags.

But the strange huge shapes bore down upon them as though they were ants in the dust and to save themselves they had to step aside and let them pass. Now Ling Tan and his fellows saw these shapes were machines, and how could they speak welcome to machines? Ling Tan and his fellows could only stand aside, gaping and waiting, and the machines went through the village and on.

Then they asked each other, “Is this the enemy?” None had seen such machines before, grinding upon their own wheels as they went. But who could answer?

They waited a while longer in the cold cloud around them debating whether to return to their houses, when they heard the sound of tramping feet, and then they saw the dim shapes of walking men and these they knew were the real enemy. Now they gathered close together and in the road they stood waking and when the leaders of the enemy drew near, they bowed to the enemy, and the old man took off his cap and the cold wind blew on his bare skull, and he began to speak the few words of welcome he had by heart and he lifted up his old piping voice,

“Friends and conquerors,” he began, and then his heart misgave him and he stopped. The faces of those leaders were not good. They were fierce and savage faces, and upon them now were unnatural smiles.

When Ling Tan heard the old man fail he quickly took his place and stepped forward.

“Sirs,” he said, “we are only farmers and a small merchant or two in a village and my cousin the scholar, and we are men of peace and reason, and we welcome law and order. Sirs, we have no weapons, but we have prepared a few cakes and some tea—”

At this point one of the enemy shouted out:

“Where is your inn?”

Ling Tan scarcely knew what this enemy said, so broken and guttural were the words.

“In the middle of our village street,” he said, “and it is a poor village for we are poor men.”

“Lead us there,” the enemy said.

Ling Tan’s heart misgave him more and he did not like the looks of the enemy as they came out of the mists and now close to him but what could he and the other villagers do except go on in front? Beside him the ninety-year-old hobbled as fast as he could, but it was not fast enough, for one of the enemy behind him prodded him in the back with a knife at the end of his gun and the old man cried out and then he began to sob with pain and surprise because no one in the village was ever hard with such an old man, and he turned to Ling Tan.

“I am hurt!” he cried, piteously.

Ling Tan turned to make protest to that enemy who had stuck the old man, but what he saw on the faces of those men behind him dried the spittle in his mouth and he went on, only putting his arm around the weeping old man until he came to his own door and then he thrust him in and told his son to go with him to care for him. So without these two they went on to the tea shop and there the keeper was ready with hot tea and cakes and his two sons had stayed to help him and the smiles were as thick as lard on their faces.

But the enemy swelled into the tea shop like an evil horde, and they sat down at the tables. By now Ling Tan and all the villagers knew that the outlook was not good with these men their conquerors and so he and his fellows stayed near the back door to the tea shop and waited while the keeper and his two sons poured tea. As soon as the tea was in the bowls a low roar went over the enemy and Ling Tan and his fellows could understand nothing of it, until that one spoke who could speak and that one said,

“Wine—we want wine, not tea!”

Ling Tan and his fellows looked at each other. Where could they find wine to feed so large a company of greedy men? Wine the villagers drank sometimes at the feast of the new year, or once or twice more when they went into the city after they had sold a good harvest, but there was no wine here.

“Alas, we have no wine,” Ling Tan faltered, and he moved nearer to that back door.

This the enemy told the others, and the men looked darker than ever and muttered together and then that one spoke again, to Ling Tan:

“What women have you in this village?”

Now Ling Tan could not believe what he heard and for a moment he looked silly, thinking the man must have used one word for another.

“Women?” he repeated.

The man did not speak but he made an evil gesture toward himself and Ling Tan knew then that he did mean women, and now he looked at his fellows and he gasped out a lie to save them all.

“We will go and find women,” he said, and then he and all his fellows ran out of that back gate and he stopped only long enough to tell the women in the kitchen of the inn,

“Run—run—hide yourselves—they look for women!” and then he ran to his own house and every man with him ran to his own house to save his own.

Inside his own gate Ling Tan drew the bar across and shouted to Ling Sao to get the household together, and he took down the old broadsword as he spoke and Ling Sao for once said nothing. She ran and called to her sons and daughters and their children, while Ling Tan stood and waited by the gate.

In a while he heard the sound of many feet come toward his gate, and he listened to this until it seemed he could not bear it, and then he opened the gate a little to see what went on outside. Well it would have been for him if he had borne his anxiety and kept the gate locked, for at that moment when he opened it there those faces were before his eyes, angry and full of fury, and under soldiers’ caps he looked into eyes black and fierce with lust. They were like men drunk, their faces so red, and when they saw Ling Tan they plunged at him with a great shout. He stepped back and locked his gate at the same instant and the points of their guns struck into the wood. He heard his faithful dog, who had been barking and snarling at the enemy, yelp and then howl and then grow still.

“Our good old dog is gone,” he groaned, but he could not help a beast now.

Well he knew there behind his gate that even its heavy wood could not hold and that he must prepare for the instant when they broke through, but he had this instant between. Now he thanked his fortune that he had seen war before this and that he knew how men in battle looked. He knew too how a man embattled is no longer himself but a creature with his mind gone and only the lowest part of his body left, and so his first thought was for the women in the house.

He ran back therefore into the house while the gate held and there he found all his household gathered in the main room, the women holding their children and the men’s faces green.

“We are lost,” his eldest son cried, but Ling Tan raised his hand for silence. Long ago he had made his plan for this hour.

“Every one of you is to go to that little back gate that has been locked all these years, and the vines hang over it so that it is not easily seen. Go out of that gate and scatter over the land through the bamboos and behind any hillock you can find. Let each man know where his own wife and children are, but pay no heed to others, and my third son is to look after his younger sister and his mother.”

“I will stay by you,” Ling Sao said.

“You cannot,” he said, “I must climb the rafters and hide in the thatch.”

“So will I,” she said.

There was no time to deny her, and so he ran before them to the back wall and there he found the gate and he pulled aside the vines and wrenched off the rusty latch. It was such a narrow gate that he and Wu Lien saw at once Wu Lien’s mother could never be pushed through it, and so he bade her stay until the last so that the others could be saved. Then he tried to push her through and Wu Lien pulled but it was true she was too fat and there was no way to do it without cutting her and that they could not, so Ling Tan pulled her back again and he told Wu Lien to leave and he would do his best for this old soul if Wu Lien would help the others. So Ling Tan saw them gone and over the sobbing old woman he let the vines hang, and he hoped for her safety but he could stay no longer to see to it, for she was not his own mother. The strong gate was giving now, and he could tell it by the yelling triumph of the voices.

Back in the main room he climbed upon the table and swung up to the big beam above it and behind him Ling Sao came like an old cat, and he stooped and gave her his hand to pull her when she stuck and thus they reached the roof. Into that thick thatch which his forefathers had put over this house and which once in ten years or so each in his time mended and added to, he burrowed a hole above a side beam and he and Ling Sao clung there, suffocated with dust and straw, but still able to live.

Scarcely had they made themselves secure when the gate groaned and gave and he heard the noise of angry men surge into his court and then into the room above which he hid, but he could see nothing nor did he dare to move. Ling Sao clung to him and he to her, drawing their breaths only enough to live, and he prayed his forefathers to help him so that they would not cough or sneeze in the heavy dust. Lucky it was that the straw after all these years made a heavy mat woven together with cobwebs and with damp so that it held around them and the beam was beneath and yet they must not move lest dust or straw float down and tell where they were.

But it was only a moment that the men were in the room below, for when they saw it empty they howled and ran from one room to another of the eight rooms and the kitchen and Ling Tan and his wife heard their good dishes thrown down and broken and they heard their furniture broken and smashed, and they only trembled lest the house be set on fire and they burned with it.

They waited for this to happen next and Ling Tan planned how he would jump and pull his wife after him. But instead of the roar of flames they heard something else. It was a scream, which at first they thought was one of the two pigs, for it sounded like a pig stuck for butchering. Then they heard a word or two and a gurgle and a long moan, and they knew what it was. The enemy had found Wu Lien’s old mother under the vines. Ling Tan moved to go down to her when he knew what it was, but his wife had her arms about him like a strong iron band.

“No,” she said in the smallest whisper. “No! She is dead. You must remember us all. She was old. There are the young to think of.”

And she held him and he knew she was right and he stayed.

So at last the wild enemy went away, but long after there was silence Ling Tan and his wife did not dare to move or to speak. They waited until their limbs were aching more than they could bear and until their lungs were choked and they must cough and spit out the dust, and their bodies were streaming with sweat, though it was a winter’s day.

Then at last he whispered in her ear,

“I will go down because some of the children may come back and think us dead.”

For herself she would not have allowed him to move but when he spoke of the children she let him, and she followed him, and down they crept again into what had been their good and ordered home.

It was ordered no more. They stood at last on the tiled floor of the main room and looked about them. There was nothing left whole, scarcely a chair and not the table even which now fell beneath their weight, nor the bamboo couch that the third son slept on, and they went from room to room, their two hands clasped together, and without one word of speech between them they saw the ruin of the house. When they had seen all, Ling Tan said:

“They have taken nothing but the rice. You see they wanted nothing we had and so in wantonness they broke to pieces what they did not want.”

This the enemy had done, and they had torn garments and slashed the quilts on the beds and why they had not set fire to everything Ling Tan could not think except that in their wantonness they wished him to see ruins instead of only ashes.

“Oh, my good red pigskin boxes that I brought here as a bride!” Ling Sao moaned when she went into their sleeping room and saw them slashed and burst open. And among all the disorders of their ruined garments and burst boxes they saw a torn snarl of human hair and Ling Tan stooped.

“What is this?” he asked.

Then Ling Sao picked it up to see. “It is Jade’s hair she cut off from her head that day,” she said.

“Lucky it is not on her head now,” Ling Tan groaned.

And yet they knew that worse than this was waiting them at the small back gate and so slowly they went toward it, dreading what their eyes must see,

“But we must be the first to see it,” Ling Tan whispered. “We must not let any of the children come in first.”

They crept through the ruined kitchen and out of the door and so to the small back court. There at their feet the old woman lay dead. It would have been enough had she been dead. But she was worse than dead. She was naked, and so wounded that they could see in a moment that in their fury those wild men had used her as they might have used a woman young and beautiful.

Now Ling Tan groaned for if this could happen to an aged soul, heavy with her years and half dazed in her wits, what of the young women in his house and what even of his own wife? He turned to Ling Sao, the blood all gone out of his face.