The Floating World and All Its Faces Part 2

Supplementary Account: Juekong

Speak of the Mu family in Kaifeng, Henan, and there was no one who did not know them. The Mu had risen on the silk trade, the greatest clan of the region; their kinsmen alone numbered some seventy households there, six hundred souls and more. In an age like this, the old phrase "wealth to rival a kingdom" had gone out of date—and in truth even so grand a flourish was too much for a family like the Mu—but "wealth to rival a sect" fit them well enough. Sects, that is, outside the Nine Great Houses.

To ease comings and goings among the clan, from the moment the realm's broad order was first settled the patriarch Mu Kun had enclosed a great tract of land, a full five li to a side, and ringed it with a city wall four zhang high. The wall was wide enough to walk along the top and set with watchtowers; a gate opened on the east and on the west, each broad enough to admit a coach-and-four. Within, the streets ran in orderly lines, lined with a hundred manors and grand houses for the clan to live in. It was an immense undertaking, employing some thousands of craftsmen over the years, and Mu Kun did not live to see it finished; he passed fifteen years on, still waiting.

The new patriarch was Mu Kun's eldest son, Mu Qing. Mu Qing carried on the work as his father had charged him. Seven years more, and Mu Qing had a son, named with the single character Jie and styled Guzhi—"steadfast"—for Mu Qing of course hoped the boy would labor diligently and keep the family's holdings whole. Three years after that, the Mu Family Manor was finished at last, and Mu Qing set down its name in his own hand.

That small city had taken a full twenty-five years to build.

By rights, being the Mu clan's dwelling, it should have borne the name "Fortress"—but for one thing "Mu Fortress" sounded ugly and ill-omened, and for another, a place on this scale could hardly be called a fortress and was better called a small city. Yet "Mu City" was too strange, and "Mu Lands" reeked too much of the martial world. The Mu were only merchants; such of the clan as trained in arms did so mostly for their own amusement. Mu Qing was a plain, down-to-earth man who wanted no clever, showy name, and so he simply wrote down a name: the Mu Family Manor.

On the day the manor was completed, Mu Qing laid a thousand tables and held a feast that ran open for seven days, food set out day and night without pause; local folk, merchants and travelers from north and south, rich or poor, old or young—any who would sit down were served good wine and good dishes. The completion of so singular a mansion made even the people of Kaifeng feel a share in the glory, and as Mu Qing was a devout believer in the Buddha with a wide name for charity in those parts, word ran from mouth to mouth, and for those few days Kaifeng was all peace and plenty, brimming with festive joy.

Yet amid the rejoicing, one old fortune-teller in the east of the city sat glum and out of sorts. He had read the manor's geomancy, and seeing it walled all around without a gap, sighed and said: "The Mu hemmed in on every side—isn't that just the character for 'trapped'?" He shook his head and shook it again, finished his share of the feast, wrapped up half a leftover chicken, made off with a bottle of poor wine, and went home to drown his cares.

Beyond the seventy-odd households and six hundred-some souls of the Mu, this little city also housed three hundred guards and bodyguards, eight hundred servants and attendants, a hundred fine horses in the stables, and several hundred jars of choice Shaoxing wine laid down in the cellars. Mu Qing was no lover of drink or luxury, taking only the odd small cup; these seemingly lavish stores were, for the Mu, no more than the ordinary necessities of daily life—to say nothing of the thousand measures of grain in the storehouses and the fowl and oxen and sheep that wanted for nothing in the pens.

When Mu Qing's father Mu Kun raised this little walled city, it was not simply to enclose a tract for his own pleasure, or to wall himself off from the world. He had seen with his own eyes too many feuds and killings in the martial world, too much strife and disorder, and in that age that had only just glimpsed peace, this was a precaution against the rains to come. And even though thirty years had passed since the Kunlun Council, armed clashes still broke out in the martial world from time to time.

Mu Qing understood the reason for it. Each year at the Buddha's birth he would take his kin to Shaolin to pay homage, donating a handsome sum of incense money, and on the way home he would stop by the Songshan Sect on the eastern side of Mount Shaoshi. However much he gave in homage to Shaolin in a given year, the incense money he added to the Zhongyue Temple of Songshan was always the same. The difference, if any, was that what he gave to Shaolin came from devotion, and what he gave to Songshan from courtesy.

A monk's house and a Daoist's, parted only by Mount Shaoshi. Shaolin to the west, Songshan to the east.

And Kaifeng, as it happened, lay east of Mount Shaoshi.

After the Kunlun Council, the Nine Great Houses had divided the realm into territories, and the Songshan of that day was no more than the largest sect within Shaolin's domain. Thirty years on, within Shaolin Temple one heard only the sound of sutras, and nothing of the affairs of the world.

Twenty-five years ago, the Songshan disciples in Kaifeng had grown steadily more numerous, and the Iron Sword Sect of Shangqiu paid Songshan a courtesy that, faintly, outstripped what it paid Shaolin.

Twenty-two years ago, the Taishan Sect and the Songshan Sect were joined by marriage, and from then on Song and Tai were one house.

Eighteen years ago, the horse-bandits within Shandong's borders were swept clean away. In the name of guarding hearth and homeland, the Songshan disciples sent men throughout Shandong to raise Daoist temples far and wide, taking in students and teaching the arts.

Nine years ago, a wanted criminal of Wudang fled to Shandong, where the Songshan disciples seized and killed him; the body was sent back to Wudang, and the proctor-monk Shaolin had stationed at the Lingyan Temple knew nothing of any of it.

By now every sect in all of Shandong, great or small, answered to Songshan's command alone.

The Kaifeng and Shangqiu region lay at the throat of the road from Shandong to Shaolin, and so it became an awkward ground. Being close to Shaolin, both places saw much coming and going of monks; and though temples stood thick there, Daoist halls were hardly few.

Only after the Mu Family Manor was finished did Mu Qing's heart settle a little.

From his earliest years Mu Jie grew far taller and bigger than other children his age. From the time he was old enough to know anything, he lived in the Mu Family Manor; step out the door and the faces he met were uncles and aunts or cousins of one kind or another. Maids and servants at home were his to command, his food and clothing and keep all of the finest; by the age of five he had a tutor teaching him his letters; and on the rare occasions he left the manor he went surrounded by bodyguards and retainers—for all the world the little crown prince of this five-li realm of dreams.

When Mu Jie was six, Songshan sent out invitations far and wide and convened a grand assembly of the martial world. The move went directly over Shaolin's head, and for some reason Shaolin did not seem to mind; it even sent an envoy to attend. At the assembly, envoys of all Nine Great Houses gathered—among them Yan Yingqi, full younger brother of the Huashan sect leader; and the Beggars' Sect sent Peng Zhenhao, then prefectural chief of its Fuzhou chapter, a man of the Five Tigers Gate-Breaking Saber Peng Family who also went by the byname Old Beggar Peng. "Old" though they called him, he was in truth no more than thirty-five that year. His post as a prefectural chapter chief was a lowly one, but he was a heroic figure whose name had risen swiftly in recent years. Everyone took him for one of the three future chief-chapter masters of the Beggars' Sect; in sending him, the Sect chose a man neither too exalted in standing nor too slight, conveying respect to Songshan besides. It was, as courtesies went, a rather deft stroke.

At the assembly, the Songshan Sect announced before all that it would rename itself the Songyang Sect—taking the sunlit south slope of Mount Song, the yang, for Songyang, and the shaded north for Shaolin—so as to do away with the partial notion that Shaolin alone owned the name of Mount Song. And it asked the Wudang envoy to carry word back to the chief of the Kunlun Council of that day—the Wudang Daoist Gusong—saying that as fellow streams from the same Daoist source, Songshan wished to join in alliance.

At this, however dull and dense Shaolin Temple might be, it could no longer hold its tongue. From of old, to speak of Mount Song was to speak of Shaolin Temple; for the Songshan Sect to rename itself Songyang was, on its face, to do away with a mistaken name, but in truth it split the mountain in two. The Songshan Sect was under Shaolin's authority—what was wrong in calling Mount Song "Shaolin"? And more, the Songshan Sect was not one of the Nine Great Houses; where did it find the standing to ally with Wudang at all?

So at the assembly the Shaolin envoy charged Songshan with overreaching its bounds, and the Songshan sect leader Cao Lingxue seized on the pretext to round on Shaolin, accusing it of ignorance in worldly matters and misrule, and drove the Shaolin monks out. The envoys of the various sects knew this was no ordinary affair and took their leave one after another to report back to their houses. Cao Lingxue kept the Huashan Sect's Yan Yingqi behind for a private talk, after which Yan Yingqi departed alone.

Then the Shaolin-Songshan war broke out, in the summer, the fifth month, of the thirty-third year of Kunlun.

It was the greatest sect war since the Kunlun Council, and the course it ran left onlookers clicking their tongues in wonder. The Zhongyue Temple and Shaolin were parted by no more than a single mountain; the Shaolin envoy had barely set foot back through the temple gate when the Songshan Sect poured out in full, a thousand and more disciples surrounding Shaolin Temple. The high monks then holding power at Shaolin were mostly of the Zhi generation; the abbot Zhiquan ordered the gates barred fast against the enemy.

This first step was already a misstep. The Songshan Sect's strength was no match for Shaolin's; caught off guard though Shaolin was, with a thousand-some hall monks within, a sally to break the siege need not have come off the worse. But Zhiquan was a monk of true attainment, unwilling to cross blades and shed life, and sought only to refuse battle through peace.

This delay gave Songshan its opening: they had long since sent word out, and every gang and sect within Shandong's borders answered the call and came streaming in. In under a month, those besieging Shaolin had swelled past three thousand, and by then, even had Shaolin wished to fight, it no longer could. Worse, the temple's stores of grain and fodder ran short, while Songshan's reinforcements kept on arriving.

Cao Lingxue surrounded Shaolin but only penned it in without assault, instead posting men in ambush at every commanding point. Hearing that the holy ground was besieged, the Shaolin disciples of the Hebei, Henan, and Shanxi regions hastened to the rescue. The abbots of the various temples were deep in cultivation but not one of them was skilled in war; the relief forces each went their own way, vowing only to converge at Shaolin, with none to command them. Before they ever reached Mount Shaoshi, they ran into ambushes at the passes, the dead and wounded everywhere—this stratagem of besieging a city to strike at its rescuers left Shaolin Temple wholly at a loss.

Abbot Zhiquan could not await his reinforcements, and seeing no grain left in the temple, was forced to give battle. The gates swung wide and a thousand monks poured out; the Songshan Sect broke at the first clash and fell back into the depths of the woods beyond the temple. Sure they had victory in hand, the monks pressed the pursuit, meaning to drive on to the Zhongyue Temple—and halfway there ran into ambush. A great fire in the woods burned more than two hundred monks to death and left over four hundred wounded; the head monks of the Samantabhadra and Avalokitesvara Courts, and the abbots of the Right View, Right Livelihood, and Right Effort Halls, fell in battle; the head monk of the Manjushri Court led his men in a desperate fight and won back to the temple. Of the thousand-some who marched out, only four hundred returned, the rest slain or taken.

It is said that Old Beggar Peng, then in Hubei, passed his verdict on the affair: "Well, that's something at least—it solves the grain problem. Only I wonder whether monks can stomach a Daoist's cooking."

Abbot Zhiquan was at the end of his stratagems and could only grieve from the depths of his Buddha-heart; he held a great service and chanted the sutras to ferry the dead. By now the taking of Shaolin would have been no hard matter for Songshan, and it seemed this thousand-year cloister must fall in an instant—when Cao Lingxue, of a sudden, held his troops still and did not move.

At the same time, in a small matter unknown to most, Yan Yingqi had stirred up trouble within Wudang's borders. Many took it for an unrelated affair, yet no one asked why Yan Yingqi should have turned up at Wudang at all.

The flames of war reached even the Mu Family Manor in Kaifeng.

After the Shaolin-Songshan war began, Mu Qing forbade any of the clan to leave the manor, and the two hundred-odd guards and bodyguards he had hired patrolled day and night.

The first martial folk to set foot in Kaifeng were the Songshan Sect's. They had had their instructions early, entering from Shandong by way of Kaifeng, and pressed straight on to reinforce the siege of Shaolin without lingering in Kaifeng. The Songshan bands that followed—now fifty, now one or two hundred—did the same.

Not until two months on, when word came of Shaolin's great defeat, did fear grip the city. Mu Qing had already prepared for the worst: even if Kaifeng fell into Songshan's grasp, it would not touch the Mu family's livelihood. But should the fighting drag on, that was another matter.

It was in the ninth month that two hundred-odd Shaolin disciples out of Xinyang skirted the ambushes and reached Kaifeng. They meant to muster their forces here and strike at the Songshan Sect's rear.

They got wind that another Songshan band, some three hundred strong, had also come from Shandong to Kaifeng.

A clash in Kaifeng was now inevitable.

And so the fortress and the lay of the Mu Family Manor became the key to victory or defeat. Whoever held the Mu Family Manor, with the advantage of its walls, was sure to hold firm and stay unbeaten—indeed, for Shaolin, the Mu Family Manor would make a fine base from which to gather strength.

The Shaolin disciples came from the west gate, the Songshan from the east, neither aware that only the Mu Family Manor stood between them and the other band. Both at once sent in their cards, asking Mu Qing to let them through into the manor to lay out their battle.

Mu Qing was thrown into a quandary at once. Devout as he was, he had no wish to offend Songshan—the more so having heard of Shaolin's great defeat—and to admit either side was to court trouble. Besides which he had heard that a great host of Shaolin disciples was still to come, while Shandong lay close at hand and no few Taishan Sect disciples were hurrying to Kaifeng to lend their aid.

Mu Qing returned both cards, courteously declining either side and lending aid to neither—the best course he could devise.

But things ran contrary to his wishes. No sooner had he refused than the hundred-odd Songshan disciples launched their assault on the Mu Family Manor outright. To hold the manor was to seize the advantage of the ground, and that was too important for them to let pass.

Mu Kun had spent twenty-five years building a fortress to shelter his family, and now it had become the very root of disaster. The guards and bodyguards on the walls were no match in skill for trained sect disciples—and these past years of ease at the Mu Family Manor had left them with no stomach for a fight besides. A dozen-odd Songshan disciples flung grappling hooks and scaled the walls; some were cut down at the chains and dashed bloody to the ground, that goes without saying, but the nimbler ones gained the top and grappled the guards there, and in a blink a dozen-odd lay dead or hurt. More Songshan disciples climbed up under cover of this, and with the weight of numbers soon held several stretches of the wall, edging steadily toward the gate.

Seeing how things stood, Mu Qing knew that win or lose, a feud with the Songshan Sect was now certain; and in his desperation a thought came to him, and he hurriedly sent men to open the west gate and welcome the Shaolin monks in to aid the defense.

By the time the Shaolin disciples reached the east gate it had already been breached. The Songshan disciples had lost a score and more, but the Mu guards had suffered far worse. The Shaolin disciples charged into the fray with a great war-cry; every one of them was a seasoned fighter, an altogether different thing from ordinary guards. The Songshan disciples, their strength already spent, lost more than thirty men in the hard fighting that followed, and the rest fell back wounded and fled.

Mu Qing at once gave the order to shut the gates.

He knew the Mu Family Manor had become a battlefield. He had his wife gather their valuables and take their son Mu Jie to seek refuge at Wudang; he bade the Mu kinsmen scatter each to their own way; and he himself stayed behind to hold the Mu Family Manor.

Twenty-odd years before, as a small boy, he had watched with his own eyes the first patch of that wasteland swept clear, the first brick and tile laid up. Though it should become scorched earth in the end, he would keep his post here, guarding the Mu Family Manor that was his pride.

Before the clan could even finish packing their baggage, early the next morning Mu Qing climbed the wall, and beyond the east gate, far off, he could see dust boiling up. It was a column of at least five hundred men, the "Song" banner snapping in the wind.

On the wall, the Shaolin disciple at their head cried out: "Steady, everyone—Brother Zhang is on his way! Once Brother Zhang comes, these brigands are nothing to fear!" The Shaolin disciples raised a shout together, their spirits surging, for they seemed to have boundless faith in this "Brother Zhang."

Mu Qing had no faith at all.

Before the Songshan Sect broke in, the Mu kinsmen had each gone their separate ways, taking only a little silver; the horses had to be left for the Shaolin monks to fight from. Only Mu Jie and his mother, by virtue of their special standing, had a single coach, with two guards to see them off.

So Mu Jie went with his mother toward Wudang. Halfway there, the two guards, tempted by the silver, robbed the coach of mother and son's money, and the two of them were left to beg their way along, fleeing on toward Hubei. The hardship and homelessness of that journey, Mu Jie—who had never known a day's suffering—would remember to the end of his life.

When at last they reached Wudang, the then sect leader of Wudang, the Daoist Gusong, was away at Kunlun, and the acting leader Guxu took them in. They lived three months at Wudang, and then word came of fresh tidings.

The Shaolin-Songshan war, after eight months, was over.

The Songshan Sect had been crushed. Cao Lingxue laid down the sect leadership and passed it to his disciple Han Moying, and went to Shaolin to be held captive. That Cao Lingxue would die of illness at Shaolin fifteen years later is another matter; for now, after the great defeat, the Songshan Sect quit the Zhongyue Temple and removed to Mount Tai. To avoid sharpening the conflict, Shaolin remained nominally the master of the Songshan Sect, but in truth the affairs within Shandong's borders, great or small, were mostly handled by Songshan itself, with no need to report.

The Shaolin-Songshan war changed many things; for Mu Jie, only seven, the greatest change was his home.

The Mu Family Manor had become a field of scorched earth.

The walls lay toppled; as far as the eye could reach there was nothing but ruined battlements and broken walls. Of the once-splendid manors only ashes remained, burned through; where now were the birdsong and the flowers of the gardens he had played in? Twenty-five years of accumulation and hard labor had bought less than three years of glory, and a stretch of wasteland crying out to be cleared.

Mu Jie saw his mother kneeling before their old home, weeping bitterly—but he did not see the father who should have come out to greet him.

The one who came was a monk, around forty, with sword-straight brows and bright eyes, a man of considerable bearing.

"This poor monk is Ziqiu—Qiu, as in 'one leaf tells of autumn.' Would you be the young master of the Mu family?"

The Mu were ruined, and the clan never came back. The monk Ziqiu took in Mu Jie and his mother, and on the site of the old Mu manor he raised the Jinglu Temple.

"Only with pure dew can one quench the fires of karma, and only so put out the afflictions, dispel disaster, and bring peace to the souls of the dead." So said Master Ziqiu.

Mu Jie found Master Ziqiu very unlike the other monks. When the other monks of his rank chanted the morning and evening offices, Master Ziqiu did not join them; against their strictness he seemed faintly frivolous in his conduct, and though he was abbot of the Jinglu Temple, he had a wife and child besides.

"My name is Zhang Jizhi." Mu Jie first met Master Ziqiu's son in his tenth year. He wished to take Ziqiu as his master, and Ziqiu introduced his own son to him.

"He's two years older than you, and entered the door before you. From now on you're to call him senior brother."

Mu Jie made a bow. "Greetings, senior brother."

Zhang Jizhi tilted his face up, stretched out a hand to measure the gap between their foreheads, and exclaimed, "You really are tall." Then, "Come on, junior brother, I'll take you to train."

Ziqiu laughed. "You and your three-legged-cat skills, you want to teach someone? Off you go—stand the horse stance."

Zhang Jizhi pouted. "Mother told me to go study."

Ziqiu said, "Study you must, and train you must; you can't let either run to waste. Don't forget—what is your name?"

"My name is Zhang Jizhi," said Zhang Jizhi. "I'm to carry on my father's name, to master pen and sword both, so as not to disgrace the great name of Zhang Qiuchi, the Iron Brush That Paints the Tide."

Ziqiu laughed aloud. "Just so. After your books you've your calligraphy to learn as well, hear me?"

Zhang Jizhi nodded, thoroughly put out, and tugged Mu Jie away.

From then on Mu Jie trained, wrote, and read alongside Zhang Jizhi. Mu Jie was the taller of the two not only in height but in talent, and he was the harder worker and the more diligent besides.

His diligence baffled Zhang Jizhi.

Once, Zhang Jizhi asked: "All the time I've known you, I've never once seen you rest. Why do you drive yourself so hard?"

Mu Jie answered: "My father named me Jie, and styled me Guzhi, to make me labor diligently and keep the family holdings whole."

Zhang Jizhi asked: "What holdings have you got? That broken-down old house?"

The words pricked at a dull ache in Mu Jie. He had once had holdings, right where the Jinglu Temple now stood—there had been a road broad enough to drive carriages abreast, and manor after splendid manor. Guards had stood on the walls; he and his cousin had flown kites together while the servants called after him, waiting on him, urging him to come and eat. In summer there had been watermelon hauled chilled from the well, mouthfuls of sweet flesh and sweeter juice—he would take two bites and toss it aside on the table, because what he really wanted was the lychees sent up from the south.

But he did not blame Zhang Jizhi. He was the son of the Jinglu Temple's abbot; he had lived through none of it.

In his fifteenth year, Ziqiu took him to his father's grave.

Besides flowers and fruit, Ziqiu had laid out a dish of kung pao chicken, a bowl of braised pork knuckle, a bowl of abalone and shark's-fin soup, and a bottle of Shaoxing wine.

For a monk to set out so many meat dishes in offering was a thing altogether unbecoming.

But he knew—his mother had told him—that these were all the foods his father had loved. Only now, even he himself could rarely eat such things more than a few times over.

Ziqiu made a deep bow before Mu Qing's grave, then drew Mu Jie down to knock his head three times, and bade him sit.

"I've never told you how your father died, have I," Ziqiu said. "Do you want to know?"

"The Songshan Sect killed him," Mu Jie said. "They set fire to the Mu Family Manor and killed my father."

"That the Songshan Sect killed him is true in the main—but not wholly true," Ziqiu said. "The fire that burned your father to death was not set by the Songshan Sect."

Mu Jie started. "If not the Songshan Sect, then who?" Even as he spoke, something seemed to come to him, and he looked at his master in dread.

Ziqiu said: "The Songshan Sect knew we would muster at the Mu Family Manor and strike at their rear, so they sent seven hundred disciples from Songshan, and with four hundred Taishan disciples come from Shandong, ringed the Mu Family Manor about. The Shaolin disciples holding the manor were just over a hundred and twenty—a hundred men against a thousand. Even leaning on the lay of the manor, defeat was certain."

Mu Jie asked: "Wasn't there supposed to be relief? Weren't the Shaolin disciples to gather at Kaifeng and cut off Songshan's rear?"

"There was never going to be any relief." Ziqiu shook his head, thought a moment, and went on: "That false report was one I deliberately let slip to the Songshan Sect. From the very first, the only ones holding Kaifeng were the hundred-some disciples who came first—and me."

At first Mu Jie did not understand, and then it broke over him: "It was bait?"

"More than just bait." Ziqiu thought again, then said, "To break the siege of Shaolin, we had to scatter the strength Songshan had thrown around it. The moment we entered the Mu Family Manor, besides manning the walls we laid straw and oil and every kind of kindling all through the city. Your father took one look and knew what we were about."

Mu Jie said: "You meant to burn the city?!"

Ziqiu nodded. "You're very clever. If only Jizhi had half your cleverness and diligence." He sighed—only ever when his son was mentioned could he not help but sigh, while of the matter of the Mu Family Manor he spoke as though of some ordinary thing. "Your father wished to stop us, but I would not agree. We told him to leave; he would not. He said this was thirty years of the Mu family's heart's blood—he had watched its towers rise with his own eyes, and he would watch them fall.

"The day before the host descended, we meant to carry him off by force. First he pleaded with us bitterly, then threatened us with his own death; he said that once out of the Mu Family Manor he would cry the matter aloud for all to hear, and at the last he swore he would set himself afire. With the city full of kindling, the smallest spark would have been enough to bring on calamity and undo the whole plan. I honored his resolve, and so I let him stay within the manor."

Mu Jie listened; he had already guessed what came after.

"We lay in ambush outside the walls; your father barred the gates and kept to your old home—the very ground where the Jinglu Temple now stands—and waited for the Songshan disciples to break the gate. They charged in to find an empty city, and before they could find your father, our hundred-some men held the front and rear gates and loosed fire-arrows into the city, and in a moment the flames climbed to the sky. The Songshan disciples fled in panic, and we blocked the gates against them so they could go neither forward nor back; taken or killed, of a thousand-some disciples only a hundred-odd escaped by luck—and the Mu Family Manor became a field of scorched earth."

"So the sweet dew of the Jinglu Temple was really meant to put out the fire on my father," Mu Jie said. "To honor my father's sacrifice, and the foundation of the Mu family's six hundred souls?"

"Your father was a devout believer; it's said that as he died he chanted the Buddha's name, and went very peacefully."

Mu Jie shook his head. "That can't be. My father believed in the Buddha, but never so devoutly as that. With the flames searing his flesh, he must have died in agony past telling."

Ziqiu did not deny it. He only asked: "About your father—is there anything more you wish to ask?"

Mu Jie said: "Master, you said it was only true in the main, not wholly true, that the Songshan Sect killed my father. The rest of it—was that you?"

Ziqiu said: "I have my regrets, but were it to be done ten times over, ten times I would light the fire. What must be done must be done; your father's death cannot be laid at my door."

"Then who must answer for that other small part?" Mu Jie asked. "Am I to fault my father for his stubbornness?"

Ziqiu pointed far off to the west. "It's that pack of monks at Shaolin Temple."

Mu Jie asked: "How was it Shaolin's doing?"

"If not for their muddled incompetence, how would Songshan have grown so great? How would the Shaolin-Songshan war ever have started, and so many lives been lost? What can those monks chanting the Buddha's name do but pray? Trust to the Buddha to guard Shaolin, to guard Kaifeng, to guard the people of the four provinces under Shaolin's sway?" The more Ziqiu spoke the more his indignation grew, until at the last he was grinding his teeth.

It was the first time Mu Jie had seen his master so roused, and the first time he had heard a monk so revile Shaolin—even revile the Buddha—though he had long suspected his master was no ordinary monk.

"At the very brink of life and death, they would still have a lay disciple shave his head and enter the halls before he could command in battle, before he could lead his brethren. Those muddled monks—they are the other half-cause of your father's death! Mu Jie, remember this: to let power fall into the hands of the incompetent is calamity, and it kills the innocent, men like your father! Remember it: the one who guards the people of these four provinces is not the Buddha—it is Shaolin Temple! Remember—"

And then he heard those words, for Shaolin the rankest heresy of all:

"The Buddha may perish, but Shaolin must not!"

Mu Jie did not blame his master. He knew his master was right.

When Mu Jie was seventeen, Zhang Jizhi was as much the layabout as ever. He had not inherited his father's wit and talent; in both martial arts and letters Mu Jie had long left him far behind.

Though he had no father to raise him, though he and Zhang Jizhi were taught by the one master, Mu Jie always walked straight, sat steady, and bore himself with measure. As he grew older his gaze grew ever keener—what Zhang Jizhi did not know was that, many years on, that keenness would turn to steadiness, and then to depth, until it became a bottomless pool that men looked upon and feared.

Zhang Jizhi was somewhat jealous, for his father had handed the temple's important affairs over to Mu Jie to manage, including the patrol of Kaifeng.

Ten years after the Shaolin-Songshan war, though the Songshan Sect had largely submitted, there remained a remnant of unpurged malcontents who still nursed the old delusions. On the surface they had drawn a clear line between themselves and Songshan, but in truth they lay hidden in the dark, stirring up trouble and damage from time to time, seeking to bleed away Shaolin's strength and so attain their heart's great wish: to sever Songshan from Shaolin and make it a sect in its own right.

Mu Jie did not disappoint Ziqiu. Scarcely a month into his patrols, by following the faintest of traces he caught seven disciples turned renegade from Songshan. They had been preparing to attack the Jinglu Temple by night with fire; their aim was to assassinate Ziqiu.

After taking the seven, Ziqiu interrogated them, and without so much as reporting to Shaolin Temple, beheaded them all. Not only did he hang their heads from the city wall, he had the bodies flayed and strung up a bloody ruin of mangled flesh on seven long bamboo poles.

Zhang Jizhi was sickened, and said to his father: "You'd killed them, that was enough. Doing this—it's too cruel."

Ziqiu sighed and shook his head at Zhang Jizhi, as though he could not even be bothered to explain, and turned instead to ask Mu Jie: "Tell me—is it cruel?"

"Kill one to warn a hundred; only so do you frighten off the rest. At the least their fellows won't dare offend within Kaifeng's bounds again."

Zhang Jizhi said: "And if they come back for revenge? We of Shaolin are the orthodox seat of the Buddha's gate; the Buddha's mercy—"

Before he could finish, Ziqiu thundered: "Be quiet!" Zhang Jizhi started, and Ziqiu went on: "Wait until they've killed people in Kaifeng, and then come tell me whether it's cruel or not! What is cruelty? To die innocent—that is cruelty!"

Ziqiu rarely raised his voice to Zhang Jizhi, and at this roar Zhang Jizhi did not dare speak another word, only muttering low, "Father is right to chastise me..."

Ziqiu said: "If they dare come again, so much the better—we'll be rid of them at one stroke, to the delight of all." With that he turned away and said to Mu Jie, "Come with me."

Mu Jie nodded and followed.

The two walked outside the old city of Kaifeng prefecture, the ancient walls scored with the weathered marks of years. Mu Jie glanced at his master; ten years had passed, and his master's back seemed to have bowed a little.

"Do you know why, when the Songshan Sect surrounded Shaolin Temple in the Shaolin-Songshan war, Cao Lingxue held off so long without storming it?"

Ziqiu put the question abruptly. It had always been one of the great unsolved riddles of the martial world. None knew what Cao Lingxue had meant by laying siege without assault; all took it for his gravest blunder, even the very thing that turned defeat into Shaolin's victory in the end.

Seeing Mu Jie make no answer, Ziqiu went on: "Because taking Shaolin would have done him no good. Shaolin is the foremost sect under heaven today; he could never swallow it. Destroy Shaolin, and the counterstroke of its disciples would be enough to wipe out the Songshan Sect."

"If he could neither win by advancing nor gain by withdrawing, how was this Shaolin-Songshan war to be ended—and why fight it at all?" Mu Jie asked in return.

"Besides forcing Shaolin to recognize Songshan as a sect in its own right, he hoped to become a tenth Great House beyond the Nine. He was waiting for someone to come and mediate—once the Nine Great Houses stepped in, he could use Shaolin as his threat to make the other eight acknowledge him, and then lift the siege of Shaolin; not only would the thing be done in good name, he would have won his whole desire."

"No other sect stepped in," Mu Jie said. "Every great house behaved as though it were no affair of theirs."

"That has to be told from two ends," Ziqiu said. "First, the Nine Great Houses. They all knew in their hearts that the Kunlun Council is the Nine Houses; the nine jointly raise the chief; add one more house and each one's portion of interest shrinks by a share. Strong as Songshan was, what was it set beside the Beggars' Sect, Kongtong, Diancang, Wudang? Shaolin and Wudang are close; Gusong might have helped, but he was away at Kunlun, and Guxu dared not take such a decision on himself. With Kunlun not stepping in, the other eight Great Houses were even less likely to."

Mu Jie said: "Cao Lingxue had been laying his plans for years; without assurance, would he have dared provoke the quarrel? He would never have made such an error."

Ziqiu said: "And that brings us to the second matter. Songshan was no more than a sect under Shaolin; if it held a grand assembly, the most the other sects would do was send disciples with gifts and good wishes—courtesy in full, and no more—which is why the Beggars' Sect sent Old Beggar Peng, then still a prefectural chief at Fuzhou..."

The name of Old Beggar Peng was no longer strange to Mu Jie. It was a name that his proud, self-assured master, when he spoke of the lore of the martial world, would rarely let pass without a look of respect. Old Beggar Peng had only a few years before been raised to chief master of the Jiangxi chapter; he was the man among the Nine Great Houses most worthy—perhaps the only man worthy—of the title "great hero."

"Only Huashan, of all of them, sent the sect leader's own younger brother, Yan Yingqi. Why was that?" Ziqiu asked.

Understanding broke over Mu Jie: "They were already in league. This was a thing prepared."

"Huashan and Shaolin had a long-running border dispute in Shanxi. Cao Lingxue promised that afterward, in the name of payment for mediation, he would lean on Shaolin and let Huashan take the disputed territory—and so bought Huashan's intervention. But that one sect alone was not enough. After leaving Songshan, Yan Yingqi went to Wudang; he went as Songshan's envoy, to plead its case. Guxu might not be able to decide, but he could step forward to mediate and wait for Gusong to intervene. Gusong was the reigning chief; if he intervened, that was the Kunlun Council intervening, and then Cao Lingxue would have his wish—on the condition of lifting the siege of Shaolin, he could win at the Kunlun Council the standing of a tenth Great House." Here Ziqiu burst out laughing. "Who'd have thought that idiot Yan Yingqi, lecher that he always was, would take a fancy to some woman on the road to Wudang and ruin her honor. The woman would not bear the shame and hanged herself, and a small sect under Wudang called the Xianxia Sect came to learn of it. The Xianxia sect leader Yang Jingyao was a true man; he hunted Yan Yingqi all the way to Shaanxi, they crossed blades, and Yan Yingqi, no match for him, was killed—so naturally the word never reached Wudang."

He laughed on, and went on: "The pity was that Yang Jingyao did not know the truth, knew only that Huashan never forgets a grudge. 'A drop of Huashan blood, a head from the martial world'—fearing reprisal, he disbanded the Xianxia Sect, saw his old and young settled, and went up Huashan alone to answer for it. Yan Yingqi's record was a foul one, the whole martial world knew it; were he not the Huashan sect leader's brother, whether he'd have lived past twenty-five is a question. The fault here was Huashan's—but Huashan, fearing Yang Jingyao had learned something from Yan Yingqi, killed Yang Jingyao to stop his mouth, and to cover the thing over only made it plainer by issuing a public warrant of vendetta. A pity, a man of iron like Yang Jingyao... Jizhi spoke just now of cruelty—what is cruelty? This is cruelty!"

Only then did the full understanding dawn on Mu Jie.

"The Xianxia Sect was under Wudang, and the Daoist Gusong had always prized Yang Jingyao as a man of talent. After this affair, while he was still chief of the Kunlun Council, he set a new rule: the ravishing of women, which sects had until then punished as they saw fit, became from that day a crime for which all under heaven might put a man to death."

"How did you work out the threads of all this, master?"

"How would I have worked it out? Cao Lingxue told it himself—he's a guest at Shaolin still." Ziqiu said. "He loves Shaolin so well, having besieged it a full half-year, that he won't be leaving it for the rest of his days."

Mu Jie asked: "Even granting Yan Yingqi bungled it, the Shaolin-Songshan war ran eight months from first to last; word should have reached Kunlun long before. Why did the Daoist Gusong hold off so long without intervening?" And here understanding came to him, and he looked at Ziqiu and said: "Master—it was you who held the Daoist Gusong back, who kept Kunlun from meddling in the Shaolin-Songshan war?"

Ziqiu looked at Mu Jie and sighed again, and Mu Jie knew he was thinking once more of Zhang Jizhi. Ziqiu said: "Songshan could not win, and could not withdraw; this was a battle Shaolin was bound to win. That being so, why let Kunlun step in and hand Songshan the advantage?"

He considered a while, then went on: "You are a hundred times cleverer than Jizhi, and your character is the tougher by far. Have you... ever thought of taking the tonsure?"

Mu Jie answered: "I am an only son."

Ziqiu said: "Even an only son may. You could be a monk such as I am."

Only then did Mu Jie learn that, to deliver Shaolin, five lay disciples had shaved their heads and entered the halls, and Ziqiu was the first of those five—known in the martial world as Zhang Qiuchi, the Iron Brush That Paints the Tide, a rare talent of wisdom and courage both, and the man whose hand had been the key to Shaolin's victory. After the great Shaolin-Songshan war, the other four lay monks stayed on at Shaolin to handle temple affairs; only Ziqiu was unwilling to remain at Shaolin, and came instead to Kaifeng to serve as abbot of the Jinglu Temple. For one thing, Kaifeng sat at the border of Shandong and Henan, close enough to keep watch on Songshan; for another, he loathed the airs of Shaolin; and for a third, there was a little of the wish in him to seek out the heirs of Mu Qing.

Ziqiu said: "The Shaolin-Songshan war, on its face, was a war of arms; but beneath the arms ran many hidden currents. That unseen struggle is often a hundred times more perilous than the fighting in the open—one wrong step and the whole board is lost. You must think thrice, think four times, think ten times, a hundred times, until there is no oversight left, before you set down a single step."

Mu Jie nodded. "This disciple understands."

"Hereafter all that I have will be yours." Ziqiu clapped Mu Jie on the shoulder. "Shaolin's future I leave to you."

From then on Ziqiu handed all the temple's affairs over to Mu Jie, and disregarding Shaolin's rules besides, passed his whole body of martial learning to Mu Jie entire. As for Zhang Jizhi, Ziqiu seemed to have given up on him; he neither set him to train nor pressed him further to study. Zhang Jizhi too drifted further and further from Mu Jie, until when the two met they often would not so much as exchange a greeting, but turned their heads and walked off—and Mu Jie never minded.

Only Ziqiu's body seemed to weaken by degrees. Two years more, and Ziqiu suffered a stroke of wind that nearly took his life; though he was saved, from then on he was bedridden, and never rose again.

He had grown old at last.

Seeing Ziqiu laid low, Madam Mu fell to worrying over her own health, and pressed Mu Jie again and again to marry; but Mu Jie would not consent.

After Ziqiu took to his bed, the Jinglu Temple passed wholly into Mu Jie's keeping. Shaolin Temple sent letters from time to time, all of them knotty temple matters wanting Ziqiu's judgment to settle; Mu Jie answered these as well, deftly and with keen discernment, and no one suspected the hand was not Ziqiu's.

Another year on, Mu Jie noticed that of late certain awkward figures had appeared again in Kaifeng, stirring restlessly.

"That pack of Songshan bastards again," Mu Jie thought.

One day Mu Jie rose at the fourth watch and went to attend to business at the Jinglu Temple; reaching the door, he saw the lock hanging askew.

He was meticulous and self-disciplined by nature: when he left and locked the door, he always set the lock straight, never the least bit careless. A lock hanging crooked meant someone had been at it. There were only two keys to this lock, one held by himself and one by his master—could his master have come?

He gathered his wariness, opened the lock, and had no sooner pushed the door than a streak of white came slashing at his face. Mu Jie was ready for it and twisted aside. Four masked assassins came at him in a ring, and one among them, slender and finely made, was a woman.

Mu Jie was just twenty that year; one against four, he raised a shout for help. Before long the proctor-monks of the Jinglu Temple came running, and a dozen-odd monks surrounded the four.

One of the four cried out hurriedly: "Fall back!"—the voice strangely familiar. The four meant to cut their way out of the ring, but the monks barred them, and unable to escape, one by one they were soon taken.

Mu Jie stopped the one who had cried the retreat, and tore off the mask.

It was Zhang Jizhi.

Zhang Jizhi stammered out: "Junior brother, spare me! Junior brother... I... I didn't mean to, I was forced into it!..."

The woman cursed: "Why beg him? Mu Jie, you son of a bitch—you took seven lives from our Songyang Sect! That bastard Han Moying is afraid of you, but the brave men of Songyang aren't afraid to die!"

Zhang Jizhi snarled: "Shut your mouth, you filthy whore!" Then turned back to plead: "Don't let my father know! Junior brother... I beg you, spare my life, spare my life..."

Slowly Mu Jie closed his eyes, as though in thought. The north wind howled, and of a sudden it began to snow.

......

"I beg you—spare his life." On his sickbed Ziqiu pleaded in a mournful voice. This man who had once directed the great Shaolin-Songshan war, this hero of wisdom and courage both, was now only an old father begging in a feeble voice—where in his eyes was a single spark of his old brightness?

He braced himself on Mu Jie's shoulder and toppled from the bed to his knees; Mu Jie made to lift him, but he knocked his head against the floor: "He's the only son I have, my one bloodline! He's your senior brother, you grew up together! You trained together, sparred together, ate from the same pot, drank from the same bowl!"

Why Zhang Jizhi had thrown in with the Songshan remnant and committed the great crimes of betraying Shaolin and assassinating his own brethren—the reason they both knew. But it was far too late to pursue the why.

He forced out his hoarse cries, though his breath had long since thinned to a thread.

Yet he heard no answer from Mu Jie.

Ziqiu lifted his head. He saw a back held straight, and a face firm and lean. That tall frame—yes, somewhere along the way Mu Jie had grown far taller and bigger than himself, and those eyes that had once carried an edge had now turned mature and reserved.

Zhang Jizhi could not be spared. The son of Zhang Qiuchi, hero of Shaolin, had joined the ranks of Songshan against Shaolin—what greater irony could there be?

To let him live would only shake the law and authority of Shaolin Temple.

If even the son of Zhang Qiuchi could break the order's rules and live, who then would not chance his luck?

Mu Jie said only one sentence. The sentence that had once come from his master's lips, the one that struck deepest to his heart:

"The Buddha may perish, but Shaolin must not."

Ziqiu slumped to the floor and broke into wild weeping, beating his breast and stamping without cease.

Zhang Jizhi was sentenced to immediate execution. He was not sent back to Shaolin but put to death directly at Kaifeng, and Mu Jie did the deed with his own hand. He let Zhang Jizhi go without the least pain, as though passing in a dream.

Zhang Jizhi's mother, Ziqiu's wife, left Kaifeng when she heard the sentence. The white-haired sending off the black—she could not walk her beloved son to his end, and from then on she never returned.

The other three assassins did not die. The next night a masked figure broke in, quietly opened the cell, and set the three free.

They called themselves the Songyang Sect—the name Songshan was forbidden to use—the radical faction within Songshan unwilling to bow beneath Shaolin; from their talk one could tell their discontent with the current sect leader Han Moying.

Shaolin could bear their assaults; but could Songshan bear their internal strife? Let them grow strong, and they would become a faction within Songshan turned against Songshan; they would chafe at the rule of Han Moying and his like, bite back at Songshan, and bring it to ruin. And a ruined Songshan would never again have the power to threaten Shaolin.

The strife in the open was far less perilous than the strife beneath the surface. It was the hands of Zhang Qiuchi, the Iron Brush That Paints the Tide, that had raised him up, and he meant to do better than Zhang Qiuchi. His sight must reach farther, see wider, see more clearly through, with surer means.

In the last year of his life, Ziqiu made over to Mu Jie all his collected books and all his connections, holding nothing back, giving everything. Only his standing did Ziqiu not give—that, Mu Jie afterward climbed to step by step, on his own strength.

He hung all his hopes on Mu Jie, looking for him to become, after his own day, the next leader of the lay monks.

Then he died. As his life ebbed at the end, his lips parted and closed, parted and closed, and what he said could not be made out. Mu Jie leaned close, and heard only a faint, broken murmur, repeating without end: "Jizhi... Jizhi... Jizhi..."

Afterward Mu Jie stayed on at the Jinglu Temple, laying his plans for Shaolin in the guise of a lay disciple.

In his twenty-fifth year, Mu Jie married—took to wife a niece of the Kongtong sect leader—and fathered three sons and a daughter, securing the line of the Mu.

In his twenty-eighth year, Madam Mu had her heart's wish; cradling a grandson, she passed away smiling, and Mu Jie became a hall-entered lay practitioner of Shaolin, and quietly emerged as the leader of the lay monks.

Not until he was forty did Mu Jie take the tonsure and enter the halls. He was of Ziqiu's line; ranked by seniority, he served in turn as a hall monk of the Right Effort Hall and abbot of the Right Speech Hall, and in only a few short years rose to head monk of the Samantabhadra Court.

For him the road traveled was no more than a process; even had he never become head monk of the Samantabhadra Court, no one would have doubted his standing.

The foremost of the lay monks: Juekong.