18

ZUO CHU TRIES TO STRIKE THE DUKE OF LU WITH A FLYING MILLSTONE;

ARGUS-EYED SPIRIT SAVES THE DUKE OF LU AND OFFERS A PLAN.

POEM:

As strong as Lame Priest’s grasp of magic is,

When he meets the blood pumps, his defeat is sure.

As for Ma Sui, Li Sui, and Zhuge Suizhi,

For quelling demons their fame will endure.

Wen Yanbo shouted for the battle line to be opened, which allowed the pump hands and the archers to come forth and either squirt the weird creatures and fierce animals in the face or else shoot at them. Many of the creatures proved to be paper cutouts or snippets of straw, and countless soldiers were shot by the archers. The government army, sensing the possibility of victory, attacked and killed three-tenths of the enemy force, two-thirds of the dead falling victim to Wen Yanbo’s column. Having suffered a major defeat, Wang Ze hastily withdrew his men into the city, raised the drawbridge, locked the gates, and made no further forays.

Following his victory, Wen Yanbo withdrew his troops and camped at a point not far from the city wall. From there he gazed at Beizhou like a tiger eyeing its prey—the city could fall within a matter of days. The names of the officers and soldiers who had distinguished themselves were recorded in the honors register, and the army’s morale rose even higher. Wen Yanbo ordered five hundred men to go up into the mountains and fell timber for battering rams, scaling ladders, catapults, assault platforms, and flaming arrows. Within a day or two all the equipment was ready, and he ordered an attack on the city wall. The army went up to the moat and began the assault.

In the aftermath of his defeat, Wang Ze illustrated the truth of the saying “When your sword suffers a nick, your prestige takes a loss.” He ordered his army to keep their bows at the ready and place a close guard on the battlements, but not to issue forth from the city. He also invited the demons Zuo Chu, Zhang Luan, Bu Ji, Pellet Priest, Ren Qian, Zhang Qi, and Wu Sanlang to the yamen chamber and had them sit there in a circle. “Gentlemen,” he began, “Wen Yanbo has seen through our use of magic, and we have lost a great many soldiers. I no longer dare to leave the city and engage him in battle. He has now come right up to our walls and is challenging us to fight. What are we to do?”

He had barely finished speaking when a scout brought in a report: “Commander Wen has ordered his troops to make scaling ladders, catapults, assault platforms, and flaming arrows, and they’re under the walls right now attacking the city!”

“With the situation so dangerous, what will happen to all the people in this city?” asked Wang Ze in alarm.

Zuo Chu rose to his feet. “You needn’t worry, Your Majesty,” he said. “I, Zuo Chu, can perform thousands and thousands of transformations. There’s no need for us to fight; I’ll merely see to it that Wen Yanbo comes to an unnatural end outside the city. Once they’re deprived of their leader, his hundred thousand troops will scatter without a fight. What do you say?”

“What brilliant plan do you have in mind, my dear minister, that would bring about this man’s death and make an army of a hundred thousand scatter in all directions, ending the siege?”

“Simple!” said Zuo Chu. He ordered the men under his command to go to a mill and fetch a large millstone. Before long a dozen men entered the lower part of the chamber carrying a millstone on their shoulders. Zuo Chu went down there and wrote a charm on the stone with a vermilion brush. Next, with loosened hair and bare feet, holding a sword in his right hand1 and an earthenware bowl of water in his left, he chanted a magic formula and took a mouthful of water, then spat the water at the millstone, shouting, “Presto!” At once, to the cheers of Wang Ze and the others present, the millstone floated up into the sky and flew off outside the city.

Commander Wen had just taken his seat in his command tent and invited Deputy Commander Cao Wei, General Wang Xin, and General of the Vanguard Sun Fu in to discuss their plans for taking the city when a millstone came flying down out of the sky aimed directly at his head. An earthshaking crash followed, and the faces of the men in the tent turned pale with horror—they thought that the millstone must have struck and killed their commander. However, Wen had been sitting in an armchair when he was suddenly seized around the waist by someone and pulled a few steps away. As the millstone came down, it missed him but smashed his chair to pieces and buried itself a foot or two in the ground. The other men were overjoyed to find that Wen was unhurt, although he had suffered a considerable shock. Another armchair was fetched. “Who was it who seized me around the waist?” asked Wen.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when someone stepped forward and bowed, a large, tall man with an ugly face. Nobody recognized him; he wasn’t a member of Wen’s staff, nor was he one of the guards posted at the front of the tent. “You saved my life!” exclaimed Wen Yanbo. “Who are you? Please tell me about yourself. Of course I shall give you a handsome reward.”

“I’m not one of your soldiers. Wang Ze of Beizhou was using demonic magic to try and crush you to death with that millstone. I came especially to save your life in order to repay you for a meal that you once kindly gave me.”

Wen was delighted to hear this. “I’m grateful to you for saving me, but I wonder where I could possibly have given you that meal. And I would dearly like to know your name.”

“If I tell you, I’m afraid you may forget it. Could I borrow a silver bowl as well as some writing materials?”

One of the attendants brought out a silver bowl and some writing materials and arranged them on the table. Then the man said, “Could I ask you to send your staff out of the room?” Commander Wen dismissed his staff, and the man wrote something in the bowl, placed it upside down on the ground, and strode out of the tent. Commander Wen immediately sent someone after him, but he had disappeared.

How very strange, thought Wen. He told an attendant to turn the bowl over. The words “Argus-Eyed Spirit” were written in it in large characters. None of those in the tent knew what to make of them.

Commander Wen puzzled over the name for some time before suddenly realizing what it meant. “Before I graduated, I once stopped for the night at a courier station,” he said. “The officer in charge warned me about the room I had. ‘This place is haunted by a ghost, and many of the men who slept here lost their lives.’ At the time I didn’t believe him, and I lit the lamp and the candles, bought some wine, and sat there drinking by myself. Then at midnight a wild wind sprang up, and when it had passed, there was a man standing in front of the table. His hair covered his face and his hands were crossed over his chest. Addressing me as prime minister, he asked me for some food and wine. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘And why don’t you show your face?’ He replied, ‘I’m so ugly that people die of fright when they see me—that’s why I don’t dare show my face.’ When I doubted him, he parted his hair and revealed a blue face with a dozen flashing and flickering eyes. I was frightened, too, but I gave him the food and wine, and when he had finished it, he said, ‘Someday you’ll be in great danger, sir, and I’ll be sure to come to your aid.’ And with that he disappeared. It just occurred to me that the man who saved my life just now must have been that Argus-Eyed Spirit.” When the others looked at the silver bowl, they found a column of small characters beside the name: “If you meet the three Sui, you’ll be able to take Beizhou.”

Wen was jubilant. “I never expected that he would not only save my life but also give me a plan to defeat Wang Ze. The trouble is I haven’t the slightest idea what ‘the three Sui’ means. Can any of you think of an explanation?”

“We’re completely in the dark,” they said, before returning to their own quarters to puzzle over the meaning. And there we shall leave them.

Meanwhile in Beizhou Wang Ze and the other demons had set out some wine in the chamber and were congratulating Zuo Chu while at the same time dispatching scouts to find out what was happening on the front line. One scout returned and reported as follows: “Commander Wen’s forces are under strict discipline and arrayed in good order. There’s been no change.”

“If they’d been deprived of their commander,” said Wang Ze, “they’d surely be in disarray and have lost any taste for battle. If there’s nothing going on among Wen Yanbo’s forces, I wonder if the millstone did actually hit him.”

“That magic of mine has never been known to fail,” said Zuo Chu. “No one can stop it. He must have been crushed to death.”

“If we want to find out the truth,” said Wang Ze, “we’d better get someone to go over there and issue a challenge.”

“Quite right, Your Majesty,” they said.

They wrote out a challenge and sent it by a reliable soldier right to Commander Wen’s tent. When the commander saw what it was, he called the bearer in. His staff received the document and laid it on the table, and Commander Wen opened and read it. He quickly deduced what lay behind the challenge: Wang Ze must have thought that by demonic magic he had caused the millstone to crush me to death. How could anyone imagine that I would escape unscathed? When he saw that nothing was going on over here, he decided to use the challenge to find out what really happened. He wrote his reply right on the document: “We’ll fight tomorrow,” he said, and gave it to the bearer to take back.

After reading the reply, Wang Ze put a question to the bearer: “Did you go right into Commander Wen’s tent?”

“Your Majesty, Commander Wen didn’t act at all suspicious. He called me into his tent and personally wrote the reply before sending me back.”

Hearing that Wen was unharmed, Wang Ze was filled with anxiety and that night invited Zuo Chu and the other demons to devise a plan to counter the enemy. “Since the millstone failed to crush him to death …” said Zuo Chu and continued by whispering something in Wang Ze’s ear that concluded with the sentence, “In the battle tomorrow we should do such and such.”

Next morning, with his plans set, Wang Ze mustered ten thousand men, opened the gate, let down the drawbridge, and drew up his soldiers in formation outside. For a long time the two armies stood facing each other. Relying as before on the pump hands with their pig’s and sheep’s blood, Commander Wen had someone shout out demanding an exchange of words with Wang Ze. Wang, however, did not come forward but stayed in the ranks. His hair was loosened and his feet bare, he wore no armor, and he was completely naked. Holding a sword in one hand, he led a white horse with the other. Zuo Chu clicked his teeth and worked his magic. He paced out the Big Dipper,2 then recited a formula and shouted, “Presto!” at the same time thrusting his sword into the horse’s neck. When the blood spurted forth, he took it in his mouth and spat it at the front line. Before he spat, it was a fine day with bright sunshine, but after he did so, a dark wind sprang up and a fierce rain fell, with intermittent thunder and flying sand and gravel. You couldn’t see the person opposite you or even your own outstretched hand, and the soldiers were so panicked that they cast aside their weapons and fled for their lives. Their flight led to certain consequences: the prime minister in the Eastern Capital lost his way, and Commander Wen chanced to meet someone who suppressed demons.

If it’s your fate, you’ll meet though far away;

If not, you’ll never meet though close at hand.

Did Commander Wen survive in the end? Turn to the next chapter to find out.