The night wind blew past, and the flames swayed all around. Ning Yi’s words carried from the wooden platform, echoing through the darkness.
To men of the greenwood, a story told by a man of letters could be somewhat difficult to follow, but the opening of this one wasn’t hard to understand at all.
“…Many years ago, in a certain city, there was a young man whose family circumstances weren’t very good, but he was a decent sort of person… He went to work as an apprentice at a cloth shop. The shop’s owner thought him clever and took special care to promote him, paid for his education, and eventually made him the shop’s manager… That cloth shop was a large one, handling business across the region, which exposed him to a great many things, and his family’s circumstances soon improved as well. His mother had originally been gravely ill, and it was the owner who paid to have her cured, so that this man’s mother could live out her years in peace.”
Ning Yi sat in the chair, looking out over the crowd below, his pace of speech calm and unhurried, so that everyone could keep up. Under the threat of death, even this valley gathering a thousand strong now sat in silence.
“…And so he came to be trusted with more and more, and little by little, he wanted to live even better… He wanted to become the owner himself. Then he came to know certain people, and together they laid a plan — he deliberately leaked the shop’s business secrets to a rival, and later had men hired to assassinate the owner, leaving him gravely wounded and paralyzed… He wanted to drag that merchant family all the way down to rock bottom, and then step in himself to turn things around… But the plan failed. Having failed in their attempt to kill him, he fled together with the people he’d come to know, took to the greenwood, and called themselves… heroes and men of honor.”
Ning Yi smiled. “None of this surprises you, does it? Up on your Liangshan, there’s no shortage of such unrighteous, ungrateful scum… As for what came next, you must know that even better…”
His voice suddenly rose, and he slapped his palm against the table beside him. “A hero! How could he stand to be humiliated so! Sooner or later he’d go back and settle every old score, one by one! Isn’t that right, all of you?”
No one dared speak at that. Ning Yi’s gaze swept across every face before him, and silence held for a long moment.
“What came next is just as you’d expect. At the end of March, he took a group of brothers back with him, meaning to wipe out the old owner’s entire family, root and branch. Unfortunately, a small mishap occurred — of the more than two hundred people in that household, only just over a hundred were killed, and he lost a few brothers of his own besides, so they had to go back and plan to come again another time. I know that’s what you’re thinking — you’re all clever people, you’ve surely already guessed… this man is on Liangshan.”
“His name is Xi Junyu.”
Ning Yi stood up.
“From a cloth shop hand! Rising to shop manager! And then to a bandit chieftain — a great brother many of you have heard of. Clever people really do turn up wherever you go. And that… is the reason I’ve come here.”
He paused a moment, then began to laugh. “Perhaps right now you’re thinking I’m here to say how unjust this world is, how heartless and immoral this whole affair was. As if I’d come to lodge a complaint! To curse him as a heartless wretch! To tell you all what he did and how greatly I’ve been wronged… But no. If that’s what you’re thinking, you have it completely wrong.”
“My wife… is that shop owner’s daughter. Most of the time, I’m simply a schoolteacher. I don’t want to lecture you on principle, because it’s useless — it’s already too late for that. The reason I’m telling you all this is only so you understand clearly why I’ve come, and what I’m about to do. I haven’t come on behalf of any government office.” He looked out over the crowd, saying each word deliberately. “This time, I’ve come only to collect a debt of lives!”
“In this world, people run into all manner of injustice. Landlords seize your cattle and sheep! The powerful and privileged bully your daughters! You rob and plunder others’ homes! Shop managers scheme to seize their masters’ fortunes! Once a thing has already happened, talking about principle does no good — principle only has its use before something happens!”
“I am a simple man. Whether you’re a person of high station and power, or a lawless villain, whatever power you lean on, you only have one life! You lay your life on the line, and I’ll lay mine on the line right back at you! I haven’t come this time to argue right and wrong, not to seek justice, and not merely to punish the ringleader. You all stood together, gave him the courage to do this, backed him up — if you shared in the fortune, you share in the sin!”
“You all gathered together, claiming to act on Heaven’s behalf, drinking deep from great bowls and eating meat by the slab — and once you’d eaten and drunk your fill, you’d go out together and rob, and however great the grievance, you’d repay it by slaughtering an entire family. Very well then! So this time — I’ve come to kill!”
“This time I’ve laid my own life on the table. If you can take what I’ve got, you’ll live and go on doing your evil deeds. If you can’t, you’ll die.”
Ning Yi paused a moment, then gave a cold, faint laugh.
“Some people think that every life carries the same weight. Sixty thousand lives on your Liangshan must surely outweigh two hundred people’s, right? Wrong! In that household — I taught there. There was a child, just growing tall — going in, coming out — many children I knew, cut in two, or with their heads lopped off. All your lives put together, to me, don’t add up to one strand of that child’s hair.”
“I am not the government. Your lives aren’t worth anything either — you consider yourselves villains, and so you can march into other people’s homes to burn, kill, and plunder with a clear conscience. So I’ve come to kill. From today onward, once I start, you — all of you, your entire households, young and old, mothers and fathers, wives and children, whether an old mother of eighty or an infant still in swaddling clothes — don’t let me find them, or every one of them dies. Since you consider yourselves villains, I’ll show you something even more villainous.”
The wind howled through the night sky. The figure on the wooden platform turned, sat back down in the chair, and his gaze, when it turned back to face them, carried a tone that had grown noticeably flatter.
“I know many of you have family up on Liangshan. In a moment, all of you will be released. After today, I won’t say anything more — take up your weapons and go your own way, however you please. Go back to Liangshan, back to your great bowls of wine and slabs of meat, and wait for me to come — pick up your blade and fight me. Either you kill me, or I kill you and send your whole family down after you.”
“You can also leave Liangshan and find some other mountain stronghold to go on living your blade’s-edge existence, though that Zheng Biao just now killed a great many people around here, and with Liangshan in the state it’s in, everyone’s hand is against it — see for yourselves whether you can even get clear of this area. And the most important thing is… whatever you do, don’t let me find you. The moment I do, you and your family are done for. This is a blood debt, and I can promise you, responsibly, that before either you or I are dead, there will be no day it stops.”
“And don’t think that when the government troops come, you can just throw down your weapons and surrender and be done with it — it’s not that simple. I have a thousand ways to make you die slowly. You’ve already thrown in with them, done the deeds — a debt must be repaid.”
“If you want to have your slate wiped clean with me, there’s only one way — bring me heads in exchange. Trade your life, your family’s lives.” Ning Yi stood up and drew a thick stack of blood-stained papers from inside his robe. “Liangshan has already fallen apart! These are letters of surrender that some of your own chieftains shot into our camp during the attack on the Zhu Family Estate — but on the battlefield, they had no way to actually get through. Go back, spread word of what happened, and I guarantee the whole of Liangshan will fall into chaos beyond measure. Once it’s in chaos, you’ll be able to act. Protect yourselves, and bring me heads to trade for your lives. When the government troops attack, turning coat earns credit — the more heads, the greater the reward, and the exact rules for how much and how it’s rewarded are posted outside; take a look, listen a moment, on your way out. Once this is done, your name is cleared, and whether you go home to farm or live out your days as a man of means, that’s entirely up to you. That family whose members were half slaughtered — Liangshan owes more than thirty thousand lives to fill that debt. Whoever’s left, might just live.”
He walked over to the table and began gathering his things, putting the bracelet back on, picking up his hat.
“I’ve said quite a bit — that’s so you’ll remember it all the more clearly. You can think I’m just making empty threats, or think I don’t have it in me to actually do any of this. Once you’re out there, whether you stay or go is your own choice. Turning your blade against me, or against the person beside you — either way, it’s for the sake of finding a way for your family to live, and there’s no shame in it. To wipe every one of you out, I still have a great many arrangements to make, so I have to go now. In a moment, someone will come in and tell you some things. Among your Liangshan chieftains, some were framed by Song Jiang and the others, driven up the mountain against their will — we’ve looked into it, and we have the full account of what happened, and a list of names. Pass the word along for me, and there may yet be a future for them, as a way to make amends.”
Having said this, he took a step to leave, then seemed to remember something and turned back, fingers tapping the table. “Oh, one more thing. That man called Lin Chong — he came to my house at the end of March. By rights he should have died. But for one thing, he showed restraint that day, and for another, a few of his sworn brothers pleaded on his behalf, asking me to spare his life if at all possible. So he too may live — but whether he actually does is up to him.”
His footsteps carried him to the edge of the platform, and there he turned back once more, sweeping his gaze over the more than a thousand men below. “A man in the world of rivers and lakes cannot always choose his own path — you had no choice but to go up Liangshan, and I have no choice but to come and kill you. I only mean to wipe you and your families from this world, but I don’t know any of you, and I bear you no personal ill will — I’d have you all understand that clearly. If fate allows, perhaps we’ll meet again someday, but once you walk out that gate today, hold your blades steady, and let each of us fight for our own lives. Take care. Farewell.”
That solemn, ice-cold voice echoed above the little square. Had Ning Yi said all this only a few days earlier, it would have been dismissed as a joke — but by now, these words carried a chilling gravity, bone-deep in its earnestness. Just days before, the whole of Liangshan had stood at the very peak of its momentum. But after three days, Liangshan had fallen, and by the eighth of the sixth month, the entire Liangshan formation had collapsed in full view of everyone.
Not long after, someone came in and began reading out a list of chieftains who had been driven up Liangshan against their will, along with a brief account of what had happened, of the methods Song Jiang and the others had used — and after that, the price on the head of every single man on Liangshan. In the deepest darkness before dawn, they were finally sent out from the camp, each man given back his sword or spear — the other side clearly cared nothing for what they chose to do afterward, only wanted them dead.
A great many men gathered together on the dark roads, in the hills — some at a loss, some huddled talking among themselves, some simply walking forward without thinking, unable in this deepest of darknesses to find any path ahead…
At the very same time, the whole of the Liangshan power base was likewise sunk in a cloud of gloom and despair. Compared to the height of martial confidence when they’d marched out at the end of the fifth month, no one had imagined that in less than half a month, the whole of Liangshan would come crashing down from the heavens with such speed — and the cause of it all was simply that, amid the many great affairs of these past few months, they had carelessly offended the matrilocal son-in-law of a cloth merchant’s family a thousand miles away.
Nothing in this world could be stranger than that — and yet when the matter fell on one’s own head, no one could find it in themselves to laugh.