Chapter 11 — The Secluded Valley
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 1 of 6
Zhang Qingyue climbed the mountain and came to the bamboo grove so utterly familiar to him. Green billowed over the slopes in fold upon fold, and where the mountain wind passed, the sea of bamboo rose and fell like ocean swell — a sight so vast that his heart opened wide at once.
He drew a deep breath of the fresh mountain air, worked the stiffness from his limbs, and went into the grove with his woodcutter's knife. The place he headed for now was not where he had gone when first he came three years before: it lay at the deepest heart of the grove, where the great bamboo stood tall and the wood was harder still.
A faint morning mist drifted among the trunks like thin gauze, and on the green leaves flanking the path hung beads of dew, clear and luminous.
After a while he stood inside a green ocean. The black-jointed bamboo here mostly soared, thick in leaf and branch, piercing straight into the sky; light seeped down through the gaps and left the ground in scattered patches of shadow. Zhang Qingyue looked this way and that, picked out a great black-jointed stalk, hefted his knife to measure the cut, and raised it to strike.
"Thup" — a muffled thud, and Zhang Qingyue felt a stab of pain at his brow: something had struck him on the forehead. He looked down. A pinecone rolled on the ground at his feet. Black-jointed bamboo stood all about, and there were plenty of shoots, but pinecones there certainly were not.
He thought a moment, and a smile crept to the corner of his mouth. He looked about him and called out, "Senior Sister, is that you?"
His voice carried far through the grove, but for a long while no one answered. Zhang Qingyue knew his senior sister had always been mischievous and fond of pranks; he was about to call again when suddenly his brow smarted once more, sharply this time — another pinecone had found its mark — and from overhead came a shrill chattering, "tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk."
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Zhang Qingyue looked up. On that black-jointed stalk, he knew not when, a gray-furred monkey had climbed, a few pinecones clutched in its paws, its tail hooked over a branch so that it hung upside down, screeching with laughter, "tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk," altogether delighted at another's misfortune.
Zhang Qingyue was dumbfounded. In three years he had never seen a monkey in the bamboo grove; and Dazhu Peak was almost nothing but bamboo, save for a stand of pines and cypresses in the deep valley on its shaded side. The monkey must live there, he supposed; how it had come running up the mountain today he could not guess.
Dazhu Peak was steep and sheer. It did not rise above the clouds as Jietian Peak did, yet it too ran straight into the sea of mist, and from its foot upward there was scarcely a path to walk; the disciples of the Canglan Sect mostly came and went through the air. Zhang Qingyue's cultivation was shallow, and apart from his daily bamboo-cutting he had heard his senior brothers speak of how, in the deep valley behind Dazhu Peak, pines and cypresses grew into a wild forest, dark and unfathomable, where human feet seldom came. In years past, certain of the founding masters of the Dazhu Peak lineage had ridden their swords down into that valley to explore it, but it was only primeval forest, with nothing strange in it — merely more than a few fierce beasts and venomous insects, which never left the valley, so that matters had gone peaceably enough all these years.
As he mused on it, the monkey suddenly raised a paw. Zhang Qingyue's heart jumped; he dodged aside, and sure enough another pinecone came smashing down. Had he not moved, he would have paid for it.
Seeing him slip away, the gray monkey screeched twice, its face creased with wrath, as though it blamed Zhang Qingyue for dodging at all.