Huang Feihu Defects

H uang Feihu held the title Martial Success King, and he had earned it the hard way — thirty-odd campaigns won for the house of Shang, his family loyal through seven generations. On the first morning of the new year, as custom required, the wives of the great officials came into the inner palace to pay their respects to Queen Su — who was Daji, the thousand-year fox in a woman's shape. Among them came Huang Feihu's wife, the lady Jia-shi, glad of the errand: her husband's younger sister was a consort of the West Palace, and the two women, sisters only by marriage, met like this once a year and no more. But Daji knew the name. Huang Feihu had crossed her once, long ago, and clawed her face, and she was not a creature that forgot. She smiled, and called the general's wife her elder sister, and poured the wine. Huang Feihu was the Martial Success King, who had set up more than thirty feats of merit for the Shang and whose house had been loyal for seven generations. On New Year's Day, by custom, the wives of the princes and great ministers entered the palace to pay respects to Queen Su — Daji — in the principal palace. Huang Feihu's principal wife, the lady Jia-shi, came to pay respects; his younger sister, Consort Huang, was of the West Palace, and sister-in-law and sister met only once a year. Learning who she was, Daji thought to herself: "Huang Feihu, you once presumed on your strength and clawed my face — today your wife Jia-shi has walked into my snare as well." She had the lady announced, seated her, called her "elder sister," and set out a banquet.

When the feasting was done Daji took her sister-in-law up the Star-Watching Tower to see the view. What Jia-shi saw, looking down over the winding rail, was the pit they called the Nest of Vipers — snakes and scorpions crawling over heaped white bone — and beside it the pool of wine and the forest of hung meat. Then the king came up the stairs, as Daji had arranged, and there was no avoiding him. He looked the general's wife over and liked what he saw. A ruler does not receive a subject's wife; that is the rule, and he knew it, and he set it aside, and rose and carried a cup of wine to her with his own hand. Jia-shi struck the cup back into his face and cursed him to it — her husband had won him a kingdom across thirty pitched battles, and this was the wage: to have his wife dishonored on the word of the fox. Then she turned to the rail. Husband, she called out into the empty air, I keep your name clean for you — and, grieving aloud for three children who would wake with no mother, she threw herself down, and her body broke on the stones below. When the feast ended, Daji took Jia-shi up the Star-Watching Tower to view the scene. Looking down over the winding railing, Jia-shi saw the Nest of Vipers, the snakes and scorpions and heaped white bones, and the pool of wine and forest of meat. The king came up, as arranged, and Jia-shi could not withdraw. He looked upon her beauty. He had said a ruler does not see a subject's wife — that this was propriety — yet, urged by Daji, he came, and now took a cup of wine and, smiling, offered it to her himself. Jia-shi, with no way to retreat, seized the cup and threw it in the king's face, cursing him: "Fatuous ruler! My husband fought for your rivers and mountains, set up rare merit in more than thirty battles, and you do not think to repay it — today you believe the words of the base Daji and dishonor your subject's wife." He ordered her seized; she cried, "General Huang! I keep whole your name and honor for you — I pity only my three children, with no one to watch over them —" and leaped from the tower, her bones ground to powder, her body shattered.

Word ran to the West Palace, and Huang Feihu's sister — Consort Huang — came at a run. She stood on the tower and named the king's crime to his face: her brother had held the eastern sea against raiders and the south against the tribes, her father kept the frontier at Jie Pai Pass, a whole house of loyal soldiers, and this was the throne's return on it. Then she turned on Daji. Being a general's daughter she had a soldier's arm; she dragged the fox to the floor and beat her, twenty blows, thirty, while Daji — who could have loosed her sorcery and did not dare, not with the king looking on — screamed for rescue. The king moved to pull his consort off, and in the scramble her fist caught him full in the face. That was enough. He took her by the hair and the robe and, being a strong man, threw his own consort from the Star-Watching Tower after her sister-in-law. The news reached the West Palace, and Consort Huang — Huang Feihu's sister — came. She went up the tower and, pointing at the king, cursed him: her brother had resisted the sea-raiders in the east and fought the southern tribes and held military power with a loyal heart; her father, Huang Gun, guarded Jie Pai Pass; a whole house of loyal and ardent men served the state — and on New Year's Day her sister-in-law had come by the state's own rite to pay respects, and been lured up the tower. She called him a ruler who loved beauty and destroyed the bonds of kin. Then she seized Daji — being a general's daughter she had strength — dragged her down, pressed her into the dust, and struck her twenty or thirty blows. Daji, though a demon, dared not use her power with the king seated above, and only cried, "Your Majesty, save me." The king, partial to Daji, came to intervene; in the struggle Consort Huang's fist struck the king's face by accident. In a rage the king seized her hair and her robe, and being strong, threw her down from the Star-Watching Tower.

“A man can swallow his wife's death and keep serving. What he cannot swallow is being told he owed his rank to her face.”

The maidservants carried it home, where Huang Feihu sat over the New Year's wine with his brothers, his four sworn friends, and his three young sons. When the boys understood that their mother had gone off the tower, they wept aloud. Huang Ming spoke first, and spoke the old rule: when the ruler is not upright, the minister goes to another lord. He and the three others stood, drew their blades, and rode for the gate. But Huang Feihu would not move. He would not, he said, betray two hundred years of his family's honor over the death of one woman — and he called his friends back and cursed them for bandits hunting a pretext. So they changed their aim. They laughed at him. They let him hear the thing the court murmured behind its hand: that Huang Feihu owed his high place not to his own sword but to a wife whose beauty kept the king content. The general who had swallowed his wife's death could not swallow that. It kills me to hear it, he said — and called for his armor, and gave the order to break out of Zhaoge. The maidservants brought the news to the mansion, where Huang Feihu was drinking the New Year's wine with his brothers Huang Feibiao and Huang Feibao, his sworn brothers Huang Ming, Zhou Ji, Long Huan, and Wu Qian, and his three sons — Tianlu, fourteen; Tianjue, twelve; Tianxiang, seven. Hearing their mother had died from the tower, the sons wept aloud. Huang Ming said: "The ruler has lost the Way and overturned the bonds of kin… 'When the ruler is not upright, the subject goes to a foreign state.' …Let us rebel." The four mounted, took up blades, and left. Huang Feihu thought: "Am I to betray the state's grace for the sake of one woman?" and called them back, rebuking them as men of the greenwood seizing a chance to plunder. The four laughed. Zhou Ji said that the ignorant would say Huang Feihu had risen not by his own worth but by leaning on his wife's beauty to please the king and win his rank. At this Huang Feihu cried out, "You enrage me to death," and ordered his retainers to pack and break out of Zhaoge.

One of the friends, Zhou Ji, was not finished. A quiet flight west could still be undone; a blow struck at the king's own gate could not. So he pressed for it — meet the king that very dawn at the Meridian Gate and have it out. Huang Feihu, his mind gone to smoke, said only, So be it, which the storyteller marks as the turning of heaven's own wheel, for it was not a thing a clear head chooses. They fought at the gate as the light came up, one dragon and three tigers, and after thirty passes the king's blade could no longer answer them and he backed his horse in through the gate. Huang Feihu did not chase him. He turned west instead, out of the city, across the ford at Mengjin, into open country — a subject in flight from his own throne. Zhou Ji thought: "Just now I talked Feihu into rebelling by a stratagem; if he sees through it, he may not rebel after all. Better to leave him no way back." He said: "To go to Xiqi, break through the five passes, and borrow troops to return would be too slow. In my humble view, meet the king this very day at the Meridian Gate and decide it." Huang Feihu, his heart in confusion, answered offhand, "So be it" — for such, in the main, was the way of heaven. In golden armor he mounted his five-colored divine ox. They fought at the Meridian Gate, one dragon and three tigers. After thirty rounds the king's blade could not be raised, his horse sat back, and he retreated through the gate. Huang Ming wished to pursue; Huang Feihu said, "Do not." They rode out the West Gate and past Mengjin.

Into this rode Wen Zhong, the Grand Tutor, home that same day from a long war in the eastern sea — the one man at that court whose word the throne could not simply bend. He heard the king's version and did not take it. The fault, he said to the king's own face, lay with the throne: Huang Feihu was a loyal servant, his wife had come by the state's own rite, and no woman dies of that by accident — someone had lured her to the tower and turned a wife's honor into the king's disgrace. And yet. A lesser officer named Xu Rong put the other half of it: that whatever the king had done, a subject who storms the palace gate and trades blows with his sovereign has thrown away the whole duty of a subject. Wen Zhong could not answer that, because it too was true. So the man who had just judged the king guilty sent the flying dispatches out to the passes to net the fugitive, and made ready to ride after Huang Feihu himself. The one honest voice in Zhaoge and the throne's long arm were, in the end, the same arm. Wen Zhong, the Grand Tutor, returned that day in triumph from his eastern campaign. Finding Huang Feihu absent from court, he asked why, and the king said Huang Feihu had rebelled — that Jia-shi had offended Queen Su and leaped to her death of her own doing, that Consort Huang had assaulted the queen and been thrown down by accident, and that Huang Feihu had, for no clear reason, attacked the Meridian Gate. Wen Zhong said sharply: "By my aged reckoning, it is Your Majesty who has wronged the subject. Huang Feihu has always been loyal; Jia-shi came by a subject's proper rite — she would not die without cause. The Star-Watching Tower is Your Majesty's own dwelling; why was she brought there? There was surely one who lured her, to entrap Your Majesty in wrong." The ministers agreed and begged for a pardon. But a lower officer, Xu Rong, said: "The king wronged the subject, true; yet Huang Feihu led a host into the Meridian Gate and did battle with the Son of Heaven — he has utterly failed a subject's duty, so he too is at fault." Wen Zhong could not gainsay it; he ordered flying dispatches to the passes of Lintong, Jiameng, and Qinglong to stop the rebels, and prepared to pursue and take Huang Feihu himself.

Between Huang Feihu and the west lay the five passes, and the road through them is the body of this story: five fortified gates, five commanders, each a wall between a fugitive general and the open country beyond. At the first, Lintong, four armies closed on him at once and he gave himself up for dead — until an immortal of the orthodox school, watching from the clouds, hid the whole family under a banner and sent the pursuing marshal chasing shadows. Even inside the walls, gratitude did more than swords: a junior officer named Xiao Yin, ordered to fill Huang Feihu's camp with arrows in the dark, remembered a kindness the general had once done him, warned him instead, threw open the gate, and cut down his own commander to buy the family's escape. But the passes took their price. At Tong Pass the commander Chen Tong nursed an old grudge, and when the swords settled nothing he loosed a javelin wreathed in fire that struck Huang Feihu from his ox. The Martial Success King lay on the ground, his face like white paper. He was dead. To reach Zhou, Huang Feihu had to cross the five passes. At Lintong Pass, forces closed on him from every side, and he sighed that he could not escape. But Qingxu Daode Zhenjun, of Purple Yang Cave on Green Peak Mountain, seeing from the clouds that the Martial Success King was in peril, had his warriors cover the family with the Primal banner and move them into the hills, then scattered Grand Tutor Wen's pursuit with divine sand so that he chased back toward Zhaoge. Within the pass, the guard Zhang Feng set three thousand archers to shoot Huang Feihu by night; but his lieutenant Xiao Yin, whom Huang Feihu had once promoted and favored, could not bear to repay grace with treachery — he warned the general, opened the pass, and speared Zhang Feng dead as he gave chase. Eighty li on, at Tong Pass, the guard Chen Tong, who bore Huang Feihu an old grudge, fought him; when Chen Tong fled and Huang Feihu pursued, Chen Tong loosed a Fire Dragon Javelin that struck him from his five-colored ox. His true light was put out; he fell, and was dead. Zhou Ji was struck and killed as well.

The same immortal had one card still to play. Thirteen years before he had carried off Huang Feihu's infant son, a boy of three named Huang Tianhua, to raise on his mountain; now he sent the young man down with medicine to raise his father out of death. So Huang Feihu woke on the ground to a Daoist he did not know, who knelt and wept and told him: I am your lost son. The reunion lasted only as long as it took the boy to ask after his mother. When they told him how she had died, he cried out and dropped as if dead himself, and rose again swearing to cut his way back to Zhaoge for her sake. With a divine sword he took the grudging commander's head and broke the family out of Tong Pass, then turned back to his master, as an immortal's discipline required, promising to meet his father again in the west. There were passes left. At the next, a commander offered Huang Feihu a warm welcome and a soft bed, meaning to burn him in it — and it was Jia-shi who saved him, her ghost riding in on a night wind to snuff the lamp and wake her husband before the fire could catch. The immortal sent for Huang Feihu's son. Thirteen years earlier, passing on his way to Kunlun, he had seen a killing-aura rise from a three-year-old of rare features and had taken the boy, Huang Tianhua, up his mountain; now he sent him down to save his father, saying the two would later serve Zhou together. Tianhua came by earth-magic to Tong Pass, ground immortal medicine into water, and forced it through Huang Feihu's teeth; after a while Huang Feihu cried out in pain and opened his eyes. The Daoist knelt: "Father, I am Huang Tianhua, lost from the garden when I was three." When Tianhua learned his mother was not among them, and was told she had died from the tower and his aunt with her, he cried out and fainted; reviving, he swore he would not go back to his mountain but would kill his way to Zhaoge to avenge her. With the Moye sword, his master's treasure, he took Chen Tong's head, and the family broke out of Tong Pass. Then Tianhua, bound by his master's command, parted from his father, promising to meet at Xiqi. At Chuanyun Pass the guard Chen Wu, brother of Chen Tong, feigned welcome and feasted Huang Feihu, meaning to burn him alive in the night; but Jia-shi came in a whirlwind, put out the lamp, and warned her husband — "great flames are coming; wake your brothers" — so the family escaped, and Huang Feihu killed Chen Wu.

The fourth pass was the hardest, because its commander was Huang Feihu's own father. Huang Gun had kept the frontier for the Shang all his life, and the word that his eldest son had turned rebel shamed him to the bone. He drew up prison-carts and stood in the road to arrest his own child and hand him to Zhaoge — better a loyal corpse for a son, he said, than a living traitor. And Huang Feihu, who had defied the throne itself, bowed to his father and made ready to give himself up. It was the sworn brother Huang Ming who would not let a whole family walk into the executioner's hands. By a hard trick — surrounding the old man, then burning the pass's own granary so the throne would blame him too and leave him no road back — he made the father a rebel beside the son. Huang Gun bowed eight times toward Zhaoge, hung his fifty-six marshal's seals on the hall, and rode west with the boys he could not save any other way. The fourth pass, Jie Pai, was held by Huang Gun, Huang Feihu's father. Hearing his eldest had rebelled and killed the pass-commanders along the way, Huang Gun drew up three thousand troops and ten prison-carts to take the rebels and send them to Zhaoge. He cursed his son at length for betraying seven generations of loyalty over one woman, and said: if you would be a loyal and filial son, dismount and let me deliver you to Zhaoge, that I may live and you die still a subject of Shang. Huang Feihu, on his ox, cried, "Do not blame me, Father — deliver me to Zhaoge," and made to dismount. But Huang Ming stopped him, and by a stratagem — the four sworn brothers surrounding Huang Gun, then loading up his goods and burning his granary so that, with the stores gone, he could not answer to Zhaoge and would surely die there — forced the old man to go with them. Huang Gun sighed that he was made a fugitive against his will, bowed eight times toward Zhaoge, hung his fifty-six marshal's seals in the Silver Peace Hall, and led three thousand of his own troops west.

At the last pass the family's luck ran all the way out. Its commander kept a sorcerer, Yu Hua, who fought with a Soul-Slaying Banner that plucked a man out of his saddle and dropped him bound in the dirt; one by one it took Huang Feihu, and his brothers, and his sworn friends, and his second son — seven captured generals — until only the old father and two small grandsons were left free. Huang Gun put off his armor, dressed in mourning white, and knelt at the enemy's gate to beg — not for himself, but for the life of a seven-year-old boy. The commander refused him: the law was the law, and a rebel's whole house went to Zhaoge together. So the old man surrendered himself and the children into the cells. What saved them was not mercy but another immortal's errand: Taiyi Zhenren sent Nezha down from his mountain, and the lotus-born boy on his wind-and-fire wheels barred the escort road, caught the Soul-Slaying Banner in his leopard-skin bag as though it were nothing, felled the sorcerer with a golden brick, and broke every prison-cart open. He took the pass ahead of them and carried the whole family through to the border of Zhou. At Sishui Pass the guard Han Rong had a general, Yu Hua, called the "Seven-Headed General," who used a heterodox Soul-Slaying Banner that lifted a man from his mount and cast him down bound. One after another Yu Hua captured Huang Feihu, then Huang Ming and Zhou Ji, then Feibiao and Feibao, then Long Huan and Wu Qian, then the second son Huang Tianlu — seven officers taken. With only himself and two grandsons still free, Huang Gun took off his helmet and jade belt, put on plain mourning dress, and knelt at Han Rong's gate to beg that the seven-year-old grandson be released, to keep one thread of the Huang line alive. Han Rong refused, saying he could not bend the law and betray his charge — the whole house must go to Zhaoge for judgment. Huang Gun then surrendered himself and the two boys into prison. But Taiyi Zhenren of Golden Light Cave, sensing their peril, sent his disciple Nezha down to save them. Nezha, on wind-and-fire wheels, barred the escort road, caught Yu Hua's Soul-Slaying Banner in his leopard-skin bag, struck the sorcerer down with a golden brick, opened the prison-carts, took Sishui Pass, and escorted the family to the borders of Xiqi, parting from them at Golden Rooster Ridge.

The rest was arrival. Still in his mourning white, Huang Feihu rode ahead into Xiqi — a country, he found, where travelers gave way on the road and the fields stood full — and asked the way to the house of the prime minister, Jiang Ziya. Ziya came out to the eaves to meet him and would not let the general kneel. Huang Feihu told him the whole of it: the New Year's rite, the fox's snare, his wife broken on the stones, his sister thrown after her, and the plain old reason a subject leaves an unjust throne. Ziya brought him before King Wu of Zhou, who had heard of Huang Feihu for years and received him like a piece of enormous good fortune — the sign, his ministers said, that the west was rising and the Shang was falling. The king kept the general's old Shang title nearly whole and changed a single word of it: the Kingdom-Guarding Martial Success King became the Kingdom-Founding Martial Success King. The man who had spent thirty years defending a throne would spend the rest of his life helping to build the one that replaced it. The Huang family passed Shouyang Mountain, Taohua Ridge, and Yan Mountain, and came to Mount Xiqi, seventy li from the city. Huang Feihu, in plain mourning cloth, rode ahead into Xiqi — where he marveled that travelers yielded the road and the people were prosperous, a land under a sage — and asked for the mansion of Prime Minister Jiang. Ziya came to the ceremonial gate to receive him; Huang Feihu bowed at the eaves, and Ziya returned the courtesy, saying he had once served under the general and would not let him be so humble. Asked why he had left Shang, Huang Feihu told of the king's debauchery, of Daji's plot against his wife so that she died from the tower, of his sister thrown from the Star-Watching Tower, and said: "When the ruler is not upright, the subject goes to another state — this is only right." Ziya, delighted, presented him to King Wu, who said he had long admired Huang Feihu and received him as a threefold blessing, a sign of the west's flourishing. Learning that in Shang Huang Feihu had held the title Kingdom-Guarding Martial Success King (鎮國武成王), King Wu said, "In Xiqi we will change only one word," and named him Kingdom-Founding Martial Success King (開國武成王). Huang Feihu gave thanks, and a feast was held.