Zhao Gongming

T he Shang grand marshal Wen Zhong was losing his war in the west, and when a marshal is losing he sends for old friends. He sent to Mount Emei, to the Luofu Cave, for the immortal Zhao Gongming — a master of the Jie school who had passed an age in the mountains and had no quarrel of his own in the quarrel of kings. Zhao came anyway, for a friend's sake. He came down out of the clouds on a black tiger with a steel whip at his side, rode out ahead of the Shang camp, and called the enemy commander by name: "Tell Jiang Shang to come out and face me." The immortals on the Zhou side looked at the man on the tiger and understood, before a blow was struck, that the war had just turned. The grand marshal Wen Zhong, hard pressed in his western campaign, sent to Mount Emei, to the Luofu Cave, for the immortal Zhao Gongming of the Jie school, who came to his aid. Riding his tiger and raising his whip, Zhao rode out before the camp and shouted, "Tell Jiang Shang to come out at once and face me." (Jiang Shang is Jiang Ziya.)

Jiang Ziya came out, and the Zhou immortals came out behind him, the great names of the Chan school one after another, and one after another Zhao Gongming put them down. He fought with the steel whip, and what the whip could not reach he reached another way. From his sleeve he threw the Twenty-Four Sea-Calming Pearls, and they rose into the air and came down among the immortals, and wherever they came down an immortal fell. In one stretch of fighting he wounded five of the Chan school's senior adepts, Guangchengzi among them, and drove the rest back inside their own lines. The orthodox immortals of Kunlun had no answer for it. Force would not beat this man, and the Zhou side knew it. Jiang Ziya and the immortals came forth. Zhao Gongming loosed the Sea-Calming Pearls — there were twenty-four of them — and with the pearls and his whip he wounded five of the senior immortals, Guangchengzi among them, and drove the others back. The Chan-school immortals could not overcome him by force.

What beat him was not force. Two hermits came down to the Zhou camp, Xiao Sheng and Cao Bao, and they brought a small, unremarkable thing: a copper coin called the Treasure-Dropping Coin, which did just what the name said. The next time Zhao Gongming sent up his pearls, one of the hermits threw the coin, and the pearls that no immortal could dodge simply lost the sky and fell, dead weight, to the ground. His dragon-binding rope fell with them. In a single exchange the terror of the western front stood disarmed, his treasures lying in the dirt to be gathered up by two men he had never heard of. He turned his tiger and rode off, and the immortals let him go, a beaten man being a problem that has solved itself. They were wrong about that. Two immortals, Xiao Sheng and Cao Bao, came to the Zhou side bearing the Treasure-Dropping Coin. When Zhao Gongming next sent up his pearls, the coin was cast, and the Sea-Calming Pearls, together with his dragon-binding rope, fell to the ground. Having lost his treasures, Zhao Gongming withdrew.

“They could not beat him on the field, so they killed him without a blow — his name on a straw man, and three arrows.”

Humiliated, Zhao Gongming did not stay home. He rode east to the Three Immortal Isles, where his three younger sisters lived — Yunxiao, Qiongxiao, and Bixiao, immortals in their own right — and asked to borrow their Golden Serpent Scissors, a pair of shears that opened in the air and closed again would cut any living thing in two. Yunxiao, the eldest, did not want to give it up; she could see the shape of where this was going as clearly as anyone. But a brother is a brother, and in the end she took the scissors down and put them in his hand. He rode back to the war more dangerous than he had left it, and now there was nothing on the field that could stand in front of the scissors and live. Zhao Gongming went to the Three Immortal Isles and asked his sisters Yunxiao, Qiongxiao, and Bixiao to lend him the Golden Serpent Scissors. Yunxiao was firmly unwilling, but at last she brought out the scissors and gave them to him, and he returned to the battle.

On the Zhou side the immortals had run out of answers, which is usually when the strangest help arrives. A Daoist none of them knew walked into the camp and named himself Lu Ya, a wanderer out of the western Kunlun, of no school and no rank that anyone could place. He heard their trouble — the immortal on the tiger they could not kill — and he did not offer to fight him. He took out a slim book and put it in Jiang Ziya's hands. It was called the Nailhead Seven-Arrows Book, and what it held was not a weapon but a method: a way to kill a man you never touch, from far off, with string and straw and patience. The immortals of Kunlun, who had spent the whole war trading blows, leaned in to read. A Daoist came to the camp and said, "I am Lu Ya, a wanderer of the western Kunlun." He gave Jiang Ziya the Nailhead Seven-Arrows Book and taught him how to use it.

Jiang Ziya did as the book instructed. He went up to Qishan and raised an altar, and on the altar he built a little man out of straw. On its chest he wrote three characters — Zhao Gongming — and he set one lamp burning at its head and one at its feet. Then he let down his hair, took a sword in his hand, and paced the steps of the Dipper across the altar floor, drawing talismans and burning them and forming seals, and three times a day he bowed low to the straw man that wore the living immortal's name. There was nothing martial in any of it. It had the look of a funeral held for someone who was not yet dead. Jiang Ziya went to Qishan and built an altar, and on it tied a straw man. On its body he wrote the three characters "Zhao Gongming," set a lamp at its head and a lamp at its feet, and, with his hair unbound and a sword in hand, paced the pattern of the Dipper, drew and burned talismans and formed seals, and made obeisance three times a day, continuing thus toward the twenty-first day.

Far to the east, in the Shang camp, Zhao Gongming began to come apart. It started as heat: his heart, he said, felt as if it had caught fire, and his mind as if it were frying in oil. He could not sit and he could not lie still. He paced, he clawed at his own ears and face, he could find no road out of a room that had no walls. Day by day, as the straw figure on the far altar took its bows, the immortal who had put down five adepts and outrun the whole Chan school sank lower, until he could neither stay awake nor truly sleep and knew nothing of what went on around him. No one had wounded him. Nothing had touched him. That was the horror of it. Far off in the Shang camp, Zhao Gongming's heart burned as if with fire and his thoughts seethed as if fried in oil; he could find no way to flee, and clawed at his ears and cheeks. As the days went on he sank ever deeper into a stupor, sleeping yet never resting, until he no longer knew what went on around him.

On the twenty-first day, Jiang Ziya washed his hands, took up a bow of mulberry wood and arrows of peach wood, and turned to the straw man. He set the first arrow to the string and put it through the left eye. He put the second through the right eye. He drove the third into the heart. Far to the east, in the middle of the Shang camp, in the middle of his own marshals, Zhao Gongming sat up, cried out once, and died — no mark anywhere on him but the three the arrows had made in a doll. So the immortal of Mount Emei, who could not be beaten on any field, was killed by his own name written on a bundle of straw. On the twenty-first day Jiang Ziya cleansed his hands, took up the bow, and nocked the arrows, and shot the straw man: the first into the left eye, the second into the right eye, the third into the heart. In that same moment Zhao Gongming died in the Shang camp.