Chapter 46 — Pain

Zhang Qingyue was taken aback. Slowly he turned and looked at Bili, and saw on her somewhat thin but still beautiful face a faint, helpless smile. He could not help blurting out, "When I was gravely ill, you need not have given most of the dry food to me. That way you might have lived a few days longer, and perhaps…"

"Perhaps what?" Bili suddenly cut him off.

Zhang Qingyue was still a moment, then shook his head and said low, "Perhaps you might have been saved."

Bili shook her head slightly, a faint smile on her face. "I do not want to die. But I want even less to wait in this dead silent cave, facing a skeleton and then a slowly rotting corpse, until I go mad before anyone comes to save me."

Hearing her describe it so, Zhang Qingyue could not help shivering. It was indeed no life for a human being.

Bili glanced at him and said mildly, "What, are you afraid too?"

Zhang Qingyue at once straightened his back. "Not at all!"

A smile touched the corner of Bili's mouth, and in her eyes as she looked at him there slowly came a thread of tenderness, faint and uncertain. "Promise me one thing, will you?"

Zhang Qingyue frowned. "What?"

Bili smiled faintly. "Our dry food is all eaten now. Apart from a little clear water there is nothing left to eat. I fear in less than seven days we shall starve."

Zhang Qingyue was silent.

Bili's face was calm, but what she said next made Zhang Qingyue's color change as though he had seen a ghost: "In a few days, if you see that I can go on no longer, kill me first."

Zhang Qingyue's mouth fell open, and he pointed at her, struck speechless for a moment. But he had not expected that Bili, still calm of face, would go on to say things wild and world-shaking: "After I die, my body will remain. If your heart is set on living, then eat my flesh — it will likely buy you a while longer."

Zhang Qingyue nearly fell to the ground.

It was a long while before he recovered from the great shock. At once he said to himself, "So the demon cult truly are all monsters — even such a thing as this they can bring themselves to do!" But looking at Bili's face, calm through it all, a deeper chill came over him. He could not help stepping back, and the finger he pointed at her fairly trembled. "You — what did you say?"

Bili looked at him, and the tenderness in her eyes seemed to deepen; but in Zhang Qingyue's eyes it seemed more poisonous than all the venoms in the world combined.

"Do you not want to go back to Great Zhu Peak in Canglan Mountain and see your Senior Sister Ling'er? You have several fellow disciples still in this Ten Thousand Bats Grotto; they will surely come looking for you. The longer you live, the greater their hope of finding you — is that not so?" Bili bowed her head slightly, and her tone stayed as flat as ever.

But Zhang Qingyue had no thought now for her tone; he did not even notice how she knew of Senior Sister Ling'er. He only pointed at her in fury. "You — you would have me eat, eat, eat… You heretics and demons are beyond all reason! Shameless, disgusting, I — I… you — you…"

The more he spoke the angrier he grew, but his tongue would not obey him; "I-I-I" and "you-you-you" for a long while, and nothing more came out. Yet this reaction of his seemed to have been expected by Bili. She was not angered, nor did she mock him; she only gazed at him in a daze for a long time, until his ragged panting gradually subsided. Then she said slowly, "Whether you eat me or not is up to you. But you must kill me first!"

"There you go again!" Zhang Qingyue flared up. "Do not imagine I will sink into the mire with you demon-folk! Give me some dry food, and I will repay you with this flesh of mine — but to drag me down with you, never!"

Bili shook her head slowly. "No. It is because I am afraid."

Zhang Qingyue answered by habit: "Nonsense, I will never fall for your tricks… Eh? What did you say?"

As though at this crisis of life and death something in Bili had changed beyond all knowing, she seemed to sink into some memory; a fear rose on her face such as Zhang Qingyue had never seen there before. Then she tossed her head hard, as if to shake off some thought.

"Do you know what it is like," she said low, "to wait alone for death?"

Zhang Qingyue was taken aback, sensing dimly that there was something else behind this. His curiosity stirred. "What?"

The muscles at the corner of Bili's eye seemed to twitch. Facing death, facing this youth who alone kept her company in the face of death, she could not govern her feelings after all; even her voice carried a faint haze and hollowness: "When I was six, my mother took me back to the Six Fox Cave on Fox Fork Mountain to see my grandmother. But it happened that your righteous path attacked us then, and the vicious monk Pufang of the Brahma Sound Temple used his treasure, the Golden Alms Bowl of the Stupa, to bring the whole Six Fox Cave down, burying my mother and my grandmother and me alive beneath the earth."

Zhang Qingyue's body suddenly shuddered. An ill foreboding, a kind of dread, rose from his heart and ran chill from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet.

By now Bili seemed wholly lost in bitter memory, her eyes fixed straight ahead, blank and empty, as was her voice — flat and hollow, bearing the deepest pain: "I screamed and wept with terror. It was a little cave; a few great stones propped it up, and so we lived. But my grandmother was too badly hurt, and soon she died. My mother held me and wept in that pitch blackness, and then she buried her."

"We were buried deep in the earth. Apart from a few drops of water seeping between the rocks, all around us was hard, cold stone. I was terribly afraid, but my mother kept telling me: Little Yao, don't be afraid. Father will surely come to save us."

Zhang Qingyue held his breath now and listened closely, seized by an indescribable strangeness and a dim dread, as though he sensed that something was about to happen.

"But it was always dark there, and father never came. In that dark cave I was so frightened, and so hungry, and I wept without cease. I remember my mother sighing beside me, holding me tight in her arms, saying over and over: Little Yao, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Mother will not let anything happen to you. Your father will surely come to save us!"

Bili's face slowly turned deathly pale, but she went on: "But father still did not come, and I was starving. I cried to my mother for something to eat. She searched the cave again and again, but never found anything. In the end I was too hungry even to cry; I could only lie in my mother's arms and moan. Then one day, suddenly, my mother found a piece of meat!…"

Almost as Bili spoke, Zhang Qingyue saw her body begin to tremble.

"I was too hungry to care for anything. I ate it, and then I seemed to sleep comfortably, and it seemed that my mother laughed in the darkness too. And so it went: every so often my mother would find me a piece of meat, and so I lived. But my mother's voice grew weaker day by day. At last one day I called to her, and she did not answer. From then on I was alone in the darkness, waiting to die."

Bili slowly turned her head and looked at Zhang Qingyue. Meeting her eyes, he could not help a chill at heart. "Do you know what it is to wait for death there alone? Do you know the smell of your mother's body rotting slowly beside you? Do you know what it is to live forever unable to see what is around you, forever in terror?"

At each question Zhang Qingyue's body shuddered.

Bili fell silent. Zhang Qingyue hardly dared breathe. At last, as though waking from a dream — or half-waking still — she went on vaguely: "Then one day, all at once, a light shone down from above. I screamed with fright and hid in the deepest corner. The light grew brighter and brighter, and the opening above grew wider and wider. I heard father calling my name and my mother's. Then I saw him leap down and stand before me."