Chapter 46 — Pain
劍問蒼天 · Page 4 of 5
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.