Hawaii - James Michener [248]
What the invading Tartars would have done with this walled-in village, had they ever got to it, was a mystery, for they could scarcely have squeezed out of it a single grain of wheat more than it already yielded, and if they took much away, the village would starve, but it became a fixation with Char and his friends that the Tartars, after satiating themselves with Peking, were certain to burst into this ancient village, so that the farmers formed the habit of convening each night in the farmhouse of their wisest member, General Ching, to discuss plans for the defense of their land, for now there was no government to protect them.
This Ching was not a real general, of course, but merely a stocky, red-faced wanderer who had chanced to be near Peking one day when the emperor's henchmen required an army in a hurry. Ching had been swept up, and in a long campaign found that he liked military life, which was a disreputable fact in itself. After the war, which proved fruitless, for the Tartars quickly overran the very areas Ching had been pacifying, he returned home to the mountain and to his resolute, stubborn associates, regaling them month after month with stories of his campaigns in the north.
"We will place men here and here," stout-hearted Ching proposed. He was a courageous man of whom it was said, "He can march forty miles in a day and fight that evening." He had a broad, resolute face, and in many of the things he did in the years following his impromptu military service he displayed great fortitude, so that although he was clearly a braggart, men did not begrudge him his title of general and listened when he predicted: "The Tartars will approach our village by this route. What other way would a sensible general choose?"
But before General Ching's theories could be tested, an enemy far worse than the Tartars, and far more familiar, descended upon the village. The rains did not fall as required, and a hot sun blazed remorselessly in the copper sky. Seedlings withered before the middle of spring, and by midsummer even drinking water was at a prohibitive premium. Families with old people began to wonder when the ancient fathers and mothers would die, and babies whined.
Farmer Char and his wife Nyuk Moi had lived through four famines and they knew that if one practiced a rigid discipline and ate the roots of grass and chewy tendrils dug from the forest, there was always a chance that one's family would survive. But this year the famine struck with overpowering force, and by midsummer it became apparent that most of the village families must either take to the road or die among the parched and blazing hills. Therefore, when the sun was most intense, Char and his wife fetched mud bricks from the almost vanished village stream and walled up the entrance to their home, placing a cross of black sticks where the door had been. When the house was almost sealed, Char went inside and weighed for the last time the little bag of seed grain upon which life would depend when his family returned next spring. Hefting it in his hand, he assured his miserable group: "The seed grain is now locked inside. It will wait for us."
He then climbed out and swiftly closed the opening. When this was done, he turned his back sorrowfully upon his home and led his family out of the walled village and onto the highway. For the next seven months they would roam over the face of China, begging food, eating