Hawaii - James Michener [254]
Across great mountain ranges the travelers moved, down swollen rivers and past burned villages. Winter came and deep snows, summer and the blazing heat of central China. At times General Ching was forced to lay siege to large cities, until food was given, and had China been at peace, imperial troops would undoubtedly have cut the marauders to shreds and crucified the leaders, but China was not at peace, and the great trek continued.
Years passed, and the stolid, resolute men of Hunan struggled southward, a few miles a day. Sometimes they bogged down at a river bank for two or three months. The siege of a city might delay them for a year. They ate, no one knew how. They stole from all. In the high mountain passes in winter their feet, wrapped in bags, left bloody trails, but everyone was constantly on the alert to fight. More than a thousand children were born, and even they fell under the simple rules of General Ching: "No old people can join us. You must submit to the government of Ching and Char. We never break into a sealed house."
There was only one element in the army that successfully defied General Ching, and that was Char's old mother. Like a resilient field hoe whose suppleness increases with age, the wiry old woman thrived on the long march. If there was plenty of food, she was able to gorge herself without the stomach sickness that assaulted the others at such a time; and if there was starvation ahead, she apparently had some inner source of strength that carried her along. General Ching used to look at her and swear, "By the fires of hell, old woman, I think you were sent to torment me. Aren't you ever going to die?"
"Mountains and rivers are like milk to me," she replied. And she became the symbol of the group: an indomitable old woman who had known starvation and murder and change. She refused to be carried, and often when her son, General Char, rejoined the group after some rear-guard action against local troops who were trying to disperse the army, he would throw his sword upon the ground and lie exhausted beside his mother, and she would say, "My years cannot go on forever, but I am sure that you and I will see a good land before I die."
The years passed, and this curious, undigested body of stalwart Chinese, holding to old customs and disciplined as no other that had ever wandered across China, probed constantly southward, until in the year 874 they entered upon a valley in Kwangtung Province, west of the city of Canton. It had a clear, swift-running river, fine mountains to the rear, and soil that seemed ripe for intensive cultivation. "I think this is what we have been looking for," General Ching said as his minions stared down at the rich promise below them. "This is the Golden Valley."
He held a consultation with General Char and his lieutenants, and then called in Char's fantastically old mother. "What do you think?" he asked her solemnly.
"From what I can see, it looks good," she said.
The general rose, cupped his hands, and faced north. "You old people, dead back there in the walled village!" he shouted. "Your children have found their new home." Then he glared at Char's mother and said, "You can die now. It is really outrageous how long you have lived."
The occupation of the valley was not so simple a task as General Ching and his advisers had hoped, for the river bed was occupied by a capable, fiercely compact group of southerners whom Ching and his cohorts held to be not Chinese at all, for they spoke a different language, ate different food, dressed differently, followed different customs and hated above all else the old-style Chinese from the north. At first, Ching attempted to settle the problem directly, by driving the southerners out, but their troops were as well trained as his, so his army had little success. Next, he tried negotiation, but the southerners were more