The Whipping Boy

Nights 87-89

After a lot of heavy chapters where the first generation has mostly died off, we get what feels like comic relief. Kongming takes charge, and he repeatedly whips Meng Huo, the “Barbarian King” from Magic. Kongming defeats his first set of allies with his strategic mercy. Then, it requires a little more creativity to defeat him in the next rounds. 

Despite the comic relief of Meng Huo being defeated over and over, we get some pretty gruesome deaths. When crossing the Lu, many men fell over dead in the winter and others who got back to the shore also died, “blood flowing from their mouths and noses.” (p. 1556). And later, Meng Huo retreats behind other springs. One is “like boiling water,” the other is the “Spring of the Mute” which causes loss of a speech, and a few days later, death.” (p. 1576) And more. Kongming finds allies or other ways around these obstacles.

One of the more interesting notes is how Meng Huo’s men are described as “tribal chieftains and braves” (p. 1570) or men that run around without clothes. I wonder how much of this is a function of how this is translated from how people from hinterlands are perceived in Western culture. So far, they have not been referred to as “savages.” We’ll see how it goes. We haven’t seen the Meng Huo’s last defeat yet.