彩面環睛 Painted Faces and Ringed Eyes
逐句解 Line by line
Painted faces and ringed eyes; two horns, towering.
The portrait opens on the head, and on the detail that gives the game away: 二角, two horns. 崢嶸 normally describes a mountain — craggy, lofty — which makes the horns geological.
Four sharp, sharp ears; the apertures of the spirit flashing bright.
Four ears between three creatures would be odd arithmetic; the line means each has ears that come to points. 靈竅, the numinous apertures, is a term from inner alchemy for the openings through which spirit passes — used here of eyes that glitter.
Their whole bodies patterned like painted work; their coats all over brocade, like flying blossom.
蜚英 — flying flowers — with 蜚 an old way of writing the graph for flight. The demons are being described as decorative objects, which for creatures whose whole trade is appearance is nicely judged.
The first: on his head a fox-fur flowered cap, warm; over all his face a bristling mane, and the heat steaming off him.
Now the three are separated out, and each gets a temperature. This is 辟寒大王, the Cold-Averter, and he radiates heat — a fur cap and steam coming off him. The names are not decoration; the novel has built each king's appearance out of what he wards away.
The second: light gauze hung about him and fierce flames flying; his four hooves flowered and glossy, jade-bright and clear.
And this is 辟暑大王, the Heat-Averter — in thin gauze, with flames flying off him. The pattern holds and the logic is a charm's logic: the thing that wards off heat is the thing you keep near a fire. Note 四蹄, four hooves. Nobody has said the word yet.
The third: awesome and mighty, his roar like thunder shaking; his tusks sharp and keen, outdoing silver needles.
辟塵大王, the Dust-Averter, gets the noise. 賽 is to rival or outdo, and the tusks beat needles for sharpness. Three kings, three sensory registers: heat, light, sound.
Every one of them brave and fierce, each holding one of three kinds of weapon: one wielding a battle-axe, one able with a great sabre;
The armoury, and the line breaks off mid-count so the third can have its own line. 鉞斧 is the broad ceremonial battle-axe of the storyteller's stock repertoire.
but look at the third — across his shoulder he carries a knotted vine-staff.
The best weapon in the chapter, precisely because it is not a weapon. A 扢撻藤 is a gnarled, knotty length of vine — a stick. Two of these kings carry parade steel and the third has picked up something off the mountain. A reading: 擔 here is dān, the verb, to carry across the shoulder — not the dàn of a carried load, which is the same graph and the reading it takes at 守著擔 earlier in the chapter, exactly as chapter 1 splits the two at 擔挽火麻繩.
The demons' portrait is built the way this novel always builds them — matched couplets, one feature to a line — but with a design underneath it that pays off the names given three passages ago. The Cold-Averting King wears fur and steams with heat. The Heat-Averting King wears thin gauze and throws flames. The Dust-Averting King roars like thunder. Each is dressed as the thing he claims to ward off, which is a charm's logic and also a swindler's.
And the poem tells you what they are without once naming it. Two horns. Four hooves. Tusks. A muster of mountain bulls, water buffalo and yellow oxen. These are rhinoceroses, though the chapter will not say so for a while yet — and a rhinoceros in Chinese lore is exactly the creature whose horn is supposed to ward off cold, heat and dust. Their names are their own bodies, sold as amulets.
The last line is the one to keep. Two of them carry parade weapons, an axe and a great sabre, and the third comes out with a knotty length of vine across his shoulder. After a thousand years of nobody turning up, the third king has not bothered to fetch anything better than a stick.