Hoai and the Holy Fox

It was 8031 BCE. Cáo was the youngest of four kits. He struggled for recognition within the fox family, but when his mother soothed him at night in their den, she would always say, “One day Cáo, one day. If you work hard at your magic, even you may write your story into the stars.”

It was 1420, and Emperor Lê Thái Tổ was racing through Lam Sơn, his bitter enemy, Marquis Li Bin of the Ming army, hot on his heels. His men had moved off at an angle to divert the pursuing enemy while the emperor moved off alone, to the protests of his personal guard. Perhaps they’d been right. Shortly after they’d parted ways, the emperor had heard the war horns of the Ming army off in the distance, and although it was difficult to judge, he estimated that the diversion had not been entirely successful. Then his horse stumbled in a deceptively deep hole in the grass, and became lame. The emperor left her and raced on, now on foot. The river on his right was widening, but also getting deeper and more powerful. There was no escape that way. And the thicket on his left now seemed to curve in towards the river…

It was 1958. Hoai was born after a very long delivery. His umbilical cord was cut and tied, and he was placed on his mother’s chest. But he was silent and unbreathing. His mother was exhausted, and in pain. And increasingly desperate, though the midwife was now gone, rushed off to another birth. But, miraculously, after two minutes that seemed like centuries to her, he suddenly jolted, breathed in, and to his mother’s almost unbearable relief, began to cry. His parents, honourable though poor, brought him from their small rural village where they were both employed in a brick works, north to Buôn Ma Thuột, where a comparatively wealthy old aunt lived, (all four of their parents having been killed in the first year of the war.) After a few weeks, it was decided Hoai’s parents would go back to their village and their jobs, and little Hoai would stay with his aunt for the first three years of his life.

The plan changed when, after a couple of happy years, his aunt, surprisingly for her age, got engaged. This meant she would have to move far away, up north to Vinh. Hoai’s parents made the trip back up to Buôn Ma Thuột to collect their little boy, but bandits attacked and killed them on their journey, and they never arrived. His aunt, deeply saddened by the loss of her brother and sister-in-law, told the little Hoai that he would be coming with her up to Vinh, just like he’d wanted, but it soon turned out that her new fiancé wouldn’t have it. To his aunt’s horror, he was left at the local Trần Nhân Tông shrine. Just left and abandoned there at the age of just over two. His aunt wailed tragically that he would surely die, but her fiancé merely shrugged and mumbled, “That’s good,” and whipped the horse whose traces held the trap the two of them were sitting in. It moved on.

By age five, living with a local teacher who’d lost her son in the war, Hoai had grown into a happy, healthy and helpful little boy. He brought her joy. The teacher was very kind to him, although she could be bossy and outspoken sometimes. When she was caught teaching the folk religion of Đạo Lương to her class and her boy, she was warned, but that wouldn’t stop her. Her fate was sealed not so much by the teaching of forbidden religion, but by her domineering attitude, in a time and place where women were still seen as second-class citizens. She was beaten to death by the authorities. People muttered that this was going too far, but they were all scared about being made the next example of disobedience to authority…

A family who was friendly to the victim took Hoai in, but although he got along well with the mother and one of the sons, the father and other son took a dislike to him. The son got into a fight with Hoai, who barely fought back, though he evaded most of the other’s kicks and punches most infuriatingly. It was then that the father walked him down to the local police station and bribed the sergeant to do something with the boy. As they walked down there Hoai had asked what he’d done to offend him. The man clipped his ears. The boy asked what would happen to him. The man said that he could die for all he cared. How would that help him, the boy questioned, his already high-pitched voice rising. But that just earned him another clip.

The sergeant arranged to have Hoai shipped up to an orphanage in Thanh Hóa. Unfortunately Hoai’s cycle of moving north, and to steadily larger towns and then cities seemed to work against him. He was bullied at the orphanage, although he had one good friend, a little girl called Nhung. By the age of eight, most of the staff at the orphanage, though generally tolerant and even appreciative of the boy and his amiable and helpful attitude, even in diversity, agreed that he was an unsettling influence and arranged to have him moved. They struggled to find a place for him though, and ended up shipping him even further north to an even bigger city, Nam Định. Nhung insisted on coming with him. The new orphanage was very overcrowded, and a weird keep-to-yourself culture made the place grim. A tall and skinny man who was secretly a monk, and who administered the orphanage, appreciated Hoai. He tried to keep an eye on him, but the young boy just had a way of innocently annoying many of the people around him. He managed to get in the bad books of a gang of big kids who were insulted that he refused to be dominated by them. They waited until he was alone, then jumped out at him, and surrounded him. After saying they were going to kill him, and Hoai asking with genuine bewilderment how his death would help them, they started hitting and kicking him. Hard. Nhung had been coming to meet him though, and when she saw from a distance what was happening, she ran up and threw herself furiously at the boys. Who accidentally killed her, then raced off. Despite his injuries clearly supporting their side of the story, the Thanh Hóa judicial system was extremely corrupt, and Hoai himself was accused of her murder!

The boy was locked in a police cell for months and months, subsisting on extremely bare rations. He got skinnier and skinnier. Though he never complained, eventually the genuine smile, that had been his default facial expression all his life, faded. After the better part of a year they moved him to a jail, north, in Haiphong. Hoai spent his first day in the cells reflecting on the fact it was his eleventh birthday, and he had no freedom to celebrate it, and, now that Nhung was dead, no-one to celebrate it with anyway. He sat on his bed, back to the wall, knees up and those dreadfully skinny arms around his bony ankles. He looked up through the bars at the night sky.

One evening he was looking through the bars as usual, and all the noises around him seemed to fade. The guard’s toilet cistern, with its broken ballcock, filling and filling and spilling and spilling. The guards’ snores. The man in the cell over from his wanking repeatedly. The gravelly call of the occasional bulbul, up in the teak trees outside the jail. They were still semi-active, even though it was now night-time. The burbling snuffles of one of the men heroically failing to hide his sobs, and the wailing of a fifteen-year-old boy in another cell, who wasn’t even trying to hide his personal grief. The bicycle bells from out on the road, along with the heavy tyres of trucks bumping through the potholes and over debris. And, always, in the background, the sound of the war – gunfire and explosions out on the edge of the city, and sometimes within it.

All sounds had disappeared other than Hoai’s own heartbeat. He still stared through the bars up at the night sky. There were a few clouds, but he could see the stars most of the time. They were coming for him tomorrow. He’d been rotting in a cell for what seemed like most of his life now, but somehow he knew it. He would be executed tomorrow.

Although his eyes were well-adjusted to the dark now, soon even his vision seemed to fade. The walls of his cell. The floor. The ceiling. The corridor outside the barred wall of the cell, and then the bars too. He lifted an arm slowly in front of his face. Nothing. Back outside the window though, he could still see the night. The stars. He just hung there in space. A heartbeat and stars. It was then that he remembered Linh, the teacher who’d once taken him in. She was the most loving mother figure he could remember. At the end of the day, when he’d lain peacefully on his mattress under his warm blanket, she would read to him from a book with words on the cover he didn’t then understand: Lĩnh Nam chích quái. He’d thought first it was a book about her, as the first word looked like her name. The book had marvellous stories. He most enjoyed hearing about hồ ly tinh, the foxes with magical powers. Especially the cửu vĩ thiên hồ, the nine-tailed celestial fox. Linh would read until the little boy fell asleep, pull the blanket up for him, and leave him dreaming the stories of Vietnam’s spirit.

Hoai’s body was still in the same position on the bed as 3am came and went, and yet he was not aching or stiff-necked. His knees and his back felt fine. He was still looking out the small high-up barred window in complete silence. And complete darkness, except for the piercing beauty of the stars. Suddenly he felt a jolt intrude on his inner calm. There! Two eyes at the window! The heartbeat started racing. Eyes. Whiskers. A long snout. Large triangular ears. The fox wriggled impossibly through the narrow bars, and leapt down onto Hoai’s bed. His senses of hearing and sight returned, and he looked out through the bars to the corridor to see if anyone was observing him, but it was 3am, and everything seemed quiet. He looked back, and although most of his facial expression didn’t change, his eyes went very wide. The fox had nine tails! This was a hồ ly tinh! It walked around him on the bed, found a soft-ish spot, and lay down, splaying out the tails so he could easily count them. The boy was awed. This celestial fox was at least ten-thousand years old. It would have been practicing its magic at least five thousand years before the first Vietnamese dynasty! It was the most worthy-of-respect being he’d ever been near, and yet he couldn’t help softly stroking its muzzle, head and back.

A slightly unsettling mental bond formed between them. It seemed to need his help. It seemed to need his… his death. How could his death help anything? Hoai asked that question that he’d struggled with on many occasions throughout his life. The bond between them deepened, and suddenly he understood. Though a brick-maker may die, the bricks they have made remain. Vietnam was a sacred temple, and each course of bricks in its many walls were the legacy of it people over the ages. And although war had eaten away at the strength of some parts of the structure, the calm, cheerful, intelligent, and brave spirit of the country had, on the whole, strengthened and beautified it more and more with time. Through the way he'd lived his life, Hoai had contributed many bricks. And he now understood. With his death he could remove a source of contamination of those bricks, especially around one of the most precious parts of the building.

The bond between boy and fox broke. They looked at each other and had true understanding and appreciation. The fox leapt back up towards the windowsill, and Hoai lay down on his prison bed. And for just a glimmer of a second he thought he saw the ghostly shape of Nhung, riding on the back of the hồ ly tinh!

The magic of the cửu vĩ thiên hồ was strong, but not enough to leap back in time that far. But, with the sacrifice of the two special children he’d hunted for so long, he could do it. The next day, as they boy died, his body riddled with firing squad bullets, his soul pushed at the cửu vĩ thiên hồ, and Cáo was flung back into the past.

Emperor Lê Thái Tổ heard the thunder of horses’ hooves far behind him, but catching up. He ran on desperately. Suddenly there was a flash of white, close over the waters of the river. He looked over and saw the body of a young girl in a white dress floating on the waters, her expression quite calm, although she was obviously dead. The emperor took off his armour and waded into the freezing churning waters. He grabbed the body of the child, and, when they were out of the river, he picked up his armour, and the child – though waterlogged she was very light – and carried her over towards the thicket. There was a small opening just there! Although he suffered many painful scratches from the prickly thicket leaves, he managed to walk through about ten steps until he found a small clearing. There he dug a hole, and buried the girl, saying prayerful words over her grave when he was done. There he hid, knowing it was only a matter of time until his enemy found him.

Marquis Li Bin knew he had his hated rival in his grasp now. He could see the impenetrable thicket on his left getting closer and closer to the river. Yes! The fool had walked into a trap! This evening he would be burning the emperor’s tongue to ashes, and storing them until he got home in order to graffiti a rebuke to Lê Thái Tổ, and his pathetic kingdom, right on the Li Bin stronghold gate. That would teach this peasant realm to mind their manners.

Suddenly, from the direction they were headed, came a white fox. With many tails? It darted this way and that, and the marquis, who knew he was in control of the situation, decided he could take his time, and follow it. As they got closer and closer though, the lure of the chase of the animal seemed to take him over. Several times he thought he had it, but by the end of the day it had eluded him. Each day after that he would start his army searching for the wretched creature earlier and earlier, and they would find it. But it would elude them! Each day he pushed the men harder and for longer. The chase occupied him completely. Then, finally, after a month’s chase, they caught it!

Marquis Li Bin reached his stronghold, and paused. The remainder of his army – after a long and incredibly wearying five-month journey – trudged wearily forward into the compound, towards their lodgings. Li Bin had no ashes to adorn his stronghold’s gate with. The fox’s tail-of-nine-tails would have to do.

And, through Cáo, a new story was added to the holy pages of the Lĩnh Nam chích quái, and the temple that was Vietnam rested more calmly, more beautifully, and more assuredly on its foundation of ages. With the two heavenly children on his back, Cáo leapt unblinking up towards the stars.