The Promise to Herd Cattle and Sheep Beyond Yanmen Pass

The Promise to Herd Cattle and Sheep Beyond Yanmen Pass is Xiao Feng and A'Zhu’s vision of a life together beyond the frontier, where riding, hunting, and tending herds might replace vengeance and separation. Its decisive significance lies in the gulf between the future they describe and the future they receive: first a plan to begin after Xiao Feng’s revenge, then a plea to postpone that revenge, and finally a vow recalled at A'Zhu’s grave. The imagined pasture becomes both a measure of their intimacy and an emblem of a peace the story will not grant them.

A future beyond the Pass

Xiao Feng first sets the plan beside the revenge he still intends to carry out. He tells A'Zhu that after confronting Duan Zhengchun, they will go north beyond Yanmen Pass, ride horses, hunt, and pasture cattle and sheep, never again taking a step inside the Pass. He has already sworn to kill Duan Zhengchun’s whole family, but, after seeing Duan Zhengchun’s personal loyalty, decides that only the person responsible for the deed should answer for it. The imagined life together therefore begins as the future waiting on the far side of a final act of vengeance—and as a sign that Xiao Feng is already reconsidering how far revenge should reach.

The promise is concrete rather than grand: a shared life in which the two can travel and tend animals together. At a farmhouse, after buying rice and two chickens, Xiao Feng tries to reassure A'Zhu by describing their journey north and their life beyond the Pass. The ordinary meal and modest domestic vision stand in contrast to the violence and dangerous pursuit surrounding them. For Xiao Feng, the future makes their escape from the Central Plains imaginable; for A'Zhu, its closeness only sharpens her fear that they may not reach it.

A'Zhu asks him to wait

As A'Zhu falls ill and says she cannot accompany Xiao Feng that night, she tells him she does not want them to be separated. She asks him to take her beyond Yanmen Pass at once, live there together, and delay his revenge on Duan Zhengchun for a year. The request changes the promise from a destination after revenge into an alternative to its immediate completion: a year together should come first.

Xiao Feng explains why he believes waiting would create new danger. Duan Zhengchun’s martial arts are far inferior to his own, but a year later Xiao Feng would have to go to Dali, where the Duan family has many experts and a master of the Six Meridians Divine Sword might defeat him. A'Zhu accepts the danger in his reasoning and says he must not enter the tiger’s den alone. Xiao Feng, in turn, makes plain how much the plan now means: if he were alone, he would face the Duan family without concern for his life, but because he has A'Zhu and wants to be with her for life, his own life has become precious. The promised herding life is thus not merely a reward for surviving revenge; it changes how he values survival.

The vow survives its speakers

At the bridge, A'Zhu asks Xiao Feng to watch over her younger sister, A'Zi, whom she fears may go astray. Rather than accept that A'Zhu will remain absent, Xiao Feng answers that once she has recovered they will find A'Zi, and invites her as well to join them beyond Yanmen Pass. He imagines A'Zhu and himself as her sister’s elder sister and brother-in-law, turning the secluded future into a possible family reunion. A'Zi emerges from beneath the bridge and rejects the invitation, but her appearance confirms that A'Zhu’s plea has made the imagined future include her sister too.

After A'Zhu dies, Xiao Feng carries her body to a grave and covers it with earth, stopping short of covering her face. As he watches, he recalls that only hours earlier she had spoken of riding beyond Yanmen Pass, hunting, pasturing cattle and sheep, and staying with him for life. The memory turns the promise into the measure of what has been lost: from that day onward, he will never hear those words from her again, and the plan for the frontier has come to nothing. He kneels beside the grave for a long time before finally covering her face as well. The vow remains present not as a future they can resume, but as a life interrupted at the moment it seemed close enough to picture.

The frontier as promise and contradiction

The setting of the vow gains wider resonance in Xiao Feng’s later experiences among the Jurchen and Khitan. The Jurchen chief HeLiBu welcomes him as an honoured guest despite his Khitan identity; HeLiBu’s son AguDa admires him and gives up his own tent for Xiao Feng and A'Zi. Yet when Khitan and Jurchen forces meet, arrows are exchanged and a Jurchen hunter is killed. Xiao Feng restrains himself from killing his own people, dismounts Khitan riders without killing them, and later uses arrows to bring down four Khitan without causing their deaths. The frontier is not simply an open refuge: the same divided affiliations that make escape attractive keep intruding upon life there.

That contradiction becomes sharper when Xiao Feng, serving the Liao Empire, encounters Song captives taken in a raid. He recognizes the cruelty of the recurring border practice in which Liao soldiers raid neighbouring populations for provisions and Song soldiers retaliate in kind. Remembering the people captured at Yanmen Pass, he questions the division between Khitan, Song, Jurchen, and other peoples, then releases the captives and tells them to move away from the border. His reflection gives the private promise a larger ethical echo: the dreamed-of life beyond the Pass promises distance from the raids and enmities that make civilians suffer, while the story shows how difficult it is to escape those conflicts simply by crossing a frontier.

An unrealized measure of peace

The promise holds together two possibilities that never become the same life: Xiao Feng’s desire to settle his revenge and A'Zhu’s wish to postpone it long enough for them to be together. Its repeated images—horseback journeys, hunting, and tending herds—give their hope a recognizable shape, while the reversal at the grave makes those details painful precisely because they remain imaginable. The later border scenes widen the contrast: what the couple picture as a pastoral refuge stands against a world where imperial rivalry repeatedly turns frontier communities into targets.

For Xiao Feng, then, the promise is both intimate and ethical. It is a commitment to A'Zhu that makes his life worth protecting, and a vision of existence outside the cycle of pursuit and reprisal. A'Zhu’s death prevents the couple from fulfilling it; the remembered vow nevertheless endures as a poignant standard against which the violence of the frontier—and the cost of their separation—can be understood.