by Henry Lien
For me, the whole Motivation proceeds in clouds. Clouds roam across the Radial of Mighty Tranquility while each girl competes against her attackers. Clouds roam through my mind as my concentration on the Motivation competes against my thoughts about the attack on the palace.
Suki does well. She takes on ten attackers wearing nothing but a pair of forearm gauntlet shields, a torso plate, a sleeveless pearlsilk top, a pleated skirt, and pearlsilk underclothes, of course.
Sensei Madame Liao announces, “Disciple Chen Peasprout will be skating to Multipliers of ten attackers, wearing seven articles including two pieces of armor.”
I choose the same number of attackers as Suki did and wear the same armor except I don’t have a gauntlet on my left arm because of my injured wrist. So my Multipliers are higher than hers, but so is my risk. I skate onto the court.
I look at the practice mannequins standing on the perimeter to act as shields against stray fans. I think of the head of that mannequin burst open, the soft bodies crushed under the wedge of the ceiling on the starting line of the boys’—
An iron fan comes flying through the air at my unarmored arm.
I dodge just in time. Be here now, Peasprout. I focus my Chi. Then I do a forward flip and sling one of my fans back at the row of girls in front of me.
My opponents don’t rely on just their armor to block my fans; they also use their skate blades to block. I’m relying on dodging and reversing direction and twisting with mostly hummingbird-school moves, because I don’t have much armor and I can’t afford to use my skates to block.
I quickly discover that my deficiency is actually a great advantage. The fact that I have less armor doesn’t just mean that I have a higher Multiplier, it means that I can dodge and use defensive maneuvers much better than the other girls can. It also means that I am not as weighed down and thus can glide on my skates to preserve my knee and blades.
Finally, as the court rings again and again with the sound of my opponents’ skate blades blocking my fans, I’m noticing more and more of them stumbling as they skate. My fans are nicking their blades! However, they aren’t permitted to stop the Motivation to change their skate blades. They’ve never had to preserve their blades before like I’ve had to and thus they are no match for someone who can make her blades last.
I finish, triumphant and panting for breath. I end up placing slightly higher than Suki.
When Doi’s turn to skate comes, the dread hurts my stomach like monthly cramps. I know that Doi’s about to do something unforgettable and terrible. And that I might be the only one who can stop her.
When she skates out, the cloud cover is so dense that I can barely see her. There’s only a pale figure. At first, I think that she’s one of the practice mannequins.
Sensei Madame Liao announces, “Disciple Niu Doi will skate to Multipliers of ten attackers, wearing two articles including zero pieces of armor.”
The whole crowd of girls gasps. As the clouds slightly part, I see Doi in the middle of the court. She’s only wearing the thin, white underclothes that we all wear under our robes. No armor.
No, Doi, don’t do this!
A few of the senseis are whispering and complaining to Sensei Madame Liao, but she’s unmoved. She takes out a scroll, scans it for a clause, and stabs her finger at it. The other senseis cluck, but Sensei Madame Liao says firmly, “That is final!”
She turns back to Doi and nods.
The clarion sounds for the combat to begin. My stomach twists again when I see that Suki and her House of Flowering Blossoms girls have volunteered to be among Doi’s ten attackers.
However, even as they sneer at Doi, they’re uncertain how to proceed. Iron Fan Dance is no child’s game. Iron Fan Dance can injure, even kill. Doi can’t afford to be hit by even one fan. As much as the girls hate Doi, they hesitate. No one has ever fought ten fully armored girls while being completely unarmored. As the girls look to Suki for guidance, we hear the whistle of two fans cutting through the air. The ten attackers leap, then duck, to avoid being shortened a foot from both ends by Doi’s flying fans. Tired of waiting, Doi has started the battle on her own terms.
The skating court stirs into action. It starts as a game of shrouding. Doi uses the end of her fan to stir the clouds floating about into little balls that she whips at the faces of her attackers. However, it doesn’t provoke them into throwing their fans at her in earnest. They’re still afraid of being punished if Doi ends up leaving the Radial of Mighty Tranquility in twenty pieces. They only throw their fans in coordinated sets of three or more and clamp down together in a huddle as her fans fly at them in tortoise-school formations, which gain Doi no points.
Doi has no choice but to spend all her time dodging. They refuse to use any throws that can be blocked or that can leave them open to her scoring a hit on them, even if that means they have no chance to gain points from her. They don’t care about that. They only want to prevent her from earning any points until she lashes out in frustration and does something rash or injures herself.
When Doi sees that her tactics aren’t working, she begins doing one real riven crane split jump after another, aiming directly for the attackers’ throats to try to force them into engaging her in earnest. The girls around me gasp, not only because of Doi’s savagery, but also because everyone knows that the real riven crane split jump can only be done 608 times in one’s lifetime before the knee bearing the force of the landing is destroyed forever. She’s wildly wasting jumps over and over again, as if we have as many riven crane split jumps in us as words.
Suki and the other attackers still don’t engage her properly and continue throwing fans only in conservative, unblockable formations. The irritation is clear on Doi’s face. She still hasn’t scored any points. What good is a towering Multiplier if you don’t score any points to multiply?
Finally, Doi throws her fan at the attackers. While the fan whips through the air, slicing the billowing clouds like egg custard, she races toward the girls. They brace for her blows in a ten-faceted tortoise wall, but she doesn’t strike them. She skates straight at two of her opponents. As she nears them, she does a strange twisting single-toe flip that I’ve never seen before. She flies up over two of the girls, bunching their lengths of hair together with one hand as she rises. As she pulls their hair taut, her flying fan returns on its arc and slices through the girls’ hair.
Everyone screams. I don’t know if this is an illegal move, but for the House of Flowering Blossom girls, just touching another girl’s hair without permission, much less amputating it, would be a vicious and open declaration of war.
The combat comes alive. Suddenly, the girls are flying at Doi from ten sides, skates, closed fans, and spinning open fans churning like a storm of knives around her. We all scream with excitement as we watch Doi block and dodge and pull and throw and parry and weave, all while stretching the clouds into ribbons and balls that she whips into the faces of her opponents.
The attackers realize that Doi has blocked every one of their strikes and that, during their attack, they have just given her at least eighty points to be multiplied. Suki nods to them to assume a new formation. They skate away and form a ring around Doi.
The girls open their fans, but they don’t throw them. Instead, they all leap up and bring their fans down hard on the pearl. The rush of air goes racing across the pearl, blowing the cloud cover away, tightening in a circle that collides at Doi. The gust shoots straight up her figure, lifting her top pearlsilk garment into the air. Suki leaps to snatch it and flings it over the mannequins ringing the Radial of Mighty Tranquility into the sea. Hateful, vindictive girls! If they can’t beat Doi, they want to humiliate her.
It’s like I’m watching that horrible dream where for no reason, I’m at school naked in front of everyone, except it’s really happening to Doi, and it’s not a dream; it’s happening before my eyes, and it’s happening because she missed the third Motivation, and she missed the third Motivation because she protected me
against Suki, and she protected me against Suki because I blew Suki’s pearlflute and lied about it. I want to curl into a ball. I’m unable to watch, unable to turn away.
The ten girls’ fans have swept away all the clouds from the arena. Doi’s standing there, covering her exposed torso with one arm.
The attackers launch their fans at her. The girls throw them at an angle so that the fans don’t arc back. Instead, they travel at twice the speed in a straight line for the girls across the ring to catch and then throw back. The attackers launch salvo after salvo of these throws at Doi. She fields them valiantly, but one of her fans is knocked out of her hand, and it flies off to impale itself in one of the mannequins ringing the court. She’s now fighting with one fan while desperately trying to cover herself with her other arm. I can’t help but fold my own arms across my chest in horror and sympathy.
Then Doi stops resisting. With a stony expression, she takes her one fan in both hands, and from that moment onward, she doesn’t bother covering herself up. She’s completely vulnerable, but her wu liu form is confident. She claps one open palm on top of the other, with the spread fan pressed between them. She spins sixteen and a half rotations and releases the fan straight at Suki.
Suki is prepared for it and is already coming out of her own sixteenth and a half rotation when she receives the blade. They’re engaging in the thousand-tiered pagoda to heaven challenge.
Suki receives the spinning fan but doesn’t stop it. She meets it at the exact speed and arc and, instead of disrupting that force, continues it, whipping it back at Doi but adding the accumulated Chi of her own sixteen and a half rotations, which Doi returns and sends flying back at Suki even faster. The other girls step back to give Suki full room to maneuver.
The fan flies faster and faster, each combatant hoping that the other will make a mistake and miss the return. By the seventh circuit, the fan is spinning with such speed and traveling with such velocity that the air is ringing with the high hum of singing metal.
After the completion of the tenth circuit, the metal is flying so quickly that I can barely see it. As Doi receives it, instead of catching it with her hands, she kicks it into the air, causing it to roll on its axis as it travels back toward Suki. Each roll causes it to wobble in its flight path. The spinning fan weaves in and out between the girls as if they’re an obstacle course, cutting the straps that bind their face, breast, and gauntlet armor in place.
As the blade finally buries itself in a mannequin, pieces of armor fall to the pearl in a great clatter. The attackers are unmasked and unarmored, down to their pearlsilk underclothes. The senseis haven’t tallied the points and Multipliers yet, but they don’t have to.
We all know that that girl, standing there heaving with exhaustion, has not just finished first at this Motivation.
That girl, uncovered but unharmed, has just done something legendary.
That girl, stripped but unashamed, has just made academy history.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
After the luckieth Motivation, Doi’s ranked first, I’m second, and Suki’s sixth. The first-year boys’ Motivation will be delayed a day longer than last time. I guess that this is because the damage to the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties was much worse than what happened to the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice.
I wish it were delayed even longer, because I know that when the New Deitsu team comes, Chairman Niu will want to see me.
Suki continues whispering to the other students at every opportunity about the attack on the palace. “You see! The Empress Dowager won’t stop until she has the secret of the pearl, no matter how many hostages’ feet she binds or how many structures her spy destroys!”
However, it appears that she still hasn’t taken her claims to Pearl Shining Sun yet because I don’t see my name or Cricket’s written in birds. Maybe she knows that she doesn’t have enough evidence. Maybe she believes that I have evidence about her cheating at the first Motivation. Or maybe it’s simply that it’s usually too cloudy during the Season of Spirits for Sensei Madame Phoenix and her birds to do the Pearl Shining Sun headlines.
Or worse, perhaps it’s because Suki’s too busy with her new favorite target. Doi can’t seem to go anywhere without Suki and the House of Flowering Blossoms girls spewing comments after her.
“Some girls will do anything to get attention!”
“Did your father finally realize you exist?”
During literature class, Suki recites her essay about Princess Eyun Dei-Bwun. She tells us that during her reign, Princess Eyun Dei-Bwun, commonly known as the Mad Seductress of Pearl, wreaked havoc on Pearl’s system of measures by constantly revising the standard unit of measurement to match the length between her hips and the hem of her dresses, which became shorter and shorter throughout her reign, until her sister had her drowned in a well for her depravity. Since the assignment was to write an essay about famous speeches by military leaders on the eve of battle, it’s clear that Suki’s just using this to humiliate Doi again.
During architecture class, Sagacious Monk Goom calls Doi to the front of the class to take her turn at another weird counting exercise with Chingu, the oracular monkey. As Doi skates up the aisle, Suki leans out to yank at her length of waterfall hair. Before her fingers brush a single strand, Doi has spun around and is frozen in position with her skate blade at Suki’s throat.
“She’s attacking me outside of wu liu practice again!” squeals Suki, and the House of Flowering Blossoms girls all shriek like starved hatchlings.
The squealing sets off Chingu, who starts jumping from desk to desk, screeching and chopping at them with her cleaver. We cower underneath the desks as this spoiled, deranged monkey hacks at them. I don’t need to be an oracular monkey to predict that the price for getting close enough to Chingu to receive an oracle is a hand, or at least a few fingers.
Doi never says anything in response to the abuse. I don’t say anything, either, because I’m too ashamed to say anything. And I’m only more ashamed that I don’t say anything.
There is so much rage in her. And such willingness to do things that everyone else would call too reckless, too extreme. I still don’t know whom she’s talking to at the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness about “hostages.” All I know is that I don’t know how to talk to her, because I’m a little afraid of her.
* * *
As announced, the New Deitsu team is soon here. Supreme Sensei Master Jio tells us that we’re not to face south while they repair the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties. The boys and girls are put together in a joint wu liu practice session on the Conservatory of Wu Liu. Since no one can do a complete spin or flip without facing south at some point, we’re simply given the task of speed racing. Sensei Madame Liao and Sensei Master Bao have us form ten queues and skate as quickly as we can northward, and then skate back southward to return to where we started. It’s a boring but dangerous exercise because it’s easy to collide with another student in these tight lanes of speed skaters going in opposite directions.
Cricket accidentally hooks his arm with the arm of another student going in the opposite direction. They twirl each other around like dancing partners before taking out two more skaters with them in a terrible crash. Ten thousand years of stomach gas. All of them are made to sit out the rest of the session. Fortunately, Cricket and the skater he hooked aren’t punished for momentarily facing south because they were twirling too fast to see anything.
Not long after, we hear a great popping sound. Sensei Madame Liao puts her ear to the pearl below our skates. She announces that we may resume use of all lucky directions. I turn south, but the palace is far off on the Principal Island and obscured from view by the clouds. We hop on the rails and skate back toward the Principal Island. Out of the clouds comes Cricket, skating directly into me. He’s beaming.
“I heard it, Peasprout!”
“Heard what?”
“After I got taken out of the training session, I skated in the dir
ection of the worksite.”
“You didn’t look at it, did you? We can’t afford to break any rules!”
“No, I promise! I skated backward and stayed on the south side of the Conservatory of Wu Liu. The palace was across the water, and I kept my back to it. I heard a great sizzling sound. And then I heard water washing over something. And then there was a great popping sound.”
“I heard it, too. Don’t go near it again. Wait here.”
I leave Cricket and the other students and senseis. I skate toward the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties. Clouds obscure it, but when the wind changes direction, they part.
The palace is completely restored. The sloping roof is covered in tiles like a dragon’s scales, as if nothing happened.
Someone grabs my arm. I feel the long nail of the Chairman’s little finger digging into my sleeve.
I cry out, but there aren’t any senseis or students around. He hauls me toward where the New Deitsu team is gathered.
We enter the palace. Within it is a structure I have never seen before. A small, simple pavilion with a sloped roof and a door. He pushes me inside it. I have to duck to avoid striking my head on the lintel.
He remains outside.
“So the Empress Dowager sent you here to learn about the pearl, little bird?” he says. All his false smiles and charm are gone, and I no longer see any resemblance to Hisashi. “By attacking the structures and seeing how we rebuild them?”
“I didn’t have anything to do—”
“Since you want to learn about the pearl so badly, I will share a fact with you. You have noticed all the water that flows over and throughout every structure here? What do you think it is for?”
From the way he asks, I know that it’s not to keep the pearl from burning.
He continues, “Seawater keeps the pearl from shrinking. There is a law in Pearl that gives New Deitsu Pearlworks Company authority to punish criminals who threaten the secret of the pearl. The criminal is sealed inside a structure. Then we cut off its supply of seawater. The structure shrinks around the criminal day by day until he’s slowly crushed to death.”
