Black Dragon, Black Cat

by Brian Edwards

  Jai-tien had prepared the noon meal by the time Mao finished belatedly her morning chores. She sat down at the table breathing heavily from her exertions. The two ate their portions of rice and beans at the outside table under the willow tree. Afterward, Jai-tien began clearing the table and Mao went back into the house and lay down upon her sleeping mat.

  After ten minutes had passed, Mao felt a presence standing over her, and she looked up into the eyes of Jai-tien. The old man stared down at her with an expectant look on his face. She only stared back at him.

  “Hei Mao,” he asked presently, “why did you not join me on the training ground after lunch?”

  “Master,” Mao replied, “I cannot train today.”

  “Why not?”, he asked with a quizzical cocking of his head. “What has happened today?”

  “Master,” she pleaded, “I suffered a serious injury yesterday. I must wait for my body to heal before I can resume my training.”

  Jai-tien shook his head in disgust. “Come now, Hei Mao,” he replied, opening his hands outward toward her and raising his shoulders. “It is the path of the warrior that you have chosen. If you cannot withstand pain and injury, then you have chosen the wrong path.” He lowered his shoulders and walked away, out of the room.

  Mao had been relieved the night before to learn that her training could continue, but she had not imagined that it would do so until after her arm had healed completely. Doing chores was one thing, but could she really train with a broken arm? Surely not! Nevertheless, she groaned and struggled to her feet, then followed her master outside to the training area.

  She had just arrived at the training area when Jai-tien turned around and pretended to notice her presence. “Ah, so you did come!”, he said in mock surprise. “So maybe you have a warrior’s spirit after all.”

  Mao let out an exhausted sigh, and looked down at the ground. Jai-tien silently gathered his thoughts for his lecture, which Mao knew was coming henceforth. She secretly rolled her eyes up into her head, waiting for his tedious chatter to begin.

  “Hei Mao, a true warrior never gives up or compromises. The spirit of a warrior must be pure and strong, lest his virtues wither and die without notice. Dedication to the art is the most important aspect of purity and devotion, and this is developed and manifested through daily training. A true warrior would rather die than dishonor his art and himself by voluntarily suspending his training. Come! We will find things for you to do to continue your training. If you cannot do a, b, and c, then we will do x, y, and z instead! Let us begin!”

  Mao was relieved that the lecture was a short one. Jai-tien then began to lead exercises that he knew Mao could perform with one arm.

  After several days, Mao had settled into her new, more complicated routine. The morning chores became easier as she became more adept at performing them using only her right arm. Her training consisted mostly of exercises that did not require arm movements, and she spent many hours perfecting different types of kicks.

  Several weeks had passed when she and Jai-tien began sparring again. Mao was very hesitant at first, and felt very vulnerable without her left arm to protect herself. She was overly concerned about getting hurt again. Jai-tien was very cautious, however, and never attacked using a technique that Mao could not counter using only her right arm. Within the first week, Mao had recovered from her temerity and launched herself into her master with renewed confidence.

  During her few moments of spare time, Mao would laze by the pond under the willow tree next to the ashes of the black cat. She spent much time there sitting on the ground, trying to snatch several smooth, flat stones from the air after releasing them from her right hand. She had worked her way up from three to four, and felt confident that she understood the principles involved. First, the motion must be simple, because the more complicated it was the more things that could go wrong. Second, quickness was important as the faster one caught them, the less time they had to spread out from each other.

  Many times, lying in the shade beneath the willow tree under a blazing sun, she would reflect on the training she had learned so far. She felt sure that she was progressing well, and would make great bounds after her arm healed from the break. She often wondered on the history of Jai-tien. Any doubts she had years ago concerning his competence had long been erased, and she recognized that he must be a very proficient master to teach her as well as he did. But were Master Chung Jun’s words really true? Was her master the greatest warrior of his generation? Although she was completely dubious of this claim at first, in the past year she had witnessed enough to begin to accept that such a thing might possibly be true. Still, however, it was hard for her to believe that the claim was not overstated to some large degree.

  As summer waned and the westerly wind began to herald the onset of autumn, Jai-tien declared that it was time to test Mao’s arm for soundness. One afternoon he carefully cut the hard, brittle cast from her arm, sending shards of plaster and dust into the lazy, late summer breeze. Mao felt a sense of elation as the cast split apart and fell from her arm, and she felt the breeze on her left upper arm for the first time in months. Compared to the other, this arm was very pale from lack of exposure to the sun, but otherwise it felt fine. Jai-tien ran his fingers along its length, probing deeply for signs of a misalignment. After several minutes, he pronounced the arm to be healed and as good as new. Mao lifted her freed arm in the air and examined it carefully, feeling a rush of power sweep through her body.

  The feeling of elation stayed with Mao throughout the afternoon and evening, both up and down the pathway on the hillside that led to Lu-chin’s house. She went to her sleeping mat that night feeling giddy about the prospects of the coming weeks, reconditioning her left arm after its atrophy from little use during the summer. She was sure that a month would suffice to develop the muscle and stamina within the arm to bring it to its old form. She fell asleep that night, dreaming of great battles to come.

  Unfortunately, she was destined to lose those battles, as she awoke in the middle of the night after a cold shock struck her in the face and chest. She bolted upright on her mat in a panic, searching confusedly for the source of the invasion. Her eyes soon fell on the figure of Jai-tien standing by her bedside, holding an empty bucket.

  “You sleep like a rotting carcass, waiting for the vulture to swoop down to devour you!”, he said to her with evident distaste in his wrinkled face. “A soundly sleeping warrior is a dead warrior! You must learn to sleep lightly, so that you can sense the vibrations in the air around you. Otherwise, all of your training is useless!” He set the bucket on the floor and went back to his own sleeping quarters.

  Mao sat on her mattress, drenched with cold water from the waist up. Fortunately, the nights were still filled with the warmth of summer, but she grew very angry nonetheless. She sat there for many minutes steaming about the injustice of this event. What is the purpose of this? Why is Jai-tien so viciously cruel to her? How can she possibly sense “vibrations in the air”? Can Jai-tien even do this? No chance! He has not the awareness to do this. Even animals cannot do it. How can he expect her to do it if he cannot?

  Mao’s anger continued to seethe unabated throughout the sleepless night. Although she lay back down on her mattress, her mind continued to turn. Eventually, she came up with a cruel plan to take revenge on her master and to teach him a lesson: she would turn the tables on him and surprise him with a bucket of cold water one evening when he was not expecting it. That would show him! She smiled menacingly to herself at the fiendishness of her scheme. She was still smiling as the sun came up, when she arose from her mattress and took up her broom.

  Mao and Jai-tien finished their noon-hour meal and headed to the training area for the afternoon session. An hour was spent performing the usual routine of stretches and exercises, followed by another hour of extensive practice of the mechanics of kicking, punching, and striking. After these were completed, Jai-tien sat down cross-legged on the ground and motioned for Mao to sit
beside him. She sat down in a comfortable position, and Jai-tien began speaking.

  “Now that your arm has healed fully, it is time to begin another phase of your training. You must now learn the art of grappling, which is the theory and techniques used while fighting on the ground in direct contact with your opponent. These skills are very important to a true warrior, as many battles are decided in combat while rolling around in the dirt. What you do after you fall down, or are tackled by an opponent, will decide your fate, victory or defeat.”

  “Many practitioners of kung fu do not view grappling favorably, but with great distaste. They believe that rolling around in the dirt lacks dignity and is ignoble. Most people who practice kung fu do not even train these skills at all, let alone become proficient in them. This gives those who know this form of the art a great advantage over those who do not.”

  “There are many advantages to grappling, the most important being that it can be used to neutralize an opponent’s natural advantages. If your opponent is extremely quick, you can minimize this advantage by taking him to the ground and using your arms and legs to inhibit and constrict his movements, effectively slowing him down. If your opponent has a distinct size advantage over you, such as long arms and legs, he has the ability to strike you from a distance where you cannot reach him; however, if you know how to take him to the ground, you can actually use his size against him with the proper application of techniques.”

  “I will now begin teaching you this new phase of the art, and you must study and learn it very carefully. If you fight many battles, you will find that it is the deciding factor to victory in almost half of them.”

  Mao listened to all of this, trying to appear more excited than she truly was. The thought of rolling around in the dirt with some sweaty opponent did not appeal to her at all, and she believed that it was quite understandable that most people tried to avoid it.

  Jai-tien stood up and motioned for Mao to do so also. “I can sense that you are very excited to begin this new phase of training, Hei Mao!”, he said with a broad smile. Mao was not sure if he was being sarcastic. “However,” he continued, “before we can study the art of grappling, we must first learn the mechanics of joint locks and the theory of pressure points! These I will teach to you first!”

  Jai-tien motioned for Mao to stand in front of him. She arose from the ground and complied. “Hold out your hand,” he commanded.

  Mao held out her hand, which Jai-tien grasped between his thumb and forefinger, thumb on the back of Mao’s hand and finger in her palm. With a simple twist of his wrist, Mao went down on her back with a gasp of pain straight to the ground. Jai-tien turned his wrist further and flipped Mao over onto her stomach, placed one knee on her back, one on her face, and wrapped his other arm around her right upper arm just above the elbow. He twisted his torso and another bolt of pain shot through Mao’s arm. He stopped twisting, but held the position firm, while she grimaced in pain on the ground.

  “From this position,” began the old man, “I can break every joint in your arm, from the fingers all the way to the shoulder. Then I have removed entirely one of the weapons from your arsenal. If necessary, these joint locks that I will teach you can be used to destroy your opponent in the event that such an act is necessary. However, they are especially useful if you need to subdue an opponent without seriously harming him.”

  Jai-tien gave Mao’s elbow, wrist, and shoulder another tweak, and she yelped in pain. If you perform these locks rapidly, the joint will break with little effort. The key is leverage, and if executed properly, the force required is minor, just as when I levered the rock into the pond many years ago. The spirit of even the largest and most determined foe can be broken in this way.”

  The master gave her arm a final tweak, and then stood up, sending a wave of relief through Mao’s consciousness. She slowly rolled to her feet, rubbing her aching arm.

  “Now there is also the science of pressure points!” Jai-tien lifted his right foot from the ground and threw a kick with little force that landed behind Mao’s front leg, about five inches above her knee. Although there was hardly any impact at all, her entire leg went numb and she stumbled around for several seconds before falling to the ground. She sat rubbing her tingling leg, watching as it spasmodically trembled for a half minute.

  “That is an area where an exposed nerve can be struck, even lightly, producing a temporary paralysis that will briefly incapacitate your opponent if performed properly,” he stated as he walked behind her. He bent over and grasped the base of her neck between his thumb and forefinger, twisting his wrist as he did so. Mao let out a yelp of excruciating pain. “This is another pressure point,” stated the old man. “It will take many years for you to master these techniques.”

  Jai-tien relaxed his grip, to Mao’s great relief, and she stood up rubbing the area of her neck where the exposed nerve had been abused.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent with much lecturing and demonstrations by Jai-tien. Mao was poked, prodded, pinched, squeezed, bent, knocked down, thrown over, and tortured in all sorts of sinister ways for several hours. At the end of it, she found herself desperately rubbing every aching joint and bruised muscle in her body.

  All of that fall and well into winter, at least two hours each day were spent in grappling training using joint locks and pressure points. Mao’s irritation grew daily, while her motivation sank proportionally. She had never imagined that there was so much to know about the art of kung fu, and how dirty and inglorious much of it was. It was not all beautiful jumps and kicks, but entailed a lot of undignified flopping around on the ground. She spent the fall rolling around in the dirt, and the winter flailing away in the snow, much of the time facedown. They wore the same training clothes year-round, shivering in the winter and sweating in the summer, and it was difficult for her to keep her clothes white with all of the squirming around on the ground. Each night she had to trudge up the hill to the house of Lu-chin with achy knees and ankles, wishing all the while that she could snatch her master’s walking stick out from under him.

  In late fall, Mao took another unexpected midnight bath and became furious once more. Her resolve to exact revenge on her master became feverish, and she bided her time for an extremely cold night in the dead of winter on which to implement her plan. After a cold day of training and a shivering walk down the hill from Lu-chin’s house at sunset, the clear sky foretold of a very cold night. She decided that this would be the evening that old Master Jai-tien took his midnight shower!

  As soon as the pair returned to their house, Mao stoked the iron stove with several fresh logs and retired to her sleeping mat. Jai-tien went straight to his room, and after shuffling around for several minutes, put out his candle and became silent.

  Mao lay in bed for several hours, thinking about the devilish plan she had dreamed up. “Ha!”, she thought. “Master will not be able to drench me with water any more after I drench him! I can’t wait to see his face!”

  Long after midnight, she silently slipped from her mattress and slid through the house without making a sound. She eased herself out the front door, where she found the bucket of water that she had hidden there in the morning. There was a layer of ice on top, which she cracked and removed before quietly going back into the house.

  On ghostly tiptoes she crept toward her master’s room, and noiselessly shifted the curtain over his doorway so that she could see his prone body lying covered head-to-toe on his bed. With a loud scream of triumph, she took two steps into the room, and emptied the bucket of water onto Jai-tien and his bed.

  Nothing happened! Mao was startled at the lack of response, and shifted a step forward for a closer look. “Master?”, she whispered. Still there was no movement, and she felt a strange twang of worry aroused within her mind. “Master, are you all right?” Yet the figure of Jai-tien did not move, and the agitated feeling within Mao grew stronger. She took a full step forward and reached down to shake the prone figure of her master, but when she
touched his body it was as soft as a downy pillow. Immediately, she knew that she had been outsmarted. With an audible gasp, she turned quickly to exit the room, but was met with the cold shock of a bucket of water thrown directly into her face.

  “And what is this?”, Jai-tien chuckled with a broad smile on his wrinkled old face. “A noisy and clumsy water buffalo thinking she could snort cold water on old Jai-tien?”

  Mao stood stiffly, staring at the old man, realizing that she had become the victim of her own prank. Water dripped from her drenched hair and nightshirt, and she could feel her cheeks flush crimson with embarrassment at the current state of affairs. She stared dejectedly down at the floor in the faded moonlight.

  “Come now, Hei Mao!”, he said as his grin widened further. “Did you think that you could squirt your master so easily? I could have heard your breathing from my mother’s house, and I could smell your odor drifting around the house with your movements. Your footsteps echoed across the valley, raising window shades in the village far below.” He set down his empty bucket and stepped around Mao to his sleeping mattress. He pulled off the wet linens and lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. To every visible appearance, he fell immediately back to sleep.

  Mao went back to her mat and sat down in disgust. How could that old man possibly have known what she was doing? She had made no sound whatsoever, yet still he knew. And that statement about smelling her, how could that be so? She pulled her shirt up to her nose and sniffed at it, but could discern no noticeable odor. No, she did not smell! It was impossible! He could not have known! Yet he had. How had he managed it?