Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

by Justin Hill

  Snow Vase’s eyes widened. “Yes, mistress, yes!”

  “Don’t call me mistress.”

  “Master?”

  Shulien frowned. “Nor Master.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.” Shulien turned away again. Snow Vase was not sure what to do. After a long pause Shulien said, “I have spent too long alone. The gentle arts of conversation rubbed away after a while. But some things remain. Titles have little meaning to me. If you must call me anything, then call me ‘teacher.’ For that is all I am. I do not seek to master anyone or anything.”

  Snow Vase nodded. Shulien turned quickly. “Good! So. Show me what you know.”

  Snow Vase opened her hands. “I am best with a sword or bow . . .”

  “But you have neither . . .”

  “No,” Snow Vase said.

  “So?”

  Snow Vase held her hands open . . .

  Shulien walked outside to the tree in the corner of the yard. “What tree is this?” she said.

  Snow Vase shook her head.

  “This tree,” Shulien said, “is a magnolia, planted by the Buddhist monk Dashan, who lived in the Dajue Temple. He planted a sister tree there. The one in the temple has white flowers, but look, this one bears flowers that are both white and purple. Every March, for ten days only, this tree flowers, and it does so whether anyone is here to notice or not.”

  Snow Vase nodded as if this were a lesson, though she did not understand what exactly was being taught. Shulien reached up to stroke the tree, and as she did so she snapped off two branches, each one ending in a flower.

  She smelled one as she walked across the yard and handed one branch to Snow Vase.

  Snow Vase blushed. She was not really one for flowers or perfume. She was a warrior’s daughter, a horsewoman, a fighter.

  “Look at it,” Shulien said.

  Snow Vase looked. Each petal was deep pink at the base, fading to white at the tip. She wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  “What does it smell like?”

  “Lemon.”

  “Look at it.”

  Snow Vase looked.

  “What do you see?”

  “A flower. Petals. They are deep pink at the base, white at the top.”

  Shulien said nothing and Snow Vase felt she had to keep on talking. “There are two layers of petals.”

  “The outer petals protect the inner ones,” Shulien said. She had stepped very close. “From the frost and the snow.”

  Snow Vase looked back at the flower.

  “Are you ready?” Shulien said.

  Snow Vase looked up. “This is my sword?”

  Shulien nodded.

  Snow Vase took a quick breath before taking up a fighting stance, and using the stick as a sword, swished it through the air in the Wu Tang style. Petals flew off as she fought. At the end she held her stance, the half-stripped flower bobbing at the end of the branch.

  Shulien nodded. “Your form is good,” she said. “Your posture correct. It is a start.”

  Snow Vase held her posture for one more moment, before standing to listen. “Thank you, teacher,” she said.

  Shulien stepped forward. “But it is one thing to perform the movements, another to apply them to real fighting.”

  Snow Vase nodded. “I know,” she said.

  “Do not answer back,” Shulien told her. “Students should listen, not talk, otherwise they learn little.”

  Snow Vase’s cheeks colored, and she nodded and bowed her head and swallowed back her irritation. Acting like a demure noblewoman, dressing in constricting silks, being a student again. None of this was easy.

  “Strike me,” Shulien said.

  Snow Vase shrugged. She was starting to feel irritated. “Do you want to see the crane style, or the mantis?”

  “The only arrow that counts is the one that strikes the foe.”

  “So . . . Which form should I use?”

  “The best one.”

  If this had been her mother, Snow Vase would have rolled her eyes, but she bit her lip and nodded curtly.

  The spirit of the crane entered Snow Vase. She was long-legged, long-necked, her blade a beak to strike the snake. A slender girl, hair plaited to the sides of her head, in black trousers and top, suddenly assuming the stance of a striking crane. She was grace and elegance and then she struck and she was speed and power and penetration, then soft and flowing and graceful again, as the dancing bird.

  Shulien was neither crane nor mantis, tiger, leopard, snake or dragon. She was all and none; she was hard and yet soft; yielding and firm. She batted Snow Vase’s attacks away effortlessly, one hand behind her back, barely moving her feet. Snow Vase pursed her lips, and came faster and fiercer, trying move after move and improving. Shulien irritated her at first. Snow Vase worked harder and faster, her feet moving as fast as a fist-fighter. But however hard she tried, however fast she fought, she could not land a blow.

  One by one the remaining petals were torn from her flower. Shulien’s flower had not lost a single petal. Her teacher was not even breathing hard, while Snow Vase’s forehead was damp with sweat.

  Snow Vase abruptly stopped, and let her arms hang without form. She was furious.

  “What does this prove?” she said.

  “That anger is like wine, it harms your health.” Shulien held the flower up almost delicately. “That fixed form cannot beat a fluid defense.”

  Snow Vase scowled. Shulien took up a casual pose. She did not move her feet before landing the first blow.

  “One,” Shulien said.

  Snow Vase bit back her anger. She told herself to move faster this time but the older woman walked almost casually, flicking the stick against her arm and skirts. “Two. Three. Four,” Shulien said, the last one a gentle touch on Snow Vase’s left cheek.

  No one had ever struck her face. Snow Vase’s nostrils flared as she attempted to defend herself, but the number of strikes kept increasing. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  Snow Vase stepped back and forth, desperately parrying, and failing. She tried to attack with a quick thrust to Shulien’s face, but the older woman knocked it to the side and slapped her left cheek again.

  Snow Vase tried to parry with her arm, but the strikes began to come thick and fast, so fast that all Snow Vase could smell was lemon, all she could feel was the soft kiss of petals on her cheek. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.

  Shulien stopped suddenly. Snow Vase paused, wary, but it seemed the lesson was over. Snow Vase looked at her own stick, and it was bare of buds and flower. All that remained were a few stamens. “Your flower has not lost a petal, but mine is bare,” she said.

  “Not true,” Shulien said, and held up her stick. Snow Vase watched as a white petal broke off. Shulien caught the petal in her open palm, and she looked at it sadly, before turning to her student. She almost smiled, a brief and passing expression. “You have some skill,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “But think. You are faster and stronger than I. And yet I beat you.”

  “How is that?”

  “The true sword requires more than speed,” Shulien said. “More than power.” She did not take up a fighting stance, but deftly landed a light blow with the flower to punctuate each sentence. The third time Snow Vase tried to parry, but the flower kissed her cheek regardless.

  Her face grew dark with sudden frustration and anger. Shulien landed another blow on the tip of her nose.

  “The master knows when to strike,” Shulien said, stepping back and lowering her stick. She walked to the gateway. “Practice what I have taught you,” she said, and then walked away.

  Snow Vase called out, “Teacher. What have you taught me?”

  “What have you learned?”

  “That I am too slow, too tense, that I have much to learn. I am ang
ry at myself for being beaten so easily.”

  Shulien nodded. “Never be angry. Be glad you came to someone who can teach you.”

  “I am, teacher.”

  “First lesson, then, is to control your anger, your energy, your qi.”

  “What is qi, exactly?”

  “It is all around us. It is the air we breathe, the will that lifts us from the ground when we are tired, the thing that sparks our life within our mother’s womb, the thing that we give up when our days are done. It is fierce, it is powerful, you must learn to summon it in and control it. Anger is wasted qi. Channel your anger. Make it soft . . .”

  Shulien smiled gently, then bowed and left. Snow Vase was alone. She stood and stared at the magnolia tree as if it might tell her. The tree stood silent and uncaring, dropping petals. She sat down and threw the stick across the yard. She shook her head, let out a sigh. She had thought she was good, and Shulien had just shown her how little she knew.

  She thought on her teacher’s words. Channel, soft, anger, qi.

  Snow Vase was determined to match Shulien. She pushed herself up, rolled her shoulders, and tried to loosen the muscles in her neck. She reached up and kneaded her right shoulder. She breathed deeply to slow her heart down, then picked up the stick and closed her eyes. She remembered the day her mother had first taught her, breathed in the qi, and felt it swirl within her.

  “Stand with your feet together,” her mother had said. Snow Vase had done so. “Shut your eyes.” Snow Vase had. “Now, imagine the tip of your left little finger has become heavy with all the qi rushing there.”

  The five-year-old Snow Vase had frowned as she thought. She imagined the tip of her left little finger becoming heavy, so heavy that her body began to lean, and as it did so her mother’s voice came close by her cheek.

  “Let your stance open.”

  The tip of the little finger pulled Snow Vase down to the left, and as it did so her right leg came off the ground.

  “Balance yourself,” her mother said.

  The weight slipped from her finger, and she opened her eyes and found that she was standing with her feet shoulder-width apart.

  Her mother was seldom talkative, or even concerned with her daughter, but this time she seemed to speak from personal ­experience.

  “Men will think that you are weak because you are a girl,” she said. “That is their first mistake. The mind is stronger than the body. Remember that.”

  There were many tricks her mother showed Snow Vase to reinforce this point. She taught her the one-inch punch, which came from the heel, and which could throw a man across a yard. She showed her how a tense arm held out straight was bent easily by twisting the wrist inwards, while holding an arm out straight and relaxed, but imagining that a steel bar ran through it, made that arm stronger than iron itself, as long as she held onto that mental image.

  But her mother never told her what to think of a teacher who would not even tell her what the lesson was.

  Snow Vase lifted the stick as a sword, and imagined hitting Shulien full in the face with each blow. Fifty, she thought, a ­hundred!

  Snow Vase meditated before she slept. Each morning she meditated before the sun was up. Then, dressed in a simple cotton shift, she trained harder and faster than she had ever trained before. She brought images to mind that would bring anger. Anger, she learned, was like a tiger, wild and clawed and unstoppable and deadly; she began to learn how to master it, subdue it, tame it, make friends with it, like a household cat, sit it purring on her knee, until the moment she needed its speed and focus.

  As she trained, Shulien would come and watch her. They would spar, and Shulien would try to enflame her anger, and Snow Vase met her teacher’s taunts and probes with gentleness, softness, and turned them all aside, as the oilskin sheds rain.

  “Good,” Shulien said one day, quite out of the blue. “Tomorrow take a wooden sword and train at the butts.”

  Snow Vase bowed deeply. She was so calm that it took a long time to realize that the feeling inside her was deep, bubbling joy.

  She smiled only faintly. “Thank you, teacher,” she said.

  I7

  Wei-fang shook himself awake. He could hear the scrunch of grit, the slap of an open palm on a knee or a high-kicking foot. He pushed himself forward to the front of the cage.

  It was the young girl. Shulien’s pupil. The ice queen.

  He hunched forward against the bars and watched her, skin pale as a ghost, her hair loosely tied up at the back of her head, effortlessly moving through the Hundred and Eight Routines. She was as slender and graceful as a willow wand, as cold as winter. It thrilled him just to look at her. She finished with a sudden shout as she kicked high then landed low to the ground, like a cat. She rose slowly, caught his eye, and looked away, picked up her towel from the floor, wiped her brow, and threw it over her shoulder as she walked from the yard.

  The second morning she ran through the same routines, and did not look his way. As she left he called out to her but she ignored him. She ignored him on the third and fourth mornings, and on the fifth he lay back, closed his eyes and chanted lines of Lu Bai’s poetry to himself, an old favorite about sitting with friends, drinking together by the gentle light of the full moon.

  “Hush,” a voice said. It was the girl.

  He opened one eye, then the other, kept humming the lines.

  “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  He stopped and sat up and smiled. “When will she let you train with a real sword?”

  “Cocky, huh?”

  He shrugged.

  “How’s your new home?”

  “A little smelly. The previous owner apparently had fleas.” He looked at a point just before him and clapped suddenly. He opened his hands and shook his head. “Missed it.”

  She was unamused. “What is your name?” he said.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because it’s your fault I’m here,” he said, and he thought he saw the hint of a smile. “Next time I won’t hold my blows.”

  “You didn’t hold your blows.”

  “I didn’t draw the sword.”

  “You couldn’t,” she said. “I had hold of your hand.”

  “So you won’t tell me?”

  “No,” she said.

  At that moment the door of the courtyard opened and a servant came in dressed in the blue livery of the Te household. She was short and plump and smiled as she came forward. She bent down and passed a bowl of cooked white rice through the bars. “There you go, my little duckling,” she said, clucking like an old hen.

  Wei-fang smiled. “You are too kind,” he said. “May the Buddha bless you. Oh my! So much rice. And warm too, thank you!”

  The kitchen maid half hid her smile as she made her way back out again. Wei-fang took the chopsticks and started to shovel in the rice, smelling the meat before he uncovered it, hidden under the rice: slices of fatty pork fried with garlic stalks. His grin was sudden and spontaneous. In his joy he held it up to the girl to show her.

  “Look!” he said. “See, I am not all bad.”

  “Tell Hades Dai that.”

  Snow Vase walked to her compound and used a damp cloth to wash away the sweat from the back of her neck. She dressed in a simple gown and went to the kitchens.

  “Has Mistress Yu eaten lunch yet?” she said.

  The cook was a gentle man also named Te, who spoke through an iron pipe, the end stuck with a wad of rolled tobacco. The pipe had gone out, but he did not remove it.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  He pointed to a round tray on the chopping table, where domed wicker screens covered four plates. “Mistress Yu Shulien likes simple dishes. No garlic. Nothing too strong. I used to make them myself, but she likes my son’s cooking better now. His taste buds are still good. Me?” He put a thumb to h
is nose. “I smoke too much.”

  He waved his hand and kept chatting as Snow Vase picked the tray up and nodded as she hurried out with it.

  Duke Te had liked to eat his lunch early, and even though he was gone, the routines he had set carried on beyond him. A few servants were returning with empty trays, but otherwise the lanes and courtyards were quiet, except for a yard where the grandsons of Duke Te were being schooled, and they were chanting together Hanyu’s “Memorial Discussing the Buddha’s Bone.”

  Snow Vase’s mother had been classically educated, and she had tried a few times to teach her daughter, but Snow Vase had never had a head for dry treatises.

  “The Buddha was a tribesman from distant lands,” they chanted. “His tongue was incompressible, his clothes were foreign, he did not know the histories of our earl kings nor dress like our old masters.”

  Snow Vase rolled her eyes. She passed another courtyard where some other children were playing. Their laughter was sudden and delightful as sunlight through colored glass, but then she turned right and at the end of a long silent walkway was Shulien’s yard.

  Snow Vase paused, balanced the tray on one knee and knocked.

  There was no answer. She knocked again, listened, heard nothing, and pushed it open with her foot.

  She peered through and saw an empty courtyard, and felt a shiver of premonition.

  “Teacher?” she called out and walked toward Shulien’s chambers. There were three broad steps up. The door to Shulien’s chambers were open. Snow Vase put the tray down and crept into the room. She jumped when she saw Shulien, sitting on her bed, eyes open, watching her.

  “You frightened me,” Snow Vase said, then saw that Shulien was not looking at her, she was looking through her. Snow Vase turned and saw a teapot on a tall vase stand. It was an ugly little thing: fat-bodied and short-spouted like an ugly woman with large flapping feet.

  “Teacher?” Snow Vase said. “Are you well?”