Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

by Justin Hill

  The second time the doctor squeezed Wei-fang looked away and ground out a moan.

  The third time seemed unnecessary. Wei-fang stared at the doctor, who was staring at the wound over the top of his glasses.

  “Good,” the doctor said at last. He dabbed the wound. The pus and blood had stopped. A clear liquid leaked out. The doctor dabbed it away and spoke to the wound, not to Wei-fang.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  “It is looking better?”

  The doctor glanced at him over the top of his glasses. “Yes,” he said. “Much better. The poison is slowly working its way out.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “Of course.”

  Wei-fang lay back as the doctor prepared another poultice, sprinkled it with wine, and then cupped it onto his chest and bound it tightly.

  “Itching is good,” he said. “It is a sign of healing.”

  He tied the bandages tight, then smiled briefly. “You should eat eggs,” he said. “I will speak to Sir Te.”

  As the doctor gathered up his things Wei-fang flexed his hand into a fist, and the exertion and pain brought sweat to his ­forehead, which gleamed yellow in the candlelight. His look brightened when Snow Vase stepped inside, but then Shulien and Silent Wolf followed. Their faces were serious.

  Shulien was the first to sit down, then Snow Vase and Silent Wolf.

  “What?” Wei-fang said.

  “We have matters to discuss with you,” Shulien said.

  Wei-fang looked at their eyes, and saw no hint of what this was about. He looked to Snow Vase, and her gaze was hard to read.

  They waited for the doctor to leave, and then Wei-fang saw that Silent Wolf had brought Green Destiny in with him. He set it down on the bed at Wei-fang’s feet.

  Wei-fang wanted to reach out and touch it. So much had rested on this sword. He had suffered and risked so much for it. It lay innocent as a kitten.

  “We need to discuss what we should do with the Green Destiny. It cannot stay here, that is clear,” Silent Wolf said. “Sir Te is not his father, and he is not the one to defend this blade and to keep it from the hands of evil. Snow Vase said that you have a right to help decide, as you helped to keep the sword safe.” Wei-fang felt strangely responsible now. Strangely mature, sitting like a judge over the future of the Green Destiny. “So,” Silent Wolf said. “What shall we do with it?”

  Wei-fang felt like all their eyes were on him. “Why don’t you take it?” he said.

  Silent Wolf looked at the others.

  “I think it should be hidden,” Shulien said. “I will take it. I will be the guardian. I will disappear and the sword shall go with me.”

  “But what happens when you die?” Snow Vase said.

  “When death is coming, the secret of the sword shall die with me.”

  Snow Vase shook her head. “Shulien,” she said, “I think what we have seen is that the Green Destiny cannot be hidden. That has been tried. It will always draw men to it, and men like Hades Dai will find a way to uncover its location. We cannot break the sword. We cannot destroy it. It is a sword. That is its nature—why should we try to go against it?”

  “Because it is too dangerous,” Shulien said.

  “No. It is a sword. No more, no less. I say that we accept it for what it is.”

  “So what should we do with it?”

  “The power of the Green Destiny lies in the hand that wields it. The only way of ensuring that the Green Destiny does no evil is by putting the sword in the hand of one who shall not do evil.”

  “Who?” Shulien said. “Silent Wolf? You?”

  “I say that Silent Wolf should take it,” Wei-fang said.

  Silent Wolf shook his head.

  Snow Vase shook her head in exasperation. “No.”

  Shulien stood up. “Then who?”

  Snow Vase looked at each of them. “Do you remember what Genghis Khan told his sons? How each of them was an arrow shaft, easily broken. But when they all stood together, like a sheath of arrows, then they were unbreakable. Teacher, you think in ones. You think this is your strength, but I think it has brought you failure. It has brought you sadness. And it will not serve the sword.”

  She saw the look on Shulien’s face and spoke quickly. “Why don’t we all take the sword? We four. Together we will be far stronger than alone. We shall uphold the Code of the Iron Way. We shall bear the memory of Mubai and Jiaolong. We shall be as one, and if one of us should be lost, then the others will be there to carry the memory of the lost one along.”

  Wei-fang watched Snow Vase in awe and astonishment. The wisdoms of Silent Wolf and Shulien had failed. They fought alone. They lived alone. There was a different way.

  He felt a thrill as he listened to Snow Vase’s words. He could see it. The four of them, riding into the red glow of legend.

  “No,” Shulien said. She took the sword and stood up. “No,” she said again, more determined this time.

  Silent Wolf and the others exchanged glances as Shulien nodded to each of them and walked out.

  Snow Vase looked hurt by her teacher’s refusal. Silent Wolf stood up and walked to the door, but he did not follow Shulien.

  “I liked your idea,” Wei-fang said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Silent Wolf,” Wei-fang called out. “What do you think?”

  Silent Wolf turned and smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Look at me. When I was young I knew exactly what to do, but age has made me wise. I see many solutions, and none of them seem right.”

  The room grew silent.

  “I will talk to her,” Silent Wolf said after a while, and walked out.

  “How are you?” Snow Vase asked.

  “I’m getting better, apparently,” Wei-fang said. “The doctor comes twice a day to press and prod. I think he squeezes until he makes me curse. I should just curse when he comes through the door now. Then perhaps he’ll leave me alone.”

  “I should let you rest,” she said.

  He nodded, but he was disappointed as she went out.

  Snow Vase needed to clear her head.

  She was angry at Shulien. It was clear to her that her teacher was wrong. She had made the wrong decisions, Snow Vase was sure. She had relied too much on honor, seen virtue in abstinence; mistaken loneliness for virtue.

  Snow Vase walked through the palace, barely seeing the people she passed. There were servants, wives, concubines, sons, grandsons. It was full of life and vitality. One generation passed on as new ones were being born. It was so different to the household she had grown up in, which was detached, quiet, excluding.

  Her mother had never seen the point of family. She had almost resented her daughter and Snow Vase wasn’t sure why. Was it because she was adopted? Was it because she was family, and had claims upon Jiaolong? Was it because her mother loved her, but had spent so long alone that attachment was too hard?

  She stopped suddenly. It was the fourth month and the sun was warm, the birds were singing clearly.

  The world was bursting with life and opportunity. Snow Vase savored the earth’s rich, damp smell. She felt balanced, suspended, poised. So many possibilities stretched before her. The boundaries of her future were still unset, uncertain. She looked out and did not see walls or barriers or hidden places, but wide open plains, vast steppes and deserts, snow-capped mountains.

  She turned around and walked quickly back toward Wei-fang’s yard.

  She found him standing in the doorway. He wore a simple gown, a jacket thrown over his shoulders, his arm in a sling. He was leaning against the doorpost, looking out on the day. The trees had a light green light around them, as the first buds were growing.

  “I thought you were resting,” Snow Vase said.

  “I am,” he said. “Smelling the earth. Se
eing the world. These things bring healing.”

  She walked toward him. It was good to see him standing in the daylight. Color was returning to his skin. She stopped before him, put up a hand to his cheek, and then kissed him.

  His lips were soft, his stubble prickled her cheek, she pressed her lips to his, and then let his head go.

  He looked at her. “Well,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You surprised me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She put her hand up and pulled him down again, and this time he put his good arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. He kissed her lips, inhaled the smell of her, and as he did so her lips parted.

  They stood kissing for a long time, pressing their bodies against each other.

  She pulled away.

  “We should go inside,” she said.

  He took her hand, shut the door behind her, and still kissing, they moved, slow step by slow step toward the bed.

  At the bed they stopped. His hand slid down her back. She was young and firm and beautiful. One of her hands was around his neck, the other held his back. She tugged at his jacket, pulling it off his shoulders.

  “Does it hurt?” she said, meaning his arm.

  “No,” he breathed, as his jacket fell to the floor.

  She started unbuttoning his gown as they kept kissing, then she took his hand and put it inside her gown, onto her breast, and she heard him groan.

  “I thought Shulien said a great warrior should not take lovers,” he said.

  She whispered back at him, “I do not think I want to be a great warrior.”

  Layer by layer they stripped each other naked. In the world around them swallows were making their nests, the first cicadas were beginning to call out, and high overhead honking geese were returning north in wide vees. But they were oblivious as she lay back on the bed, and opened her legs, and he lay down between them.

  3I

  Shulien had been pacing the floor like a chained leopard. Silent Wolf had taken his time, but now he sat on her bed, legs drawn up and folded under him. The Green Destiny lay on the bed next to him. He had not spoken a word since he had come into the room, but she could tell what he was thinking.

  She continued to pace back and forth. She was going to wear a hole into the carpet at this rate, and still she felt chained. She did not know why he was here, staring at her.

  “You cannot tell me what to do. You have no power over me. We may have been betrothed, but we were never married,” she said. She turned and glared at him, but he was not looking at her, but at the sword. “Stop looking at the damned sword,” she said. “I am talking to you!”

  He looked up at her. His eyes were hard and dark and unfathomable. She wanted a sign from him, but he was as flat as the reflection in the mirrored water.

  “Why did you come here?” she said.

  “You needed help.”

  “I did not.”

  “You would have died in the woods if I had not come.”

  There was a pause. “I might have escaped. You never gave me the chance.” There was another pause. She walked slower now. At last she stopped. “You think I am wrong.”

  He tilted his head slightly. He irritated her so much she could hardly contain herself. Mubai would not have behaved like this, she thought, and the answer came quick. But he is dead. And another, sharper voice hissed: And when he was alive you would not marry him.

  She bit back recriminations.

  “How can we trust them?” she said.

  Silent Wolf looked back down again at the sword, but this time he spoke. “There is little certain for any of us on the Iron Way,” he said. “What we think is solid, crumbles; what we think is weak grows strong. That is what we learned as children. What is strong is weak, what is soft is strong. It is the fundamental truth of fighting.” He paused for what seemed an age to Shulien. She could feel her irritation rising. “But I think you ask the wrong questions, and in doing so find the wrong answers.”

  She sat down. “What do you mean?”

  “The question is not can we trust them, but why shouldn’t we trust them.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then I have the answer to that. We should not trust them because they stole the sword.”

  “And why did they steal the sword?”

  “To kill Hades Dai.”

  “A good reason, don’t you think?”

  “But they failed.”

  “Is failure a sin? You failed to save Mubai. I failed to kill Hades Dai twenty years before. We all fail, but perhaps we should not be judged by what we have tried to do and not succeeded at, but by the things we have set out to do. They failed to kill Hades Dai, but they succeeded in stealing it from us, and Hades Dai never got the sword.”

  “But we had to be there,” she said.

  “Is that what you are angry about?”

  She looked at him, and felt something hard and knotted within her open, like an old nut, and the seed fall out. “Maybe,” she said, but her voice had softened.

  She came and sat down on the bed near him. Green Destiny lay between them. She put out a hand and touched it, almost like touching a friend’s arm. She had lived in fear that she would be called back to protect Green Destiny, and her fears had come true, and here she was, having passed through her fears, like a curtain, finding daylight on the other side.

  What was it you were frightened of? she asked herself.

  Was it not being dragged out of retirement and isolation?

  She knew the answer. It was living without Mubai all this time but still having to sort out the problems he left behind. No, she thought, and paused to let the true answer come to her. She feared loss. She feared letting others get as close as Mubai had been, and losing them as she had lost him.

  Silent Wolf looked at Shulien as she touched the sword with her fingers and ran them gently along the snakeskin sheath. The scales were worn almost smooth with age, especially where it had rubbed as men carried it on their backs. Since the day it had been forged. Hundreds of years. A thousand and more years.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” he said.

  Shulien looked up and he saw that her eyes were wet with tears.

  “We have tried to hide this thing, and we have failed. The Green Destiny is older than all of us. It has great powers, if used for good. It should be taken out into the world to battle evil and ignorance and fear. It should be borne by great warriors. Just think what you or I, or Mubai even, could have done in the last twenty years with that sword. I tell you this because I know what it is to be hidden. I know what it is to disappear from the world, and even though I thought I was doing good, I achieved nothing. You and Mubai did not marry. I was not there to save Mubai, as I would have been. We were oath brothers, remember. We were as close as reeds in a basket. I wept when I heard that he had died. That you had let him die when I left him to your care.”

  Shulien looked imploringly at the man she had once been betrothed to.

  “I know those words hurt,” he said. “But it was how I felt. Sometimes we feel things that are not justified. That is what is happening here, with you, with Snow Vase and with Wei-fang.”

  Shulien looked down. “So we give it to them?”

  “No. I did not say that.”

  “Then what?”

  “How good is Snow Vase?”

  “She is very good.”

  “Better than you?”

  “Not yet, but soon, perhaps.”

  “And Wei-fang?”

  Shulien frowned. “He is untrained. He is wild. He is undisciplined.”

  “Do you think he can be trained?”

  Shulien considered. “He seems like he would make a good ­student.”

  “Then why don’t we take the sword and ride out with them? They
can be our pupils.”

  Shulien puffed out her cheeks. “Really?”

  “What better way of teaching them?”

  Shulien sat for a long time, trying to think of reasons why they should not do what Silent Wolf had suggested.

  But all she could think of were reasons to support him.

  At last she turned to him, and said, “I agree.”

  “Good.”

  “Shall we go and tell them?”

  Silent Wolf and Shulien walked side by side toward the courtyard where Wei-fang was resting. The early summer sun was bright, and they passed two servants carrying Sir Te’s caged songbirds on the end of long poles to the bamboo garden. They stared at the two warriors with wide-eyed admiration, and stood well to the side to let them pass.

  It was a short walk to Wei-fang’s courtyard. The gates were ajar; Shulien pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold.

  Silent Wolf came with her. They walked up toward the central hall. It was three steps up to the doorway. The door windows had not yet had their winter paper removed; this would not be done until the full heat of summer had come, but there were many tears and holes and through these came an unmistakable sound.

  Shulien stopped and looked at Silent Wolf. She lifted a fist to knock on the door, but he reached out and caught it, and put his finger to his lips: shhh!

  “They’re in bed together,” she whispered.

  He pulled her back down the steps.

  “They’re sleeping together,” she said again as he bundled her out of the gate and let it close behind them.

  “He is bedding my student,” she said, once they were safely on the other side of the wall.

  “I think she is bedding him back,” he said.

  Shulien paused. She did not know where to start. “Why are you smiling?” she said.

  “Maybe we should come back later.”

  “You still want to ride with them?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because!” she said. “Did you hear them?”

  Silent Wolf laughed. “Do not be so angry,” he said. “It sounded to me like they were having fun.”