Peasprout Chen--Battle of Champions

by Henry Lien

  In wu-liu-combined-with-music class, Sagacious Monk Goom and Sensei Madame Chingu teach us how to greatly amplify sound by changing the strings of fiddles and zithers from kelp-gut strings to metal ones that we then magnetize with rods. Doing so creates sounds of monstrous volume. When aimed properly, the blast from the magnetized strings can send someone’s legs shooting out from under them, causing them to land on their rear ends. The possibilities for application to combat are obvious. The Battle-Kite Sparkle-Pilots immediately discover that playing chords rather than single notes on the magnetized strings sends a punch of sound that can rock an entire structure.

  In wu-liu-combined-with-literature class, we study what magnets can teach us about the power of ideas. Sensei Master Ram says, “There is a form of literature called propaganda. It is all about controlling another entity. Please take the block of tenderized kelp trunk on the desk before you. Now, push nails into it. Deep. Just pretend it’s Sensei Madame Yao’s face.”

  We all laugh.

  “Now come to the front of the class. This gelatinous array is filled with disks of magnetized metal. Each of you take two and no more than two. To keep track of how many are checked out, you’ll need to trade one skate for each disk. You won’t get your skates back unless you return both disks.”

  When we have all exchanged skates for magnetized disks, we return to our desks.

  “Now use the disks to guide the block. The metal you embedded in it allows you to control it.”

  The students gesture about with their disks clutched clumsily in their fingers, as if trying to coax a mouse out of a hole with a rice cake. They’re able to make the blocks of kelp trunk move about because of the magnets pulling the metal inside them.

  “Thus it is with ideas. It is possible to plant ideas in people’s heads that allow them to be controlled. For example, I could tell you that Sensei Madame Yao hates it any time she hears a student giggle like this.” He covers his teeth and emits a “tihihihi!” in a high tone. We all twitter. “And I could tell you that she hates it enough when girls do it, but when boys do it, it makes her face turn plum purple with fury. But if I told you that, I could get the whole student body baiting her on my behalf. And that would not be responsible behavior for a sensei. It would, however, be an illustration of how propaganda embeds an idea and gets people to do things you want, just like a magnet.”

  Most of the students in the class begin practicing “tihihihi” while covering their mouths.

  Meanwhile, Cricket is doing something else. He’s waving his hands cupped over the disks as if running them over the contours of a form that we can’t see but he can feel. Suddenly, he jerks the disks in his hands with a flick of his wrists. The nails come flying out of the block of tenderized kelp trunk and stick to his magnets.

  Doi, Hisashi, Yinmei, and I gather around him.

  He whispers to us, “If we could get close enough to Shinian ships, we could use magnets to pull the nails out of them and make them fall apart. We could sink their whole navy.”

  Heavenly August Personage of Jade.

  “Cricket, you’ve saved Pearl!”

  “Not yet.” He smiles, but doesn’t deflect the compliment. My Cricket, accepting his due praise. “These magnets wouldn’t be nearly strong enough to pull the nails out of the Shinian ships. And even if they were, the bigger problem is that we would have to get very close to the ships, close enough for the archers to hit us. Our boats wouldn’t be fast enough to dodge the archers. Our drumblades would be, but drumblades can’t go on the water, so there wouldn’t—”

  Cricket’s face winces with pain.

  “Cricket, what’s wrong?” I ask.

  “My nose.”

  He slips the magnets into his pockets and cups both hands to his face.

  “Sensei Master Ram,” he says. “May I please be excused? I’m feeling ill. I need to go see Doctor Dio.”

  With Sensei Master Ram’s permission, Doi and I carry Cricket in a lucky-fisted palanquin formation to the Hall of Benevolent Healing.

  “I told you,” says the always-unhelpful healer, “human sinus bones are magnetized. That’s why all this schoolwork with magnets is affecting him. If he isn’t careful, the magnetization will interrupt the pulses from his heart, which can only shorten the little time he has left in this world. He really shouldn’t be going to school, anyway. What’s the point in educating him when by next year he’ll—”

  Doi and I shut the door of the hall on the loathsome, lying healer and carry Cricket back to his dormitory chamber.

  As he sleeps, I skate to the northeast shore of the Principal Island to be alone. I don’t believe Doctor Dio. I don’t believe that the ivory yin salts did any permanent damage to Cricket. I do believe that the coiling water dragon is lethal to him. But I’m never going to let it get close to him again.

  He’s the only family I have. I can’t let anything happen to him. I don’t allow myself to wish that Father and Mother were here to tell me what to do. What use is there wishing for something that cannot be?

  Then I hear tones. They’re drum tones, faint but carrying far across the water, like the open-bottomed martial drums that Dappled Lion Dao talked about in music class. They’re coming from the direction where I know the Shinian ships are stationed.

  They repeat a sequence over and over.

  I realize that, like Sensei Madame Chingu’s wave organ, the drums carry notes.

  In the gongche notation system.

  Yi. Wu. Yi. Wu. Yi. Fan. He. Shang. Si.

  It means, Barter. Barter. Yi-Fan. And. Shang. Die.

  Yi-Fan is the personal name of my mother, and Shang is the personal name of my father.

  It’s telling me, “Barter, barter, or your parents die.”

  Can it be true? Have the Shinian authorities really located them? But if they have, it only means that they’re being used as hostages. They can’t help me, and I’m being threatened with losing them just as soon as I’ve gotten them back.

  I can’t stop myself. I bury my face in my hands and burst into tears.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “The message means that the Shinian ships are demanding to trade Captain Cao’s mole hairs in exchange for my parents’ safety,” I say to Doi, Hisashi, and Yinmei under the Arch of Crossed Destinies immediately after I heard the message in drum tones.

  “Don’t believe them, Peasprout,” says Doi. “If they had your parents on board, or even imprisoned back in Shin, why didn’t they say anything before? They could have threatened to harm your parents if you didn’t turn yourself over. They don’t know where your parents are any more than you do.”

  Hisashi adds, “And there’s nothing we could do even if they did, since Father decided to swallow Captain Cao’s mole hairs. Who knew we had such a mature and dignified father, Wing Girl?”

  “I am sorry to say this,” speaks Yinmei, “but there is a much greater problem.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “The Shinian soldiers used the gongche notation system to send you a message encoded in drum music. That means they almost certainly know the answer to your questions that Sensei Madame Chingu has been playing on the wave organ.”

  Heavenly August Personage of Jade.

  I moan, “So they probably figured out that the answer is the coiling water dragon.”

  “Yes,” answers Yinmei, “but they do not know what the question was.”

  “It hardly even matters,” I say. “They’re going to figure it out. And they’re going to try to capture a coiling water dragon to use as a weapon against us!”

  “We must negotiate with the coiling water dragons first,” says Doi.

  “Wing Girl, in case you didn’t notice, they’re not exactly friendly. Further, Peasprout would have to leave the campus again. She could have been seized out there on the sea, not just by the Shinian soldiers but by the Pearlian city police to be deported.”

  I’m touched that he doesn’t just care about our safety. He cares a
bout my safety. Not that I ever really doubted that. So why do I need constant reminders of it from him?

  I nod at Hisashi and say, “The problem is that we can’t even get near them. We can’t navigate quickly enough on the sea to dodge them in case they don’t want to negotiate. Like last time. They’re too fast to escape by rowing or swimming.”

  “We could probably maneuver around them on skates,” says Doi.

  “But skates cannot go on the sea,” says Yinmei.

  “We could fall into the water near the academy and bring them back on campus again,” says Hisashi, slapping his palms together like a belly flop onto water.

  “No way! I’m not bringing them anywhere near Cricket ever again.”

  “So how are we going to negotiate with them before the Shinian soldiers capture one?” asks Doi.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  I look down at the sea beyond the edge of the Garden of Whispering Arches. It moves with suggestions of shapes. They’re not coiling water dragons, though. It’s the Season of Glimmers, but the senseis decided not to turn the academy to a nocturnal schedule this year, because they didn’t want us to be asleep in the daytime, when the Shinian soldiers would be able to see better and might be more tempted to attack. I know that below the calm surface of the water, the sea is filled with luminous octopuses. The depths churn with life. Life, not death.

  When Cricket wakes, I don’t tell him about the message regarding our parents. He doesn’t need the stress while he’s recovering from whatever the magnets did to his sinus bone. And I have to get him well quickly. Even if I have to deal with the Shinians knowing about the coiling water dragon, even if they really are holding our parents hostage, I can’t focus on anything if Cricket is in any sort of danger.

  Doi and I take turns bringing Cricket meals and anything else he asks for. One evening, I skate to his dormitory chamber to check on him. I pass Doi in the corridor. She left earlier to bring him some pan-fried pot stickers stuffed with chopped leeks and simmered vinegar-tofu chunks, which is Cricket’s favorite of her recipes.

  “How is he?” I ask.

  “His appetite is healthy, and his Chi is strong. However, I still feel some throbbing from his third-eye Chi point.”

  “Maybe the magnets in class really do affect his sinus bone. But it’s been days since he was exposed to them.”

  “He seems happy, though. He made a strange request this morning. He asked me to bring him two bowls, one with drinking water and one with seawater, and a spoon but to make sure that it was a metal spoon rather than a porcelain one.”

  I catch Doi’s gaze as she says metal, and we both realize it at the same time.

  He’s still doing something with magnets. That’s why his third-eye Chi point is still throbbing.

  We skate to his dormitory chamber and slide open the shoji door.

  “Aiyah!” he shrieks. “I could’ve been naked!”

  He’s kneeling, dressed in his sleeping robe and socks, in front of two bowls of water.

  “What are you doing?” I cry.

  “I’ll show you if you shut the door!” he says, irritated. “Please.”

  We slide the shoji door closed behind us and kneel down next to him.

  He cups in his hands the two magnetic disks from wu-liu- combined-with-literature class. I completely forgot that he snuck them in his pockets before we carried him to the healer.

  “Watch this,” he says. “The left one is drinking water.”

  He drops the little metal spoon into the water. He then touches one of the magnetic disks to the water. The spoon slides and sticks to the disk just as it would with no water. He pries the spoon from the disk, then drops the spoon in the other bowl.

  “The right one is seawater. Now watch … this!” he says with the equivalent of one of my legendary hand flourishes in his voice.

  He touches the magnetic disk to the seawater. The spoon leaps from the bottom of the bowl and floats above the water!

  “Heavenly August Personage of Jade!” I cry. “How did you do that?”

  “The magnet activates something in the water that repels metal. But it’s only something in seawater, not in fresh water. There’s something in the seawater here in Pearl.”

  “How under heaven did you discover that?”

  “The way that my sinus bone hurt in class with the magnets was like how it hurt when we were on the sea with the dragon.”

  “Yes, we know that its presence makes your nose hurt.”

  “No, it’s not the dragon’s presence, but the sea itself. It got worse when the dragon got close, but the pain started before. And it was at its worst not when the dragon mauled us, but when we were under the sea.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. We’ve been surrounded by sea all this time.”

  “Which means the sea was different that night, Peasprout. It was magnetized. Do you remember how we found Ong Hong-Gee’s skate suspended in the air? It had been pushed up from the bottom of the sea and was floating above the water because the magnetized sea repelled the metal skate blade.”

  “But why didn’t you feel this all the other times you were near the sea?”

  “Because someone hadn’t turned on the magnetization then,” Cricket says with triumph. “My nose only hurt that night when we were looking for the dragon. And maybe when the dragon attacked Eastern Heaven Dining Hall.”

  “But why would someone want to magnetize the sea?”

  “So that they,” says Doi with a look of shock and delight spreading on her face, “could skate on it.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  So this is how we can approach the coiling water dragons safely. By skating on the magnetized sea around them. Just like whoever we heard out on the sea the night that the dragon mauled us. This is how we are going to maneuver close enough to negotiate with them and beg them to help us before the Shinian ships capture one.

  At first, I wonder if magnetizing the sea could hoist the ships into the air by their nails, and I feel like a prodigy for it! However, Cricket does the calculations and says that the metal in the nails is far too negligible to lift the whole ship.

  Cricket recovers from his magnet sickness as soon as we return his magnets to Sensei Master Ram in exchange for his skates. We’ve lost time with Cricket being sick. The Third Annexation is just two months away, which is not much time at all to figure out how to apply what Cricket learned about magnetizing the sea to our advantage.

  The first meal that Cricket’s well enough to join us in Eastern Heaven Dining Hall for is a special banquet. To make up for the disappointment of not having a Festival of Lanterns since the academy is no longer nocturnal, the senseis have been scheduling weekly banquets during the Season of Glimmers, taken from ancient Edaian traditions. I have no reason to believe that the histories of these banquets are any more authentic than the supposed two-hundredth anniversary of the Festival of Lanterns last year was, but all five of us are happy that no octopuses will be burned alive this year.

  The Shinian servant girls bow to Yinmei when they serve us. She is their princess, after all. They place in front of each of us a bowl that looks like a letter orb. This banquet is all about Zendoshi koans interpreted in food. We open the lids covering the bowls.

  “It’s empty,” says Hisashi.

  Cricket holds the bowl to his nose and says, “No, it’s not! It’s a scent course. Mine smells like plum porridge.”

  “Mine smells like lotus-root soup,” says Doi.

  “Which Zendoshi koan does it interpret?” I say.

  Hisashi replies, “I know! The parable of the fools who found profundity in sniffing unwashed dishes! Hahahah!”

  Once the Shinian serving girls move on to tables far from us, we continue our debate in hushed tones. Thankfully, the ribbing of the beams in Eastern Heaven Dining Hall helps to isolate sound. If we whisper, it’s impossible to hear from even a table away.

  “Someone deliberately magnetized the sea,” say
s Cricket.

  I reason, “But how do we know it wasn’t some effect of the coiling water dragon on the water around it?”

  Doi replies, “Remember? We all heard people skate onto the water right after Crick said his nose was hurting.”

  “I’m with Crick, too,” says Hisashi. “We heard eight feet like a giant spider running across the surface of the water. That was lucky people wearing eight skates. They turned on the magnetization of the sea so they could skate on it.”

  Yinmei speaks as if reasoning aloud. “The appearance of the coiling water dragons; the purported location of the nest behind the Conservatory of Architecture, which they forbid us to enter; the magnetization of the sea … As you yourself said, Peasprout, it is all too much to be coincidence. I believe Crick is correct that someone magnetized the sea in order to chase after the dragons.”

  So it seems the nickname Crick is catching on.

  They’re all coming together as a battleband. They’re ready to help me skate on the magnetized sea and negotiate with the coiling water dragons.

  If I solve this problem, I solve all my problems. At last—at long last—I’ll be safe.

  I want that so badly, it aches.

  But I’m their leader. And as their leader, I need to consider their safety at least as much as my own.

  I announce, “I’m not going to let any of us go searching for the coiling water dragon again unless we have a lot more information about how to deal with it.”

  “The third-year architecture students would know,” says Cricket.

  “The three of them along with their sensei were probably the people we heard on the water that night,” reasons Doi.

  All five of us look at the three third-year architecture students, two girls and a boy, seated at a table alone at the far end of Eastern Heaven Dining Hall. They catch us watching them and give us a good, long look in return. They huddle closer together over their bowls and resume whispering. However, because of the ribbing of the beams, we can’t hear them any more than they can hear us.

  “They’ll never reveal anything to us,” I say. “They’re not just honoring an academy rule or New Deitsu Pearlworks Company secrets anymore; they’re part of this whole plot. They would never say anything within our hearing.”