Master Brandon settled onto bent knees and ankles; and it was like his weight, some solid essence of him, just sunk downward, and rooted itself in the floor. I followed this invisible mass with my eyes before realizing how ridiculous I must appear, but when I looked up he only twinkled his eyes at me, as if we shared a joke no one else had got yet.
“Now,” he commanded, “try and push me over.”
I obliged, but it was like trying to tip over a pyramid.
“You’re too big.” I told him. “I’m not strong enough.”
“No? If your stance was deeper than mine, you wouldn’t need to be. But I understand what you mean. Mr. Gritsmith!”
The dwarf nodded and approached.
“Now you try and push me over.”
Gritsmith grinned, set his own feet, and gave Master Brandon a shove that would have brought down a wall. Master Brandon didn’t so much as budge. The dwarf’s grin turned to a frown, and he tried again, harder, with the same result.
“What th’ hell?” he finally asked.
Now it was Master Brandon’s turn to grin. “How about you get some friends, and a running start? Go ahead. If y’all manage to get me on the ground, by any means, then we’ll skip White Crane Flaps Its Wings in the warmup tomorrow.”
With this incentive (White Crane Flaps Its Wings was an exhausting, arm whirling, lunging leap that Master Brandon made look as elegant and as beautiful the flight of its namesake, and made the rest of us look like concussed bugs recently bounced off a windowpane), we lined up to try and tackle our instructor; first one at a time, then in groups, then finally all in a big rush. We nearly buried him, but he shifted less than a tree in the wind, and stayed rooted.
“You’re just so strong!” Marka cried. “How are you so strong?”
“Am I really?”
Gritsmith folded his arms over his chest and scowled, as if at an undecipherable document. I didn’t think he had ever lost an arm wrestling contest, and was probably better at sizing up a person’s raw muscle mass than the rest of us would ever be.
Master Brandon stuck his head out of one of the doorways and said something, and after a minute an elderly human lady appeared. Her hair was long and grey, but her movements were fluid and her slender posture erect. Whatever the years had done to her, they had not beaten her down or drained her dry. She wore a purple sash.
“Ms. Adalaide.” Master Brandon greeted her, and they bowed to one another. “Would you care to demonstrate Stone Stance for us?”
The woman sank into a Stone Stance possibly even more graceful than Master Brandon’s, and then stayed there. She was so still I might have passed her on the street without even registering her as a presence.
Snuck up on me while pretending to be a rock? I thought back, barely remembering not to roll my eyes. Right, ‘cause that happens all the time.
Voice laughed.
And that was a good question. I bet Cynric’s Goggles could see her. I thought. I bet no one’s Stone Stance goes as deep as their beating heart.
Not gonna happen. I nixed this train of thought before it went any further, and then sighed. I needed my gear back. The Voice in my head was getting bored.
“…go ahead and try now.” Master Brandon’s voice brought my attention back to the moment.
Gritsmith gave Adalaide a slightly horrified look, as if pushing over little old ladies was against his religion. She patiently waited him out, and after a final glance at Master Brandon, the dwarf went over and very gently pushed on her shoulder. She didn’t move. He pushed harder, and I noticed her flexing slightly in response, but she still didn’t topple, and finally Gritsmith gave her the same wall-wrecking shove from earlier, with no result whatsoever.
“Do you still think Stone Stance is all about strength?” asked Master Brandon, to our collective astonishment. “Stone Stance,” he demonstrated again, “is about becoming like a mountain. No one will ever get you on the ground, because you are the ground. Do you understand?”
We all dutifully nodded, but he wasn’t fooled.
“Ms. Sami.” The twinkling eyes seemed to pin me to the ground. “What do you think?”
“I think…” I gulped, and then went for it. “I think she’s like a tree.”
“That’s an interesting observation!” He boomed at us again. “There is a variation of Stone Stance called Weeping Willow Waits. Ms. Adalaide?”
The human shifted her stance slightly, and flexed her arms, which were now looser. It almost seemed there was a slight sway to her, though her feet never moved. Master Brandon threw a punch at her, much faster than I would have expected, but clearly not faster than she did. Her arms barely moved, but somehow wrapped themselves around his fist and deflected it away from her head.
Thus armed with proof that Stone Stance was not out of the reach of any physical type, we practiced all day, with Master Brandon and Ms. Adalaide coming around to subtly correct us. By the end of the class, most of the white belts had some acceptable approximation of Stone Stance… except me.
“Shouldn’t some real world experience make it easier to learn stuff?” I grumbled under my breath, while closing my eyes and trying to let my essence sink into the floor. It stubbornly refused, bobbing around me like an air bubble being asked to submerge underwater. When I finally thought I had it, I opened my eyes, and Marka reached out one open palm and very gently tipped me over.
I stood back up to try again, but it was time to break for afternoon classes. We bowed to Master Brandon, who congratulated us on our new stance, and I tried not to feel disgruntled at being left out. As we were filing out of the training room, he stopped me with a light touch on my shoulder, and I observed that I didn’t even try and reach for my non-existent daggers to relieve him of a few fingers.
“Ms. Adalaide, would you work with Ms. Samiel,” he pronounced it Sam-ay-ahl, “on stances this afternoon? I think she might benefit from your style.” He smiled hugely at us, mustache bobbing; Adalaide bowed, and thus disposed of, we retreated to one of the smaller training rooms.
She ran me through Stone Stance, again, and still to no effect. She hid any possible disappointment well, and instead asked me to demonstrate the other stances I knew. I was best at Cat Stance (which Voice insisted was Dexterity based), ok at Waiting Stance (Wisdom based, according to Voice), surprisingly good at Hooded Cobra (Intelligence based), and terrible at Dragon Stance (everything based).
“You must master the elements in order to proceed on the Four Element pathway. For your belt testing ceremony, you will have to break a board while holding your stance.” she told me. “Stone Stance, rooted in the earth, is the easiest and most powerful, which is why we teach it first. You clearly have great talent… I don’t understand why you are having such trouble with it.”
“Wait, hold on a sec, break a board with what? I thought we weren’t allowed to use weapons.”
“With the weapons you already have.” She smiled at me and held up her empty hands, as if in demonstration.
Ignoring, for the moment, the physical reality that a wooden plank was going to be harder than my flesh and bones, I went back to my more immediate problem. “Can’t I just do everything from Cat Stance?” I asked. “I like that one!”
Adalaide thought about this. “Can y
ou do Tumbling Pebbles from Cat?”
Tumbling Pebbles began with Stone and ended with Cat. I tried to start in Cat, but my feet kept getting tangled up. Step one just didn’t lead naturally to step two. Finally I tried to feel my way through Tumbling Pebbles by figuring out which move did lead naturally from the previous one, keeping the end of the kata in mind the whole time; when I got there, I was very proud of myself for finishing, feeling like I had worked my way around Stone Stance, until I thought back over my moves and realized I hadn’t done Tumbling Pebbles at all. My pride deflated even further as the realization continued that I had also not invented an entirely new kata, in fact, I had just recreated Cat Kata.
Adalaide, on the other hand, did not seem frustrated by this at all. “You have an affinity for this.” she stated, pacing around me while I held Cat Stance. “Just not for Stone, though you recognized the rooting aspect of it right away… and we don’t teach Weeping Willow until red belt!” Adalaide finished her pacing, facing me, and then, as if testing out a crazy idea, said, “Have you seen any of the other element stances?”
I shook my head.
“Follow after me then. This is Sea Stance.” She made the wrapping motion with her arms that Master Brandon had done on our first day, as if slowly gathering a great inertia of power to herself. “Sea Stance is about harnessing the harmony of the waves, but beware, once set in motion, you will fumble and fail if you try and fight the current. Move slowly, and push the energy before you, wrap yourself in it, and then pull it from behind you as well, and it will carry you with great power…”
I tried Sea Stance. It was fascinating, and even worse than Stone. Undaunted, Adalaide gave up on that one, and we moved onto Flame.
“Flame Stance is about channeling the passion inside you. There is energy in your breath, in your blood, in your bones. Learn to burn it, and it will fuel you and your strikes with devastating force. To do so, you must tap into your innermost core, your truest self… and you must be true to yourself, or it will not work. Flame is the stance of purity. Beware, though; Flame has no natural direction, and if you do not give it direction, it will consume you entirely. The most injuries occur in Flame Stance.” Adalaide thought about this for a moment, and then added, thoughtfully, “To both you and your opponent.”
Her Flame Stance was better than mine (her everything was better than mine, she was a purple belt, after all), but even I could see it wasn’t as graceful as her Sea Stance had been. It wasn’t her natural element.
I really liked Flame Stance, and I could see the potential of it, but I couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Adalaide stopped me after about ten minutes of trying, and promised me we’d come back to it after I took a breather and got a drink of water, and she cleared out the remaining breakables in the room. She was right. I was tiring too quickly, and my movements were getting clumsy.
“I’m sure I’ll be good at Flame Stance.” I told her. I was lying on the reed mat on the floor until the room stopped spinning. “I just need to practice some more!”
“Remember to breathe.” She handed me a cup of water. “You’ll need to master an elemental stance, for sure, or else you won’t be able to progress along the Way. But this is some very advanced material, and we don’t teach it to beginners for a reason.” She sighed. “I really thought you’d take to Sea. Its energy is so abundant, here in Triport.”
“Are you not from here? Originally?” Her accent was flawless. I wondered how long it would take me to pass as a native of this wet stone city, so different from the empty desert wastes of my childhood.
“No.” she answered, not rudely, but as flat as Stone Stance.
I let it drop.
“It’s called the Four Element Pathway,” I began, seeking a change of subject, “but we’ve only just covered three elemental stances. What’s the fourth?”
She gave me an appraising look. “The fourth is both difficult and impractical. And if you haven’t mastered Stone, you’ll never keep your balance.”
“We could try Flame again.” I countered.
Adalaide sighed, and we stood up. “Very well. For what it’s worth, this is Wind Stance.”
She rose up on her tip toes, light as a ballerina, her arms seeming to float in the air. From some corner of the room a draft stirred in the still air; it reached out, tickled my legs, and playfully tousled my hair.
Hello, brother. I grinned at Adalaide, and rose up on my own toes. Shall we dance?
I lined up with the other white belts in class the next morning, trying not to fidget with excitement. Adalaide had worked with me all afternoon, showing me katas starting from Wind, even though most of them were far beyond my skill level. I did manage a pretty decent rendering of Autumn Leaf Drifting from the Tallest Cedar, as well as my new favorite: Sphinx Ascending. I had been so excited to have finally mastered an element, I practiced Wind Stance all evening as well, leaping up into it at every opportunity; shadow boxing with dust bunnies, jumping along the rafters, and even trying it out upside down while doing handstands on the training dummy. Wind Stance was not really a stance at all, but rather a way of moving, of treating the air itself as if it were a medium of balance instead of a useless and empty void.
In some ways it felt less like learning something new than of rediscovering something old, something I had once known as a child, but which I had neglected since coming here to the busy and crowded city. A truth inside of me. I thought of Flame Stance, and wondered how I was going to master that one.
Not me?
“Tomorrow,” Master Brandon told us as he paced in front of the class, his thumbs tucked into their habitual spot in his sash, “we are having a belt testing ceremony. That means that if you feel you have mastered an elemental stance,” here he pointedly looked at me, and I beamed back, “you will have the opportunity to test for yellow belt. You must also show comprehension of the first five Static Stances and the associated katas. And, because no movement, or kata, or even stance, is demonstrable in a vacuum, you will be demonstrating what you know in live combat.”
The class stared at Master Brandon in disbelief that ranged from Marka’s look of horror to Darkfistz’s whoop of joy. Live combat? With these white belts? I liked my fellow students (for the most part), but they were quite likely to break something, probably themselves, if let loose in a real fight. I was still puzzling out if the Black Belt Factory was in fact way more hardcore than I had anticipated, when I noticed the twinkle in Master Brandon’s eyes.
“What sort of live combat?” I finally asked, and he let loose the laugh that had been building up inside him.
“I’m just kidding y’all!” he confessed, belly still bouncing. “What I mean is, in yellow belt you get to start sparring. So what do y’all say we sneak in some practice beforehand?”
At this announcement that we were not about to be fed to raging orks in a trial-by-combat for our first belt level, even Marka relaxed. We got given all the careful dos and don’ts of what was allowed in low level sparring, which basically amounted to “don’t use any of the dirty tricks that you would in a real fight”, and then we were let loose to pair up. The Brownian motion of the sorting eventually left me opposite Darkfistz, whom I had learned from previous single-move exercises was disinclined to pull his punches. After me and Gritsmith, he was the shortest person in the class, although he was human, or mostly so. Dwade had confided to me that Darkfistz was actually a half-dwarf, though his human mother had raised him somewhere to the north, away from the traditions of the mines.
We bowed, squared off, and on Master Brandon’s command, dropped into our stances. Darkfistz
’s Stone Stance wasn’t bad, and I answered it with my new Wind Stance.
“Dude, you are so doing it wrong.”
“I find this easier for me than Stone.” I told him, light on my feet, feeling like a fish must feel in the sea; the whole world suddenly turned into three dimensions, the air around me no longer a void, but a new thing to explore, limited only by the distant sky.
Master Brandon gave the order to begin, but Darkfistz only rolled his eyes again. “You look totally gay.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. This is what I get for trying to spar a girl.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Shut up and spar, then.”
With a great, exasperated sigh, he threw a punch at me, if you could call it that. A fast growing plant could have dodged it.
“Really?” I danced forward and tagged him in the thigh, on one of the nerves near the knee, just to show him how it was done. It wasn’t a strong punch, just a reminder that he left me an opening. He retaliated with a delusory kick in my direction with the same leg that would have been immobilized if I had landed my own punch at full power.
“Now who’s doing it wrong?” I asked. “Your kicks are so slow they need an intermission!”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” he intoned, in what he probably imagined was a kind and patronizing tone.
“Stop being such a wuss. Neither of us is going to learn anything, much less pass our belt test, if you fight like a puppet underwater!”
He narrowed his eyes at that, and reached out to grab me. This move had some teeth behind it. I dodged out of the way again. Frustrated, Darkfistz swung a haymaker at me in a whistling arc, which, if his fist had connected, would have made a dent in the wall with my head. This drew Master Brandon’s attention.
“Ms. Samiel! Mr. Darkfistz! How are we coming along?”
For A Few Minutes More Page 10