Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

by Justin Hill

  The two ladies talked and Wei-fang could barely bring himself to eat, and they watched him as he sucked up long-life noodle after noodle, careful not to break any of them lest that brought him bad luck.

  The matchmaker watched his every slurp, her small black teeth giving her face a sinister appearance, and then at last she smiled. “I know the perfect kind of girl.”

  That evening of his seventeenth birthday, Plum Blossom and Wei-fang stood at Master Zhang’s grave. She knew why they were there, and she was almost managing to maintain a happy air as Wei-fang lit the three sticks of incense and bowed three times, burned paper money, paper gold ingots, food, and a string of paper coins he had asked the funeral shop to make for him.

  At the end he knelt and prayed aloud to the four winds. “Old master,” he said, “I am, like you, an unfilial son. It is too late perhaps, but I am going to do what you told me. I am going to find a new teacher, and I will right some wrongs in the world and leave it a better place than when I was born.”

  He bowed again, and lit the incense sticks and stuck them in the ground where Master Zhang lay. The wind in the cedars sang gently as he rose slowly and bowed to the earth, and sky and heavens.

  “Please don’t,” she said, but her foot always hurt her on the long walk, so when she was biting back the pain, he lifted her.

  “You’re no weight,” he said.

  By the time they got back to the shop the shadows were lengthening. “Come inside. I have something for you,” she said, and she smiled quickly.

  She pulled out a stool and stood a little unsteadily to bring an old chest down from a top shelf. It came down in a flurry of dust. She puffed on it, took a damp cloth and wiped the lacquered wood clean. “If he had lived I am sure he would have given you this. This was his old weapon.”

  She took out a bundle and set it on the table, next to the medicine scales, and fold by fold he opened up the cloth. Inside were three lengths of wood, dark and smooth with use, the middle length joined at both ends by three links of iron.

  It was a nunchaku, a three-sectioned staff, the “coiling dragon staff.”

  Wei-fang’s face lit up. “Thank you,” he said. “Many many thanks!”

  He picked it up reverently. “I remember he showed me this once. He said it was first used by Chao Hong Yin, the first Emperor of the Song Dynasty. Look, it is made of red maple. It is heavy but not stiff. Yielding but not soft. Each length of wood is matched to the other.”

  He took up a stance and spun the staff around his head, and it whirred in the air despite its age and frailty. He remembered the old man telling him about this weapon. “You can strike far,” he had said, and the staff whistled through the air. “Medium, and close! Strike! Trap a weapon and pull it free, entangle horse’s hooves, encumber an enemy and allow you to close,” he had said, suddenly stepping forward and placing his foot on Wei-fang’s, holding him in place, “and strike!”

  Plum Blossom stood back and Wei-fang moved with growing confidence. Each night he remembered the words of Master Zhang: “Go to the Twelve-Sided Pagoda. There are great masters there. They can teach you.”

  The drum tower was sounding sunset when he finally said his goodbyes. Plum Blossom lingered at the door. Her old jacket was fading at the collar. Part of him wished that he could be satisfied with the simple home life. She might have made him a loyal and honest spouse.

  But his spirit yearned for something more. A grander life. Less sure, less steady.

  “Goodbye Wei-fang,” she said. She put out a hand. She did not want to let go.

  “I’ll send word,” he said. “I’ll come back when I’m a great ­warrior!”

  “Good,” she said, and wondered how long she would wait, and very suddenly she stepped up and kissed his cheek.

  He blushed to his navel, but she pushed him away. “Go. I will miss you. But do not come back until Master Zhang’s ghost would be proud of you!”

  Wei-fang was sadder than he could imagine as he walked home that night for the last time.

  6

  It was past midnight. The moon was rising. Wei-fang’s pack was light. What else did a young man need when facing the unknown but food, a warm padded jacket, a spare pair of cotton shoes, his fighting manuals, and a pot of rice wine?

  He moved silently from his own courtyard, past his parents’ yard, the kitchens, the stables, and right to the back, where his father’s chrysanthemum garden was cleared of pots and ready for winter.

  Duung! From the drum tower the low throbbing note vibrated over the city. Clok-clok! came an answering sound. Clok-clok! as the night watchman struck his wooden block as he made his rounds. Wei-fang knew the man. He was a pleasant enough fellow, when not given power.

  “All is well!” the man called out.

  Wei-fang waited until the watchman had passed, and then waited a little longer. For a moment he felt regret and fear. There was a moment’s clarity as he realized how the household would wake. In the morning, when the maids found his chamber empty, he knew what would happen. They would run back and forth, searching for him, and one of them would run to Pipa Alley to see if he’d spent the night there.

  No one would dare to tell his mother. They would draw lots as they always did, and at last when it could be hidden no longer, one of them would walk trembling into her room and fall to her knees and kowtow, and, trembling more, tell her that her only son had fled.

  He pictured the maids in his mind. They had been like aunts to him: spoiling him, laughing at him, slipping him treats.

  It’s a fine way to reward them, Wei-fang thought, and steeled himself. With a sudden resolve he leaped up, and caught the top of the wall. He lay on the top of the tile roof and lingered for one last look.

  Your last view of home is always the most beautiful, a poet had once written. So it seemed, he thought, as the moon rose over the gray tiled roofs with their curving eaves.

  As Wei-fang dropped down into the street, he felt a hand on his arm. He could tell from the instant it touched him that it was not the lazy night watchman. One finger pressed on the lines of his qi that ran up the inside of his arm, the thumb pressing hard onto the lu pressure point on his elbow. The application of force was hard, precise, and his hand curled uselessly. He tried to twist it away, but the hand held him tight. He fought harder, but he could not shake the hand off. Panic rose within him and through panic came fear. With his other hand and knee he pulled and shoved, kicked and tripped, but however much he used his strength the dark figure held onto him. “What is your name?” he said as he tried another shove.

  The figure was shorter than him. It stepped into his attack. There was something familiar in the shape and movements of the man who had him. No, he thought, not man.

  “You are a woman!” he said in surprise.

  There was a low laugh that sounded familiar. “Am I?” a woman said.

  He blocked the openhanded punch at his throat a moment before it choked him.

  In an instant he knew who the fighter was. “You cannot stop me leaving,” he said. The pressure on his arm increased and sweat started to form on his head.

  “No?” the voice said. “Why should I find a bride for you, young warrior, if you are going to flee your home?” The figure stepped forward and in the shadows he saw the black smile and tried desperately to wrench his hand free. How could an old lady grip him so tightly? She laughed at his efforts. “You have much to learn,” she told him. “There is no power in strength. The soft overcomes the strong. Weakness consumes the stiff. The man who fights will always lose. Struggle is weakness.”

  All this time her finger and thumb pressed into his qi lines. He tried a punch to her chest, and the blow was diverted. He kicked and the kick was blocked. He threw his pack at her and she was not there, and then suddenly he was on his back with steel fingernails prodding deep into his throat.

  He felt them nick his ski
n.

  “I said,” the matchmaker purred, “that you have much to learn. Patience is one. You have skill. Just like your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “Not the one you call mother,” the woman laughed. “But you are too old and willful and stupid! You should have left when Master Zhang told you.”

  “You knew Master Zhang?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I know much that is hidden.”

  “Do you know where the Twelve-Sided Pagoda is? He said his master might teach me.”

  “You want to go to the Twelve-Sided Pagoda? The old masters are dead. Hades Dai is master there now!” she said. “But you are too old to learn! He will not take you—go back to your mother!”

  She let go of his wrist and pain flooded into his hand and fingertips. She put a hand to his chest—it was an almost gentle movement—but the force was such that he slammed against the wall. He grunted and slid slowly down, shaking his head to clear his vision.

  At that moment came the clok! of the returning night watchman. In a single leap she landed on the opposite roof with a flap of robes.

  Wei-fang saw the swinging paper lantern and grabbed his backpack. His hand throbbed uselessly as he tried to scramble up the wall after her, but she disappeared from view. He winced as he pursued her—a shadow running from rooftop to rooftop—lithe, animal almost. He hurtled after her. His legs pounded as he leaped from roof to roof, his pack flailing wildly in his hand.

  He ran across the top of the Temple of Bounteous Truth and saw the matchmaker below him. She was crouched on all fours like a bat that has just landed. Her face turned up toward him in an inhuman movement and he understood that this was no human but a devil in human form sent to torment the weak.

  Her lips peeled back in a snarl and her teeth were not stained black, but sharp and pointed white fangs. A red tongue hissed at him, and she suddenly leaped forward. He fell back in his terror, tumbled down head over heels, and landed with a heavy thud on his back in the middle of the temple yard.

  A hiss made him jump once more in fright. He leaped up and grabbed for his sword, and saw a black mottled cat, back arched sideways like a moon bridge, hissing at him.

  “Is that you?” he said and the cat hissed again.

  “Where is the Twelve-Sided Pagoda?”

  The cat teetered like a girl in high platform shoes. He wasn’t sure it was the matchmaker. He had heard of shape-shifters and demons, but a temple did not seem the place to find them. “Ya!” he said and clapped his hands. It worked, the cat skittered off, and Wei-fang just had time to grab his pack and his staff before a sleepy monk thrust his head from the door of his sleeping chamber and looked out into the empty courtyard.

  Wei-fang walked through the night, past sleeping villages where only dogs barked, and empty fields where bullfrogs bellowed. At the end of the first day he paused and leaned on his staff and looked back when he heard the faint ring of a bell carry over the fields. It struck three times. Miles of carefully tended wheat and cabbage fields, and the loess mud-brick houses with their bamboo groves that sprouted up like untidy clumps of mushrooms separated him from home.

  Before him mountains rose, forbidding as temple guards on either side of the entrance hall, tumbling torrents of white water, and thick bamboo forest ahead. To the Twelve-Sided Pagoda, he thought, wherever that might be.

  Wei-fang traveled from village to village. The peasants were wary when they saw the lone wanderer. The women hurried back to their homes. The men stood on the narrow walkways between the diligently planted fields and held their hoes and watched him until he had passed along the road.

  At night he stretched and closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, until the world turned dark around him and he heard the creatures of the day replaced by the watching silence of the night, and he felt fear creep slowly over him, like rising water, and he breathed deeper and more calmly, kept his mouth free.

  Each day after a breakfast of yesterday’s bread or wild roots and hardy winter herbs, he pulled his pack onto his back and set off into the miles ahead. “I am looking for the Twelve-Sided Pagoda,” he said when he met locals. Some were inbred and stupid people. Others refused to understand. But when he met fellow wanderers, or scholars, or crazed poets, then they would stop and listen, and perhaps share their wine and food with him.

  “The Twelve-Sided Pagoda?” one man said. “I do not know, but if you are to study wushu, then Mount Song is the place to go. Shaolin Temple is there. I have heard that there is no better place to study the martial arts.”

  “No, my master said I must go to the Twelve-Sided Pagoda.”

  One day the sun was shining and the air was still and watchful, and Wei-fang opened up his padded jacket as he began to sweat. He came to a village. A fat man with a shaved scalp was sitting by the side of the road with a pot of wine, a bowl of rice half eaten by his side, his cotton padded coat open to let his belly air, his blue cotton trousers pulled up to his knees. He was chewing a dry rice stalk. He spat it out, looked Wei-fang up and down, pushed himself up, and waded toward him, belly first.

  “Welcome,” the man said. “It is a hot day for walking.”

  Bullies attracted cronies like flies around shit: noisy little men who needed a bully to make themselves feel important. Wei-fang took them all in, assessing their strengths, postures, weaknesses. His senses were suddenly sharp.

  “Where are you going?” the bully said.

  “Along the road.”

  The bully hitched up his trousers, sniffed and stuck out his gut. “There’s a fee for this road.”

  “Is there?”

  The bully nodded, belly out.

  Wei-fang leaned on his staff. “And what is the fee?”

  The bully laughed. “Cash, coin, work? You have a sister, perhaps, you could send her to pour our wine?”

  Wei-fang laughed and the fat man’s face turned unfriendly. He looked to his jackals and they all came forward. Wei-fang did not move. The first came at him from the right. Wei-fang dropped into fighting stance, the staff twirling around so fast it whistled through the air and knocked the man flat.

  Two more came from the right, and Wei-fang gut-kicked one and felt the connection solid and true, the grunt of shock as the air was driven out of his lungs. The other tried to jump on Wei-fang’s back and hold his arms. But as he leaped Wei-fang stepped in and met him with the end of the staff: a quick jab to the sternum. He landed next to the first, a sprawling mess of pain.

  Wei-fang swung the staff and dropped into position, his forefingers together, pointing at the fat bully, his mouth closed, his nostrils flaring as he breathed. His confidence made most of them skittish. He lowered his chin and breathing, and the rest turned and ran, while the fat bully fell to his knees.

  “Do not punish us!” he said.

  Wei-fang scowled. “You shall let travelers pass on their way without worry or hindrance.”

  “Yes!” the fat man nodded.

  “And if I hear otherwise, I shall return and take my revenge on you and all your family!”

  Wei-fang took the pot of wine as he left. He had a pleasant night that night, drinking to his own success.

  Next morning, early, when the peasants were still walking out into their fields, poles balanced across their shoulders, Wei-fang reached a great crossroads. North was Luoyang, west Xian, south Nanyang, and east the Thirty-Six Peaks of Mount Song rose up straight from the plains: the chiseled valleys reaching up to high crags, thick with thorny bushes and low trees.

  He turned that way. The mountain seemed to lure him forward. The villages fell away as the land rose and the fields were replaced by wild forest. The path was sometimes so overgrown that it was a green tunnel through trees and grasses and bamboo. The soil was dry and light; the scattered rocks turned underfoot, or slid away down the slope. It was tough climbing. Wei-fang set his staff in the grou
nd and pushed himself up. The last pot of wine was long gone and he missed the taste and energy it gave him.

  This was a strange wild land. The only huts here were those of woodsmen and hermits. As he reached the top of the mountain, he saw that what he had climbed were just foothills, mere essays, and before him rose the majestic peaks of Mount Song. Paths clung terrified to the edges of sheer drops. Looking up he could see the dark shapes of high temples, clinging like swallows’ nests to high crags. As he stood a gibbon howled high up—the noise almost lost on the breeze—a strange and wondrous sound that echoed back from the sheer cliff faces.

  Wei-fang sat and shook his head. He had thought of many challenges ahead but the heights before him were dumbfounding. Before him he could see no path, and without a path there was no way through.

  He sat down almost in tears. He felt defeated. He would have begged for a pot of wine then, he thought. And racked by lonesome thoughts, he lay down, alone under the stars, and slept.

  7

  On the second day of searching Wei-fang came across a little track, such as goats made, and followed it through the dappled green shadows of bamboo and cedar trees. The wind whistled a light and mournful note in the long-hanging cedar needles. The bamboos rustled and swayed all as one.

  The path led down through sharp craggy rocks to a torrent of white water. He clambered down over mighty fallen rocks, wet with moss and spray, and stood at the brink and felt the cold damp on his face.

  The torrent made him tremble. How could he cross such a deluge?

  He looked up and down and saw that it would be death to try and pass: one false footing would send him tumbling into the writhing snakes of water.

  He squatted down and splashed his face. The water had a clean fresh taste. He refilled his wine pot, and let the white noise wash over him.

  He was about to go back when he saw a deer come down to the stream on the far bank. It did not notice him. It was a young female with lean brown flanks and nervous ears. She stepped delicately as she came down the rocks and bent to sip the water.