Peasprout Chen--Battle of Champions

by Henry Lien

  Hisashi bows to her and clears his throat. I forgot about his voice. He might look like Doi, but his voice has already changed. He begins to say in a timid tone, “We were—”

  “That’s a filthy, disgusting lie, Niu Doi! You’re all trying to get to the Conservatory of Music to steal my gongs. Thieves!” she shouts, looking around for other senseis. “Shameless, unwhipped thieves!”

  On the right, Sensei Madame Liao comes skating out from the boys’ dormitories toward the real Doi. I quickly shift to make sure she can’t see Hisashi on the other side. She calls out, “What is it now, Sensei Madame Yao!”

  “Niu Doi and her accomplices are trying to take advantage of Bite the Sea Cucumber to steal my gongs!”

  Sensei Madame Liao looks at Doi and calls over, “What makes you think that, Sensei Madame Yao?”

  “Niu Doi has gong-polishing powder smeared all over the front of her robe!”

  Sensei Madame Liao looks at Doi and her unsullied robe.

  “What are you talking about, Sensei Madame Yao?”

  Doi and I look at each other and sweat immediately beads on my forehead. I have to make sure Sensei Madame Liao doesn’t skate around to the other side and find out our scheme.

  “Come over here and look!”

  Sense Madame Liao gazes in bafflement at Doi, then skates around to the other side of the pavilion, to Sensei Madame Yao. I quickly skate toward the other side as well. What am I going to do?

  When Sensei Madame Liao sees Hisashi, with his identical cropped hair and features, wearing my skirt under his academy robe, she stops short.

  She skates back to Doi’s side, then back to Hisashi’s.

  She looks past Hisashi, past Sensei Madame Yao, and at me.

  I mouth silently to her, “Please.” I touch my palm to the pavilion we are transporting.

  Sensei Madame Liao looks at me, looks at Hisashi, and says, “There’s been a misunderstanding, Sensei Madame Yao. I asked Niu Doi and her friends to … help me move my new … meditation pavilion. It’s been flaking powder and needs refreshing.”

  “No, they’re up to something! I know it!”

  “Are you challenging the truth of what I said, Sensei Madame Yao?”

  “I’m going to tell Supreme Sensei Master Jio!”

  Sensei Madame Yao skates off in the direction of the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties.

  Sensei Madame Liao turns to me.

  “I can explain, Sensei Madame—”

  “Oh, yes, you are going to explain everything to me, Chen Peasprout. But at present, it looks like you need to go.”

  I bow to her and say, “Thank you for trusting me, Sensei.”

  Another boom sounds just north of us, from the direction of the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues. We push the pavilion toward the hall. Beside me, Hisashi is looking over his shoulder. A figure slips behind a wing of the girls’ dormitory just as I catch sight of it.

  “Hurry,” I say. “Suki’s still following us.”

  He begins to say, “Peasprout, we don’t have to worry about this Suki follow—”

  “You have no idea what Suki is like. Trust me, Hisashi.”

  We execute three consecutive sets of leaps and hop the pavilion over the knots of ropes tying the casings filled with dormitory furnishings.

  We push the pavilion with us across the bridge leading to the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues at the far northeastern corner of the campus.

  The Chairman and the New Deitsu Pearlworks Company maintenance team are nowhere within view. We push the pavilion across the bridge to the left, onto the great square of Divinity’s Lap spreading across the north side of the campus. Nothing there, either.

  “Wait here. I’ll get a better view.” I skate back to the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues and execute a string of side flips up its ten tiers. From here, atop the highest level of the tallest structure at Pearl Famous, I see the New Deitsu team hidden behind Eastern Heaven Dining Hall on its seaward side, on the southern part of the campus, where we just came from. Ten thousand years of stomach gas.

  Behind the Hall of Lilting Radiance, a barge is parked along the north shore of the Principal Island. It’s masted with great scallop-shaped pearlsilk sails and oared with ribbed flippers. A plump tail of silver fur trails on the surface of the water behind it. A cluster of girls is gathered on the shore near it, readying to embark.

  The girls of the House of Flowering Blossoms. And in their midst is Gang Suki, pointing straight up at me.

  “Who’s that atop the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues?” she shouts.

  I begin scrambling down the tiers of the hall, but I have to proceed carefully because they’re slick from the spray of the waterfall cascading down its western face.

  Suki and her girls reach the pavilion before I can. They’re pointing at Doi and Hisashi and screeching like a monkey being struck by lightning.

  “Seize that pavilion!” screams Suki.

  I leap into the waterfall and ride the rest of the tiers down its plume. I execute a triple screaming squall jump and leap onto the pavilion. I ride it as it shoots into the canal dividing Divinity’s Lap and the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties.

  “Get on!” I shout at Hisashi, Doi, and Cricket. They skate alongside the pavilion as it bobs down the canal, sling themselves into the air, and land atop its steeply pitched roof. The energy from all of us making speeding leaps onto the pavilion sends it shooting even faster down the canal.

  We approach the first bridge and leap over it together, as the pavilion passes under. We come down together and regain our balance.

  Suki and the House of Flowering Blossoms girls streak alongside us on Divinity’s Lap. They spring at us with uncurbed skate blades, one after another, shooting like flurries of flashing knives. Hisashi pants, “I think I see what you mean about this Suki, Wing Girl!”

  However, we have the advantage because we present a moving target. We easily block all the skates flying at us and send the girls bouncing back onto the pearl beside us.

  We leap over the next bridge in the canal and prepare for the hard turn around the northwestern corner of the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties. “Southwest diagonal backflips!” I command. Our moves send the pavilion rotating at a velocity that will help it negotiate the hard curve without jumping the canal.

  The pavilion bumps as it takes the corner of the canal, but the rotation makes its ornamental exterior flourishes grip the turn so that it actually comes whipping around even faster. The lucky of us pedal and hop to compensate for the spin and jolts as it bumps southward down the canal.

  We leap the next bridge with ease and approach the southwestern juncture. However, this time, instead of keeping the pavilion from jumping the turn, we actually need it to pop up and pivot toward the southeast so that it can continue eastward in the Central Canal. As we approach the hard curve, I call out, “Iron hammer throw with north-to-east rotation!”

  We sling ourselves to flip and strike down in the form of spinning hammers. The impact plunges the pavilion down into the water and then its buoyancy makes it come popping back up. The pavilion splashes down in the Central Canal with us atop it, headed east on our final approach toward Eastern Heaven Dining Hall.

  We ride the currents of the Central Canal and pass under the Bridge of Serene Harmony. We don’t need to leap over it since it’s so high, but Hisashi does a pear blossom forward somersault anyway, stepping over the bridge lightly with a little flip like a petal skipping in the wind. He meets us on the other side.

  “That was for you, Chen Peasprout!” he says with a flash of dimples.

  I swallow down the disturbance in my Chi as we ready for the final leap. When we approach the last curve, I spot Suki and the House of Flowering Blossoms girls pouring toward us along the path on the east side of the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties. It’s no use, though—they’re too far. They’ll never make it to us before we reach Doi and Hisashi’s father, and Suki wouldn’
t dare challenge an adult, especially not someone that powerful. I can just hear her screaming, “Infuriate—”

  A great force slams into the pavilion beneath our skates, sending us flying off its roof, onto the pearl.

  The point of a great bronze arrowhead as large as a person is buried in the wall of the pavilion, but the pearl is too thick for it to penetrate to the interior. The arrowhead is attached to a chain that leads out to the nose of Suki’s private barge that she had been about to embark. It rowed down here to intercept us! Ten thousand years of stomach gas.

  The flipper oars of the ship begin to stroke in reverse, hauling the harpooned pavilion out of the canal and onto the pearl on its side. Suki and her vile girls swarm it. “Roll it into the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness and cut it open!” orders Suki. The girls roll the pavilion through the archway of the courtyard, encircle it, and begin taking one leaping slash after another at it.

  “Let’s go,” whispers Hisashi to me, skating away quietly.

  “What do you mean ‘let’s go’? What about whatever was inside the pavilion?”

  “She was never inside the pavilion.”

  “What do you mean ‘she’?”

  “The pavilion was just a distraction in case we got stopped. She was following behind us all along.”

  I whip my head around and catch a glimpse of the figure I thought was Suki. So Hisashi kept looking back to make sure she was still following us, not to get away from her.

  “Who’s this girl that was following us?” I ask.

  “I’ll tell you everything, but first, I have to speak to my father.”

  Ahead of us, dressed in a spreading robe of shimmering gold pearlsilk embroidered with a frenzy of intertwined eels, stands Chairman Niu Kazuhiro. The man whom I made a bargain with to betray the Empress Dowager. The man who could still destroy me by shipping me back to Shin. He stares at Hisashi, then Doi, then Hisashi’s skirt.

  Hisashi skates to him, ending in a slide onto his knees that finishes at his father’s feet. He says, “Venerable and esteemed Father. I humbly beg you to listen to my worthless entreaty—”

  “What are you doing here?” spits the Chairman, glancing at the riot of girls trying to slice open the pavilion behind Hisashi. “You’re supposed to be in Shin. Did you obtain the hostage Zan Aki?”

  “Father, we need to go somewhere private. There is someone you need to meet.”

  Hisashi looks back over his shoulder and beckons. For a moment, we see nothing except a sculpture rising out of the little pool. Then from behind the sculpture comes a girl in a swirl of yellow robes. She doesn’t wear skates but instead pushes forward on a board using snow poles like the ones I saw the elderly tourists using when I first arrived here.

  She’s also the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, luminous and tragic like a lost moon.

  The Chairman’s gaze bounces back between the girl and Hisashi. At last he says, “Come with me.”

  We all proceed toward him.

  “I don’t mean all of you,” he sneers. “Just this girl. And my son.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  I lie awake half the night in the dormitory chamber at 8,888 Cups, the boardinghouse in the city that Sensei Madame Liao arranged for Cricket and me to stay in during the New Year’s holiday month. I want to go over to see Doi in the dormitory chamber she rented for the night with the last of her money, but I should let her rest. When birds start singing outside, I give up trying to sleep and go to take a bath. Outside the dormitory box is a letter orb. I twist it open.

  From the orb, Hisashi’s voice says, “You’re finally awake! I’m downstairs in the saloon!”

  I wake Cricket and Doi and we rush downstairs.

  Hisashi’s in the saloon, balancing five eating sticks standing upright on his fingertips.

  “Good morning!” he says, snapping his fingers closed and snatching the sticks into a bundle.

  “So what happened with your father?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. Father forbade me from discussing it before the hearing.”

  “What hearing? You owe me a lot of explanations!”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk displeasing Father. Not after all that Doi and I have sacrificed.”

  I look to Doi. She looks at Hisashi, sighs, and nods. Why is she concerned about pleasing their father after the way he treated her?

  “Fine. Is there anything that you can tell us?” I ask Hisashi.

  “Well, first of all, Wing Girl, you’re not going down to Auntie’s house in Tao-Ka as planned. I used most of our money to rent us dormitory chambers here at 8,888 Cups for the New Year’s month. I know I can get Father to talk with you and reconsider his decision to take you out of Pearl Famous. I’ll convince him not to commit you as a novice nun at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters.”

  I look to Doi, but her face shows no reaction to this.

  “Who is this girl that you brought back from Shin?” I ask.

  “I can’t tell you that. But it’ll all be public after the sanctuary sponsorship hearing.”

  “The what? Where is she now?”

  “She’s staying with Father at our family compound atop Thousand Catbear Peak until the hearing. I can’t say anything more before the hearing or it could jeopardize her status.”

  “You tricked us into helping you help this girl.”

  “Peasprout, I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to explain that what I brought back was a girl and that she was important. But the truth is that I just got a little overwhelmed by you.”

  “Oh, so this is my fault. So you’re saying that I was too aggressive, that I intimidated you, that the force of my personality trampled you into silence?” No answer. An infuriating little grin appears on his face.

  “Hello? Anyone home? I asked you a question,” I say.

  “Peasprout!” cry Doi and Cricket together.

  “What?”

  “Hah!” laughs Hisashi.

  I turn to him and say, “What are you laughing at?”

  He answers, “It’s just that even though I only met you yesterday, I already know that I’m never going to forget you.”

  With these words, I feel the anger drain from me. I feel the Chi vibrating from all three of them still. I’ve made everyone around me uncomfortable. I don’t want to do that.

  “All right,” I say. “I’m done being angry. I know you must have your reasons for withholding information. Hisashi, was there an ‘I’m sorry’ somewhere in what you said? Wait, don’t answer that. I know that’s what you meant. Accepted. Now, can we get something to eat?”

  We ask the cook what the offerings are today here at 8,888 Cups. She decided to use up some ground pork that was about to turn bad by sprinkling a little of it into all the dishes offered today. Thus, we leave and skate down Midmount Road, the largest boulevard in the Aroma Bay quarter of the city of Pearl to get something to eat.

  Around us, youngsters speed like minnows everywhere, unattended by adults. They leap from handrail to handrail and call out challenges to one another of simple wu liu jumps and spins.

  What would my wu liu be like now if I had had a childhood as theirs, here in a city such as this?

  * * *

  Elders in white robes peacefully do their morning liu chi exercises together in lines across a low bridge, slowly dipping, lifting, and turning together as one.

  Will I be one of them someday, living out my destiny here in Pearl?

  Although it’s still technically the Season of Drifts, the Season of Spouts has already begun to make itself felt. Small rudimentary spouts of water rise from the canals over the banks and stroll up the streets of the city before spinning themselves into mist. Everywhere around us, plumes of spray from the little water cyclones gently stroke the sides of halls and temples.

  A little water cyclone rears up out of the canal that runs down the median of Midmount Road. It keeps up with us as we skate, sucking its way along swiftly and e
ffortlessly. It runs over a vein of kelp that drifted into the canal. For a moment, the little water cyclone frenzies with streaks of vegetation, then it appears to choke on the kelp flippers and flotation orbs, threatening to topple and splash into us.

  The lucky of us duck into the doorway of a small teahouse overhanging the canal to avoid the spray. The doorway leads into a teahouse formed of two lotus-shaped caps cupping a windowed gazebo from above and below.

  “Let’s look inside,” says Hisashi.

  We skate in, and I can tell immediately that this teahouse is like one of those shops that are so refined, normal people can’t even tell what it is that they’re selling.

  “This place looks really expensive,” I say to Hisashi. “We only have enough money to cover our meals until the new school year.”

  “Just a minute,” he says, counting coins from his purse. “We have enough for a little treat if we share. Miss, table for lucky, please.”

  A teahouse girl skates over, dressed like a princess in a high-collared, sleeveless qipao of embroidered black and silver pearlsilk. She looks up and down our academy uniforms and says, “Ah, Pearl Famous students?”

  “Yes,” answers Doi.

  “Welcome, welcome,” she says, bowing low. She leads us to a table by a moon-shaped window open to the canal below us.

  Hisashi says, “Just one pot of simple green, please.”

  “With the discount for Pearl Famous students, you can upgrade to a pot of triple-fantasy jasmine green tea fresh from Eda.”

  “Sold!” says Hisashi, beaming like he just won a palace on the moon. It’s hard to stay annoyed with him.

  From our table overlooking the canal, I see a group of young dolphins sporting in the water below us. Back in Shui Shan Province, I learned some river porpoise language from a trader and I’m tempted to try the few clicks and whistles that I remember. However, I decide not to because I can’t do them very loudly, and I’m sure these Pearlian dolphins don’t speak the same dialect as Shinian river porpoises.