Gan Nineteenth Sister Chapter 1 – Part 1

Winter days are short. It seemed barely any time had passed after the midday meal before the sky began to darken.

The western sun showed but half its face, a thin wash of fading light filtering through the branches of the old trees ahead, casting its rays upon the gilded characters “Yueyang School”¹ on the great plaque. The interplay of light created a brilliant display of colour—indescribably melancholic, unutterably dreary. It carried the unmistakable weariness that spoke decline after glory past its zenith.

The snow had not yet fully melted. The eye fell upon nothing but desolation wherever it looked, and the ground was a morass of mud and slush. There was no wind, yet the cold bit deep.

Old Ma² breathed into his palms and rubbed his thick, calloused hands together vigorously. He stretched like a cat, slow and languid, and rose from beneath the gate archway.

Every day he sat in this very spot to soak up the winter sun, his back propped against one of the stone guardian lions, legs splayed wide, letting the warmth seep into him. When the heat crept into the crotch of his old cotton trousers, a comfort beyond words spread through his entire body.

He was fifty-seven this year. He had a sobriquet, Mantis Blade,³ and he could not claim to be a direct disciple of Yueyang School. Two successive zhangmen⁴ had shown him favour over the years, imparting to him a measure of dao⁵ techniques and martial skills. Despite performing only menial gatehouse duties, none within Yueyang School looked down upon him. Those of junior standing still addressed him respectfully as “Uncle”. Content with this arrangement, he had never bothered to stir himself elsewhere, and so the years had passed, one after another.

For forty years he had witnessed this renowned martial arts school grow and prosper, its fame spreading far and wide across the land. The former zhangmen, Xian Bing⁶ the Lone Gull,⁷ had possessed martial arts of transcendent mastery and there was none in the jianghu⁸ who had not heard his name. When the venerable elder reached advanced years and retired two years prior, he passed leadership of the school to the current zhangmen, Li Tiexin⁹ the Peerless Sword.¹⁰

Li Tiexin the Peerless Sword was no man to be trifled with. In the mere two years since he had assumed the zhangmen’s mantle, he had accomplished a string of deeds worthy of honouring his forebears, feats that demanded admiration. At the Stone Gate, his sword had struck down the Seven Fiends. He had cleansed the waters of Dongting Lake,¹¹ riding alone to rout the brigands. At the Battle of Mount Jun,¹² he had put the Dongting Gang’s lakeside fortress to the torch and humbled the Thirty-six Friends with his blade.

Every one of these exploits had shaken the jianghu to its foundations. Any one of them alone would have been enough to make his name. Small wonder that a saying had sprung up across the wulin:¹³ “The Yueyang School stands at high noon. The Peerless Sword is matchless under heaven!” Truly imposing indeed.

Yet as the proverb holds, “Founding a legacy is hard, but preserving it is harder still.” Li Tiexin could not have been ignorant of this truth. A tall tree catches the wind, a lofty name invites jealousy. The wise course was to conceal one’s brilliance and bide one’s time.

For reasons unknown, the zhangmen had travelled to Lake Tai¹⁴ at the beginning of the year. Upon his return, he had not set foot beyond the gates again. For a full year he had remained within the compound, and those of the school knew the reason. He had shut himself away to train. But what art he was cultivating, and why he had so suddenly thrown himself into such rigorous practice, no one could say.

A sudden gust of wind swept across the snow.

It came skimming low along the ground, and when it struck a man’s face it cut like a little knife, stung like a pair of scissors. Old Ma’s complexion turned the colour of cold iron. He sucked air through his clenched teeth against the biting chill, shuffling his worn cotton shoes as he made to slip in through the side gate. Then he saw something that stopped him where he stood.

A sedan chair was approaching. Small, with a red canopy and curtains of emerald silk, it came swaying up the road toward Yueyang School.

The two bearers were young attendants in dark blue livery¹⁵ turned out with immaculate care. Red satin sashes cinched their waists. White stockings showed above dark blue shoes. Though they trod through snow and slush, not a single fleck of mud marred their persons. They moved in perfect unison, matched in height and step, their features uncommonly fine, the unmistakable look of servants from a great household.

But this was not the strangest part. It was the man who walked ahead of the chair.

He looked to be thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, with a pallid, bloodless face and eyebrows that drooped like a mourner’s. Tall and gaunt as a rail, his appearance at first glance called to mind nothing so much as a hanged ghost. He wore a fox-fur robe with a scarlet outer shell and a round skullcap of the same hue, and in one hand he carried a riding crop¹⁶ of spotted Lake Tai bamboo.¹⁷ The man looked for all the world like a painted clown¹⁸ from a stage play. Keeping close to the front of the chair, he was plainly an attendant of some sort. And so, swaying gently with every step, the little sedan chair made its way straight toward the imposing gates of Yueyang School.

Sedan chairs were common enough, nothing remarkable in that. The striking part was the procession, and the three people attending it.

Old Ma stared, transfixed.

He had first spotted the sedan chair when it was still on the far side of the tree line. Yet in the time it took him to blink, the chair had arrived before him. Three people, six feet, treading across the snow-covered ground with an ease and lightness that beggared description. Each foot rising high and landing soft, as though they walked upon the very air. Without superlative qinggong,¹⁹ how could such a thing be possible?

Old Ma felt his scalp prickle and tighten, as though he had seen a ghost. Instinctively, he took a step backward.

The ornate sedan chair had arrived at Yueyang School’s towering entrance.

It stopped.

The gaunt man in red walked forward a few paces and tilted his head back with a faintly wooden air. He was not looking at any person. He was studying the plaque. The great gilt characters that read “Yueyang School”.

Having satisfied himself, he thrusted his bamboo crop three times upon the snow, and the chair was lowered smoothly to the ground.

The curtains remained drawn. Through the fine gaps between the woven bamboo slats, one could just make out the dim shape of someone seated within, but who it was, or what they wore, was quite impossible to discern.

The chair stood squarely before the main gate of the Yueyang compound, some thirty feet from the entrance.

The gaunt man in red turned and approached the sedan. He murmured something too soft for Old Ma to catch, and the figure within replied in equally inaudible tones. Then the red-clad man waved a hand at the two bearers, who bowed respectfully and withdrew. They did not go far, only to a nearby mounting block,²⁰ where they sat down to wait. The man in red then took up his green bamboo crop and drew a perfect circle in the snow some twenty feet across.

The ground here was paved with flagstones, so that only white snow lay upon it with no trace of mud. The circle, scored into the smooth surface of the snow, stood out with vivid clarity. But what it signified, Old Ma could not begin to fathom.

The gaunt man seemed utterly oblivious to Old Ma’s existence. Having completed his circle, he walked slowly back to the front of the sedan. His thin frame inclined forward in a slight bow, his bony hands clasped the bamboo crop before him and planted it in the snow. And there he stood, motionless as a post.

Old Ma stared, utterly at a loss.

The sedan curtains still hung undisturbed. The gaunt, shrimp-backed man had his eyes closed, looking for all the world as though he had fallen asleep on his feet.

Old Ma could hold his peace no longer. He cleared his throat, gave a cough, and offered the red-clad stranger a cupped-fist salute, smiling as he spoke. “Might I ask, friend, who might you be…?”

The man in red opened his eyes. He cast a single glance at Old Ma, then closed them again. Old Ma stiffened, a flush of irritation rising beneath his collar. The fellow’s manner was plain: he looked down on him, did not consider him worth a second glance. The more Old Ma thought about it, the angrier he grew. He took another step forward, the toe of his shoe coming within three feet of the circle drawn in the snow.

“Friend!” Old Ma raised his voice. “What is the meaning of this? Stopping a sedan chair before another man’s gate? This—”

This time, the man in red did not so much as crack an eyelid. He did not look at Old Ma at all.

Twice now Old Ma had spoken, and twice the stranger had not deigned to utter a single word in reply. His temper flared. He gave a cold snort and strode toward the sedan. He had no intention of wasting further breath on the red-clad retainer. He meant to go straight to the person inside the chair and demand an explanation. But the instant his left foot crossed the line of the circle scored in the snow, a blast of unearthly cold struck at his trouser and seized his leg as though he had been struck by lightning.

He cried out in shock, staggered, and sat down hard in the snow.

Through the thick padding of his cotton trousers, his left leg had gone rigid, as though it had been flash-frozen, as though he had suffered a sudden apoplexy. An icy chill radiated from the leg and spread through his entire body in an instant. Old Ma struggled to his feet, shaking from head to toe. His ruddy face had turned deathly white. His eyes seemed to have lost their focus. Every part of him, all at once, felt wrong.

It was very like a stroke. But Old Ma was certain it was nothing of the kind. He could have sworn the blast of sinister wind had issued from within the sedan chair itself. There was something deeply unnatural about the whole affair.

His body might be failing him, but his mind was still clear. He had to get back inside and report this to the zhangmen.⁴

The man in red opened his eyes. He was watching him.

Old Ma clawed his way upright. He managed two faltering steps before his legs gave way and he collapsed again. This time he could not rise.

A strange, crushing pressure settled upon his chest, as though a great stone had been laid upon his heart. Cold. A cold beyond all description. He loosed a single terrible, shrill cry, and then he could no longer move.

That cry brought two others running. An old man and a young one burst through the side gate in obvious alarm. The elder was not truly old, sixty years of age or thereabouts, and the younger was no youth but a man of some twenty years. At the sight of them, Old Ma’s face twisted with desperate hope, as though he had found his saviours.

“Second Master Xu!” Old Ma’s voice was a ruined croak. “Quickly… save me!”

Footnotes

1. 岳阳门 – Yuèyáng Mén. Literally gate south of mountain. Yueyang carries a deep sense of scholarly-official duty and concern for the nation as a result of Northern Song statesman Fan Zhongyan’s essay Record of Yueyang Tower. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 老马 – Lǎo Mǎ. Literally “Old Ma”. Ma is his surname, meaning “Horse”. ↩

3. 螳螂刀 – tánglángdāo. ↩

4. 掌门 – zhǎngmén. The head or leader of a martial arts faction. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩ ↩²

5. 刀 – dāo. Single-edged blade, one of the fundamental weapons in Chinese martial arts. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 冼冰 – Xiǎn Bīng. His name meaning “Ice”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 一鸥子 – Yīōuzi. A name evoking solitary mastery, in the manner of Daoist recluses. ↩

8. 江湖 – jiānghú. The world of martial arts. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

9. 李铁心 – Lǐ Tiěxīn. His name meaning “Iron Heart”. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

10. 无双剑 – Wúshuāng Jiàn. ↩

11. 洞庭湖 dòng tíng hú. The second largest freshwater lake in China that is a flood basin of the Yangtze River. The provinces Hubei and Hunan are named after their locations relative to the lake, north of the river and south of the river respectively. See Wikipedia. ↩

12. 君山 – Jūnshān. An island in Dongting Lake, known in legend as the burial place of the wives of Emperor Shun. A strategic location in the lake region. See Wikipedia. ↩

13. 武林 – wǔlín. Martial arts community. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

14. 太湖 – Tàihú. One of the largest freshwater lakes in China, located in the Yangtze Delta region between Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. A region with strong ties to the jianghu. See Wikipedia. ↩

15. 青衣 – qīngyī. Dark blue clothing, typically worn by attendants and servants of wealthy households, indicating their subordinate status while reflecting the dignity of the house they served. ↩

16. 马竿子 – mǎ gānzi. A riding crop or horse switch, here made of rare spotted bamboo from the Lake Tai region. ↩

17. 太湖斑竹 – Tàihú bānzhú. Spotted bamboo from the Lake Tai region, prized for its distinctive mottled markings. According to legend, the spots are the tear-stains of the two consorts of Emperor Shun, who wept upon the bamboo after his death. See Wikipedia. ↩

18. 三花脸 – sānhuāliǎn. Literally three-flower face. The painted clown role in traditional Chinese opera, characterised by a patch of white paint on the nose and sometimes the forehead. A comic or villainous stock character. See Wikipedia. ↩

19. 轻功 – qīnggōng. Literally light skill. Techniques that allow practitioners to move with extraordinary speed and agility, appearing to defy gravity. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

20. 上马石 – shàngmǎ shí. Literally mounting stone. A stone block placed outside the gates of a residence, traditionally used to mount and dismount horses. A common fixture before the entrance of any establishment of standing. ↩