| I should have had the sense to specify dull swords. When Henpecked Ho met me the following night beside the old well he had the drum and the swords all right, but the blades were sharp as razors. It was too late to do anything about it. If I tried to dull the blades against a rock I would wind up with jagged edges, which would be suicidal. "Li Kao," I said gloomily to myself, "you are going to slice your quivering little body to pieces." |
1 |
| Perhaps I should explain that Chinese sword dancing is very dangerous. Many emperors have tried to ban it on the grounds that it kills or maims hundreds of people every year, but they might just as well try to ban the rising of the sun: the Sword Dance is grace and pride and beauty and strength and courage rolled into one, and masters of the art live for nothing else. |
2 |
| There are two contestants, three judges, and a drummer. The drummer sets the pace, and once the drum begins it is forbidden to stop, or to break the rhythm in any way. The contestants begin fairly far apart and are required to perform six mandatory maneuvers in sequence, each with a higher level of difficulty. The maneuvers are performed while leaping - both feet must be off the ground - and each requires precise slashes over, under, and around the body, which the judges grade according to grace, accuracy, closeness of the blades to the body, and elevation of leap. These six maneuvers are very important, because the judges watch for a mismatch very carefully, and if one of the contestants is clearly outclassed they will refuse to allow the dance to proceed. |
3 |
| With each maneuver the dancers move closer together, and at the end of the six mandatory maneuvers they are practically face to face. If the judges agree that the contestants have performed the six levels of difficulty satisfactorily they signal for the drummer to sound the beat of the seventh level, and now the fun begins. |
4 |
| The seventh level is free form. Here the dancers can express their souls, since the only requirement is that their maneuvers must be higher than the seventh level of difficulty. The fun lies in the fact that once a dancer has completed a seventh level maneuver he is perfectly free to clip the hair from his opponent's head, if he has time to do so before his feet touch the ground, and the opponent is free to block the stroke only after he has completed his own seventh level maneuver - and can do so before landing. A sword dancer is immediately disqualified if he makes a slash or parry while so much as one toe is touching the ground. The great masters of the art disdain such easy targets as the hair on an opponent's head, and try to barber his beard and moustache if he wears such adornments, and the loss of an ear or a nose is considered to be an occupational hazard of no great importance. The real danger lies in panicking and breaking the rhythm of the drum, because you will leap up when you should be coming down, and your opponent will aim for your hair and cut off your head. This adds a certain spice to the entertainment. |
5 |
| It is a great privilege to watch a pair of consummate masters go at it. Their bodies seem to float effortlessly into the air, and to hang suspended in space. Their swords are mere blurs and the flash of steel can be blinding, particularly in torchlight. Swords clash together with the din of a hundred festival gongs, each brilliant maneuver inspires a counter maneuver that is even more brilliant, the audience screams - but the contestants laugh out loud - when a stroke slips through and blood spurts, and then the sand clock runs out, the drummer stops, and even the judges rise and cheer as the contestants embrace. |
6 |
| Of course if you are not really up to seventh level maneuvers you have no business attempting the Sword Dance. You will be very lucky if you merely chop off one of your toes and your nose, because your enemy is not your opponent but your own clumsy self. |
7 |
| Need I say that I was seared nearly to death? My fingertips felt like ice as I stripped down to my loincloth, and each sword seemed to weigh fifty pounds. Henpecked Ho positioned himself behind some shrubbery with his drum. He had great faith in my plan, and surprising faith in his own abilities as a drummer. So far as I knew the old scholar's only talent lay in piecing fragments of clay tablets together, yet his voice was strong and confident as he said: |
8 |
| "I practiced all day, Li Kao. I think that I have it down perfectly." |
9 |
| "Splendid," I said, without much enthusiasm. |
10 |
| Somewhere an owl hooted hollowly, and in the distance a dog howled, and the wind through the trees sounded like mocking laughter. Then I heard the three raps of the watchman's wooden knocker, and I turned to the patch in the wall to look for a ghost shadow. This time I found that I could draw it over me with ease, practically without thinking about it. Once more the door stood open, and I turned to face Bright Star. |
11 |
| The flute began to play its slow inexorable song. The beautiful dancing girl moved through the trees in her long white robe with the blue embroidered flowers. Moving beautifully, delicately, mechanically, without joy or pride or hope. |
12 |
| "Begin," I said. My voice was like the caw of a crow. |
13 |
| The moment Henpecked Ho touched that drum I knew that if anyone failed it would not be him. Somewhere he had learned to play like a master, and his hands were strong and confident as he played the music he had learned through a hundred sleepless lovesick nights: the heartbeat of a dancing girl. |
14 |
| "Louder," I said. |
15 |
| The heartbeat grew in volume, calling insistently, challenging the ghostly flute for command, and I began to see a puzzlement, a wonder, a growing awareness in the eyes of Bright Star. |
16 |
| "Sound the challenge," I said. |
17 |
| Henpecked Ho pounded the challenge to the Sword Dance. Over and over he repeated it, subtly weaving the challenge in and out of the beat of Bright Star's heart, louder, more insistent, leaning his whole weight into it until the heartbeat and the challenge shook the leaves of the trees. I saw Bright Star's eyes begin to sparkle. Still she moved slowly, to the flute that chained her, but not even death could erase the memory of that glorious challenge to the most dangerous dance in the world. |
18 |
| I stepped forward, directly in the path of the beautiful ghost, and raised my swords in the salute. Bright Star saw me. Her hands moved to the clasp at her throat. On and on she slowly danced, still chained to the flute, but her long white robe fell to the ground and she danced toward me slim and straight and proud, wearing nothing but her loincloth and the jade pendant which her captain had given her on a chain between her small firm breasts. |
19 |
| Suddenly two ghost swords flickered in her hands, and I consigned my terrified soul to Heaven. |
20 |
| "First maneuvers," I said, and Henpecked Ho wove the rhythm of the six mandatory maneuvers in and out of the heartbeat of Bright Star. |
21 |
| If judges had been present they would have yawned at my mandatory maneuvers. I performed them reasonably competently but there was nothing imaginative about the Tiger, the Kingfisher, the Swan, Dragon's Breath, the Serpent, and Night Wind. As I had hoped Bright Star did not bother to outclass me. She seemed amused, but she went along with it and performed similar classroom exercises. I could see in her haunted eyes that she could scarcely wait to get to the seventh level, and all too soon that dread moment came. I had nothing to fear from her ghost swords, of course, but nothing on earth could persuade Bright Star to continue the Sword Dance if I failed to perform my seventh level maneuvers, and my own swords would probably kill me inside of three minutes. |
22 |
| "Seventh level," I said. Henpecked Ho pounded the beat of free form, and we went at it. |
23 |
| I sent a prayer to Buddha and leaped into the air with Seventh Drake Under the River Bridge - seven slashes with each sword around my body and under my legs - and Buddha must have heard me because for the first (and last) time in my life I managed to complete it without chopping a hole in my left thigh. Bright Star seemed to approve. At least she did me the honor of trying to top me, and I very nearly fainted when I saw that beautiful girl lift into the air, float there like a leaf, savagely slash her swords in the nearly impossible Ice Falling From a Mountaintop, and still have time to take two playful swipes which would have trimmed my eyebrows if her blades had been real before touching ground. |
24 |
| I glanced back. The door was closing. It was now or never. "Go!" I yelled, and I desperately launched my body into Three Stallions on a Golden Meadow. |
25 |
| Bright Star's eyes widened with shook and horror as she saw the impossible happen. I was performing an acceptable seventh level maneuver, but I was backing away, retreating from the reach of her swords, and the judges had not stopped the contest! The drum beat louder, shaking the clearing, forcing her to continue the dance - but how could she continue when my cowardice was plain for all to see? The only explanation was that the judges had been bribed, and she wavered and almost stopped until I sneered: "Are you afraid to continue, base-born dancing girl?" |
26 |
| That did it. I was making a mockery of the Sword Dance and she was going to make a mockery of me. Bright Star uttered a scream of rage. Her lithe body shot into the air, and her swords swept around her body like tongues of flame as she pursued me down the path performing seventh level maneuvers never before seen by man. If her blades had been real I would have lost my nose and ears in ten seconds flat, and I puffed and panted and danced backward as fast as I could, chopping holes in myself while the ghost pursued me as gracefully as a gazelle. |
27 |
| Bright Star still does me the honor of coming to see me now and then in my dreams, and once again I see her swords flicker like lightning and her eyes fill with fire and her fury cause her hair to stand up like that of a big beautiful cat as she dances in the moonlight. I truly believe that I have been fortunate enough to have competed with the greatest sword dancer in the history of the world. |
28 |
| "Faster!" I yelled, and Henpecked Ho's hands began to spurt blood as he pounded that rough sheepskin drum with every ounce of strength that he had, and I was beginning to look like something dragged out of a slaughterhouse, and my lungs were full of fire and I saw black spots before my eyes. "Faster!" I squawked. "Faster! Faster!" |
29 |
| Bright Star laughed as her swords flashed through absolutely impossible maneuvers and flickered around my exhausted body like the tongues of fire-breathing serpents. My own swords got all tangled up as I attempted Sixth Dive of the Blue Heron, and I backed into a log on the path and tripped and fell. The beautiful ghost leaped clean over me, pinning my cowardly face to the ground with her swords - the ultimate humiliation of a sword dancer - and landed like a cat on the other side. |
30 |
| It took her a moment to realize that the log I had tripped over had been placed in front of the door in the wall, and that the door had not yet closed, and that she had vaulted right through it. She gazed at me with wonder, and then her eyes grew large as soup plates as she saw Henpecked Ho come running from the shrubbery. His face was transfigured by joy, and when Bright Star turned she saw her captain. |
31 |
| He was a tall handsome ghost, and he must have been quite a hero in life, for he was able to force himself to raise his clenched fist to Ho and myself in a soldier's salute, and to hold it for the full fifteen seconds before he took Bright Star in his arms. Then the ghosts faded away, and the door faded, and Henpecked Ho and I stood there in the moonlight looking at a bricked up patch in a wall. |
32 |
| "What a dancer!" I kept saying over and over as I limped back down the path. |
33 |
| "What joy!" cried Henpecked Ho. |
34 |
| We laughed all the way to Ho's workshop, where he had confidently made preparations for the ceremony. We were rather bedraggled dignitaries for so solemn an occasion, but we doubted that anyone would mind. We cut paper silhouettes of the happy couple. Henpecked Ho spoke for the bride, and I spoke for the groom. We chanted the prayers and marriage vows, and burned paper money for the dowry, and burned food for the guests and sprinkled wine upon the ground. Thus Bright Star married her captain, and when the sky grew pale and the cock crowed we thanked the happy couple for the banquet, and let them go at last to the bridal bed. |
35 |
All in all it was a very satisfactory night.
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36 |