The Watcher in the Shadows by Chris Moriarty

Author:Chris Moriarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Dangerous Man

THE NEXT MORNING was Friday, the day of Sacha and Lily’s lesson with Shen. Shen’s lessons were the high point of their week. By now they’d been studying with her for the best part of a year. Lily was completely infatuated with their teacher, and truth to tell, Sacha had been bitten almost as badly with the kung fu bug.

During the first few months, Sacha had pulled muscles and tendons and ligaments that he didn’t even know he had. And then the pulled muscles felt as if they’d developed pulled muscles of their own. He and Lily had shuffled around on legs they could barely raise off the ground with arms so sore they seemed to have stopped being regular parts of their bodies and turned into objects of the most refined torture.

But it had been worth it. Slowly, Shen had initiated them into the mysteries of something that Sacha was beginning to see as both a way of fighting and a kind of moving art. One by one, she had taught them the incredible movements—she called them forms—that they’d watched her students do that first day.

Sacha loved everything about the forms. He loved their names: Dragon, Snake, Tiger, Leopard, and Crane. He loved the way the different moves took on the spirit and character of each animal: the majestic, flowing power of the dragon; the slippery elusiveness of the snake; the power and agility of the tiger; the speed of the leopard; the perfect balance of the crane. They conjured up images of a beautiful land of tall mountains and pearl rivers and cedar trees—one that seemed to belong to an entirely different universe from dull and ordinary Hester Street.

And it wasn’t just the forms of Shaolin kung fu that Shen taught them. She also told them stories of how the Shaolin monks had created kung fu in order to defend themselves against armed men without killing their opponents, and how they had traveled throughout China using their courage and their kung fu to protect the weak and prevent injustice. But the greatest masters, she told them, had gone beyond merely fighting—even in a noble cause—and had begun to seek spiritual wisdom as well as physical mastery. They had learned that kung fu was a means of preparing oneself to follow Wu Wei, the Path of No Action. And by following the Path of No Action, the greatest of them had gained such wisdom that they became Immortals.

Lily was convinced that Shen was an Immortal and longed to ask her about it. And when Sacha pointed out that Shen always called herself a student too, Lily just scoffed at his objection.

“Shen a student? That’s ridiculous! And anyway, I read about it in The Seven Secret Sages of Shaolin—or was it Shaolin Sheriff? Or—well, never mind where it was. One of those magazines. The point is, Immortals always say that kind of thing. Shen’s just acting like a textbook kung fu master, with all this nonsense of being as ignorant as the beginningest student.

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