John Ringo: Princess of Wands

“Why do you do this to me?” John said, going over to the lockers and pulling out pads.

“It builds character,” Barb replied, flipping to her feet. She fielded the tossed pads and started getting them on.

Once they were both in pads, with helmets and mouthpieces in, they touched hands and closed.

John started the attack with a hammer strike and then bounced away lightly, staying out of reach of her grappling attack. He’d learned, through painful experience, not to even think of grappling with her.

In honesty, the reason that Brandon and Brook, and up until recently Allison, studied with Master Yi, was that Master Yi was simply better than John. John had Barbara, a touch, on speed. And he was definitely stronger; any reasonably in-shape male would be. But Barb had started training when she was five, when her father had been a foreign area officer assigned in Hong Kong. Over the succeeding twenty-eight years she had never once been out of training. The quality varied and the forms definitely varied; over the years she’d studied wah lum and dragon kung fu, karate in the U.S. and Japan, hop-ki do in Korea and the U.S. and aikido. But by the time she was Allison’s age, she could have won most open tournaments if they were “all forms.” And if all attacks were allowed.

John Hardesty, on the other hand, was straight out of the “tournament” school of karate. He’d won southeast regional a time or two, come in second nationally, and now owned the de rigueur local martial arts school. He was good, but he was by no means a superior fighter. And he’d come to that conclusion after sparring with Barbara only once.

Master Yi, despite using “karate” to describe his school, had been studying wah lum before Barb was born and was , or at least had been, a truly superior hand-to-hand warrior. If the kids were going to train with anyone local, she wanted it to be Master Yi. In fact, she often wished that she trained with Master Yi instead of with John. You didn’t get better by fighting someone who was your inferior. But, occasionally, she picked up something new.

Barbara followed up with a feinted kick and then two hammer strikes that were both blocked. But the second was a feint and she locked the blocking wrist with her right hand, coming in low with two left-handed strikes to the abdomen and then leaping out of range.

“Bitch,” John said around the mouthpiece.

“Had to call Allison on using that term,” Barb said, backing up and then attacking in the Dance of the Swallow. It was right at the edge of her ability and she nearly bobbled the complicated cross during the second somersault, but it ended up with Hardesty on his face and her elbow planted in his neck. “Don’t use it on me.”

“Christ, I hate it when you pull out that kung fu shit,” John said humorously, taking her hand to get back on his feet. “Bad week?”

“Yeah,” she admitted.

“Well, if you need to kick my ass to get it out of your system, feel free,” Hardesty said, taking a guard position. “I have to admit that fighting you is always interesting. Anything in particular?”

“No,” Barbara admitted as they closed. This time two of Hardesty’s rock hard blows got through her defenses, rocking her on her heels, and she was unable to grapple either one of them. She’d take a blow if it meant she could get a lock; once she had most opponents in lock she could turn them into sausage. But she could feel her concentration slipping and she disengaged. “I’m just tired ,” she said, stretching and rubbing at her pads where the blows had slipped through.

“Take a break,” John said, lifting his helmet and pulling out his mouthpiece. “You deserve one.”

“I’m going to,” Barb said. “This weekend. Mark doesn’t know yet.”

“He’s going to be so thrilled,” John quipped, slipping his mouthpiece back in. “You ready to get thrown through a wall?”

“You and what army?”

She helped with training until it was time to leave and then headed for the locker room. Technically, she helped with training the younger kids so she didn’t get charged tuition. In reality, they both knew that she was training John as much as she was training the kids. Who was the master and who the student? But training other people’s kids had never bothered her. She’d thought about becoming a teacher full-time; she was already an occasional substitute. But Mark made enough money that she didn’t have to work and he preferred that she stay at home. And she believed, in a fundamental and unshakeable fashion, that Mark was the master of the house. If he wanted her to stay home and be a housewife, she’d stay home.

Barbara had been raised an Episcopalian and in her teenage years, when other kids were getting as far away from the church as they could, she’d gotten closer and closer to it. She often thought that if she’d been raised Catholic, God forbid, she’d have become a nun. But her family, her religion and her country were locked in an iron triangle that defined her life. In many ways, it was religion that kept her sane. When times were bad, when she and Mark were at each other’s throats, when Allison had been struck by a car, when Mark was laid off, it was to God she turned for solace. And that solace was always there, a warm, comforting presence that said that life was immaterial and only the soul mattered. Make sure the soul was at peace and everything else would eventually fall into place.

She wasn’t a fundamentalist screamer. She didn’t proselytize. She simply lived her life, every day, in the most Christian manner that she could. If someone sniped at her, she turned the other cheek. If the children bickered or snapped, she smothered her anger and treated them as children of God. And when someone needed a helping hand because another supposed Christian had said no or simply not turned up, she gave that helping hand.

She knew that a good bit of her belief centered around what she called “the other Barbara.” One time in the sixth grade she’d been sent home, almost expelled, for putting a boy in the hospital. He’d been teasing her and when she tried to walk away he’d grabbed her. So she’d broken his nose, arm and ankle. She had not used any training; no special little holds or martial arts moves were involved, just sheer explosive rage. It was the rage, as much as anything, that she used her religion to control. She’d learned it from her mother who had much the same problems and who explained that, besides the necessity for belief in the One God, religion’s purpose was to control the demons in mankind.

Barb worked very hard to control her demons, because she knew what the results would be if she did not.

It didn’t mean she was an idiot about it. The world was not a nice place and never would be short of the Second Coming. To her, “turn the other cheek” meant “let the small hurts pass” not “be a professional victim.” So she made sure her children were as well grounded as possible, gave them all the advice she could, showed them a Christian way of life in all things and made sure they knew how and when to defend themselves.

When she was in college, shortly before meeting Mark, she had been attacked on her way home from the library late one Wednesday evening. The path was lit but the location was obscured by trees and landscaping and the man had been on her before she knew he was there. She could have screamed, she could have tried to run, he only had a knife after all. Instead she broke his wrist, struck him on the temple with an open-hand blow and walked to the nearest phone to call the police.

After the police took her statement she had gone back to her dorm, thrown up and then prayed for several hours. She had prayed for the soul of her attacker and her own. For her attacker she had prayed that he would find a way to Jesus lest the evil in his soul give him to Satan for all time. A soul lost was a soul lost. For herself she had prayed for mercy. For she had, in her anger, given his wrist an extra, unnecessary, twist, that had elicited a scream of pain. She prayed for mercy for letting her anger, which she knew to be volcanic, slip in the circumstances. And for the wash of pleasure that scream of pain had caused her. She’d been really upset by the attack.