Dancing in the Starlight: Part 3

[Gael]

Elspeth used her connections and called in favors and, soon enough, whatever records of Miriya Kyirsocs having been born or lived in Prague became...irrelevant. After all, when several thousand people fled to avoid the Soviets, of what importance is a baby only a few months old? I doubt I was even noted enough for some bureacrat to mutter a 'good riddance' over.

 

Thus, I came to have an 'official' birth certificate that said I was born in Toronto, Ontario on 1 April, 1968 to a single mother who died in childbirth. No record of a father. Elspeth adopted me and we lived on the shore of Lake Nippising near to but not in the city of North Bay. She retired from government service and lived both on her pension as well as earnings and inheritance from mining activities her late husband's family owned further north in the province. I will not say that she was rich but I shall say we never suffered for lack of money.

 

Allow me a moment to indulge in some wistful remembrance disguised as a lesson in geography. North Bay was a small city, fewer than forty thousand people, along the northeastern side of Lake Nippising in Ontario. It is getting far enough north that farming was mostly just small gardens families might plant and right close to the parts of the province where forestry, mining and tourism were the main forms of business. The lake is beautiful and large enough to never be crowded with boats even in the height of summer and the fishing was was a good draw to tourists both from within Canada and the United States to our south. We lived along the southern side of the lake near Wade's Landing.  We lived by ourselves on close to a hundred acres of seclusion with our nearest neighbors being a fishing lodge and cabins and an air charter service that carried tourists to lakes that weren't accessable by roads.

 

I learned to swim nearly as soon as I learned to walk and I also learned a lot about nature before I ever attended a school. Elspeth...even now, I cannot honestly say she was a witch. Not in the religious sense at the least but also not in the magical sense; though the latter is, in some ways, at least partially accurate. We never attended a church service save for one time when a friend of hers I had never known died when I was five. Compared to the wonders of forests and lakes and sky a structure built and devoted to the worship of a god seemed...too little.

 

My early childhood was very happy; sheltered as it was. I knew the differences between every type of tree and plant that grew on Elspeth's property. I'd fall asleep in the summertime to the mournful singing of loons and the occassional calls of moose and bear. I was not a complete recluse to civilization but I clung close to my foster mother when we went into North Bay to shop for clothing and such. And the first time she took me to Toronto I simply could not believe there could be so many people gathered together in a single area.

 

When I was finally old enough to attend school, I could already read and do math well past any of the children my age. And the reality of my situation was quickly revealed to me. My skin was too dark to blend in with the children of Canadians of European ancestry and the wrong kind of dark to blend with those who had been there long before the land was known as Canada. Being smart simply helped me realize why I was teased and taunted and picked on faster than some might understand.

 

It also taught me that I had a temper. And that a temper only led to being picked on all the more even if I gave far more bloody noses and fat lips than I got in return. In some ways, it was no better when I would get home as Elspeth...I always called her that, never Mother; by her choice...had ways of seeing through the flimsy lies a seven year old could manage. Even a precocious one. Her solution, though, was probably very different than most parents, blood or foster, would have likely done.

Shortly after my eighth birthday, Elspeth took me into North Bay and introduced me to the man I would call Master Qing.

 

He could have been in his forties. He could have been in his sixties. Chinese, wrinkled around the eyes and forehead, eyes searching and probing. But it was his hands I remember the most. When I first met him, he was sitting down and rapping the knuckles of his right hand on a piece of iron on the table beside his seat. His hand never moved more than a few inches, yet the sound of his knuckles against the metal was that of a hammer striking metal instead of skin.

 

"She has a temper, Master Qing," Elspeth told him as I simply gaped. I could have sworn at the time I could see dents in the metal deepening with each rap. Knowing what I know now, I cannot say that they didn't. "Teach her to channel it."

 

Later, I had learned that Elspeth had played a part in him fleeing China; where he had worked with the government breaking up 'criminal gangs' with the skills I was seeing so absently displayed against that piece of iron. Thinking himself a patriot at the time, he did so but, in time, his conscience turned on him and he could no longer hunt and bring down those he once had called teacher, student, friend, rival... Just how and what my foster mother did, neither he nor she would ever elaborate.

 

For now, I only knew that piece of iron got a respite as he looked at me. "Does she now?"

 

Faster than a fox slipping past a tree, not only was he standing, he was standing behind me and I whirled, wide-eyed as he smiled at me. "Do you have a temper?"

 

It was a taunt and I knew it was such. Even as I knew it, I could feel that temper starting to burn in me. He was teasing me! Before I could even speak, he was behind me again and I spun about once more, then twice more after that as he would not stand in place. This kept up long enough that my anger had flared in full. Suddenly, I could see him move. He was still astoundingly fast, but I could see how he moved. More than that, I could see where he was going to be at the next time I moved. I spun, throwing a fist at the point where he would be.

 

And found my fist stopped by the point of his right index finger. Now, granted, an eight year old girl, even one who had led as active life as I had to that point, is not going to be be able to do much damage with a punch against an adult even if the punch landed. Even so, an eight year old's fist should not be stopped by a single finger as though I'd punched it into a wall..and it felt like I'd punched it into a wall...like he just did.

 

I stared at my fist. I stared at the finger that had stopped it. I stared up the hand and arm to the shoulder and, thence, to Master Qing's face. He was smiling. Gently. Kindly. And not without that hidden sorrow I could see in the eyes of my parents in the photo of them that I had.

 

"You saw," He told me barely above a whisper. I really didn't know what he meant but I found myself nodding  as I now cradled a sort right hand with my left.

 

He held my gaze for several moments longer before he looked back to Elspeth.

 

"She has a temper, yes," He told her as he stood back up. "I can teach her to channel it."

 

And this was the point where much of the innocence I had not lost when first going to school was lost. The world was a cruel, cruel place and it did not care one bit for the feelings of a young girl. It would toss you this way and that like a boat on waves and care even less where, and if, you landed. The only way to have a  place in the world was to claim a place. In striking back at him, however futile the punch may have ultimately been, I had proven to him I would be worth his time and effort. Master Qing was obligated to Elspeth and training me was his repaymemt of some unspoken debt. That I proved to be an adept pupil turned that obligation into a duty to train me as best he could.

 

And I was an apt pupil, indeed.

[Beeflin Grut]

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