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FIRST
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The
DRAGONS of ANTIOCH CHAPTER
1 China,
In the Western Han Filthy and stinking and bent, the beggar was ancient beyond reckoning, dressed in rags, bony arms blistered in running sores, and crawling with fleas and lice. The boy should have hurried past, dropping a few copper coins in his bowl perhaps, but not lingering as he did. The boy’s family name was Ming. Son of a regional governor and expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, he was schooled in politics and poetry, calligraphy and the Confucian classics – the Analects, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean – and provided with the best tutors his family could afford. But it was his calligraphy master who changed him, introducing young Ming to the Taoist canon – the Tao Te Jing, Chuang-tzu, and the Yijing – and opening his mind and his eyes to the mysteries of the world around him.
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CHAPTER
1 Baker
Chen was last to arrive, lunch tray balanced expertly as he wove
through the crowded cafeteria at Antioch High school, making his way
to three friends waiting at a corner table. Classes for the four
were a confusing combination; lunch was the only period shared in
common between them, and the corner table was their meeting place. Pulling
up a chair, Baker set down his tray and retrieved a stack of
brightly colored envelopes from a front pocket. They were small and
red and embossed with an unintelligible Chinese character in a gold
foil script. Chandler picked one up and examined it curiously. “For the weekend,” Baker said by way of explanation as he folded open a carton of milk. The weekend. It had been said casually, but the coming weekend was something they’d all been looking forward to for months. Sunday would be their bai see lai, a ceremony of discipleship formally marking their acceptance as students in a twin martial arts tradition centuries old.
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