FAR ABOVE MULAN, above all of them, was a monstrous mountain with bulging eyes. No, not a mountain, but some sort of horrific, gigantic sea creature with mottled, slimy skin and evil eyes protruding like boils. It waved one of its many limbs over them, its rows of bowl-shaped white suckers ready to squeeze them into a sludge. It gave a strange, eerie wail that echoed in the sky. Mulan cringed.
“Your old friend!” the Rabbit yelled to Lu Ting-Pin, who was hanging on to the side of the boat, one arm raised in a vain attempt to shield himself from the immense crashing wave. He rubbed his face against his shoulder and grimaced. The swaying tentacle narrowly missed the boat and smashed down into the water, sending up a fresh onslaught of water as they desperately clutched at the boat.
“Old foe, you mean!” Lu Ting-Pin yelled back as soon as he was able to breathe again. He mopped his face uselessly with his wet sleeve and scowled. “I should’ve killed this beast four centuries ago!”
“Well, you can do it now!” the Rabbit shouted, spitting out water.
Lu Ting-Pin pulled himself to his full height, and with a proud, graceful motion, swept his arm to his back to grasp…air. He groaned.
“What’s wrong?” Mulan had to scream to be heard through the thunderous din of the provoked sea. Another tentacle was swinging above them, and this one looked as if its aim was on target for the boat.
“My sword! We’re using my sword as this boat!” Lu Ting-Pin bellowed, looking around in confusion. “What am I supposed to fight with?”
“I don’t know!” the Rabbit hollered back as he gazed upward. “But do something!”
The circular white suckers of the tentacles were coming down upon them now, like a chain of full moons falling to earth. Lu Ting-Pin gaped at the destroying limb and then lifted his chin. Without another word, he sprang from boat, grabbed the tip of the tentacle, and forced it up and away from the boat.
Mulan gawked. “He can fly?” she gasped.
“Only short distances,” the Rabbit said. “And he has some other limits, too.”
But whatever those limits were, they did not seem to be stopping him now. Lu Ting-Pin was soaring like an arrow, his legs extended like a bolt of lightning that crashed into one of the creature’s eyes. He bounced off as if the eye were a taut drum, but Lu Ting-Pin’s feat was not in vain. The transparent staring eye suddenly filled with a milky liquid and turned opaque, and Mulan realized that the beast was now partially blinded.
This, of course, caused the creature to become even more enraged. Its other eye could still see, and with one of its many legs, it swatted at Lu Ting-Pin in the sky as if he were a pesky fly. The monster’s other limbs thrashed in the water, tipping the boat in all directions.
Again, Mulan grabbed about madly as the assailing water and turbulence forced her across the boat. When her arms found the bottom of the yuloh, she clutched gratefully, but her tired arms screamed in pain.
“Lu Ting-Pin can’t last much longer,” the Rabbit said, his low tone barely audible among the din, “and neither can we.”
He was right, Mulan realized. They were both gasping and drenched with water, and even if the boat refused to topple, they would be thrown out. Mulan looked at the yuloh, the handle arching above her head like a reaching arm. Lu Ting-Pin had enchanted it somehow to make the boat sail quickly, she remembered. She pressed her body against the oar and saw the boat shift with her direction. She began to steer it the best she could to the front of the sea creature. Then, just as she was directly before it, she saw the small figure of Lu Ting-Pin fall from the sky, taken down by a blow from the beast’s tentacles.
Mulan looked up at the oar. You are too strong for your own good! Ma had scolded. But would that be strong enough? Mulan clenched her jaw, jumped up, and grabbed the handle, forcing it down. The boat lurched and the Rabbit stirred. If he made a sound, she could not hear him. She could hear nothing—not the crashing of waves, the shrieks of the sky, or even Ma’s voice in her head. All she could hear was her blood in her ears, pounding and pushing, pushing so hard and so fast that she felt she might explode with the force within her. And it was with that force that she pushed the oar against the sea.
The boat staggered forward with such power that she was thrown again. It hurtled through the water, darting faster and faster, soaring through the waves so swiftly that even Mulan’s wet, heavy clothing lifted and spread like eagle wings as she clung to the boat. Above her, Mulan saw the sea monster turn its great bulging eyes down toward the boat as if puzzled, lifting a tentacle to bat it away.
But too late! The pointed bow thrust into the creature with such force that the creature reeled backward, its eyes swelling in a silent scream. The boat bobbed up and down as the beast writhed in pain, and Mulan’s arms could no longer hold. She was flung from the boat, flying and falling, shrieking as the cold, black water swallowed her.
MULAN PUSHED herself up through the cold waves, choking and sputtering. Over the sound of her own wheezing, she thought she heard a faint voice above.
She looked up and saw Lu Ting-Pin swinging on one of the beast’s struggling tentacles, his arm wrapped around it as if in a passionate embrace. “Mulan!” he called, throwing something toward her. “Here!”
Down fell Lu Ting-Pin’s gourd, bobbing merrily next to her in the sea. Mulan seized it, putting it underneath the Rabbit’s chin as she clasped tightly. Wave after wave crashed over her, but with the gourd, she was able to rise up again, gasping.
The creature writhed and thrashed, the boat thrust into it like a spear. Lu Ting-Pin seemed to have recovered his bravado, for she could hear his laugh as he sprang through the air to the back of the boat. There, he gave it a mighty heave so the bow thrust deeper into the beast’s body. He did this a second and a third time, each push causing the creature to flail madly and Mulan to cling frantically to the gourd as she plunged through the violent waves.
But when Lu Ting-Pin shoved the bow the fourth time, it pierced so deeply that the boat was almost completely engulfed by the beast’s flesh. Suddenly, the tentacles stopped all movement as if frozen in ice. A dark liquid began to seep from the edges of the wedged boat, a thick purple blood that floated, making a brackish film on the waves. The sea creature had suffered its mortal wound.
The waves slowly calmed, but Mulan felt her weary arms begin to fail. She saw Ba’s loving face in her mind and suddenly remembered when she had tried, ashamed and tearful, to glue the village shrine statue back together. “Your job is to bring honor to your family,” Ba had said as he helped her hold the broken pieces. “Every day, you must rise up and continue.” Rise up and continue. Rise up and continue. Those words kept repeating over and over, up and down with the rhythm of the climbing and falling water. “I’m trying, Ba,” Mulan whispered, but the constant gripping of the gourd, the repeated submerging and striking, had almost brought her to collapse. She felt more drowned than alive. The gourd was just beginning to slip away when she heard Lu Ting-Pin.
“Hold on a bit longer,” he said. He seemed to be standing on the water.
“I don’t know if I can,” Mulan said faintly.
“Of course you can,” he said, looking at her proudly. “You are a mighty warrior. You didn’t slay that ugly brute for nothing just now, did you?”