渾身解數 His Whole Repertoire
逐句解 Line by line
His whole repertoire like flowered brocade, his two hands shifting like a windlass.
⚠ Two readings settled in one line. 解數 is xièshù, the full set of moves a fighter has been taught — and 渾身解數 is the phrase still used today for everything one has got. 騰那 takes 那 as nuó, standing for 挪, to shift or move about. And the similes are both from craft: 花錦 is patterned brocade, 轆轤 the windlass over a well. Even the fight is being described in textiles and machinery.
Clash and clatter of sword and staff.
乒乓 is pure sound — the characters were built to be a noise, and the same pair is modern Chinese for ping-pong. Five characters, and the couplet it belongs to is the shortest unit in the set-piece.
Bleak and dim the wild clouds drift.
The answering half, and it does what Chinese battle verse always does: cuts from the noise to the weather. 慘淡, dim and desolate, is the rhyme position, and 浮 lands in the same rime as every other rhyme in the piece.
Cutting words, laid schemes, a coming and a going like a painted scene.
劖 is to cut or carve, so 劖言語 is speech that cuts — they are still insulting each other mid-fight. Then three and three and seven, the only irregular line in the piece, which is exactly where a 賦 is allowed to break stride.
They fought till the wind roared and sand flew and wolves and tigers took fright, till heaven darkened, earth dimmed, and the Dipper stars were gone.
得 is de, introducing a complement of degree — fought to the point that. And 斗 is dǒu, the Dipper, not dòu, to fight: the same character that was a peck-measure four passages ago. The line ends the set-piece by putting out the stars.
The craft vocabulary is the thing to notice, because it is not decoration. Brocade, a windlass, a painted scene, and 經綸 in the previous passage — the poem describes a duel almost entirely in terms of making things. In a chapter whose central image is silk being spun and then wound back up, that is a sustained choice.
The rhyme, checked rather than assumed, is exact: eight positions and all eight in the 魚模 rime — 箍, 呼, 吾, 粗, 轤, 浮, 圖, 無. Getting there needed care about which positions count, since 乒乓劍棒響 is the odd member of a pair and not a rhyme at all. Read it as one and a perfect scheme looks broken.
That matters for a reason beyond bookkeeping. The two set-pieces earlier in this chapter were loose and one had no scheme at all; this one is airtight. The genre label does not predict it. Only counting does.