My lordling’s fingers tightened painfully in my flesh.
“Lord Ujimitsu was supposed to suffocate me in my sleep, perhaps? Or was it to be blowfish poison in my tea?” The words were spoken in the mincing inflections of courtiers. Foolish to incite Ujimitsu into anger when the other held a sword and my lordling was weaponless. I wished with all my heart I could speak to my lordling within my mind in the song as I could Norinaga. Bitterest irony that my heart’s love could not hear me, though my enemy could.
Your plan has failed, fox general. I couldn’t move, couldn’t join the Jindo song, but I would not stay silent. Ujimitsu is too late. Lord Yoshinori is awake.
Across the yard, Norinaga faltered, the pine-kami’s voice weaving the barest melody alone. I started to stand, but Ashikaga pressed me back down.
“Put your sword away,” said the fox-soldier.
“We are committed now. There’s no going back,” said Ujimitsu. “We’ll find a way to make his death turn in my favor.”
It is you, little shamaness, who are too late.
“Remember the first time we fought foxes?” said my lordling. Oh, he wasn’t speaking to Ujimitsu, but to me. I thought of the clearing back in Ashikaga Han deep in the forest where I’d gone to check my rabbit snares and found my lordling stuck with an arrow, instead. The fox-soldiers had attacked. One-armed, Ashikaga had defended us, but every sword-stroke met nothing but mist until I’d begun singing my mother’s Jindo warding song. The song seemed to keep them human and solid enough to be wounded.
But I couldn’t sing. Norinaga and the pine-kami made that impossible. A whimper of frustration escaped my throat. There had to be another way.
“Not the clearing,” I said. “When you climbed Hell Mountain with your men.” I willed Ashikaga to remember. My lordling found a way to defeat the foxes while General Norinaga had me bound and helpless in the False Emperor’s courtyard.
Ashikaga blinked. Ujimitsu’s determined expression curled into a slack-mouthed smile. He sidled closer.
“Get the Daimyo out of here,” Ashikaga said in a low voice, and then launched off my shoulder in a leaping roll—one of those strange exercises from practice with the guards back home—and came up to the right and slightly behind Ujimitsu’s sword hand.
Too late to save these foolish Ashikagas. They invite foreign gods and fat priests to Yamato’s soil and blindly worship dead wood images. They cannot continue on this path, leading to Yamato’s destruction. Your lordling took Go-Daigo’s head and you stood by and did nothing. Now I ask you to do the same. Just stand and do nothing again. Look inside your heart. Does it not yearn to join the kami’s song?
Lord Ujimitsu jerked to the side, but Ashikaga was already tangling his legs with an outthrust foot. My lordling brought a two-handed fist down on Ujimitsu’s fingers where they gripped the hilt of his sword.
Norinaga’s whispers were as distracting as the song. I couldn’t just sit here, gaping. Ashikaga told me to get the Daimyo out. I scrambled past the row of nobles on the platform, resolutely trying to block Norinaga’s insidious whispering. Words that resonated inside that space in my deep-most heart. A space that yearned to believe the warmth and love from my childhood that disappeared along with my mother could somehow be regained.
Join the song, Lily-of-the-Valley.
The Lord Daimyo’s shoulder was warm and surprisingly soft under my hand. Nothing like Ashikaga’s lean muscle. Oh, this felt wrong. Wrong to put my hand on the Lord Daimyo, wrong to resist Norinaga so fiercely. Maybe if I joined in singing, invited the pine-kami’s indwelling, I could change the nature of Norinaga’s sleep spell?
The Daimyo groaned. Ashikaga went crashing to the floor against the far wall with a grunt of pain. I flinched, hesitating with one hand outstretched. My lordling barely dodged a downstroke from Lord Ujimitsu’s wakizashi before twisting away in a sideways jag that turned into another one of those acrobat tumbles, this one ending with my lordling on two feet clutching a zabuton cushion.
I pulled at the Daimyo. Foxes huffed and clicked their teeth, muzzles pointed my direction. How long would they sit there? Would they try to stop me? The Daimyo’s eyelids fluttered open and then closed, but when I dragged him off the platform his legs held in a wobbly stand. Draping him over my shoulder, I made for the door. Another quick glance over the Daimyo’s shoulder showed a desperate Ashikaga, backing towards the altar, wielding the cushion as a shield. A very slim shield.
The fox-man had found a wakizashi of his own. Ashikaga used one hand to jump over the altar rail and blocked a strike from the fox-man by tangling the cushion on the tip of the wakizashi. Crouching low on the other side of the rail, Ashikaga slipped a tanto knife through the gap, stabbing the fox-man’s knee.
As the knife touched him, the fox-man dissolved himself momentarily into mist—just as General Norinaga’s soldiers had in the forest.
“Go!” Ashikaga yelled.
The other foxes milled in a chaotic weave, clearly torn between me and Ashikaga. As torn as I was between doing my lordling’s bidding and staying to help. A fox clamped down on the Daimyo’s robe as I dithered, tearing at it with a ripping sound. I kicked at its nose, forcing it to leap back with a whimper, but the attack seemed to release some kind of hold on the others. The rest of the foxes paced toward me, backs straight as arrows, heads low and lips curled back to reveal sharp canines.
Ashikaga wrapped a length of silk altar-cloth around one hand, using the gentle-faced Buddha as a shield against Ujimitsu’s sword. With a grunt, Ashikaga rammed a shoulder into the statue, toppling it over. The statue’s outstretched knee caught Ujimitsu in the gut. Underneath the heavy wood, Ujimitsu cursed. His wakizashi clattered to the floor. The fox-man misted again at Ashikaga’s next tanto strike, not seeing Ashikaga reach into an incense brazier with the wrapped hand.
“Stupid girl, go!” yelled Ashikaga, and dropped a handful of burning coal and ash into the misted fox.
Chapter Eighteen
* * *
A KEENING CRY ripped through the room. In its wake pulsed a raw silence. Everyone froze. The absence of Jindo song, fox whimper, or Ujimitsu’s grunting attack gave stark importance to the black handful of ashes smoldering on the tatami. The mist boiled and then rose in frantically waving tentacles that dissolved into the air.
Ashikaga remembered the lessons of Hell Mountain. Fire against foxes.
The Daimyo’s knees suddenly gave out, hanging his entire weight on my left shoulder. I grunted and locked my own legs into place. A few sliding steps later, I dragged him over the threshold. He didn’t weigh as much as I expected, as if the depth and breadth of him was due to layers of robe and kataginu vest. He loomed so large in my mind, but his bones felt sparrow-fragile pressed against my side.
In the corridor, men were rubbing their dazed eyes and pulling themselves off the floor. I hesitated to drag the Daimyo through them. Fox noses appeared in the doorway. One fox sprang out. The Ashikaga guards went from dazed to alert in an instant. A half dozen swords bristled in the fox’s direction. Two of the guards I recognized as part of my lordling’s personal guard—ones who had fought fox soldiers on the Hell Stairs.
Oh, daughter of Dawn. Oh, best beloved of the kami.
Norinaga’s voice in my mind, using my mother’s name. His tone was as gentle as Auntie Jay’s daughter with her newborn son. With that feather-light touch came a vision—twin to the one Go-Daigo, the Pretender-Emperor, showed me on Hell Mountain just before I sang the kami down from erupting all over Ashikaga and his guard ascending the Hell stairs.
A green clearing in a forest. A girl, not beautiful, but sturdily handsome, dressed in white sitting at the feet of a man clad in the saffron robe and brown hakama of a yamabushi, an ascetic warrior of the old ways. In his hand was a smooth walking staff of hinoki cypress and a ro
und straw hat sat on his head like a shitake. A courtier bowed before them in supplication, a long line of other nobles winding down the hillside behind him. The feeling of absolute rightness, of connectedness, of kami joined with human tinged the scene with a bright glow. So clear, so polished, a precious moment brought out again and again an entire lifetime in order to remember the precise flavor of joy . . .
You understand you are the enemy now.
The vision splintered, fell away in sharp-edged shards that cut at my insides.
The enemy.
As if Norinaga had thought we could be anything other than enemies with what his men had done to May and Flower, with the hate his heart held for the Ashikagas. Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes. Daughter of Dawn. I thought I had made this choice already. Hadn’t I suffered enough pain on Hell Mountain when Ashikaga cut off the head of the only man I’d ever met who shared the uncomplicated joy of the kami’s song with me? But here was the choice again. Would I have to keep making it my whole life? To turn my back on my mother’s world? She had given everything to the kami. Left her home, her husband, and her children.
I did not leave those I loved.
“Lord Yoshinori needs a sword,” I told one of the Hell Mountain guards. A crash sounded from inside the room. The guard nodded, clearing a space for me to drag the Daimyo straight down the hallway to the massive front doors.
“Get the Daimyo’s sedan chair,” I said to another guard leaning woozily on the giant pillar in the middle of the great hall.
“No,” said the Daimyo, lifting his chin. “My horse. I can ride.” He pushed away from my shoulder with a jerk. I backed away, crouching in an awkward bow as low as my forehead could reach.
The guard pushed the temple’s great iron-studded door and waited for the Daimyo to shuffle through before racing out ahead towards the compound’s front gate. Should I follow the Daimyo as Ashikaga had bid me? What if my lordling needed help with the foxes? I put one foot over the massive rail at the bottom of the doorway and my neck prickled. Fox magic.
A swift, dark shape, stark against the moonlit gravel of the courtyard, hurled itself up the stairway, brushed past me, and down the hall.
Norinaga. My heart thudded in my chest painfully.
I could survive a scolding tirade for disobeying Ashikaga. I wasn’t sure he would survive Lord Ujimitsu if Norinaga showed up as reinforcement. Guards clogged the wide hall. Urgency lent me the courage to push at shoulders and jab ribs to get past them.
A barrier of foxes, teeth bared, backs arched, blocked the doorway. Stunned guards brandished swords at them, but were clearly unsettled and unsure.
Inside the room, the guards’ hesitancy had allowed Norinaga and Lord Ujimitsu to back Ashikaga into a corner. My lordling held them off with a sword in one hand and a lit paper lantern in the other.
Norinaga’s fox form was huge, more like a wolf. He sat back on his haunches inches from the tip of Ashikaga’s sword, nose lifted in the air as if to say my lordling wasn’t much of a threat. Ujimitsu just looked angry, those heavy Ashikaga brows crinkled low over his flat nose in anger. If my lordling dropped his guard for an instant, Lord Ujimitsu would attack.
My lips and tongue shaped the words to the Jindo song I’d sung for Zeami and the pine-kami came rushing into my belly. Waiting, eager.
No more lonely sleep. Together now.
I drew breath and in came the acid bite of pine-needles. The strength of hundred-year roots grounded me to the wooden floor of the hall.
Like coals banked in the brazier, but still alive with heat, I have hidden my heart in melancholy.
Foxes arched back, skins writhing over the meat of their bones like each muscle contracted separately in a wild dance. Yes. This. This intertwining of human and kami spirit, the feeding of the empty places in me, the soothing of pain and sorrow and frail mortal flesh . . .
I spread fingers wide, palms out, breathing in the pine-kami’s clean, filling presence until my lungs fairly burst through my ribs. Each exhale sent our human-kami togetherness into the room—and into any being capable of feeling Jindo power. Norinaga rose to all fours, nose pointed my direction.
Now the ash has burned away;
Let there be ever more good things to come.
The other foxes’ mouths gaped open. They fell to the floor, sides heaving. High-pitched yips, whimpers and gasps filled the air. Laughing, they were laughing. Filled beyond bearing with our ecstatic wholeness.
Sleep, came the musky, penetrating heat of Norinaga’s power, a discordant undertone. The pine-kami rejected it. Enough of that.
Together now. Joy.
The human guards began to feel it. The foxes writhed on the floor, mouths wrinkled in weirdly human laughter. The men stared at me with fearful eyes even as their mouths curled at the corners into unwilling smiles.
Lord Ujimitsu shook his head, glaring first at Norinaga, and then at me. He swung his sword at my lordling. Ashikaga blocked with a ragged upward thrust of his borrowed sword, flinging the lantern at Norinaga’s rump in the same motion. The huge fox leaped backwards in my direction. In the midst of the verse “alive with heat,” I leaned forwards, almost on my toes, forming the words with all my might and breath, magnified a thousand times by the pine-kami’s powerful indwelling.
Norinaga whirled around, snarling. He scattered his foxes with a few swipes of a massive paw and snapped his jaws at my neck. Ashikaga rose up behind him and brought the sword down on a diagonal strike against the fox’s back legs.
Startled, my song faltered. The instant of silence allowed Norinaga to exert his fox magic. He misted. Ashikaga’s sword only grazed the left leg, passing through the right one completely.
Norinaga curled around, closing jaws inches from Ashikaga’s arm. Ashikaga leaped to the side, but Lord Ujimitsu was there, taking advantage of the exposed position. He reversed his sword and sent the pummel crashing into Ashikaga’s neck. My lordling crashed to the floor.
I breathed in the pine-kami’s thrumming joy and let loose the song with all my might and the full strength of my voice.
Norinaga and the other foxes flickered, their shapes blurring, and then reforming into humans. At the sight of the armed men, Ashikaga’s guards finally broke through their stupor. “Lord Ashikaga!” called out one of the guards who’d fought the fox-soldiers on Hell Mountain. He brushed past me. Norinaga, now dressed in the yamabushi garb from my vision, reached out to stop the guard. I jumped forward and pulled the wide brim of the straw hat down around Norinaga’s ears.
Lord Ujimitsu grunted loudly. He knelt over my lordling’s body, forearm pressed to Ashikaga’s slender throat.
“You. Will. Not. Be. Heir.”
The Hell Mountain guard grabbed the back of Ujimitsu’s collar and jerked him away.
“Enough!” barked Norinaga, pushing me hard to the floor. Breath and song cut off with a gasp.
He made a slicing motion through the air in Lord Ujimitsu’s direction. “There are too many witnesses. We will regroup.” Norinaga crushed the straw hat between his hands and threw it in my direction. I flinched as if the hat would burn. A few barked commands and each of his fox-soldiers backed away from an Ashikaga guard, flickering into fox shape again and escaping down the hall. Norinaga gripped Lord Ujimitsu’s wrist above his sword-hand. “The soldier in front has lost his horse, but it will return to camp with all the other lost horses. This is not the time or place for your brand of persuasion.”
Lord Ujimitsu cursed, aiming a kick at Ashikaga’s side that brought forth a pained grunt. “I am not afraid of Ashikaga’s shamaness.”
Ashikaga uncurled, reaching out for the discarded wakizashi. My lordling would never use a sword as a crutch, so the slow, painful way Ashikaga used it to stand up made my insides curdle.
My lordling suffered more than bruises this time.
“Will you put a sword in the chest of another Ashikaga?” my lord said.
“The Emperor will forgive a little tussle . . .” said Norinaga.
Lord Ujimitsu cursed again, but he lowered the tip of his sword. A duel was one thing. Stabbing another noble with a sword in Kyoto without the Emperor’s permission invited forced suicide.
“The Emperor need never know of tonight at all,” said Ashikaga.
Lord Ujimitsu scoffed. I sidled closer to Ashikaga. I didn’t know how long my lordling’s legs would hold out.
“Emperor Chokei isn’t an idiot,” said Lord Ujimitsu. “Neither is your father.”
“You surely aren’t really this obtuse,” said Ashikaga. Lord Ujimitsu reddened. That hit a sore spot. Was that part of his hatred for my lordling? Did people compare the two Ashikaga scions and find Ujimitsu lacking? “The Emperor will forgive this ‘tussle,’ ” Ashikaga said, eyes flickering over to Norinaga. The fox general looked wary, but seemed to be settling into the conversation.
No one, not even Norinaga, seemed concerned that I still supported Ashikaga. The pine-kami thrummed happily to itself somewhere outside. A feeling like the aching tingles after a long run in the forest flickered up and down my limbs. Norinaga didn’t reach for a Jindo song or the kami’s power. A small part of me felt a rush of satisfaction. I was right. He was unsure whether he could beat me if we put the pine-kami to a real test of wills. The kami liked me better.
“—the regard of Emperor Chokei. Your brother was a drunken idler. Why should he notice the younger brother, a hick, a Northerner more likely to know the recipe for grated mountain potato dumplings than the correct sequence of syllables in a tanka verse?” Lord Ujimitsu had pulled back his shoulders and stood up straight, jaw thrust forward in a stubborn posture that was all Wild Boar.
Ashikaga gave a mocking, court bow. “I cannot argue the truth of your words, oh cousin. I do, indeed, know the recipe for yamaimo dumplings. But the Lord Daimyo wishes me to gain Chokei’s favor. You can see my dilemma.”
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 23
