by Nick Lake
Taro pulled himself out of Sato’s mind violently, letting go of the ball as if it were a hissing snake.
Sato. The name of the man who tried to kill me was Sato.
Taking a deep breath, he straightened up.
‘Taro? Are you all right?’ Hiro was sitting up, looking at him with grave concern in his eyes.
‘Fine,’ said Taro. ‘Just stiff, that’s all.’
‘Hmm,’ said Hiro. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To see the abbot. I want to talk more about this dragon.’
Hiro nodded, and was that a trace of sadness in the cast of his face? ‘Of course,’ he said.
Half an incense stick later, Taro knocked on the old monk’s study door, waiting to be invited to enter.
‘Come,’ said the familiar voice.
When Taro approached, the abbot was using a small rake to tend his Zen garden. He greeted Taro with a warm smile. ‘You are thinking about the shogun’s challenge,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.
‘Actually...’ said Taro. ‘I was thinking about something you said. About the dragon. You said they are terrifying creatures. It sounded almost as if you had seen one.’
The abbot spread his hands. ‘I’m old. I’ve forgot more things than you can imagine.’
‘But you wouldn’t forget a dragon.’
‘No,’ said the abbot. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ He walked over to a paper window, through which Taro could see the shape of a tree. ‘We have heard rumours about this dragon for some time,’ he said eventually. ‘They say it burned a whole village last month. Several men who tried to claim the shogun’s reward have been killed.’
‘You think I would be killed?’
‘I don’t know. But I know that dragons are real. I... I heard about one, from a friend.’
Taro gave the man a hard look. He knew the abbot was lying, but he could also see pain in the old monk’s eyes. He knew not to push further. It was enough for him that the abbot was taking the idea of the dragon so seriously. ‘And what would you do, if you were me?’
The abbot steepled his hands. ‘Life is more difficult for you than for me,’ he said. ‘You’re not a samurai, but you’re not a peasant either. You’re of low birth, yet you killed a daimyo and were trained as a ninja by Shusaku, one of the best men I have known, but a creature of the night nevertheless. You know nothing of the sutras, are condemned to feed on blood, but you have been to death and seen more of the great wheel of dharma than I have. You’re in love with a high-born girl, and you have nothing to offer her. But this! It could give you land and a title. No one could question you then.’
Taro was a little stunned. He had thought all these things himself, but he hadn’t expected that others would have seen the same things. He was touched, in a way, that the abbot should understand his problems so well. Though of course the abbot didn’t know the half of it – he had no idea that Taro was really Lord Tokugawa’s son. ‘So I go, then,’ he said.
The abbot looked at him long and hard. ‘Yes, I suppose you do,’ he said. Then he held up a finger, as if just remembering something. ‘I asked if you would deliver our rice taxes,’ he said.
‘You did.’
‘Good. And you will guard them with your life, I’m sure. But there’s also...’ The abbot searched among the papers on his desk, clicking his tongue on the roof of his mouth, then stabbed a short scroll with his finger. ‘Ah. Here we are.’ Taking a stick of wax, he bent over a candle, then sealed the scroll. ‘Would you deliver this to the shogun, when you get there? It’s... it’s a private message.’
‘I understand,’ said Taro. He took the scroll and slid it into his cloak. At the door, he turned. ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘You have seen a dragon. I can tell from your eyes.’
The abbot winced.
‘It’s important,’ said Taro. ‘I need to know if I have any chance. If you think I might survive.’
‘I think... I don’t know.’
‘But you’ve seen one,’ said Taro gently, taking the risk of irritating the abbot. ‘I can hear it in your voice.’
‘All right, all right...’ The abbot sat down heavily. ‘There was so much snow,’ he said, his voice drifting away in thought. ‘It was snow country, that place. And the snow erased them, afterwards. Erased all trace of them...’
‘Erased who?’
‘My men.’
Taro shivered; it was as if snow had whirled into the room, soft flurries of it. ‘Did a dragon kill your men?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then tell me. Tell me what you saw.’
CHAPTER 6
Twenty years earlier
THIS WAS SNOW country.
Kakizaki no Kendo halted his horse in the gateway and gazed out from the seaside fort over the land. To the east and west, the sea stretched out, dark and cold as night. But before him was a vastness of snow, burying the rice fields, reaching up to high mountains, shimmering with the light of a pale winter sun.
Kendo shielded his eyes from the glare. The cruel light, reflecting off the snow so that it seemed to surround him, hammered nails through his eyes. He wrapped his cloak tighter around his body, shivering.
He wished he had not drunk so much sake the previous night.
The horse he rode was experienced, proven in battle, with a nimble step. Nevertheless, the ground was rough, the snow covering holes and mounds alike, and every step sent painful jolts through Kendo’s head. Curse those Ainu, he thought.
‘Wretched Ainu,’ said Lord Ando, echoing Kendo’s thoughts.
‘Gah,’ said Kendo, who couldn’t manage much more than that. Lord Ando rode just behind him – he was Kendo’s age, only more handsome and more confident, more everything, really. Despite that, the two had always been best friends. Now that Kendo was responsible for keeping Lord Ando alive, a certain stiffness had crept in between them, but not much.
‘I did tell you to get more sleep,’ said the young lord, amused.
Kendo shrugged, and even that hurt. Actually, he had gone to bed. Just not on his own, and not to sleep. Not for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity.
Behind him, the gates to the Ando settlement closed. His men had already gone ahead, two hundred of them, all mounted. Kendo was hatamoto to his old friend Lord Ando, commander of the settlement’s small samurai force. He had asked Lord Ando to stay at home, had told him he would be safer there – and that had turned out to be a mistake, because Lord Ando didn’t want to be safe, and never had.
Now they were Outside, in a broad valley that tapered to mountains, the sea behind them.
In the cold.
In the snow.
For Kendo, there was Inside, which was within the settlement ground, and Outside, which was everything else, the whole of the rest of the island.
Hokkaido.
Kendo had spent his whole life here, been born here – was a peripheral member of a prominent family. And yet, like everyone else he knew, he was an Outsider, one of only a few hundred Japanese who had maintained a toehold on Hokkaido. They had clung to this settlement, on the tip of the Oshima Peninsula, for two hundred years, a tiny island of Japanese in a sea of Ainu. They had arrived by accident, or so the story went. A ship leaving Honshu Island, blown off course to land on the southern coast of Hokkaido. The captain went to drink from a stream and found a nugget of gold in his hands as he cupped the water. he was the first Ando: he stayed to dig up the rest of his gold, and his ancestors stayed too. Many times they had been attacked, decimated even. Once their entire settlement was destroyed, and they had to rebuild again farther north. But they clung on.
Kendo was a cousin of sorts to the present Lord Ando. He would never be lord, was too far from the succession. Yet he could live a noble life here, as a valued samurai.
He could lead a proud existence – if it wasn’t for the twice-cursed Ainu.
Kendo’s horse threaded its way through the gravestones, which appeared as smooth hillocks in the snow. Here on Hokkaido, his people pu
t their dead outside the settlement gates – not because they failed to honour them sufficiently, but for protection. The Ainu would not go into a place of the dead, so the cemetery was a kind of moat. A moat of corpses.
Most things about the Ainu were different. They were hairy, where the Japanese were smooth. It was said that their people were descended from bears. The men wore full beards; the women tattooed their faces with dark ink, making them difficult to tell apart from the men. They lived not in wooden houses but in huts of woven reed and thatch, and they farmed little, but hunted instead.
One of Kendo’s men held up a hand. They had come to the end of the graves, and now they really were Outside. Nothing to hold the Ainu back. Kendo drew level, scanned the valley ahead. He couldn’t see anything but snow, and steel-grey sky. He motioned for the two hundred riders to spread out, to minimize the risk of ambush. Not that he thought there was much risk.
They don’t have a chance, he thought.
The last couple of decades, a sort of truce had developed between the Japanese and the Ainu. The Japanese gave the island’s original inhabitants sake and tobacco, for the most part, as well as the lacquerware dishes that the Ainu prized so much – Kendo wasn’t sure why; he had a dim notion that they used the bowls for some kind of ritual. Even the beliefs of the Ainu were different: they had never learned the ways of Buddha, believing instead that they were surrounded by spirits – the spirit of the mountain, the spirit of the sea. Of streams. Of trees.
In return for the gifts the Japanese gave them, the Ainu gave the settlers animal skins – deer and salmon – finely carved wooden items, and sea-eagle feathers which Japanese women loved to wear.
In this way – deer skins for sake – a precarious peace had developed.
Yet now a new leader had emerged among the Ainu. He called himself Koshaiman, and he had no interest in truces. He wanted the Japanese gone from the island, said they were an offence to all the spirits of the land. Just in the last month he and his raiding parties had killed twenty Japanese – some of them from a trading party that had gone far up-island, some who had been fishing or mining for gold farther up the peninsula. The Japanese had retreated behind the walls of the settlement.
Until now.
Kendo spurred his horse, pressing forward into the valley. He felt, heard, and saw his men do the same. For the first time, Kendo’s hangover lifted a little, blown away by the cold air streaming past him as his horse accelerated. They followed the river, a direct line from the sea to the high places. In summer it ran with water so transparent it was as if it wasn’t there; nothing but smooth stones, shifting as if lit by an invisible fire. But now it was winter, and the river was a road of ice.
Lord Ando rode behind him. The snow-covered ground, iron-hard, resounded under the hooves of the two hundred horses. Kendo could almost feel sorry for the Ainu. With their bows and their knives, they were horribly unprepared for a full assault by a samurai army.
The Japanese rode to the pass, seeing no one and nothing. Kendo signalled for the raiding party to stop. From here, he could look back to the settlement, so small from up here. And for a moment he had a glimpse of how the Ainu saw it: a little blemish, down there by the sea, surrounded by ocean and snow. He shivered.
Down-valley, the Ainu village huddled against the mountainside, as if sheltering from the elements. A dozen huts, maybe less but not much more, next to the rock on one side and a stream on the other, still flowing, the water too fast-moving to freeze. The Ainu always built by streams – they needed the water, of course, but salmon were just as important to them, for their food and for their spirits.
‘Any movement?’ said Lord Ando.
‘No.’
Mist wreathed the pine trees on the mountainsides, smoke rose from the Ainu huts. Silence reigned, until the horses came. There were no war cries, no speeches. The idea was to be quick, and brutal. Kendo pushed his horse forward, taking the lead.
‘Go in through the east doors,’ he shouted, before beginning the charge on the village. He hoped this might give them the additional advantage of surprise. The Ainu believed that the east door of a hut was for gods to enter and leave by – they never used it themselves, would never even look through it, for fear of bad luck. So it was likely that they would never expect anyone else to go in that way.
There were many who didn’t care how the Ainu lived, for the Ainu were barbarians and obviously stupid, too. They didn’t even have the sense to shave. But Understand your enemy was a thing Kendo’s father had said, and Kendo’s father had kept the settlement safe for thirty years.
Kendo drew his sword, pulling his helmet farther down on his head. The steel, scoured by the winter wind, was ice-cold against his skin. The first hut was pounding towards him, and in the corner of his eye he saw just one old man emerge from behind it. Kendo didn’t slow down as the hut approached – he was mounted on a battle-horse, fully armoured. A hut door – even the hut itself – was a bundle of twigs in his path.
He did close his eyes, though.
Crash.
Something scraped his shoulder, as he smashed into the hut through the east wall. Another old man was inside; he looked up in surprise from the cooking fire as Kendo swept down with his sword, the blade cutting clean through the man’s chest. Blood sprayed, spattered Kendo’s helmet and face, startlingly hot. There was a woman, too, white-haired and slow – she was trying to run when his sword crushed the back of her skull. He didn’t stop; just kept riding, bursting out through the west wall and back into the whiteness and the cold.
From all around came the sounds of . . . screaming. That was right. But not as much screaming as he had been expecting. As he gathered his bearings, he saw a horse stumble to his left, then go down hard, in a tangle of legs, sliding heavily to a stop. The samurai rider, feet caught in the stirrups, was thrown down like a doll, crushed and trapped beneath the horse’s twitching body. Kendo took in this scene in an instant, already aware of the two Ainu who had stretched out the wire, who were now moving on the downed rider, daggers in their hands. The Japanese didn’t trade swords with the Ainu, for obvious reasons, and the native tribe lacked the skills to make swords themselves – hadn’t even known about metal, when the Japanese first arrived on the island.
As the Ainu approached the downed man, three of Kendo’s samurai rode past, without so much as a backward glance for their fallen comrade. Kendo swore. Sensible of them, of course. But Kendo had never been sensible. The steady beat of the headache behind his eyes was testament to that.
For the second time that day, he cursed his stupidity, then rode. The two Ainu looked up, startled. He expected at least one to whirl out of the way, strike his horse with the dagger, but to his surprise he saw that both were white of beard, hobbled by age – and neither of them got out of the path of his horse fast enough.
Good.
Smoothly, he decapitated the first, then ran the other through. He leaned down from his saddle, to check the man on the ground. Alive – but only just. Blood trickled from his mouth as he looked up at Kendo with wide, blinking eyes, and Kendo knew that wasn’t a good sign, but he refused to leave a man behind. Even if he couldn’t risk moving the fallen horse right now, with the battle still going on. Not that he thought he could move the horse on his own: his flaw was stupidity, not arrogance.
‘Play dead,’ he said. ‘We’ll collect you after.’
He turned the horse, getting his bearings. Flames flickered over the huts in front of him; a cooking fire had been disturbed in the raid, no doubt. Samurai on horseback hacked and slashed at Ainu on the ground – though again, not as many Ainu as he had expected. Not as much screaming.
There was something else, too.
He glanced down at the two men he had just killed, before riding on.
Old. Both old. And the man and woman in the hut . . .
Kendo was beginning to have a bad feeling. ‘My lord!’ he called. He didn’t know where Lord Ando had gone; the moment he had crashed through
that first hut the bloodlust had been on him, the sakki, and the world had shrunk to a point, to a sharp edge.
He could hear fighting to his left, towards where the stream was – clashes of metal on metal, cries and grunts. Every sinew and nerve in his body told him to ride away from it, an instinct as strong as that to breathe. He ignored it, turning his horse to go to where the fight was—
Flowers bloomed in black night, the earth spun—
And then hit him, hard as a charging horse.
Kendo lay on his back, the scene before him resolving into grey sky, an Ainu man looking down. A scraggly beard, flecked with grey. The man raised the club he had struck Kendo from the horse with, long and heavy, and there was only blankness in his eyes. The look of a man concentrated on a task, the look of a man chopping wood.
Kendo closed his eyes. It would look like he had given up, and he didn’t need them open, now that he had fixed the man’s position in his mind. He felt the down-rush of air, rolled to the side. The club struck his shoulder, and a new flower of pain bloomed, sickly red. A glancing blow, but the crunch and the looseness told him his shoulder was dislocated.
I wish I had drunk even more, thought Kendo. Maybe then it wouldn’t hurt so much. His head felt as though it might collapse in on itself, shattering like a clay jug.
Carelessly, the Ainu hadn’t taken the sword from his hand. Kendo sat up, and swung it in a low arc. It was cold-forged steel, a family weapon, some said a Masamune. It went through the Ainu’s shins like a scythe through grass, and the man fell, screaming. Kendo struggled to his feet, left arm hanging by his side. He stepped past the Ainu’s severed feet and raised his sword, to put the writhing man out of his misery.
The old man looked up at him. ‘Prepare to meet . . . the spirit of the mountain,’ he said, and to Kendo’s amazement he was smiling.
Just then the hut behind Kendo exploded in flame, the heat striking him like a wall, enveloping his flesh. He put up his hand to shield his eyes, bashed the pommel of his sword into his forehead.
