by Nick Lake
‘I am.’
‘Well,’ said Lord Oda, picking up a brush and dipping it into a pot of ink. ‘I suppose all we can do is wait, and hope he leads us to it.’
‘He will. And then, when you have it, you will seal our bargain.’
‘Hmm?’
‘You’ll make me a vampire.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lord Oda. He bared his lips, showing his long teeth. Then he bent his head, contemptuously indicating a broken thing that had once been a man, lying in the gloom at the back of the tent, its skin white and shrunken, so forcefully had it been drained of its blood. ‘If you are as tough as you say, I rather look forward to a meal with a bit more fight to it.’
CHAPTER 31
TARO STOOD SWAYING in the dawn light, as the many plumes of incense all around him mingled with the mist that rose from the grass. As always, Hiro was beside him – and Hayao was not far off, his face healthier than when Taro had first known him, though there was a sadness about the eyes that had not been there before.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Hayao. ‘I promised you I would protect her.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Taro.
It’s Yukiko’s, and it’s the samurais’, and they will all die. It’s Lord Oda’s, and he will die too if he’s not already dead; it doesn’t matter to me.
It’s mine, and when my enemies are dead I can die too, and rest.
He blinked, his eyes sore from the sleepless night, but closing his eyelids was not enough to make the bodies disappear; nor to rebuild the halls of the monastery, which lay in ruins on the mountainside, their remaining beams and struts blackened, so that they seemed the skeletons of fell beasts. The samurai had so far not returned, but why would they need to? The monastery was destroyed, and only a handful of monks remained. The dead were assembled in greater numbers than their mourners.
Ahead of Taro, on a raised wooden bier, was his mother, lying beside Kenji Kira and the monks who had died in battle. Hiro had said that they should throw the man in a ravine, or give him to dogs to eat. But Taro had refused. Yukiko had wanted to defile Kiro’s body – and he would do nothing to give Yukiko pleasure.
‘We give him his due rites,’ he had said. ‘He was a human being. We will send his soul on correctly. Where it ends up is another matter entirely.’
‘I am proud of you,’ the abbot had told him.
‘Really?’ he’d replied. ‘I deserve none of your pride.’ And then he had turned and stalked away.
Back in the awful present, Taro gazed at his mother’s body. Like the monks, she was dressed in a clean white kimono, her head facing north, so that her soul might find its way to the Pure Land. Hana’s body was not here. Although monks still searched the ruins of the Hokke-do, Taro was sure they would find nothing. The fire that had killed her had also cremated her, releasing her from physical attachment and scattering her ashes on the wind.
It was the morning after the battle, yet it felt like years had passed. Taro had not slept or eaten. All he wanted was to go to Shirahama and recover the ball from the bottom of the bay. When he had it in his hands, he would use it to draw Yukiko to him, and then he would kill her, and everyone who had fought with her.
For now, though, he had to wait. The abbot wished to begin the funeral ceremonies immediately, for fear that the souls of the dead might linger on as gaki, feeding on the few monks who remained. There was also the fear of disease, even if the abbot hadn’t expressed it out loud. A month would pass between the funeral rites and the cremation, while the monks continued to read the sutras and chant prayers, hoping to speed the souls of the dead to a glorious rebirth. With so many dead on the mountain, and the days already warming as spring began to turn to summer, the abbot could not risk waiting even a single day to begin the obsequies.
Taro viewed the corpses through vision blurred by tears, exhaustion, and incense. All night the monks had been chanting, repeating over and over again the last sutras taught by the Shakyamuni Buddha on the day of his death, hoping that the good karma accumulated by their repetition might cling to the dead. Taro fingered the tazu beads looped around his hand, the shining balls of jade seeming the only hard thing in a world that had become smoke, liquid, and the monotonous recitation of men. The words of the Buddha seemed to float through him, occasionally snagging like fish on the hooks of his consciousness.
O disciples, if there were one who came and
dismembered you joint by joint, you should not hate him
but rather include him in your heart. . .
If you succumb to thoughts of hatred you block your own
dharma and lose the merit you have gathered. Patience is
a virtue which cannot be equalled even by keeping the
Precepts and the Austere Practices. . .
Taro almost smiled. It was clear from the sutras he had heard echoing all night that he would never attain nirvana. He could no more include Lord Oda or Yukiko in his heart than he could step off this mountain and walk through the clouds to the sea. He had already made up his mind – as soon as the funeral rites were over he would go to Shirahama to find the Buddha ball.
And he would use it to destroy his enemies.
He closed his eyes, meditating not on nothingness and the abandonment of desires, as the Buddha taught, but on the deaths of those who had taken his friends and family. The ninja who had killed his father. Yukiko. The nameless samurai who had burned the mountain, destroying the Hokke-do and Hana as if they were driftwood to be burned with no consequence. All those responsible would die, and their deaths would be only the beginning of their suffering, such are the torments reserved by hell for the killers of the innocent.
He had caused death before, and he had paid for it in pain and guilt – but this, this was different. This was vengeance.
When he opened his eyes again, the chanting had finally stopped. He saw that the sun had broken free of the mountains and now hung suspended in the eastern sky.
The abbot, who was standing by the bodies, motioned for Taro to come forward with the coins. Taro had six coins in his sleeve for his mother, so that she could pay her fare over the River of Three Crossings, the Sanzu, and thus enter the realm of death to be judged by Enma and be reborn, or wake in the light of the Pure Lands, or suffer forever in hell, as he decreed. It will be the Pure Lands, Taro thought. It must. Later today, when he left the mountain, he would lay a further six coins on the razed ground of the Hokke-do, in the hope that Hana might find them.
Approaching the bodies, he laid the coins on his mother’s lap, his hand for a moment brushing against hers, which was cold as stone and no longer felt human. Taro hoped her journey would be easy. He believed in his heart it would be, for a person’s crossing into death was determined by their karma, and who could have led a life of greater compassion than his mother? She had avoided the meat of four-legged creatures, dived the holy waters off Shirahama, and worshipped regularly at the shrine of the Princess of the Hidden Waters, protector of amas. On her way into death she would walk over the bridge inlaid with pearls and gold, while the sinners waded through rivers of snakes.
The abbot held a razor in his hand, and now he inclined his head to Taro, an unspoken question. Taro nodded. The day before, the abbot had asked Taro’s permission to grant his mother the status of a monk, in recognition of her sacrifice for the monastery’s sake, and so her funeral was also her ordainment, and it was necessary that the abbot shave her hair.
Taro marvelled at the abbot’s composure as he made a gesture to his fellow monks, then approached the bodies. All night the abbot had chanted the sutras, yet his eyes were clear and sharp, his movements flowing. Taro felt that were it not for Hiro’s hand under his arm, he would simply collapse to the ground, and never get up again.
The abbot touched the razor to Taro’s mother’s forehead, and bowed his head. ‘Throughout the round of rebirth in the three realms, the bonds of love cannot be severed. To cast off human obligations and enter into the unconditioned is the tru
e repayment of blessings.’ He repeated the verse three times, then held out the razor to one of the monks, who held a stick of incense beneath it so that the scented smoke wreathed around the blade. Then he made the respectful mudra of gassho, the razor still held in his hands, before carefully shaving her hair.
‘In shaving off hair,’ he said, ‘we pray that all living beings should be free from mental afflictions and in the end achieve nirvana.’
Holding Taro’s eyes with his own, the abbot then placed a hand on the body and began to speak in a low voice. He had warned Taro, earlier, that the ceremony was the same, whether the person about to be inducted into the Tendai ranks was living or dead, and so Taro knew that the abbot would speak to his mother as if she was alive.
All the same, he was not prepared for how much it hurt.
‘Oh laywoman who has recently returned to the source,’ said the abbot, ‘if you wish to take refuge in the precepts, you must first make repentance. Repeat after me: I entirely repent the evil actions I have committed in the past, arising from beginningless greed, anger, and delusion, and manifested through body, speech, and mind. . .’
Taro stared at his mother’s serene face, and for a moment felt that she must be on the point of answering, that she would simply sit up and say the words back to the abbot, but she did not. She only lay there, unmoving.
Taro felt a tearing sensation in his throat, and his eyes welled up with tears, and he knew that if he didn’t exert control on himself, he would break apart and be carried away by his own body, his mind fragmenting into the sound of wailing and the water running down his cheeks. He knew the monks meditated to find their place in the dharma; he meditated only so as not to break apart.
Absently he heard the monk’s words again, though these had been flowing all the time, low and unobtrusive. ‘You have attained great purification. . . Next you must reverently take refuge in the three treasures: Buddha, dharma, and sangha.’
Taking a dish of water from a monk who had come close, the abbot sprinkled it on the dead woman. He took a bell from his robe and rang it, once, then began to chant, the other monks joining in.
Hail refuge in Buddha,
Hail refuge in dharma,
Hail refuge in sangha.
I take refuge in Buddha, honoured as highest,
I take refuge in dharma, honoured as stainless,
I take refuge in sangha, honoured as harmonious. . .
You may, thought Taro, but I do not. I take refuge in nothing. I will not rest until these deaths are avenged. Some part of him was aware that he wanted to deal death to others only to distract him from his guilt, but he didn’t care. Once he had taken his vengeance, he would die himself. He was sure the Buddha ball could arrange that.
The chant finally over, the abbot again began talking, this time listing the ten precepts, which after the first – Do not kill – Taro ignored, for they did not and could not apply to him. He was empty inside, and the only thing that could fill him up would be the deaths of those who had hollowed him out.
Finally the initiation was over, and the abbot stepped away from the bodies. He breathed in deeply, then addressed the gathered mourners. ‘We are painfully aware that birth and death give way to each other, that cold and heat cannot exist together. They come like lightning flashing in a vast sky; they go like waves calming on a great sea. Today that is the case with these people you see before you, who have returned to the source. Understanding the impermanence of all things, they take nirvana as ease. I respectfully request the pure assembly to repeat after me the name of Amida Buddha. . .’
‘Namu Amida Butsu,’ said Taro, with everyone else, but the words were empty as unstruck bells.
The abbot held out the torch. ‘We humbly pray that their spirits might cross over into the Pure Land; that their karmic afflictions might fade away; that the lotus will open its highest grade of blossom, and that Buddha will grant a rebirth.’
And, because all rituals, no matter how elaborate, must always end abruptly with that which has been feared and awaited for so long, he touched his hand to Taro’s mother’s forehead, then turned and walked away, the other monks following.
Taro let out a long sigh. It was over.
Shrugging off Hiro’s consoling arm, ignoring Hayao’s sympathetic gaze, he turned and walked quickly from the others, wanting to be off this mountain and far away. With Hiro behind him – he could hear his friend’s breathing, his heavy footsteps, but Hiro knew him well enough not to speak or intrude – he wandered down the mountain slope away from the surviving temple buildings and the surviving people, touching his hands to the trees and staring sightlessly at the stones and moss.
At first he heard only shouting from a long distance away, back on the other side of the mountain, where the stone steps led down to the world beyond the monastery. It intruded into his consciousness only as much as the harsh cawing of the crows above him, in their precariously high nests.
But then the shouting grew louder, and finally there was a monk running towards them through the trees, babbling something incomprehensible. The man stopped before Taro and Hiro, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. Taro’s hand went to his sword, thinking that the samurai had come again.
‘Another attack?’ he said.
The monk looked up, his face burning red with his exertion, and shook his head. ‘No. . . not that,’ he said, through tearing rasps of breath.
‘Then what is it?’
‘The. . . girl. . . in the Hokke-do. . .’
‘Yes?’ said Taro. Gods, they’ve found her body, he thought. I don’t know if I have the strength to see it. . . ‘How. . . bad is it?’
The monk took a deep breath. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘She is not dead.’
CHAPTER 32
HER SKIN WAS smooth, her hair glossy and black. The fire seemed not to have touched her at all, as if she were precious to it. Beside her lay a skull – presumably that of a monk who had been caught in the Hokke-do when it burned. The remains of the hall were all around her. A blackened beam, two handspans wide, had been snapped by the falling roof, as if it were a twig, and lying under it were ashes that Taro hoped had come from the burning walls. Charred remnants of pillars stuck up from the ground like the stumps of burned trees, warped shapes of melted glass glinted in the light, and everything stank of charcoal.
Even as Taro looked down on her, monks were going about on their knees in the fine ash, picking up the larger fragments of the monk’s bones with chopsticks, making sure to place them in the urn in order from toe to top of the head, for otherwise the dead man would lie unquietly, upside down.
Taro touched Hana’s face – it was warm. He kneeled and put his ear to her mouth. To his shock he found that she was breathing, very slowly but steadily. Her chest rose and fell, and yet she did not wake. He pinched her arm – nothing. He could not understand it. Even the floor of the building was burned away, so that she was lying on a bed of soft ash. ‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘The heat alone. . .’
Her eyelashes, as delicate as threads of silk, were not even singed.
‘It is a miracle,’ said the abbot. He gestured to a pair of large charred beams, lying crosswise a few paces away. They were blackened by the heat, with great cracks running along their length from the intensity of the fire. ‘Those were on top of her. When the monks lifted them – and it took four men to move each one – she was lying underneath.’
Taro, still kneeling, spoke in her ear. ‘Hana.’
‘She won’t wake,’ said the abbot. ‘We’ve tried. She just lies there, sleeping.’
Hana’s arms were folded over each other, and she lay on her side, her whole body curled and wrapped around the golden scrolls. Taro could see that she had held them close to her, then huddled around them, protecting them from the fire with her own flesh. He was in awe at the extent of her sacrifice – she had been willing to die for these sutras. And yet she wasn’t dead. She was lying here, breathing gently, still clutc
hing the precious treasure of the monastery.
Taro saw where her hand was gripping one of the golden tubes and tried to uncurl her fingers. He grunted, surprised. They were unyielding as china, or stone.
‘We tried that, too,’ said the abbot. ‘It is impossible to remove them.’
Taro looked at her with wonder. A rosy blush was on her cheeks, the shadow of a smile on her lips. He half expected –
hoped
– that she would simply stand, brush off her kimono, and none of this would be real. The only hint that things were otherwise was that her eyes were closed.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked the abbot.
The abbot shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before. But there is one thing—’ He broke off, as if unsure of what he was about to say.
‘Yes?’ said Taro.
‘When the founder of the Tendai monastery copied those scrolls, it is said he received help. From Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. She gave him insights not contained in the original Sanskrit. That is why these particular sutras are so special – they are the only ones to contain the words of Kannon herself.’
Taro glanced behind him at the path that led to the summit. Though the wind had died down, the prayer wheels – dedicated to Kannon – continued to creak on their axles, reading out their endless prayers to the air. It was an eerie sound, he realized suddenly.
‘You think Kannon did this?’ he said.
The abbot shrugged. ‘It’s possible. When Kannon died, she could have melted into oneness with everything, because she had achieved enlightenment. But she turned her back on that bliss and returned to earth to help humanity. Those scrolls contained the very distillation of her wisdom, and your friend was ready to give her life to save them. I believe Kannon would understand that, and respect it. Perhaps she used her power to keep the flames from the girl.’
