Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  Miriam climbed out from under her blanket, blurry with sleep. She must have borrowed clothes from Pixii, as she was wearing a sleeping shirt that barely fit her. She stared a moment out the open door and then came to cuddle up to Nikki. It was very unlike her.

  “Are you okay?” Nikki asked her.

  She shook her head, face pressed to Nikki’s shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She took a deep breath and sighed. “Stupid dream. I think my subconscious hit me with every one of my insecurities in one majorly fucked-up nightmare. I was naked at a final exam in a class I forgot I had, and these sixty-foot ninja clown turtles were chasing me.”

  “Ninja clown turtles?”

  “I wake up and the road is gone and I’m at the house of a mountain god who likes to make pottery. Real life isn’t supposed to be weirder than your dreams.”

  Right.

  What exactly is Ame—Ame—” Nikki stumbled with the Japanese word. “Amenonuboko?”

  “The heavenly jeweled spear,” Atsumori and Miriam both said.

  Miriam added, “It’s the spear that Kenichi said was stolen. Why Iwanaga was punished. If she’s looking for it, it means that it’s real . . .”

  “Of course it’s real,” the boy god said.

  “Yes, I know,” Miriam whined. “I just didn’t get that until now. Somehow it just stayed mythical in my head up to this moment.”

  “I take it that we’re talking a spear with jewels on it?” Nikki said. “Is it a shintai like your katana?”

  Atsumori shook his head. “My katana is nothing but a hollow reed to the Amenonuboko.” He frowned a moment, and then started slowly to explain better. “In the beginning of all things, the universe was a sea of chaos, without shape, sunk in silence. Then there was sound, and with the sound, there was movement, and the particles that made up the universe separated.”

  Atsumori lifted one hand above his head. “The pure, light particles created the heavens.” He held out his other hand at his waist. “The rest of the particles gathered into the dense and dark mass of the Earth. That is the difference between humans and kami. Why most humans cannot see the kami and your machines cannot register our existence. Why even the yokai see us as separate and above them. We are not wholly of the Earth.”

  “And this relates to the Amenonuboko how?” Nikki was still lost.

  “My katana was made by humans and blessed by Inari, which is why I had you seek him out.”

  “Wait. You met Inari?” Miriam asked.

  “I—I’m not sure what we met.”

  “We met Inari,” Atsumori stated firmly. “If you took a reed and dipped it into gold, while it shines brightly in the sun, it is still just a reed.”

  It took her a moment to track the conversation back to what the reed represented. “Your shintai is made from common elements.” She followed that much. “And the spear is . . . ?”

  Atsumori thought a moment before answering. “When the first gods decided that Earth should be perfected, they called forth into existence Izanagi and Izanami. They gave the two the heavenly jeweled spear and commanded that they make the first land.

  “Izanagi and Izanami took the spear to the bridge that floats between the heavens and Earth. Standing on the bridge, they stabbed the spear into the endless sea and churned the dark water. When they lifted up the spear, water dripped from its blade and became Onogoro Shima, which means the self-forming island. Izanagi and Izanami then crossed the bridge and made their home on the island.”

  Nikki saw the point that Atsumori was trying to make. “The spear was created in heaven by the first gods. It’s not of the Earth.”

  Atsumori nodded.

  She considered the implications of something that was more like Atsumori than his katana. “Does that mean that most humans can’t see the spear? That cameras won’t register it?”

  “I believe so,” Atsumori said.

  “What about yokai? Can they see it?”

  “I don’t know,” Atsumori admitted. “Before I was called into my shintai—I existed, and yet I did not. As Inari told you, kami are like water. We exist, we have substance, but we are not with form until we are given shape by human faith. I have faint memories of that time before the blessing, but it is like sunlight on water, shifting and bright and yet unsubstantial. I was what was desired—a noble warrior spirit—but I was without a name or sense of self until I found myself in the shintai. I am not Atsumori, and yet, I am.

  “It means that what I know is limited and perhaps flawed. Yes, I am a kami. I have existed for hundreds of years. But in the grand flow of the universe, I am like a child, with a child’s knowledge of the greater gods.”

  Miriam held up a finger and tapped it as if trying to pin down an elusive thought. “I—I don’t think yokai can see the spear.”

  “Why not?” Nikki said.

  “The most famous mythical weapon is Kusanagi,” Miriam said. “It’s like Excalibur. It’s the magical weapon of Japan. The name gets used in everything.”

  Nikki shook her head. “I don’t get the connection.”

  “According to legend, the god Susanoo found the sword in the tail of an eight-headed serpent. He gave it to his sister Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, as a gift, and she gave it to her grandson, the first emperor, to be part of the imperial regalia.”

  “That’s the same guy who Iwanaga said stole the spear, Ninigi.”

  “Yes. There’s dozens of stories about Kusanagi. According to legends it’s been copied, stolen, recovered, lost at sea, recovered again, yada yada yada. It’s stored at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya. Since the sixth century, it’s been part of the imperial enthronement ceremony. It was used as recently as 1989, when Emperor Akihito ascended the throne.”

  “So it’s real?”

  “Odds are good for it being real.”

  Nikki felt as if someone were rewriting reality around her. The world had become a place with magical weapons. “Really?”

  “No one actually saw it in 1989,” Miriam admitted. “It was shrouded during the ceremony.”

  “Kusanagi is not wholly of the Earth,” Atsumori said. “Only the heavenly gifted would be able to see its true nature. It would appear to normal people as something quite different.”

  “They would see a normal sword?” Miriam said.

  Atsumori nodded and said firmly, “Yes. It is not wholly of the heavens.”

  “And the yokai would see a regular sword?”

  He gave an uncertain “Yes.” Obviously, he didn’t like being unsure. He shifted uneasily and added, “At least, I believe so.”

  Miriam waved aside his doubt. “That’s why there’re so many legends about Kusanagi. Everyone can see something, even if it seems quite ordinary.”

  Nikki and Atsumori looked at Miriam, unsure of the point she was making.

  “The spear is only mentioned in the creation section of the Kojiki.” Miriam saved her from having to ask. “The Kojiki is a collection of songs and poems that tells the history of Japan. It was recorded in the eighth century, but it represented over a thousand years of the imperial rule. Or at least, it’s believed to cover that time period. There’s no way of telling myth from historical fact, and it’s possible that the first fourteen emperors were legendary. The fifteenth, Ojin, is reported to have been born three years after his father died.”

  “I’m sure that’s a mistranslation,” Atsumori murmured. “He’s been deified as Hachiman Daimyojin. We could ask him. One of his major shrines is in Yawata in Kyoto Prefecture. It’s not that far.”

  “No, we’re good,” Nikki said quickly. She had more than enough gods running through her life.

  “That’s why I was so surprised that the spear is real and it’s in Japan. If all the yokai could see it, then eventually stories from them would have drifted into the main consciousness.”

  Atsumori nodded slowly. “So only the heavenly gifted can gaze upon it.”

  “That counts me out,” Nikki said.

 
“You would be able to see it. Your gifts are divine. You were born with a connection to the heavens.”

  Nikki wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. It made her feel weirdly like Joan of Arc. Things did not end well for Joan. “But I can only see you when you will me to see you.”

  “That is a failing within me, not of you,” Atsumori said. “I am kunitsu-kami, a god of the Earthly realm. It takes effort for me to manifest in a form that is visible to the divine gifted. Those who are not gifted could not see me no matter what.”

  Considering how much time Atsumori was spending visible, the farmhouse must be considered holy ground.

  “So,” Miriam said. “Iwanaga Hime is looking for an invisible needle in a very large haystack. How does she hope to find it?”

  “I don’t know, but she will,” Nikki said. “This is one of my stories, remember. She’ll find it and use it—or Sato will use it.”

  She got up to root through the pile of things from the car. “Divine gifted can see the spear. I’m betting that sometime in the past, one of them found it. He or she didn’t know what it was—because otherwise it would show up in stories—but they recognized that it was dangerously powerful. And they did what Japanese always do. They marked it as holy and prayed to it.” Nikki found the tour book from Iwanaga Hime’s room. The book was dog-eared from obvious close study. “That’s why this tour book is important. She knows that if the spear surfaced, someone would have built a shrine around it.”

  “Still a needle in a haystack,” Miriam said. “Kyoto alone has a thousand temples. I think we’re safe from world destruction.”

  “Still my story,” Nikki stressed, shaking the book at Miriam. “People are going to die in masses.”

  Nikki flipped through the pages. The text was written in kanji. She recognized a handful of photographs, but otherwise the books were unreadable. Even if she had Atsumori translate for her, would she even know what she was looking for? As Miriam had pointed out, the spear had vanished out of myths. It wouldn’t be written up in a tour book as one of the famous attractions of some obscure little temple.

  Still, for some reason, Iwanaga hoped to find the spear within the pages. Nikki noticed that the book’s spine been broken from being laid facedown while open. She felt a weird déjà vu; she’d written a scene with Kenichi, the goddess, and the book. In the scene, the goddess scanned a page, shook her head, and put aside the book, facedown, without reading further. In a glance, the goddess had known the information she wanted wasn’t on the page she’d just read.

  Nikki flipped the book open to the page indicated by the broken spine. She couldn’t read the town’s name in kanji, but she recognized the pictures. She’d researched the city after writing the scene. The goddess had been reading about Kamakura, which was south of Tokyo. It had served as the country’s capital for over a century during the Middle Ages. By modern Japan’s standard, it was a small town with only a handful of major attractions. The Zeniari Benten Shrine, with its cave for washing coins for good luck. The great bronze Buddha, nearly forty feet high. The giant camphor statue of Kannon that had been cast into the sea to find its own place of worship. It had drifted three hundred miles, been hauled out, found to be unlucky and thrown back in, and washed ashore in Kamakura.

  A minor snakelike kami and two Buddhist gods. No wonder the goddess had been shaking her head; she could tell at a glance that the spear wasn’t in Kamakura.

  Nikki frowned and flipped through the rest of the book. In all the towns, only some of the various shrines were highlighted. “She knows who stole the spear. She knows, and she’s guessing that it will be at a temple dedicated to that god.”

  Miriam laughed bitterly. “Oh, that narrows it down. You know there’s eight million gods?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And if it’s Inari, there’s like—what—ten thousand shrines in Japan.”

  “I know.”

  “I think we can safely assume that she’s going to be at this for a long time and focus on saving Mr. Scary Cat Dude.”

  Leo, the tourist information, and the goddess all coalesced into one memory. “Wait! I think I know who stole the spear. I had a flyer on the Gion Festival, and I had written a note on it that Leo saw. Iwanaga is pissed off about the festival, but I never understood why. I think the reason she’s mad about it is that it’s dedicated to the god that framed her. All these humans gathering together for hundreds of years in a blowout celebration for the being who caused her to be trapped, alone.”

  “The Gion Festival is dedicated to Susanoo,” Atsumori said.

  Susanoo was the brother of the sun goddess, one of the three major gods in the Japanese mythos. “Why would Susanoo take it?”

  “Why does Susanoo do anything?” Miriam said. “He’s the original loose cannon. He got in a fight with Amaterasu and decided to fill up her rice paddies and palace with shit and vomit. Then he flayed a horse and threw it through the roof, breaking her loom and literally scaring one of Amaterasu’s attendants to death.”

  “It’s a reflection of his nature,” Atsumori said. “He is the tumultuous summer storm. Wild and fierce and unpredictable.”

  Not a god you want to meet face-to-face, then.

  31

  Gion Matsuri

  “Oh, yeah,” Pixii said when they woke her up and pointed out that the road had vanished. “It does that. That’s why I told you to stop at the shrine if you couldn’t find it. Hungry? I’m starving.”

  “We need to go to Kyoto,” Nikki said.

  “Cool! Road trip!” Pixii stripped off her clothes. Under the sleeping shirt, she was all wiry muscle. On her left shoulder blade was a tattoo of a caduceus staff, the snakes both vipers ready to strike. She slid aside one of the closet doors to reveal her colorful cosplay costumes.

  “The Gion Matsuri is going on! So, problem of clothing—solved. Cherry blossoms!” She pulled out a pink yukata with white blossoms and tossed it to Miriam.

  “Pink?” Miriam checked it for length. Pixii was shorter then either of them, but the hem came to Miriam’s ankles.

  “It goes with your hair. Butterflies for Nikki.”

  A rose red yakuta got tossed to her. Swallowtail butterflies rose in swarm. Nikki wondered what odd gifts Pixii had that she had reserved Atsumori’s family crest for her.

  “And yuri for me!” Hers was done in mountain green and white lilies. “This is going to be great! Festivals have the most awesome food! Crepes. Grilled corn. Yakisoba. Have you tried the candied fruit? They dip all sorts of things into the same stuff you use on candy apples. The strawberries are iffy—they end up as so much mush after the hot sugar hits them. Japanese grapes are golf-ball-sized and oh so good candied. I get sick of my own cooking. At least I’ve gotten better. Oh God, I don’t know what I used to do that made the rice like that, but it was horrible.”

  “I do not want you to go.” Yamauchi suddenly stood just outside the open sliding doors. “It will be dangerous.”

  Pixii paused in the middle of pulling on her yukata. Chin up. Boy flat in the chest and a web of scars on her strong shoulders and arms. For one brief moment, she looked very much a combat veteran. “I am not a child.”

  “You could be twice your age and still be a child to me,” Yamauchi apparently didn’t know how to deal with women. He couldn’t have picked a worse thing to say.

  Pixii finished pulling on the yukata. “I’m going.”

  “This is not mortals who are feuding. This is kami. The greatest of the kami. The sun goddess, Amaterasu, and her brother, Susanoo, god of the storms. Even a powerful god like Inari will not interfere with this directly.”

  “All the more reason for me to go,” Pixii said. “I am not going to let people die when I can stop it.”

  Yamauchi gave her a sad look. “You may not be able to stop it.”

  Pixii pointed calmly at Yamauchi. “You should know by now that I will not be stopped.”

  The mountain god actually winced, but he sighed and nodded. “Yes, I
know. I do not want to see you harmed.”

  “We will be careful. And, even better, we’ll be sneaky!”

  “Will Simon be okay?” Nikki caught herself before adding “alone,” because in theory Yamauchi would be there.

  “He will be fine,” both Yamauchi and Pixii assured her.

  Dusk was already starting to fall on Kyoto when they arrived. They parked the car at the outskirts of the city and took the subway in. Nikki felt like everyone at the station was staring at them. At every stop, six or seven teenage girls in yukata filtered onto the train with them. The girls traveled in bouquets of two or three, keeping close to each other and giggling. Nikki realized then that people were glancing at them, but also at the other girls, because they were all pretty.

  They carried little fabric purses called kinchaku. Pixii had supplied Miriam with one but had given Nikki a slightly larger bag to hold emergency pens and a notebook along with her wallet. Because Nikki had the bigger bag, she ended up with the car keys and a carefully wrapped jade comma-shaped bead that Yamauchi had given them. It was an empty shintai that he had carefully crafted “when he was young.” From what Astumori had told her earlier, it was more heavenly than what a human could craft and thus superior to any random luck statue that they could pick up.

  The other girls had festival uchiwa fans tucked into the back of their wide obi belts. Pixii had tucked a pair of black batons into her obi. Nikki had the katana slung on her shoulder. Miriam had considered bringing Leo’s gun with them, but in the end they had left it locked in the car’s glove box.

  The trip from Nara had been taken up with talk of battle strategies in case they came face-to face-with yakuza, tanuki, Sato, Shiva, or Iwanaga Hime. They were at a disadvantage because Nikki could recognize only Sato; the rest were all dangerous strangers. Luckily, they should be equally unknown to their enemies.

  “It’s really an ultimate game of blindman’s bluff,” Pixii said. “This is our stop.”