The Year of the Dragon Omnibus

by James Calbraith

  “Thou didst not stop any of them.”

  Bran pointed to a group of travellers in front of him.

  “I know who they are, respectable tono. Your face I do not recognise.”

  “By whose authority is this interrogation?”

  “Lord of the castle and domain, Hosokawa-dono.”

  Bran pretended to ponder his situation for a moment.

  “Very well then, ask away,” he said, waving his hand in annoyance.

  The official coughed nervously.

  “I will need your name and your terauke.”

  “Aoki, Karasu,” said Bran, presenting a document showing his allegiance to a Butsu temple — a hastily falsified version of the paper belonging to the real samurai Aoki.

  “You’re affiliated to Sōfukuji?” The official raised his eyebrows. “You do not sound like you’re from Kiyō.”

  “I was raised in Mikawa,” explained Bran, this time really growing impatient.

  “What is the purpose of your journey?”

  “A pilgrimage.”

  “Ah, you must be on your way to Aoi and Kirishima! Yes, the Kuma Shrines are certainly worth the visit.”

  “Do not tire me with thy boorish talk, fellow. Dost thou have any more queries?”

  “I’m deeply sorry.” The official bowed even deeper, unsure of what to make of the stranger and his odd, but noble, manner. “Can you tell me who your two companions are?”

  Bran raised his eyebrows.

  “What possible interest couldst thou have in a woman and a servant? They are journeying with me. That ought to be knowledge enough.”

  “Nonetheless, my orders are — ”

  “The pox and gout on thee and thine orders! My father was Commander of the Guards at Yoshida Castle! I shall not be questioned by a common townsfolk scribbler. Now let me through or thy head shall roll!”

  Bran put his hand on the hilt of his sword and flared his nostrils, making a fierce frightening face. Despite his age, he was a good head taller than the man before him and the wide sleeves of his kimono made his arms seem much bulkier than they actually were. The soldiers murmured and pulled back, clutching their spears as if they were shields, not weapons. The official’s forehead became covered with sweat. Bran grunted and stepped forwards. This was too much for the poor man to handle. He dropped to the ground in prostration, whimpering.

  Bran stepped over his quivering body and the girls followed, their heads lowered politely, not looking at the soldiers or the official on the ground. They walked for a while in proud silence. The road turned and entered a grove of old bamboos. Bran made sure they were well out of sight of the checkpoint and then stopped, leaned against a bamboo and breathed deeply.

  “That was brilliant!” said a beaming Satō, dropping her bag by the same tree to take a brief respite. “Or was that the old samurai guy talking again?” she questioned, eyeing Bran suspiciously.

  “No, I told you I have him under control!” he snapped. Satō reeled back. “I’m sorry,” he added hastily. He was strangely exhausted. “It was an act. But I did take my cue from how Shigemasa behaved. Truly, I thought no man would be fooled by it. I’m not... ‘Tis not my manner,” he finished, catching his breath.

  “You’ll find that most men of power here are either insanely arrogant or cowards,” Satō remarked, “and it’s almost always better to be the former, or at least pretend to be. Unless you meet somebody who’s really uptight, then you have to duel to see who’s the more suicidal.”

  “I shall remember that.”

  Bran smiled, but inside he was still shaken. Duel. Death. Did these people settle everything with blood?

  He had lied to Satō. He wasn’t certain if the performance at the road block was just an act. Commander of the Guards of Yoshida Castle… he remembered. How did I come up with that? The general was changing him, slowly, and he wasn’t sure if he liked the direction of the change.

  Past the bamboo grove, the highway led them straight south across the vast mud plain separating the mountains from the sea. It then climbed onto a causeway, crossing over many smaller and bigger streams, canals and rivulets flowing down from the mountains.

  Bran’s overwhelming impression of the Yamato countryside was silence, punctuated only by the cries of peddlers, bird songs, the occasional rowdy chants of the women working in the fields or a distant temple bell. The quietude of the villages unnerved him until he realised the reason for it — there was no livestock in this land. No goats or sheep bleated in the green fields, no cows lowed in the pasture, no chickens clucked, no geese honked. There were a few scraggy dogs lazily lying around the households, but even these were keeping themselves quiet, not minding the passers-by in the least. The only other pets were cats, as idle and indifferent to their surroundings as the dogs.

  There were no pastures anywhere, as if the locals believed it to be a waste of space. Every free acre of arable land had been turned into fields. Along the way he had spotted barley, buckwheat and broad-leaved lotus plant but little rice — the tide plain soil must have been too poor to sustain it, he guessed. Where there was not even enough dirt for those crops, the peasants grew rush which, as Satō explained, they then used for covering rice straw mats, or reed for weaving baskets and hats. Higher up the hills, in the distance, he could see flowering orchards of persimmon and tangerine trees. No dry spot was left unused by the industrious farmers.

  What the countryside lacked in sounds, it more than made up for in aromas and sights. It was crop planting season, so the fields were sprayed with life-giving manure, the heavy stench of which permeated the air. The villages smelled of vegetables pickling in clay jugs, fish drying on poles and home-made liquor fermenting in barrels. The straw mat makers’ workshops reeked of wet rushes. Sometimes a fresh breeze brought the brackish scent of the marsh that separated farmland from the ocean.

  The villages along the main road were prosperous communities, with well-maintained shrines and large airy houses and people who liked to laugh and sing. The terrible memory of the deprived hamlets in the hills was slowly fading from Bran’s mind.

  As the sun rose towards noon and the day grew hotter, the peasants they were passing began to wear fewer and fewer clothes. By midday, both men and women were stripped only to their loincloths, and Bran was finding it increasingly difficult to look any way other than the road ahead.

  I have to get used to it, he thought. Everyone else is. I’m standing out too much.

  By afternoon they decided to make a brief stop on a green glade through which a calm blue brook flowed underneath the weeping willows. There were a few half-naked women there from a nearby village, washing their linen, and Satō and Nagomi decided they wished to take a bath farther upstream. The day was a warm one and Bran agreed without thinking, conscious of the acrid shameful smell of his own sweat. The Yamato people seemed to perspire a lot less than he did, as if they had most of their sweat glands removed at birth.

  As soon as they had reached the bathing place, beside a tiny shrine overgrown with moss and ivy, Bran realized his mistake. Satō threw off her servant clothes with an utter lack of modesty. He turned his eyes away quickly, but not quickly enough. Half-consciously he hesitated long enough to catch, for the first time, a glimpse of the girl’s entire white-fleshed body. She was built like a boy — which made it all that easier for her to disguise herself as one — narrow-hipped and flat-chested by Western standards, but she was definitely a woman, already well on her way out of adolescence. He felt his face flushing red. Not having any sisters, he had grown up unaccustomed to female nudity. Don’t stare, he reminded himself, it’s rude to stare.

  The younger girl joined her friend and they both plunged into the water, oblivious of his embarrassment.

  “Come on in, Bran-sama,” said Nagomi invitingly, “the water is lovely.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He took off one sandal and a white sock, and put his toes into the stream then pretended to shiver.

  “Too cold
for me,” he said, smiling weakly, “I’ll bathe at the inn.”

  To take his mind — and eyes — off the bathing girls, he proceeded to repack his belongings he carried in the satchel. By the time they had finished splashing about he had cleaned the lenses on his spyglass and goggles, sharpened the pencil and brushed dust off the dragon figurine.

  Satō climbed out of the stream and stood just a few feet away, drying herself with a white fleece towel. She let her hair down, took out a short-sleeved, light-blue kosode robe from her bundle and started putting it on.

  “A womanly dress?” Bran enquired, when he dared to look at the girl again for longer than a glance. The clothes seemed to fit her worse than the samurai outfit.

  “No more servant rags,” she replied, chucking the tattered tunic to the bottom of the bundle. “Somebody could still recognise my Rangaku uniform and crest, besides, I want it neat and clean for when I may need it.”

  “Sacchan, you carry more clothes than a courtesan,” Nagomi said laughing.

  “Wilt thou wish for thy sword back?” Bran asked.

  “Not looking like this.” She shook her head. “I told you, girls can’t be warriors; besides, you look good with two blades. Like a proper samurai.”

  “Thou thinkest so?”

  He looked at himself. It still felt awkward to wear these strange clothes, to feel the breeze blow around his ankles in the split skirt and plod along the dirt road in simple straw sandals. His Prydain sword in its metal scabbard was a bit too heavy to hang loosely in the sash, and the constant fixing of it in place soon became Bran’s reflex.

  “I do, and it’s do you think so,” she corrected him.

  She kept doing so whenever she remembered, but Bran was slow to learn the modern way. The general’s influence was too strong.

  “Why two swords, though?” he asked. “This is a strange custom.”

  “The katana is for battle in the open field,” she said, “the wakizashi is for close quarters, disembowelment and beheading your enemy.”

  “Disembowelment…?”

  He stared at her, his mouth wide open. Satō spoke those cruel words without any hesitation and finished dressing up.

  Misreading his surprise, she proceeded to explain.

  “Suicide. You stab the blade into your stomach and cut like this,” she said, gesturing, “then your second cuts your head off.”

  “I… I see,” he answered, still dumbstruck.

  “Not many people do it this way anymore,” Satō added, shrugging, “most prefer to take the dagger. These days wearing two swords is mostly just a mark of nobility.”

  “We should be going,” said Nagomi, picking up her bundle. Satō’s gruesome tale seemed not to make any impression on her. “We still have a long way to go.”

  “I only have one room left, honoured guests,” the innkeeper said, looking at them as if expecting to lose his head at any moment.

  “It’s all right, we’ll manage,” said Nagomi before Satō burst into another unbecoming rant.

  It was the third inn they had tried that day, and the first to have any rooms free. There was a millet festival in town, and one of the bridges leading south was damaged in a flash flood, resulting in unexpected crowds filling the city’s guesthouses.

  “It’s our biggest.” The innkeeper tried to soften the bad news. “We keep it for our most esteemed guests, and we serve sea trout today!” he cried after the travellers as they headed for their room.

  The accommodation was indeed quite spacious, fit for a large family. The girls settled themselves along the southern wall, leaving the rest of the floor for Bran.

  “We knew it would be difficult to travel during the festival season. Besides, it would have been suspicious for us to take separate rooms anyway,” said Nagomi.

  “I forgot a woman should not be seen travelling on her own.” Satō said with a sigh, unravelling her futon.

  This was the first night they were to spend together, all in the same room — until now Satō always had to sleep with the servants — and Bran suddenly became aware of his situation when the wizardess started taking off her clothes before going to sleep. She cast off her kosode robe just as unashamedly as she had by the stream. Bran turned his eyes away, but again, not fast enough.

  Part of him — the one that accepted all the new information given by the old general — knew this was just how things were in Yamato. It’s only natural, he tried to convince himself, but he was still a Western boy. The wizards of Gwynedd may have thought themselves modern and rational, but their morality had been inherited from that of Rome and the Sun Priests, even if their religion was no longer universally followed. The edicts of the ancient Imperators, separating the sexes in bath houses and gymnasiums still held more sway over his mind than he would have wished. A conflicting mixture of shame and fascination made him want to flee the room — and at the same time, stay close to the wizardess. He struggled to remain calm and unfazed.

  “The girl is shapely, I admit,” a voice spoke in his head, “but inexperienced in womanly arts — you will have no use of her, I assure you. Older women are — ”

  “If I want matrimonial advice from a ghost, I will make sure to ask,” Bran murmured wryly.

  The general harrumphed indignantly.

  “Are you cold, Bran-sama?” he heard Satō enquire, as if from a distance.

  He pretended to busy himself with preparing his own bedding.

  “No, why?”

  “You’re going to sleep in your travelling clothes?”

  “I…” he hesitated, “I got used to it on the journey.” He made up an explanation on the spot. “On a warship you never know when there will be a call to battle.”

  His eyes now wandered aimlessly around the room, but, despite himself, his gaze was pulled towards the corner where the girl was lying. He sighed, partly with relief, partly with disappointment — she was already wearing a thin, blue linen jacket and shorts, the sleeping clothes of Yamato boys.

  “Suit yourself.” She shrugged and covered herself with a blanket. The night was chilly. “I think we’re pretty safe for tonight, though.”

  Why am I lying? he thought. Why can’t I just admit this is not how things are in my country? They know I’m foreign, they will understand.

  He said nothing, just turned his face towards the wall and closed his eyes.

  That night he dreamt again of the many women from Shigemasa’s past. Their arms were welcoming, their bodies eager — and they all had Satō’s face.

  “Bevries!”

  With a loud crackle, the surface of a muddy pool below the bridge was covered with thick bluish ice spreading for about a dozen yards each way.

  “Bravo!”

  Bran clapped with enthusiasm. Satō turned to him with surprise.

  “That is how Westerners express approval,” the boy explained. “That’s quite a lot of power, but how about precision?”

  She accepted the challenge, stretched out her hand, palm up, and focused on it until sweat started trickling down her brow. She weaved a complicated pattern with her other hand. A column of packed snow started to form on the outstretched palm. Bran leaned down to see closer and the skin on his face started wrinkling up as the spell sucked moisture out of the nearby air. He pulled back to a safer distance and watched with admiration as the column of snow turned into a tiny sculpture of a cherry blossom.

  “That… is quite amazing.” Bran was astonished. “Rarely have I seen such accuracy in Llambed.”

  “Surely, the scholars in the West…” Satō protested, feeling her cheeks burn. There I go, showing off again.

  “Wizardry is a crude and rough school,” Bran said, “used for blowing up mineshafts or enslaving elementals. The elementalists are not expected to be meticulous and exact in their work.”

  “It’s beautiful!” exclaimed Nagomi. “I never knew you could do such things.”

  “It’s not really what I was trained for,” said the wizardess, “I’m supposed to use magic f
or fighting.”

  “Thou would easily pass the third year exams at the Academy,” Bran said.

  “Why not the fourth?” asked Satō, raising her head up. Bran had already explained to her the basics of the tutoring system at Llambed.

  “Thou would fail Prydain,” the boy said, smiling, and the wizardess grinned back.

  “I keep telling you, it’s you, not thou,” she corrected him.

  She was trying to sound light-hearted, but the show of magic had dampened her mood. It reminded her again of how she had failed to save her father, despite all her training and skill.

  She now realised he had always expected some danger to befall his family, but he couldn’t foresee the danger having been brought by his own daughter. By saving the Westerner she had doomed her house. It was because of Bran, because she had found him and saved him, that Shūhan had been abducted.

  She found it easy to blame herself for the Crimson Robe’s attack, but she couldn’t condemn the boy. After all, he wasn’t responsible for anything that had happened to him since he had been brought to Yamato by the beam of light… but that wasn’t all.

  She told herself it was only curiosity. There was something intriguing about the boy, a certain mystery in his behaviour towards her. She had no idea how the matters of heart and flesh were resolved in the West. She only knew men from Dejima often took Kiyō girls for lovers — “Dejima wives”, they were called — so there had to be some mutual understanding between the two peoples, something universal, overriding all the cultural differences. Satō was aware of the book Bran had stolen from the library, so at least in some respects he was the same as every other boy she knew, but why was he so awkward about it, secretive, as if it was shameful to read it?

  He seemed equally awkward about nudity. Even before discovering she was a girl, he had never undressed in their presence and always took a bath separately even if it meant waiting a long time before everyone else had finished. She wasn’t sure how to react. Should she start covering herself in his presence? Plenty of boys saw her nude in the bathhouses and neither she, nor they, ever cared about it one way or the other.