“Bran, stop!”
He stared at her, only now noticing her under the eaves.
“Why are you doing this? We were supposed to fight together …”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to do my duty. I am a Dracalish.”
“So that’s what it was all about? To conquer us with Cursed Weed?”
He raised the Lance again.
“Answer me!”
Something inside her snapped. Her limbs moved of their own accord. She reached Bran in a few long leaps and plunged her sword straight through his chest.
The dark mist covered her eyes.
Yui released Satō from the shackles with a snap of his fingers, and then introduced himself formally, at last, as Yui Shōsetsu, Father Saturn of the White Robe, chief strategist of the Eight-headed Serpent.
She looked around, barely hearing his words. There were scorch marks and melted sand on the lava streams all around her, leading towards the stone shed and inside. Her hands were burned and blistered, but the wounds were healing fast. The world had a permanent tint of a faint crimson hue, all except the robes the Fanged wore — these retained their true colour.
“I’m glad,” said Yui. “You have made the right choice. You see it now, don’t you?”
“Yes, Father Saturn,” she replied with deep reverence.
“How do you feel?” asked Yui, touching her shoulder. His voice was soothing and warm.
“I’m … fine, Father Saturn.”
“What do you wish to do now?”
“I … I want to protect Yamato.”
“Good. We must leave now.” He led her towards the stone shed. “There’s much work waiting for you, Initiate.”
She wasn’t sure what he was referring to. She strained her memory. Odd visions plagued her mind. A Western boy with jade-green eyes. A red-haired priestess.
She blinked, and the dream was gone.
The Mountain loomed on the horizon for days, the perfect triangle peering over the lower ridges like a mother hen over the chickens.
As they approached the peak, Bran could fully ascertain its size. The base of the volcano, a vast circular plain of ancient lava surrounded by a wall of shattered crags, was a country almost of itself, twenty or more miles across — as wide as Bran’s entire home province of Cantre’r Gwaelod. The cone rose ten thousand feet into the sky, its summit capped with a thick white cloud, hovering in place, heedless of the winds tearing at it from all sides. Smaller peaks dotted the landscape around it, each as tall as the tallest volcanoes of Chinzei, but mere molehills in comparison with the central pinnacle.
Bran despaired. It would take a full day to just circumnavigate the caldera. How were they supposed to find anything here? The Fanged could have had an entire town hidden among the dense forests covering its ridged, concave slopes. In True Sight, the Mountain, like all the magical nexii, was a messy jumble of coloured lines, lights and flares, impossible to penetrate. His head ached from the strain.
“Do you sense anything?” he asked Nagomi.
She shook her head. “It’s too much …” She gazed at the mountain, too overwhelmed with awe to focus. Bran guessed at the immense sanctity of Mount Fuji. If Gods lived on the lofty peaks of Kirishima, what powerful beings inhabited this monster of a mountain?
And if great spirits really live here, would they even allow the presence of the Fanged?
“We will have to land somewhere,” he said. “Ask around, get supplies. I don’t suppose you know any suitable site around here?”
“There should be a lake — and a large shrine at the lake. It’s one of Taikun’s personal shrines, like Suwa.”
There were several lakes scattered around the foot of the mountain, long and thin, filling the valleys and rifts among the crags like rockpools left after the tide. The largest of the lakes stretched south-eastwards, beyond the caldera, towards the sea. At the bottom of a steep valley, it wove its way around its own steaming, belching fire mountain — a miniature one, compared to the great Fuji. Even at the dragon’s altitude, the air over the volcano was filled with the stench of rotten eggs and brimstone. It reminded Bran of flying over the Brigstow factories.
A string of fishing villages dotted the jagged, drooping shoreline, but he could see no town large enough to support a major shrine. Just as he was about to bank away to search further, Nagomi tugged on his sleeve.
“Over there.”
A bright vermillion dot glinted against the dark trees in the sinking sun. A massive torii gate rose straight from the waters of the lake. The shrine itself was concealed beyond a dense line of bamboo and cedars, descending to the narrow beach. It marked the place where the shoreline receded at one end of the lake into a narrow opening. Beyond it, hidden from Bran’s view until now, was a calm crescent of a bay and a small harbour town beyond it. The shrine bordered it to the north, and to the south rose a uniform line of tall cedar trees, planted in equal intervals, marking an official highway.
They circled the town, remaining in full view of the people below. They were so close to Edo, Bran reckoned the locals must have grown used to the sight of a dragon by now. He did not expect them to tell the difference between a Black Wing and any other dorako.
The majority of the townsfolk hid under the roofs of their houses as he closed in. Others — younglings, mostly — ran out to the harbour, intrigued. He swooped over the highway checkpoint: a row of long timber buildings and towers overlooking the lake on the cedar tree-lined southern shore. A troop of samurai emerged from it, brandishing swords and spears in a display of force and anger, but the archers on the towers watched in idle curiosity as the dragon flew past. Bran took a mental note of their behaviour.
“I will land on that cape over there,” he pointed to a tongue of risen land jutting into the lake. Steam rose from several cracks on its slopes. “Is that near enough?”
“It’s fine.”
“Looks like there may be a hot spring near the top. We can take a bath before coming into town.”
The streets of the town fell quiet when Bran entered, followed a few steps behind by Nagomi.
The first to notice them was a small child playing in a mud puddle. She opened her mouth and stared, eyes wide open, until her mother ran up and carried her off into the nearest open building. The door shut behind her, as did those of all the other houses along the street.
Bran passed one hastily shut guesthouse after another. A few months ago, he would have entered any of these establishments and asked for a pitcher of saké, and none of these people would have batted an eyelid. Now, the landlords and landladies peered through the closed shutters in fright. He heard a baby wailing in one of the inns, sensing the terror of its parents. In the next one, he glimpsed a few more affluent guests stumbling up the stairs to the perceived safety of their suites. It seemed to Bran that, not just his face, but the whole world changed around him when General Shigemasa abandoned his body.
The closer they got to Edo, the mood in the villages grew tenser, and the townsfolk more agitated and confused with the recent events. The news of the treaty with the barbarians spread slowly: in many places along the route from Edo to Heian, the sight of a Black Wing flying south preceded the announcement. Bran couldn’t even imagine what reaction this must have elicited from the unsuspecting villagers. The proclamation itself met often with disbelief and anger, but in these parts of Yamato, far from the rebel south and Mikado’s meddling courtiers, the Taikun’s seal equalled the word of a god. There were no questioning orders from Edo.
“Aren’t you afraid somebody will inform the Black Wings of your arrival?” asked Nagomi when they paused in front of an abandoned fruit stand. Bran picked up a large peach and left a handful of copper coins in its place.
“We should find out all we need to know before they get here,” he answered, peach juice dribbling down his chin. It would take even the fastest courier a couple of days to reach the Grey Hoods’ headquarters at Shimoda with news — and Bran hoped to be well on
his way by then.
One old woman remained in the open, sitting still on a bench under the eaves of a small teahouse. She observed Nagomi and Bran with a faint, wrinkled smile. He glanced at her with True Sight, remembering the ancient kappa he’d met in the Hitoyoshi bathhouse, but as far as he could tell, it was really just an old woman. As they passed her, she reached into her drab grey yukata and presented them with a straw box of pink round rice cakes. She smiled a toothless smile.
Nagomi glanced back at Bran. He shrugged. She reached for the cake, hesitantly. She sank her teeth in the white floury flesh and her face brightened.
“Delicious!” she said, and handed Bran the other cake.
“You’re not afraid of me?” he asked the old woman, munching on the pink ball.
Her mouth shook in silent laughter. “Son, when you have lived as long as I have … Seen as much as I have seen …”
“And you’ve seen many things stranger than a barbarian flying into town on a dorako?” Bran chuckled.
“I have seen my husband swallowed by the earth … my oldest buried by ashes from a fire mountain … the other two perish in the great famine … and I have lived for seventy winters more after that.” There was no sadness in the woman’s voice, no regret. “Have you seen more of life than this, boy?”
He looked into her dark, deep eyes. He wanted to brag about the jungles of Zangibar, of the jewels of Baratha, and of the chimneys and flying machines of Brigstow, but he knew these words would mean nothing more to her than fairy stories. “No, granny,” he said. “I have not.”
He heard the stomping of feet on the dirt road and looked up. Down the road, from the direction of the checkpoint, ran a huffing and puffing samurai, followed by several spearmen. Bran raised the tarian and clenched his fist, ready to summon the Lance and dragon flame. Nagomi held his hand.
“Wait.”
The samurai skidded to a halt on the gravel a few feet before Bran and bowed. He struggled to catch his breath as he addressed Nagomi.
“I — I’m sorry, we … we weren’t informed … we would have prepared …”
Bran opened his mouth and paused. If the men believed him to be one of the Black Wing riders, they didn’t expect him to speak Yamato. He leaned over to Nagomi and whispered in her ear.
“Tell him we will forgive him this time. Let him take us to the best inn in town.”
Nagomi cleared her throat and “translated” Bran’s words. The nobleman made no effort to hide his wince of disgust. He thinks I can’t tell. He bowed and barked orders at his men. Bran slipped a silver coin in the old woman’s hand.
The inn’s main hall smelled of saké lees and flatulence. The northern wall was rotten through with damp. A mangy cat sat on the windowsill, gnawing on a fish skeleton. This was far from the best guesthouse in town. He chose not to mention it to the samurai, but he wondered, what the Gorllewin would say to this invitation?
He sat down at a wide table and reached for the cup. It smelled vile. He pushed it away without a word. The samurai commander snorted and looked to his men with scorn.
“What brings you to Hakone?” he asked. He omitted honorifics from his speech.
“We’re looking for … some rebels,” Bran murmured in Yamato into Nagomi’s ear. There was no way for the local officials to know how the Gorllewin speech sounded, and he hoped his mumbling was enough to fool them. Nagomi played her new role well and even seemed to enjoy herself, pausing to “gather her thoughts” after Bran spoke, or pretending not to understand some of his words.
“Rebels? In my town? Impossible.”
“They are cunning and crafty. Have you seen anyone suspicious pass through your checkpoint? Anything out of the ordinary?”
The samurai folded his hands. “What is ordinary these days? We have dragons back in the sky again!” He forced a laugh.
“I hope you understand I’m acting on the Taikun’s orders,” Bran pressed. “If there’s anything you remember …”
One of the swordsmen leaned over to the commander and whispered something. The samurai scowled and nodded.
“There were some odd … lights on the slopes of Fuji a few nights ago. Fires, like on Obon. We figured it was one of your beasts.”
“Do you remember the colours? Where exactly on the mountain?”
The samurai consulted with each other briefly.
“Red, yellow … and purple. Near the Hoei Hollow. You know it?”
Bran shook his head before Nagomi “translated” the nobleman’s words, but the man didn’t notice.
“It’s the round valley on the southern slope, like a giant saké bowl,” the samurai explained.
Bran nodded. “I will investigate it. Is that all?”
“That’s all I can remember.”
“Very well. You can leave us now. And let the High Priest of the local shrine know I will send somebody to see him later.”
The samurai breathed out in relief. His behaviour towards Bran was appalling. Any Yamato nobleman treated this way would have cut this insolent cur down. Were the Gorllewin tolerant of this treatment, or simply unaware? Bran tapped his chin.
“One more thing,” he remembered, just as the samurai reached the inn’s door. “Do try to keep my visit a secret, if you can. We want to catch those rebels, not scare them off.”
“I don’t want to go there without you.”
Nagomi donned her freshly washed robes and tied some flowers and ribbons in her hair to make herself look elegant and official. For a moment she played with the make-up box she had requested be brought into the room, but in the end decided against it. Now she was sitting at the low table, holding a small polished bronze mirror in her hand, her gaze vacant and wandering.
“What if you’re attacked when I’m gone?”
Bran laughed. “You’re worried about me?”
“They won’t harm a priestess. But you are unwelcome here. They don’t even know you’re armed.”
“Have you forgotten what happened to you in that shrine?”
“That was different. They knew about me there. I’ll be fine.”
“And so will I. I’m not planning on sleeping today. If they try anything, I’ll be ready. Now go, before they shut the shrine gates.”
She rose and hugged him. “I’ll be back at dawn,” she vowed.
CHAPTER XVI
The road to the shrine led through a dense, well-kept forest of slim cedar trees, descending to the lake in narrow terraces. A gravel path crossed it at a straight angle from the main entrance to the great torii gate standing on the lake shore. The evening haze ascended from the water in thick billows, giving the forest an eerie, mysterious feel.
Nagomi’s heart rose at the sublime beauty of the mist-shrouded trees and the vermillion stumps reflecting on the lake’s surface. She stood transfixed, letting the awe of the marvel of the Gods’ creation wash over her, until one of the acolytes clearing the path noticed her and came over.
“Priestess-sama?” he asked. “We are soon closing for the night. Did you want to visit the shrine?”
“Yes — of course. I was just stunned by how striking the lake is at this time of day.”
The acolyte smiled. Despite the wrinkles, he looked at most twenty-years-old. With a narrow, triangular face and wide, curious eyes he resembled a baby monkey.
“Yes, it does have that effect. Every evening I’m grateful to the Gods that I work here.” He stood the broom against the cedar trunk. “People say it’s finest in autumn, when the maples paint the path crimson. But I like it best in spring. The wild azaleas burst between the cedars like pink and purple fireworks. There are more beautiful places to see the autumn leaves, but I have never witnessed azaleas as bright as these.”
“You have a way with words,” she said. “You could be a poet. How long have you lived here?”
“Four years. The High Priest says I will stay an acolyte forever if I keep looking at flowers instead of learning.” He shrugged. “I’m in no hurry. This shrine stood for a
thousand years, it will survive with or without my help.”
Nagomi giggled. “But don’t you want to be a priest?”
“Only if it means the other priests will no longer bully me.” He smiled again. “I want to stay here, though. Even as a poor acolyte. The view from here is worth all the money and prestige.”
A gong rang out six times at the shrine marking the hour of the rooster. The acolyte picked up the broom. “You’d better hurry, if you want to see the High Priest. He likes to go to sleep right after the evening meal.”
“Where will I find him?”
“You’ll have no trouble. Our gates may be great, but our shrine is a small one.”
Nagomi left the small dining hall filled up on steamed rice and disappointment. She had learned very little from her conversation with the High Priest of Hakone. Not that he didn’t have a lot to say. Living this close to Edo, he had seen his share of odd and disturbing occurrences. But there was nothing that would point her in the direction of Satō’s whereabouts.
He was angry and fearful of the foreigners, but was careful with his wording. Ever since the Taikun had allied with the Black Wings, the Westerners could only be talked about in a neutral or positive manner. One never knew, after all, who was listening. Adjusting to this new reality was proving the most difficult, and there was little else the High Priest wanted to talk about, even after she reminded him politely she was a half-breed herself, in case he hadn’t noticed the colour of her hair.
It was too late to return to the town. The shrine gates were closed, even the small wicket kept open for late pilgrims, and the forest was dark beyond the row of stone lanterns flanking the lake path. The shrine was not used to visitors outside the festival days. She wandered about the small courtyard, not yet willing to go to the dormitory where a plain mattress and a thin blanket waited for her, prepared by the smiling acolyte.
She prayed before each of the three kami worshipped at Hakone. As luck had it — there are no coincidences after all — the Gods of the shrine were the same as in Kirishima: the sacred first ancestors of the Mikado family.
The Shattering Waves (The Year of the Dragon, Book 7) Page 18
