by David Kirk
For the time being at least the world went on, and under a clear morning sky a peasant worked chopping wood. The light was bright and sharp enough that he had to squint at the lumber he guided his ax to. He had a pile of firewood tall enough to last the week already beside him, but he did not stop. With the earth hard and unworkable until spring, the man found himself chopping simply for something to do.
“Greetings, friend,” came a voice, and the peasant turned to find two men there.
The one who had spoken was standing about ten paces away, smiling, his breath misting in the air, while another watched from the pathway on which the pair of them had evidently been walking. They both wore heavy traveling gowns that hid the shape of their bodies, their hands tucked away from the cold.
“Greetings,” the peasant said guardedly, bowing and then resting the ax across his shoulders. The men did not carry swords and both had full heads of close-cropped hair, so fawning subservience was not required.
“This village is Miyamoto, is it not?” said the man, still smiling.
“Aye.” The peasant nodded. “If you’ve come to see the temple, it’s not being rebuilt until the spring.”
“While that is a shame, I journey instead because of the monk there—I hear he is skilled in healing,” said the man.
“He’s a clever one, yes,” said the peasant. “You don’t look sick, though.”
“Thankfully I am in good health. It is my son; the boy has developed a rash. Men say the monk’s boy had the same affliction, and that he managed to cure it.”
“You’re wrong there. That boy was flecked like the night sky with scabs and poxmarks for as long as I remember,” said the peasant.
“Perhaps it is a recent cure—have you seen the boy lately?” said the man.
The peasant thought for a few moments. “No, now that you mention it. Not since autumn, at least.”
“Well, I shall journey to the temple all the same,” said the man, but he did not seem truly dispirited. “My thanks for your time.”
He bowed, and then the pair of them left. The peasant watched them go, shrugged, and got back to work. The roads often brought strange men in with them, and it was no business of his if they had set out in the opposite direction to the temple.
An hour later the two men were hunched around a wretchedly small fire hidden in a copse of bare trees. They knew very well which village this was and where the temple was located, for they had visited it when they had first arrived four days ago in the guise of pilgrims. But though they had lingered abnormally long at the grounds—they were very pious, they had told the monk—they had not seen the boy who was supposed to be there.
That was unexpected, and so this thicket had become their home while they had watched the roads in and out of Miyamoto and had questioned as many people as they dared.
“It seems the lad truly isn’t here,” sighed the second man, aimlessly flicking ash from the fire with a stick. “What a miserable business.”
“Do not let bleakness take your heart, my brother,” said the first, though his tone was hardly a contrast.
“This whole thing is just odd.”
“Odd requests bring odd amounts of money.”
“Why don’t they just march their samurai in and take care of it?”
“This is a matter they have been warned away from. Direct action would attract unwanted attention,” said the first. “Regardless, we have accepted the job—”
“You accepted the job.”
“And the people who gave it are not ones we have the luxury of failing.”
“So we’re stuck with it, then,” muttered the second. “What do we do?”
“Well, there are a few options,” said the first. “We could wait here freezing our asses to the ground until the lad comes back from wherever he has gone—if he is coming back. Or we could search every temple and monastery from here until we find him on the off chance that he has, as I was told, become a monk. Or I suppose we could go back and tell them that we couldn’t find him, waive our fee, and most likely the majority of the blood in our bodies.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” said the second, and tossed his stick away petulantly. “This whole thing is disturbing. Slipping poison into soup is one thing, but this business with the arms? That’s just morbid. They want that sort of thing done, they should send a filthy corpsehandler.”
The first looked up, sudden inspiration in his eyes.
TWO DAYS LATER, the body of a tall young man was found in a ditch. It appeared as if nothing was wrong with him, his face as calm as a man at meditation, save for the fact that his arms had been cleanly chopped off and spirited away somewhere. That might have caused some consternation, were it not for the fact that the man was a corpsehandler.
They were the builders of coffins, the executioners, the butchers, and the tanners—the ones mired in decay and death and carcasses and the lowest of the low because of that irrevocable contamination. Wise men estimated them to be at best one-seventh of a true human being, so the dismemberment of what was a tainted parody of a man in the first place made little difference in the scheme of things.
No one mourned for the armless body except his mother. His father, when he learned of his son’s fate, had tutted and sucked air through his teeth before he nodded and pronounced:
“Well, he must be in a better bloody life than this one.”
Winter passed, Amaterasu grew in strength once more, and so came the spring and a cherry blossom beautiful. The petals brought delight and then withered as they always did, and it was some weeks after the flowers had fallen that Kazuteru accompanied his lord to the estate of the Nakata.
As he expected, the grounds were opulent beyond anything he had seen. The gardens were one flowing piece of art: still, clear ponds crisscrossed by elegantly carved, arcing wooden bridges that led to immaculately raked beds of sand and gravel. Fat, pale carp swam beneath blooming lotus pads, rising to the surface with their mouths gaping and flapping expectantly as the samurai passed.
The castle hold itself, seeming like an afterthought, was guarded by men wielding long halberds with bands of gold set around the wooden shafts, each weapon inlaid with more than Kazuteru himself owned.
Before they could marvel at that ornamentation fully—or, Kazuteru suspected, perhaps notice any frailty in the fortress itself—they had been quickly led away to the mansion where the lord resided and shown to their resplendent quarters. Beautiful girls tended to each of them, and they were offered rest and relaxation in hot water that Nakata had had channeled from a natural spring almost a half mile away. Then came dinner.
Lord Nakata himself, his son Hayato, and Lord Shinmen sat centrally on a dais, and then ten bodyguards from both clans sat in rank along either side of the hall they were in. Kazuteru was on the farthest end of Shinmen’s line. Slivers of fresh, raw ocean fish sped that day to this mountain hold lay before him on a gold-leaf-painted lacquer platter. The chopsticks in his hand were plated in carved silver at the end.
Kazuteru looked at them dumbly. Still he found himself surprised to be in such situations. He knew deep down that he did not belong here surrounded by such splendor. He had not earned it. He was much younger than the other men he sat beside and of no exceptional skill with the sword, yet in the wake of Munisai’s seppuku he had been promoted to serve in Shinmen’s personal retinue.
He had accrued an accidental and unwanted fame; how he cursed the invention of the woodblock printing press. The damned machine was a recent triumph of Japanese engineering—that is to say, someone had found one in Korea half a dozen years ago in the first war and brought it back with them—and it allowed what would have taken an artist and a team of apprentices an hour to achieve to be done in a matter of moments.
The prints it produced were far from great art, of course, simple black outlines more often than not illustrating well-known tales and stories, but for the first time they were allowing the common man to fancy himself cultured. The presses therefore
resided somewhere between a novelty and the foundation of an industry, growing in popularity in Kyoto and Osaka and Edo, and so it followed that, like any trend, of course Nakata had purchased one. His machine had been kept busy these recent months printing by the score a particular scene titled The Revelation of the Nation’s Finest and All That Lay Within Him.
Kazuteru had first seen it in the barracks where he stayed, a group of samurai passing a copy of it around with stony faces. It had been one of the more expensive copies too, for an artist had gone over it by hand with red ink, lovingly picking out entrails and splashes of gore. What it showed was Munisai’s seppuku; a caricature monkey of a man on his knees with a sword in his belly, his eyes pinched shut in childish agony, tears rolling down his cheeks, and his tongue poking out.
The samurai behind him, conversely, was tall and handsome and strong, his sword held steady and proud, disdain in his stoic eyes. The perfect contrast to what squirmed at his feet, and by that immaculate man’s face was clearly printed the name Kazuteru Murayama.
“Well, you came out of this well, didn’t you?” one of the samurai had said, his eyes narrow and venom in his voice.
Kazuteru had tried to protest his innocence, tried to tell them that he found it embarrassing to be singled out so, but they had not listened. They were obliged to condemn Munisai, of course, but there was an unspoken acknowledgment that his death had been suspicious and so the words they spat were protocol only, and to hate Shinmen or the Nakata was to speak against the very thing that made them samurai.
That left Kazuteru, and so he had become their surrogate abomination.
Yet despised though he was by his own comrades, because Lord Shinmen did not protest the contents of the print and allowed for it to be openly disseminated in his own realm, the veracity of it became indisputable to the other thousands of men of all castes who saw the print. Munisai was disgraced, Kazuteru renowned, and so it came to be then that visiting dignitaries and courtiers would ask to meet him.
It had happened so often that Lord Shinmen found it expedient to simply promote him to the bodyguard rather than summon him each time, and each time when he was presented he could see the look of disappointment in their eyes that who knelt before them was not some legendary warrior but a young man barely out of adolescence.
Just another shame to bear; at least his mother was benefiting from his fattened stipend. Unwanted by those beside him, an anticlimax to men of a dozen realms, Kazuteru kept his eyes down as his lord and his ally ate, and plotted, to the sound of a koto harp played by unseen hands.
“Our regent’s war in Korea is almost spent,” said Lord Nakata once the formalities of etiquette were done with, the polite inquests of health and subtle praise and honor he and Shinmen exchanged with each other exhausted. “ ‘Do not let my soldiers become ghosts haunting foreign lands,’ his latest decree.”
“So I have heard,” said Shinmen. “And though I pray it to not be true, my emissaries in Kyoto tell me our regent is all but spent himself. His health is failing, and then …”
“And then,” said Nakata, and nodded.
The War. That was what they could not permit themselves to say. Once the Regent Toyotomi vacated this world, the whole of Japan would be thrown to the wolves. The tiny fiefdom struggles that had plagued the country would cease, petty grievances and domain disputes put to one side in favor of the true prize.
“When that happens—may it be ten years, nay, ten lifetimes away, of course—what is our plan, my ally?” asked Lord Nakata.
“We shall side with our Lord Ukita, as always,” said Shinmen. “My will is as his—unless?”
“I do not engage in deceit,” said Nakata, his ever-squinting eyes hiding any chance to see if he spoke the lie all lords spoke without shame. “I too intend to remain with our Lord Ukita. But therein lies a clarification—remain alongside, not be blindly absorbed into his numbers, as will be his urge in the marshaling of forces.”
“Oh?” said Lord Shinmen.
“I intend to remind him of my independence from him. I would ask your help, my closest ally,” said Nakata, and then at Shinmen’s look of discomfort added, “Do not worry so. I do not plan violence against him. No—new enemies should not be made now. I merely wish to remind him that I—that we are capable.”
“How?” said Shinmen.
“A Gathering of the Horse,” said Nakata.
“A Swarming Hell?” sputtered Shinmen.
“Let us keep our tongues civil, my ally,” said Nakata. “A Gathering.”
Nakata wanted to be delicate about it, but Kazuteru had seen such an event in his childhood and he knew his lord had spoken fairly. Other men called it the Crush or the Melee or the Whirlpool, and these were apt names also. He remembered the thunder of the hooves, the overwhelming fury of it, hundreds of men on horseback as fierce as on a battlefield but there for sport and not for conquest. A spectacle as dangerous and costly as it was marvelous.
The samurai would ride in a great circle that grew slowly ever tighter and ever faster. When they were pressed flank to flank and the ground was truly shaking, a wooden ball was lobbed into the center of the mass, and then the chaos began.
The goal was to grab the ball and then escape from the mass of bodies without being unseated. No weapons were allowed, but that did not make it any less dangerous. It became little more than a brawl, frenzied horses kicking and ramming and men clawing and punching at one another. To fall or to be wrenched from the saddle was to be sucked into a sea of stomping hooves, and from there very, very few men escaped unscathed.
To win had as much to do with luck as it had to do with skill, but nevertheless the man who bore the ball free won great honor and respect for both him and his clan. For that reason, rare though they were, a Gathering always attracted men from far and wide seeking glory.
“What think you, my Lord Shinmen?” said Nakata, his eyes gleaming with self-congratulation.
“As impressive as that may be,” said Shinmen, recovering from his initial surprise, “might I remind you, my dear ally, that even combined our cavalry number but a fraction of our Lord Ukita’s.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to win the thing, nor try to scare him with simple weight of numbers. The staging of it and the sight of so many lords and warriors heeding my invitation will display to him that, should I wish it, I have options,” said Nakata.
“That is not without risk. We do not wish even to put the idea in his head that our loyalty wavers.”
“Mmm, true,” said Nakata.
“Allow me to suggest something—we enter a time of steel, my lord, not gold,” continued Shinmen. “Steel is what you need to display, and fortunately steel can take the form of more than just a sword in the hand.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Go ahead with the Gathering, my lord, but show him another strength. Our cavalry cannot impress him, and gold inspires only avarice in such times. Knives grow longer. Of course I do not suggest our Lord Ukita harbors such malice, but should an accident or ill health befall you—the heavens forbid such a thing, my dear ally—our Lord Ukita might see a chance to”—he had to pause to choose an acceptable wording—“satiate his avariciousness toward your wealth. You must discourage this, remind him that your clan resides in more than just you. You must show him the strength of your line.”
“My line?” said Nakata.
“Yes,” said Shinmen, and then he turned to Hayato. “And thus the Lord Hayato here enters our consideration.”
“What—you expect me to ride?” said Hayato, surprised as much at the sudden attention as the implication. He had been eating in a world unto himself, months of indolent recuperation having returned weight and health to him.
“Yes,” said Shinmen.
“Do I need to remind my dear ally of something?” said Hayato, the empty sleeve of his kimono between them.
“What better way to display the strength of heart of the Nakata? A one-armed man riding in a Gathering has never b
een seen,” said Shinmen.
“Never been seen because he’s fallen off his horse and gotten trampled before it could even begin,” said Hayato. “No, I absolutely refuse.”
“Oh, come, my young lord,” said Shinmen. “There comes a time when every man from peasant to nobility must play a role for the good of the clan. Men shall speak of your bravery the breadth of the country, and our Lord Ukita will realize that the Nakata possess something more than coin.”
“Oh,” said Lord Nakata, and his old, jowly face was lighting up now, “oh, my ally, that is a quite wonderful idea. Romantic indeed!”
“Father!” said Hayato, more shrilly then he intended, for he took a moment to compose himself before speaking again. “I cannot do this. Have one of our commanders ride in my name, or …”
“That misses the point entirely. What is remarkable in having your men serve you? That is their duty,” said Shinmen. “Do it.”
Shinmen spoke the last two words quite levelly, but Kazuteru had spent enough time around his lord to recognize the undertone in them. There was something more than just command or plea in them—a subtle anger, a nuanced vindictiveness that neither of the Nakatas noticed.
There had been one evening some months before when Shinmen had, unusually, summoned him to his personal chambers. Kazuteru had found the lord sitting before a meal barely touched and a bottle of sake still full to the brim. A copy of the seppuku print was in his hand. The young samurai bowed and knelt a respectful distance away, waiting for the man to speak.
“Do you think it was cruel?” said Shinmen eventually, eyes not leaving the print. “You were the closest to him, at the end.”
“It was seppuku, my lord,” said Kazuteru. “It is supposed to be cruel.”
“I know that, but …” said Shinmen, and he seemed to be struggling for words. “Could you feel anything from him?”
