The Chrysanthemum Seal (The Year of the Dragon, Book 5)

by James Calbraith

  Azumi stood up quickly, drawing twin forked sai daggers to counter the remaining enemy’s sword. It was now a duel of short blades, of parrying, glancing and feinting; the swordsman had an advantage of skill and experience, but was visibly shaken by the sudden death of his partner. She pressed on with all her strength, forcing him back.

  She did not have much energy left for a lengthy battle. She was an assassin, not a samurai. Rather than by stamina, she was driven by desperation — and that would not last long. This had to finish fast.

  The swordsman sensed her exhaustion, and the force of his blows increased; but he was growing tired too, and his slashes and thrusts began to miss their target, sliding off her daggers in a flurry of grinds and sparkles. The shards flying off his blade pierced her hands, and rivulets of blood trickled down her tired wrists.

  “His left leg,” whispered Ozun.

  She noticed it too; the swordsman was shifting his weight on to the right foot whenever he could. At some point in the melee he must have sprained his ankle. Azumi had just enough strength for one last trick.

  She feigned a trip and a fall to her right. The swordsman followed with a desperate thrust, but his left leg gave way and the blade missed her shoulder by an inch. She caught the sword in the fork of her left dagger and drew the point of the right one straight into the enemy’s now open thigh. He knocked her and she fell on her back, this time for real; the dagger dropped from her hand and the swordsman stood above her, raising the short sword to deal the final blow.

  “Enough!”

  A tall, full-figured woman in an emerald-green hooded robe moved noiselessly towards them.

  “Can’t you see she defeated you already? You’re going to bleed to death from that wound.”

  The swordsman lowered his weapon and dropped to his knees, his head hung in shame.

  “Chiyo-sama,” he said, breathing heavily.

  “Get that looked after,” she ordered. “It’s enough that Mishima’s dead. I don’t want to have to look for two new guards.”

  The swordsman cast Azumi a vengeful look and hurried inside the stone gateway. Azumi’s heart skipped a beat. The woman’s thick silk robe was almost identical to the one her old Master had worn. The colour was different, yes, but it was adorned with the same black eight-headed serpent crest that flew on his banners.

  “That’s her,” said Ozun.

  “I know.”

  Azumi knelt on one knee and bowed her head. The woman approached her, closed her eyes, and brushed Azumi’s head with long, cold fingers.

  “You were with Mars when he died,” she said, opening her eyes.

  “Mars?”

  “Mars of the Crimson Robe. What was the name he used among mortals?”

  “Ganryū, my lady. I was there when Ganryūjima fell.”

  “Do you know how he was killed?”

  Azumi reached for the bundle at her waist and unravelled it, revealing the blackened remains of the sword she had found in Ganryū’s garden. She presented it in outstretched hands. The woman’s eyes widened and she drew back her hand as if burned.

  “Kuso. You did well, girl. Come with me.”

  The woman in the emerald robe walked seemingly casually down the timbered corridor, but Azumi knew she had to observe and follow her every step.

  It was the kind of house Azumi would have built if she had unlimited time and resources. A complex maze of hallways and stairways, joining at mad angles, with double walls hiding concealed rooms, false exits and escape routes at every corner; every inch of it booby-trapped. In short, a house fit for a master assassin.

  The last corridor was a tunnel carved into the meat of the mountain, leading to a balcony looking out over the valley, suspended above the forest and the quiet, sleepy village below. A piercing gale howled in the treetops. Azumi tightened her clothes to ward off the elements, but the woman seemed unfazed by the cold wind raising her robe in emerald billows, revealing glimpses of a dark grey shinobi uniform underneath, even tighter and more form-fitting than Azumi’s. She cast off her hood, revealing luscious black hair, tied in a long, thick ponytail.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I was a Koga too, you know,” she said, leaning against the railing. She took out a long pipe and lit it with a snap of her spider-like fingers. “A long time ago. Even I didn’t know anyone had survived the raid.”

  Azumi put the basket with Ozun’s head carefully in the corner.

  “It was Ganryū-sama himself who saved me,” she said. “That’s why I swore him loyalty, lady…”

  “Call me Chiyo. Or Venus of the Emerald Robe, if you want to be formal.” She puffed smoke in Azumi’s face.

  Chiyo? Without the honorific? Azumi could never be so informal with a noble lady like her. Was she really the same kind of person as Ganryū-sama?

  “Was it Mars who told you where to find me?”

  “No. I followed hints and clues for the last month… Hajime-sama set me in the right direction… but of course you don’t know him, lady…”

  “Oh, I know him,” the woman laughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “A sword for hire, right? Did a few jobs for me, too. And others. Did he mention the others?”

  “I didn’t even know there were any others until the last few weeks.”

  “Why, what happened in the last few weeks?”

  “I saw another Fanged for the first time. The one called Dōraku.”

  The woman’s eyes hardened.

  “So you’ve met the Renegade. Have you seen him kill Mars? With this sword?”

  “It wasn’t him. There was a boy — ”

  At the end of her tale, Azumi was shuddering from cold, her lips were numb, and her teeth were chattering.

  Why can’t we go inside? Doesn’t she feel anything?

  The woman, who asked to be called Chiyo, exuded none of the dread and power Ganryū had done. In fact, she was completely normal. She even sounded like a commoner.

  She was still leaning against the railing, having filled her pipe up twice already, tapping ash into the precipice below, deep in thought. The sweet smell of the Cursed Weed lingered in the air.

  “You’re thinking you’ve got the wrong person,” she said at last, chuckling.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mars liked to be theatrical. Grandiose. Terrifying, wasn’t he?”

  “Y— yes,” said Azumi, remembering the fear the Crimson Robe had struck in her heart.

  Chiyo laughed out loud again. “Mortals! You’re so easy to play with.”

  There was a sudden gust of wind and Azumi found herself looking straight into Chiyo’s black, cold eyes, inches away from her face. The woman’s teeth were long and twisted, and her skin pale like paper. Her breath was sweet and nauseating. Azumi gagged.

  “Why did you come here?” Chiyo asked. “You are free now. You could’ve gone wherever you wanted.”

  Azumi stepped back. “Ozun says you can help him.”

  “Ozun?” Chiyo frowned. “Who’s Ozun?”

  Azumi reached for the straw basket and raised the lid. A couple of flies buzzed out and disappeared into the wind.

  “The love of my life,” said Azumi, gazing fondly at the yamabushi’s severed head. “Aren’t you, dear?”

  “And you mine,” said Ozun.

  Azumi turned to the woman in the emerald robe.

  “Will you help him? I’ll do anything for you in exchange.”

  Chiyo reeled backwards in disgust.

  “Cheee…!” She covered her nose. “Girl, it is you who needs help!”

  The watchman whistled out two in the afternoon, but the sky outside the window of Bran’s cabin was the shade of twilight.

  The steel-grey sky and the steel-blue sea rolled back and forth in a titanic struggle for the horizon. Rain the size and hardness of gravel lashed the window with fury, deafening all conversation and thought. Once in a while a white shape — a face or a limb — showed in the billowing darkness outside, trying to pierce the thick glass. From
the surface, and from the outside, the Sea Maze was nothing like the straight-edged wall of cloud Bran remembered flying over with Emrys. It had been growing steadily, as the ships of the Gorllewin flotilla pushed on slowly, day by day, in the general direction of Yamato. First the winds picked up slightly, almost beyond notice. The currents grew strong and twisted, bubbling up in whirlpools, throwing whole shoals of confused fish out onto the surface. The waves changed direction and danced about the ships, crashing, and roaring.

  When the stars started changing positions in the night sky, and the sun and the moon rose in the wrong place on the horizon, Vice Komtur Aulick had ordered the anchors down. There was no point pushing through anymore — they couldn’t even tell if they were moving forwards or backwards. They waited.

  Bran returned to his desk to add a few finishing touches to his “homework” — describing the four major festivals of the Old Faith: Yalda, Nowruz, Tiregan, and Mehrgan. He couldn’t remember which was the more important one: Tiregan or Yalda? The subtleties of the Gorllewin religion kept escaping him.

  He adjusted the chafing collar and reached for the tin cup hanging on the peg. He was hot and sweaty in his new uniform; a tunic of rough grey wool of the kind worn by everyone else on the ship apart from the officers. He was pouring himself some water from a pitcher, when a freak wave heaved the ship and he spilled most of it over himself.

  “Great.”

  Leif barged into the room without knocking. Bran sighed inwardly. It was Leif’s room, and Bran was just a prisoner turned dubious guest. Still, a little courtesy would have been welcome. The giant blond Norse, oblivious to Bran’s annoyance, leaned over his head to read the paper.

  “Good, good,” he exclaimed. “You are making progress. Vice Komtur will be glad. It’s Tiregan, by the way.”

  “Ah. I was wondering,” said Bran, and wrote down the missing sentence.

  And I though alchemy was boring.

  “Although some would argue otherwise,” added Leif, scratching his bushy, golden beard. “Yalda is more popular among common people... Tiregan is more important to priests.”

  Leif was a Grey Hood through and through, so orthodox he didn’t even need to wear the ceremonial hooded robe any more: the light of his faith was uniform enough. Or so he said. The only outward symbol he bore was the crossed and horned circle tattooed on his forehead; like all members of the Sun Warrior’s caste.

  Sometimes Bran thought he’d rather stay in the prison cell where Vice Komtur Aulick had first thrown him, uncertain whether to believe the story he had hastily prepared after capture: that he had been living as a castaway among the fishermen and was not even aware they were not Qin. It was a gamble, but it had paid off for now. The Gorllewin had no means to check whether he was telling the truth. They had heard, however, of the Ladon’s disaster, and that part of the story checked out. This had bought Bran some time during which Vice Komtur Aulick deliberated whether or not to throw both him and his boisterous dragon overboard.

  The only person, other than the Vice Komtur, who could visit him in his cell at the lowest deck, stuck between crates of onions and barrels of dragon fodder, was Leif, the ship’s chaplain. Bran asked him to teach him more about the Old Faith and it didn’t take much convincing. Leif jumped on the opportunity with great enthusiasm.

  Bran was taken out of the cell dressed in the uncomfortable uniform of a Gorllewin ensign, put in Leif’s small cabin, and given a bundle of books on the basic tenets of Mithraism. Bran did his best to feign interest. What he really wanted and what he was trying to get from the chaplain, were details of the history and geography of the western continent.

  “So, what’s a Norseman doing among the Old Faithers?” was Bran’s first question. From what he knew, neither the Snaellanders on their remote icy islands, nor the inhabitants of the cold fjords of Niflheimr had much love for Rome and her priests. “And how come you speak Seaxe?”

  “I’m not a Norseman. I’m a Vinlander,” replied Leif, shaking his golden mane. “Don’t you know the difference?”

  Bran had no idea. Leif sat down on his bunk and reached for an old map of the world.

  “It’s an old story. Older than that of New Rome, older than the Gorllewin itself. It begins in the days of legend, of Arthur the Faer and Beowulf the Geat. You remember those?”

  “Of course. Arthur is the greatest Prydain that ever lived.”

  Leif nodded.

  “I guess he was. But he was also the greatest scourge of my people. You see, when Beowulf’s Geats betrayed us, my ancestors fled their savage mountain home. Most of them went East, where they built the Varyaga Khaganate among the barbarians — but some rode their white dragons West, over the frozen ocean…”

  He traced the line on the map. Bran expected it to light up, as when Dylan drew things in the air, but Leif was no wizard and his finger left only a smudge of grease on the parchment.

  “They flew for days, searching for a new home,” the chaplain continued, “they say many perished in the winds of the North. At last they reached Snaelland — an island of mist and lava, where nothing grows apart from moss and lichen. Many said that that was enough, but seven warriors and their shieldmaidens jumped on their dragons again.”

  “Why?” asked Bran, sensing a deliberate pause in the narrative. When Leif told a story, he seemed to channel an old skald telling a saga to an enraptured audience in the mead hall.

  Leif shrugged. “Who knows, after all these years? The sagas are silent. Maybe they were still afraid of Arthur’s wyrm armies. Maybe they sensed there was a better land further west. What matters is that they found it.” He pointed at the map. “A new continent, plentiful and ready for the taking. The natives fled before their dragons, and the warriors founded their settlements. Vinland… Markland… Helluland… such were the three chief provinces, but the entire country they called Hvitramannaland, the White Men’s Land, for the seven warriors wore white capes when they rode their white dragons.”

  He pointed to a large swathe of land in the north-eastern corner of the western continent, not saying another word. Bran sensed another cue.

  “And what about the Gorllewin…?”

  “Ah, that’s a whole other chapter of this old book,” Leif replied, raising his head. A spark of ancient Norse fierceness flashed in his eyes. “Six centuries had passed in Vinland and the land grew rich and prosperous, but lazy and feeble in its isolation; and when Madoc ab Owain and his Gwynedd sailors arrived on our southern coast, we could not push them back to the sea. They captured our harbours and built their fortresses where our mead halls once stood… and they called it Tyr Gorllewin, the Land of the West. But their worst crime, in our eyes, was that they tried to force their faith upon us.”

  “Faith? You mean the Old Faith?”

  “That was long before the Prydain and others turned heretics. The Sun Priests of Rome held sway over half the known world… except the North. We have always been faithful to the Spirits and Gods of their forefathers. They worshipped the Sun, we prayed to the Wolf and the Raven. They culled their dragons; we treated them as our own blood. There could never be peace between us. We fought, and we died, and so did they. For generations the border between Tyr Gorllewin and Hvitramannaland burned with dragon fire… until Dee came.”

  “Dee?” Bran looked at the wall over Leif’s bunk, where, among the bronze reliefs showing stages of the Mithraic cycle, hung a portrait of a solemn-looking bearded man. The man wore a grey hood and grey cloak with a large frilly collar and upon his forehead was carved the same horned circle that Leif and other Grey Hoods bore.

  “Yes, that one.” Leif’s eyes lit up with pious fervour. “He went among the Vinlanders, not with a Soul Lance, but with a wise and powerful word. He taught us that our real enemies were the demons in the hearts of men, not the men themselves. He taught us how we could keep our dragons and our magic and still be faithful in the eyes of Mithras. And then, just as he had prophesied when he first stood on Gorllewin shore, he died.”
/>   “Died?”

  “Killed by the agents of the Dracalish Queen. But she was too late. He had forged us into one nation, and upon his grave we built New Rome, a new city cleansed from the filth and depravation of the old world.”

  “He sounds like… an intriguing man,” said Bran, in a voice which he hoped indicated polite disinterest.

  “He taught us and wrote down his words in the Seaxe tongue, which is now sacred to us more than Latin is in Rome,” continued Leif, “although I speak Norse at home, and the soldiers from the South will speak Prydain when they get together, as you’ve noticed.”

  Bran nodded. He wanted to hear more about the history of Leif’s country, but it seemed that particular saga was over, and he wasn’t yet ready for a lesson in theology. Many of those would follow in the days to come.

  Leif stood alone by the bulwark, looking forlorn to the east, ignoring the wind and rain lashing his face. The sky in the east was slightly clearer and brighter than in the west where a dark wall of clouds rose high in the sky, illuminated from the inside by rolling lightning bolts.

  “Missing home?” asked Bran, raising his voice to shout over the noise of the waves.

  “Don’t we all?” replied Leif.

  “I sense more,” Bran prodded. It was rare to see the good-natured chaplain so solemn.

  Leif sighed. The wind tore up his reply.

  “What?”

  “I said I’m worried about my country!”

  “Gorllewin? Why, have you heard some bad news?”