He did not tell them about the way he still yearned for Kazuko, even though he had not seen her in more than six months, did not know if he would ever see her again. Finding her again after three years had reawakened all his old emotions, the love and the bitterness. Most days he still wondered how long before the pain subsided again this time.
And he did not tell them about how he had barely restrained himself two days ago from killing one of his men, who spoke of Kazuko’s barrenness as a curse upon the Otomo clan, questioning if she was being punished for unknown misdeeds. Ken’ishi had beaten the man senseless, knocked out several teeth, and perhaps blinded him in one eye. Ken’ishi could barely recall how the rage had boiled out of him, but like the searing, molten blood of a fire mountain it came. He remembered Silver Crane poised to strike off the man’s head—his name was Ujiyari, he had to keep reminding himself, a warrior with four children and a wife, a devout adherent to the Zen sect. As the man’s commander, he had the right, but such behavior was not the Way.
In time, he thanked Shirohige and Junko again. They in turn thanked him for his kindness. He could see their excitement that as soon as the weather broke, Junko would venture out to buy food.
As he untied Storm and led him out to the street, the scar on his chest set him once again to itching, more and more painfully. He pulled open his robes, baring his breast to the winter wind, and looked at the scar there.
The tendrils of red splotch around the long-healed scar had spread, grown darker. They were the same kind of splotches he had seen on Taro’s face, and on Hatsumi’s.
He indeed had much to atone for.
“Selfish thoughts are born from a mind bent on its own profit. And when you think only about your own profit, you will not think twice about how you harm others. In the end, you will create perversity, generate evil, and even destroy your own body.”
—Issai Chozanshi, The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts
“Captain! Are you well?”
Someone was weeping—a woman.
“Captain! Can you hear me?”
Whose voice was that?
Sergeant Michizane.
Ken’ishi was naked. Sitting with his knees tucked up under his chin, fists clenched against his shins. The air smelled of perfume and saké. A small lamp and brazier of coals cast opposing shadows of him against the ceiling. A futon and blankets lay in rumpled disarray.
A blast of cold air poured through the door from the hallway, the door that Michizane was standing in.
“He’s been like that for hours,” said the woman, her hair mussed. She cowered on the floor, covered by her brightly colored robe, except for one bare shoulder. Tears streaked the powder on her face. “I didn’t know what to do! He paid for the time, but he’s just been sitting there, and wouldn’t let me leave.” Her face was pale with fear, not powder. She whispered to Michizane as if Ken’ishi could not hear, “He...he said I would be more beautiful with a scar.” She traced her finger down her cheek.
Ken’ishi’s hands and feet tingled with cold.
“Captain,” Michizane said, stepping tentatively nearer, “are you well?”
Ken’ishi glanced at him, then looked away. “Why are you here?” He could not bear to ask the question Why am I here?
He knew not where here was.
“One of the men came to tell me you were here, and...it’s very, very late and...”
“What is the hour?” Ken’ishi asked.
“The Hour of the Tiger. It will be dawn soon.” Michizane’s voice carried an equal mix of concern and wariness. He was still armed. Brothels required weapons to be checked at the door.
The woman was beautiful. She must have been very, very expensive. Fear glimmered in her eyes, in her tears.
The splotch of scarlet, growing from the scar over his heart like a birthmark, like a writhing octopus, had spread across his chest. The thought back to the masterful skill with which the great, emerald-clad warrior—actually a divine fox-spirit in disguise—had placed that cut, saying that it would be Ken’ishi’s undoing. But had the fox meant the cut—or Ken’ishi’s heart? He scratched it. It felt raw, like a fingernail peeled to the quick.
Michizane said to the girl, “You may go. I will take care of this. The captain has had too much saké.”
Her face melted with thanks. She jumped to her feet and hurried out.
“Captain, may I suggest we take you home, right now?” Michizane said.
Ken’ishi cleared his throat of a large, dry lump. “Of course. Thank you for your concern about my welfare. Wait for me outside.”
“Captain—”
“I am not drunk.” But his back was still turned, keeping the mark on his chest out of sight. “Wait outside. I will join you in a moment.”
Michizane bowed. “Yes, Captain.” He stepped out and slid the door closed.
Winter wind moaned and hissed across the roof.
Ken’ishi unfolded himself—painfully—and stood. His clothes lay entwined with the blankets. He flexed his hands to return some feeling and found a tightly folded wad of paper in his right.
The paper was important, but Michizane was waiting, and Ken’ishi could not afford any more impropriety. The best he could hope for was to remain silent and try to piece together where the last hours had gone.
The last thing he remembered was a messenger coming to his house in Hakozaki. Could this perhaps be the very brothel in Hakozaki that had sold Kiosé to Tetta, the old innkeeper in Aoka village? Hakozaki was not the city Hakata was; it had only three brothels.
He shrugged his clothes back on, unable to keep from grimacing at the ugly mark on his chest. The sight of it now filled him with cold, penetrating dread.
The messenger had come at about the Hour of the Goat, mid-afternoon. Half a day was lost to him; he had no memory of it. The taste in his mouth told him he had drunk a little, but he was not drunk now, nor was he muddle-headed from the aftereffects. On the contrary, his mind felt uncannily sharp.
Now fully dressed, he tucked the paper into his robe. Perhaps it would offer a clue, but the kami whispered of danger if he read it.
He let Michizane lead him home, with assurances that he was indeed well. The starlight made the remaining snow on the roofs glow, and the icy slush sucked at his geta. The only thing Michizane said during their walk was, “I miss my wife and daughter every day. I wish I could bring them here. Those we love must live in our hearts, even though they’re not here. Right, Captain?” His tone suggested better understanding about what had happened with Ken’ishi than Ken’ishi himself possessed.
After Michizane left Ken’ishi at the gate, Ken’ishi went inside and found that Jinbei had left coals burning in the main room and had prepared Ken’ishi’s futon. With dawn less than an hour away and Ken’ishi’s mind ablaze with questions, he would not be sleeping any time soon.
He fanned the brazier to greater heat, letting the warmth rush up the front of him until he shivered with the pleasure.
The dread in his belly gathered strength, writhing like an eel. Something terrible had happened, something he did not understand. The terror in that woman’s face when she looked at him filled him with shame. What had he done? What had he said?
During their hunt for Hatsumi, Kazuko had told him of the strange things Hatsumi had done. A myriad cruelties exacted on the servants, of which she claimed to have no memory. Wandering about the castle in the dead of night.
His heart thundered its fear against his breast. He would open his belly before he went the way of Hatsumi.
His hands trembled as he withdrew the paper from his robes and unfolded it.
He knew the hand when he saw the first character.
The nightingale weeps,
Her gilded cage a dungeon,
Abandoned by her master,
She sings her loneliness.
At the Sanmon Gate she prays for absolution,
But instead old memories find new life,
And she yearns to make mo
re.
She sings for the blaze of passionate hearts
That melt the snow.
She sings for the world they created,
Where she lives in her dreams.
But someday, a dusting of ashes
Will be all that is left
Of those passionate hearts
And that world will pass away
Forgotten by all but the gods.
In the middle verse, a teardrop had caused the ink to run. The words coursed through him like fire, and his vision glazed with fresh tears. A storm of emotions crashed through him. Pity at her loneliness, anger at Tsunetomo for abandoning her, yearning for her smile, ache for the pleasures of her body, bittersweet memory at the one night they had shared, wishing he could deliver her from all that and see her happy once again.
He held the paper above the brazier. All he had to do was drop it.
His heart ached. Or was it the mark on his chest throbbing?
He folded up the paper, then pulled out his saifu from his obi, untied the string, unfolded the wallet, and slipped the paper inside.
This was a dangerous game, this dance of hearts. If Tsunetomo discovered Kazuko was sending Ken’ishi letters...
A crawling sensation on his breast drove him to peel open his robes.
One of the crimson tendrils beneath his skin wormed its way toward his collarbone.
Then he understood.
* * *
“Lord Abe,” Ken’ishi said, bowing low in the doorway of the bizarrely decorated room, “thank you for seeing me.”
Incomprehensible charts and graphs blanketed the walls of the room, here in Lord Abe’s opulent Hakata house. A strange device of nested spinning discs, inscribed with arcane symbols, sat on the tatami near Lord Abe no Genmei. Near the door to the garden veranda, shuttered now against the ongoing cold spell, sat a strange device on a brass tripod, a tube angled toward the sky but surrounded by several small arms tipped with arrows and discs. Broad sheets of paper covered the table before him.
Lord Abe set down his brush and frowned. “You took your foolish time.”
The servant closed the door behind Ken’ishi.
The yin-yang master’s blunt abruptness put Ken’ishi back on his heels. “I...am sorry, Sensei,” he said. “How did you know I would come?”
“After I saw what you became when the Seal of Hidden Forms was opened, I investigated you. I consulted the Winds and Fortunes, the stars and planets, the kami. After all of that, there was no question you would come.” Lord Abe’s gaze drilled into Ken’ishi with a mixture of admonition and curiosity. “I must say, I have encountered a few oni in this world and in my travels to other realms, but I have never encountered a man becoming an oni.”
Ken’ishi’s breast smarted, hot and raw. Even the softest cloth chafed it now like a burn.
“I want to ask you so many questions about what is happening to you, moment by moment,” Lord Abe said, “but I suspect you feel you have already wasted too much time. You may well be correct. Nevertheless, it would go far to advance our knowledge of the flow of good and evil.”
“I will tell you everything you wish to know, Sensei, if you tell me it can be reversed.” Ken’ishi’s hands became fists as they rested on his thighs. Even as he said the words, however, the cold eel in his belly writhed with anger and protest.
Lord Abe leaned back and narrowed his eyes for a long moment. “I do not know if your condition can be reversed. What I do know is that rites of purification have existed for a thousand years, and with good reason. Evil and death pollute the living, pollute the living world, pollute our hearts. As far as my knowledge reaches, I know of no one who recognized his danger and tried to arrest the infection of evil. Evil is sticky. It clings to places and people like tar. Once one touches true evil, it is difficult to shed and just as caustic. It eats into us and begets more evil. We could spend hours, weeks—lifetimes!—discussing the nature of evil, however. As a warrior, you hold the most dangerous position of any person. Your stock in trade is death and strife. Perhaps you have thought about the weight of death upon your soul that killing bestows.”
“I have thought about that very much, Sensei, especially after the invasion. I was...responsible for much death.” Beyond that, had some remnant of Hakamadare, Taro, or Hatsumi clung to Ken’ishi, lodged under his skin like a splinter, even long after they had been defeated? Had their evil infected him somehow? Had Hatsumi always been on the path to evil, or had Hakamadare’s foulness stuck within her?
Lord Abe said, “I sensed this, especially when I saw your weapon.”
“You know of its history.”
“My grandmother and my aunt were Taira. It is one of the great relics of the Taira clan, long thought to be lost.”
“Then you know it is powerful.”
“I can sense that by being in the same room, but I do not know what powers it possesses.”
The door slid open again, and a servant entered with a tea service. For the first time ever, Ken’ishi saw Lord Abe smile with genuine pleasure.
“You are a lover of tea?” Ken’ishi said.
“I am, indeed. The fields around Kyoto produce wonderful tea, but I find the tea grown on Kyushu much more to my taste. There’s a greater earthiness to balance the air and water of its elements, and perhaps some fire as well. It is enough to make my long stint in such...rustic environs bearable. The tea to be found in the capital is more...rarefied.”
The servant poured for them, and Lord Abe waited with bright eyes.
Ken’ishi accepted his cup and sipped. It tasted like kindness, and he shuddered.
Lord Abe’s eyes bored into him again. “You might be one of the most troubled men I have ever met, but you restrain it all with such a force of will that I cannot fathom where you get your strength.”
“As you say, Sensei.”
Lord Abe said to the servant, “Tell Koumei I have need of him.”
The servant bowed and departed.
The onmyouji sipped his tea and rolled his eyes in pleasure. “Now then,” he said, beaming, “I wish you to tell me the story of your life.”
“My whole life?”
“Perhaps you should realize by now, I never mince words. Indeed, your whole life. Our lives are fraught with thousands of decisions, some of them momentous and far-reaching, others tiny, perhaps forgotten, but their importance can be just as far-reaching. Our lives are like a weave of those decisions, the shuttle of the loom ever moving. To calculate the most auspicious path for you, the path that might lead you out of this hell of your own making, we must unravel your life. And with that weave unraveled, we might begin to see patterns emerge. There is great magic in patterns. Look at that tapestry there.” He pointed to a large sheet of silk, meticulously painted with patterns of horizontal lines in sets of six. “These are the hexagrams of the I Ching, wisdom that has come down from the ancients of China, two thousand years dead. With these lines, the fates of farmers and emperors might be divined.”
“Will you divine my fate?”
“As I told you, your fate is more fluid than most men’s, but we might find a likely realm, determine whether you maintain the good or fall into evil. To attain the most accurate reading, you must leave out nothing.”
“But there is something...someone...I must protect. A reputation.”
“I see.” Lord Abe gazed into Ken’ishi for several long moments, then nodded slowly. “Already we glimpse the source. Secrets have a way of eating one from the inside, like a rat chewing through a bag of rice.”
“Some secrets are more dangerous than a rat.”
Lord Abe laughed. “Captain, I come from the capital, where secrets are daily currency, and the prices are high. You have no secret I have not heard before. Let me guess. There is a woman—there is always a woman, or sometimes a man. There is a love affair that must not be revealed.” His eyes bulged with feigned drama. “Lives are at stake!”
Ken’ishi scowled. “You make it sound trivial.”
“My dear captain, we onmyouji speak often of the Five Elements that make up all things, but there is one element more common than any of them. Love. We humans drink it, eat it, bathe in it. We wallow in the want of it, or the loss of it, or the clinging to it. Gravediggers, warriors, farmers, and emperors, love can be our sustenance, or it can eat us from within—like a rat. Every human walking between the Heavens and the Earth has been touched or mauled by love. It is the root of desires, and desires the downfall of men.” Lord Abe smiled reassuringly. “Rest easy in my discretion. I come from the capital, after all, where I would be dead if indiscreet.”
The door opened again, and Koumei entered, bowing.
“Our scribe has arrived,” Lord Abe said with a smile.
“Scribe?” Ken’ishi said.
“You are going to tell me the story of your life, Captain,” Lord Abe said. “My apprentice here is going to record every word of it.”
* * *
Before long, Koumei had assembled his writing desk, stacked several scrolls, and prepared his ink and brush. In large characters, he wrote: The First Scroll.
When Koumei gave the nod, Ken’ishi began his tale.
As the ink flowed and the scrolls unfurled, Ken’ishi marveled at his own stories, how he had escaped death so many times, how he had defied fortune and succeeded. And in the doing of it all, faced incredible horrors. The multitude of small weights upon his mind and spirit had grown so numerous, like a choking cloud of mosquitoes, or on some days a swarm of hornets, that he wondered he had not collapsed from it all. The duels, the dangers. Hakamadare. Kazuko. Hatsumi. Taro. Kiosé and Little Frog. Green Tiger and Silver Crane. The weeks of torture, the imprisonment. Green Tiger’s cruelties, the horrific execution of the Minamoto historian, Hirosuke, in the sea cave. The fights against Masoku and Fang Shi. The desperate battles against the Mongols. The power Silver Crane had granted him in return for the buckets of blood it had spilled. The gathering of the great storm that destroyed the invading fleet. Ken’ishi still wished he could be sure that the storm had been natural, a fortunate happenstance or the work of the gods, anything but the result of his own efforts in feeding Silver Crane’s thirst.
Spirit of the Ronin Page 30
