The Bard of Sorcery

by Gerard Houarner

  “Why?”

  Aki had to stop his random sword cuts of the fog to remember. An old priest, yes. Dying, he'd said. The shrine, obscure and rarely visited. Lost in mountains. Forgotten. Just as he'd hoped to be.

  In those early days, without weapons or armor, he'd been forced to beg for food, or steal, from strangers he met on his mist-shrouded road. In truth, he hadn't yet assumed the title of samurai. He'd never been tested in battle, and his tutors found his poetry lacking. Not enough worldly experience, they'd told him. He still called himself a ronin, and when others challenged him, he'd called on the necessary skills even without a sword to fend off larger men interested in tormenting him. Back then, maybe the shadow of his brother's death had still been on him.

  He'd found the shrine after despair had driven him from the populated countryside. He'd sought comfort, and his death, among cold mountain rocks, praying to the god of war, Hachiman, to grant him the mercy Ameratasu had denied him. Instead, the priest had bequeathed to Aki an old sword, the shrine's koto, the keeper and guardian of the spirit the shrine sheltered, a gift of fire, earth, air, and water. It had been a sacred gift, and with it Aki had found a part of him he thought he'd lost forever: the warrior.

  Aki held the blade up, studied the hamon, finding so much of what he knew about himself in the fire-born misty hues of the sword's cutting edge.

  “It was a gift,” Aki said.

  “And the ox?”

  “He came freely, of his own will.”

  “Poor, lost Aki with no wars to fight. You are the ghost of a samurai that never was searching for duty, for a reason to live. The duels and rebellions that once defined your kind are part of history, fit only for the kabuki stage. What use are you?”

  “That is who I am. What are you, Izanami?”

  “An answer to your question.”

  A powerful wind ripped through the woods, snapping branches and blowing leaves through the air like the flags of fallen warriors. Aki staggered, went down on one knee, braced himself with his back against the heaving side of the ox. He held the sword tight, point up, ready to strike, thinking either a typhoon had struck or the demon had summoned another of its kind to attack him.

  But the wind that carried off leaves also dispersed the fog, and in moments Aki felt his skin prickle.

  Ameratasu's kiss, the warmth of the sun.

  Aki looked up into a clear, blue sky, a perfect slate on which to mark the years of his life spent in darkness. The sun blazed, blinding, forcing him to turn away. Perhaps Ameratasu was not so merciful.

  He waited for the heat to become unbearable, for his flesh to sear and peel and finally ignite.

  But the day was just that, another day. How long had it been? He held his face up, eyes closed, and basked.

  The ox bellowed, as if welcoming the light.

  Aki stood, glanced down at his companion. The light was healing the animal's wounds. Or, perhaps, melting away the illusion of its injuries. He passed a hand over his head. The cuts he'd suffered were shrinking, the blood on his hands, drying, flaking, vanishing into the air.

  The wind died down, became a breeze. The ox snuffled, groaned, rose to its feet. The animal glared at him with one large eye, then shook its head and wandered off the path where the woods had given way to a small, intensely flowered valley, down to flooded rice fields and nearby oxen, as if to find old friends.

  Above the fields, a village stood nestled in the folds of the rugged terrain. Rugged mountains loomed, raw and bristling in the sunlight. Water splashed and gurgled over rocky stream beds. Hearth smoke hung over the thatch roofs, the smell inviting. Children ran, playing a game Aki had not seen before, ducking through and behind buildings, never staying still long enough to be seen clearly. He was suddenly restless, as if a part of him was eager to join in. Spade-ploughs, sickles, buckets and other farming implements lay scattered and abandoned in a nearly balanced random pattern reminiscent of a rock garden. Baskets stood uncovered, empty.

  From inside one of the houses, a young girl sang. The brisk sweeping of a broom kept time for the random clatter of wood, utensils and pots.

  The farmers were missing from the fields.

  From the nearby mountain, an unearthly chanting of priests echoed, accompanied by slow drumming, then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  Aki looked to Ameratasu. The sky was wrong. Too pure. There should have been clouds, mist clinging to rock. The riot of orchids scattered across the landscape moved him with the richness of their colors, but there were too many, as if his eyes, starved for color and form, had created an unreasonable feast. Chrysanthemum mingled with sakura and ume blossoms in a crash of seasons delivering Fall's flowering with Spring's promise of cherries and plums.

  It was as if the painter who had composed Aki's half-finished world of fog-shrouded forest had gone to school to learn more of his craft, and returned drunk on nature's possibilities, but blind to its subtle reality.

  Birds. The birds were gone, when they'd stayed with him even in the fog. Their songs were missing from the panorama, as was the buzz and click of insect life.

  Aki wondered if his curse had abandoned him, leaving him on the wrong side of the border between life and death.

  Izanami was gone. There was only one place his tormentor could be, only one place he could go.

  He walked down a steep path, entered the village. Ameratasu's kiss turned cold on his face.

  He went through every house. Household goods were stowed neatly in their places. In each house, tea, rice and fish waited for him. There were no fires burning, though the smell of smoke and cooking remained as thick as the haze hanging over the village. Children ran, just out of sight, giggling. Whispers came to him from behind screens, the other side of doors, around corners, but no one appeared to welcome him, or chase him off.

  He could live the rest of his days, forever if that was his fate, in comfort and peace. Alone.

  Another trap.

  His sword was useless. He pressed the blade against his forehead, hoping the spirit within might offer guidance. Instead, he heard himself ask, “Who cursed you?”

  A woman's laughter rose from the fields, cut-off abruptly.

  The demon had provoked physical combat after Aki's attempt at persuading it to leave him alone failed. He'd assumed music would fail against such a powerful spirit. But he'd never tried the breath of his life, the sound of his soul.

  Aki went to find his ox.

  The animal stood quietly, apart from its grazing brethren, as if waiting for Aki to come along so they could both move on. Aki replaced the sword in the wooden scabbard but kept the weapon tucked at his waist, then drew out a flute from a saddlebag.

  A short shakuhachi. He put it aside. The next was the long bamboo. No.

  Bone. His hands trembled. When had he last played the bone flute?

  He put his lips to the instrument, remembered a kiss to his wife.

  She was the ghost he thought he would never see. His dead wife, Yuriko. He put the flute down, afraid.

  He'd stayed by the body, waiting for her angry spirit to return. He'd failed her. His duty had been to protect her, but men had robbed and raped her on the road, left her dead. The day had been gloomy, overcast. The fog was thick when the body was found.

  His younger brother, who'd come to visit, had put up a fight but had been chopped to pieces. He'd died doing what Aki should have done.

  His family said the lines he wrote for the dead at the funerals made him samurai, at last. His father was proud.

  Aki never cared about what they thought or said. He'd forgotten the comfort they tried to give him, hidden the source of his damnation behind veils of mist.

  She never returned. Even with his betrayal of her trust, the ghost of his wife did not deliver her vengeance to him. He was not worthy.

  Even his brother refused to haunt him.

  He'd rescued the bone from the pyre when no one was looking. He'd fashioned the instrument in the depths of madness.
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  If he played well enough, with air drawn deep from the land of death, on a flute of bone carved from the remains of his wife's thigh, would Yuriko return to claim the curse that had fallen over him? Would he see her in all her terror and hatred?

  Izanami. She who invites. Was she embracing him, at last, in the horror of her death?

  It would be such a relief to find her again, like the steel of a short sword sliding through his entrails.

  He blew from his heart, from his sorrow and regret, the anguish of Yuriko's absence, and of his forgetting her for so long.

  The song that took flight was low, at first. Cautious. But rooted in grief. Anger snapped at its edges. Then regret added its tones, colored by sorrow. And at last Aki's song soared with pain under its wings, as great and deep a thing as he'd ever made, wide as the seas that surrounded land, and just as deep and dangerous. The song he made flowed from his lips until it filled the valley, echoed through the countryside, nested in the surrounding peaks to wait for the comfort of winter's snows.

  The villagers came. Men and women, young and old. A walking Obon festival of the dead. They came to him, following his song, under his spell, and passed him, heading for the woods and whatever lay beyond, like so many other ghosts he'd set free during his travels.

  No one was paying for this work, but as with his duel with Izanami, he didn't mind. It was time for him to play this song, as it had been time for him to meet his match.

  The ox moved away, leaving him with the company he'd raised.

  The villagers ignored him as they walked past, as if enthralled by his performance, or caught in the glaring truth of their condition. But Aki studied them as he played, haunted by their eyes, the lines of their profiles, and was startled once, then again, until the shock of recognition no longer moved him.

  He knew these ghosts. They belonged to his past, to the years he'd lost wandering in fog. His mother, father. Dead. Uncles and aunts, cousins, friends and allies of the clan. Children he'd played with, warriors with whom he'd trained and studied.

  The girl for whom he'd written his first poem.

  The older boy who always beat him at swordplay, until the last time they sparred.

  His brother, whole, eyes wide, marching with a martial step.

  Aki's breath faltered and the line wavered. He took up the song, staying strong and true, as precise and certain as a sword stroke. He watched his brother go by and let him go to find his peace.

  Had Aki's spirit been in the village earlier, running with his brother through the houses?

  No. He was still alive. But the rest of the children who walked by were the ghosts of those lost to illness, accident, the harshness of men and nature. Like his brother. He'd played with them all, in his mother's village.

  He'd found his way back to the place his family had visited often, for more than paying respect during festivals, where he'd taken his first cuts with a sword and confounded himself in the woods chasing foxes. And where he'd met Yuriko when they were both too young to know they'd fall in love.

  Under Ameratasu's harsh gaze, in the clumsy rendering of whoever had re-shaped this place, he hadn't recognized his second childhood home.

  Again, he wanted to stop, to say farewell to his parents, to everyone he'd known. But he was already doing that, with his flute. So he kept playing, fingers slowly moving across the instrument, as delicate and precise as a kabuki actor in the depths of his role, until the last of the spirits was gone.

  Silence cupped him in a moment of death.

  He stuck the flute next to the sword at his waist and went back to the village. There were no more children running, no tea, rice and fish. Household goods were gone from their storage spaces. Only the Noh mask that had hidden the identity of his foe remained, alongside a pair of massive gloves with talons trimmed, laid out on an open sleeping mat as if ready to be put on for another presentation.

  There was no fog to left to hide in, no compelling road to lead him elsewhere. The ox still waited in the field, watching the houses. Aki was tempted to sit on its back and see where the animal would take him, but sensed he'd only get burned under the sun while the ox stood its ground.

  He found himself missing the hardness of his wandering ways. At least he'd had a taste of life on the road dealing with everyone else's demons. He'd been able to define himself as something. A banished ronin was better than whatever he'd turned into.

  “Yuriko,” he said, and again he called her, louder. She hadn't passed him while he played.

  The barest breeze answered through an open door.

  “Yuriko, do you want to forgive me? Are you here wondering if our time together was worthy of our love so you can go on in peace? Or will you come in the night when I sleep for your justice?”

  She didn't answer.

  He drew the sword. He remembered the last time he'd sought his death by its edge, was tempted again by the promised certainty of the act. All or nothing, that was the way of life. Either you took a breath, or you didn't. There was no in between. This was a realization ghosts and demons never grasped.

  If Yuriko wanted to punish him, she might leave him here, in the borderlands, naked and exposed to all that he'd done. Waiting, like the ox.

  Maybe it was time to try, again.

  Aki stared at the blade, his fear sharp. He'd fail, again. Death would not take him. It had no reason to do so.

  He found the reflection of his eyes in the blade's mirror polish. He held the sword up, stared at what it held. His face. Still young. Frozen. A rope of responsibility tied into a knot by loss. The eyes were old, the lips sad. When was the last time he'd laughed?

  Something moved behind the reflection of his head.

  He held the sword steady.

  He willed himself to be still, to let the creature hiding behind the Hannya mask strike him down. That would be an ending.

  It wasn't the mask that appeared in sword blade, but a human face. A woman's, by her long hair. The maggots writhing in her eye sockets, the flesh rotting and drooping from her face, confounded her true visage. For a moment.

  “Yuriko,” Aki said.

  Her lips parted. Was she smiling?

  “I'm sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” the woman answered.

  It was Yuriko's voice.

  “For – “

  The hand she held up stopped him. Skin sloughed off of bone.

  “I miss you,” she said. “I love you. But I only see what I am. What are you?”

  Aki started to say, “Your murderer.” But, of course, that was not true. Not completely. What more? What else?

  His gaze could not penetrate his reflection. “I don't know,” he answered.

  She laughed, as if he'd told a good joke. And then she was gone.

  He kept the sword up, studying what the mirror of its finish held, listening for the spirit in the steel, the whisper in the breeze, to answer the riddle. All he could think of was that she'd been the ghost behind the demon mask, and that she'd been waiting for him all this time, until his wandering took him past the place where they'd first known each other so she could attack him and avenge the failure of his promise to protect her.

  But she hadn't been waiting. She wasn't the spirit behind the mask. He'd been the one hanging on to her, and to everyone else he'd left behind when he vanished into the fog of his damnation.

  His curse. Not hers. Not the spirit of the sun bearing witness to his disgrace.

  He was the ghost, the demon, the spirit he couldn't name. Ameratasu hadn't banished him from her sight. He'd run from hers, from the light of day, from family and friends, duty and life. It wasn't shame that had driven him from the living, but terror. He'd been afraid of a life without Yuriko, without all that he'd wished so strongly he might have with her. The hole his brother's death made had threatened to swallow him.

  He chose to hide behind the mask of his wife's rage, his regret at not being able to protect her and his family, to fulfill his promises to the both of the
m. He hadn't failed her or anyone else. Only himself, his true master.

  Aki took a breath. Life. Another. Savored the scent of pine needles freed from a blanket of snow. Drew the bone flute, kissed it.

  He'd shed his tears. They'd opened the way for his past to speak to him so he might release it from the service to his pain. The past was all gone, now. He'd let it all go.

  Could Shöki himself have driven out the demons possessing him?

  Aki smiled. Felt Yuriko smiling with him.

  Almost certainly. Legends were no fools. He probably would have done it in half the time, too.

  And now, what would Shöki do? Stand in the ashes of the past, and be what? Return to the world, and be what?

  His hand gripped a sacred sword that had left an old shrine to find a new one. Where he stood was just another cold and lonely place, unworthy of the kama inhabiting the weapon. The sword and its spirit were not done with the world, and neither was he. Though only a masterless samurai, he still had purpose and duty. Blessed steel defined him. He knew how to deal with demons and spirits. He was a warrior. All of that seemed like enough to get him through the days remaining to him.

  Aki left the house, passed through the village rousing as if from a long sleep. The sun peeked between clouds skimming over nearby peaks as farmers appeared in the paddies like stout and sudden sprouts. The sounds of domestic life drifted from the houses, and the landscape had lost much of its flowery excess.

  On his way down to the ox, earning curious glances from the farmers, Aki encountered a little girl coming up the path. He tried to make way for her, but she took in his armor and stared at his sword, then dove into the brush. He hurried to the animal, not wanting to cause a panic or provoke a defensive pursuit by staff-wielding farmers.

  He'd climbed atop the ox by the time the first group of peasants had gathered and, armed with sickles, were beginning their approach. The ox turned and headed for the road without urging. Aki made a show of putting the sword and flute away among his bags hanging from the animal's flanks.

  The little girl appeared suddenly on a rise, hands on her hips, hair lifting from a breeze, and called out from the safe distance, “What are you doing with an ox?”