by Lian Hearn
“This one is different,” Takeshi said. “I wish it were possible to marry her.”
“You should marry,” Shigeru replied. “This girl is probably not suitable for your wife, but someone else could be found.”
“Yes, someone chosen by Iida Sadamu to strengthen our alliance with the Tohan! I prefer to stay single. I don’t notice you hurrying to marry, either.”
“For similar reasons,” Shigeru replied.
“Iida has far too much say in our lives,” Takeshi said quietly. “Let’s kill him!”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
Takeshi breathed out deeply. “At last!”
They rode back to Hagi together, talking about horses, and parted at the stone bridge, Takeshi taking the horses back to the Mori stables before joining his mother and brother, Shigeru riding through the town toward his mother’s house. The unrest of the previous years had largely settled down: the town had regained its prosperous and industrious nature, but he hardly noticed it or the greetings that were called to him. He was thinking about the boy in Mino.
He ate the evening meal distractedly, but his mother did not notice; her attention was entirely taken up by her younger son. Chiyo was also delighted to have Takeshi in the house again and kept appearing with more bowls of his favorite food. There was a festive atmosphere, and everyone drank a great deal of wine. Finally, Shigeru excused himself, saying he had pressing affairs to attend to; Ichiro and Takeshi immediately offered their help.
“I do have some things to discuss with my brother while he’s here,” Shigeru said. Ichiro was happy enough to remain behind and take a few more cups of wine. Shigeru and Takeshi withdrew to the back room, where the scrolls and records were kept. Shigeru swiftly told Takeshi the news about their nephew, while Takeshi listened with astonishment and mounting excitement.
“I’ll come with you,” he said at once when he heard Shigeru’s intention to find the boy and bring him home. “You can’t go alone.”
“I can leave the city alone and go traveling. Everyone’s used to my eccentricities now . . .”
“You have been planning this for years,” Takeshi said with admiration. “I am sorry I ever doubted you.”
“I have been planning something. But I did not know what until now! I had to convince everyone that I was powerless and harmless. It is my main defense. If we travel together, it will make our uncles suspicious.”
“Then let us leave the city separately and meet somewhere. I will go to Tsuwano or Yamagata. I will pretend it is for some festival. Tase will be my excuse and my cover. Everyone knows I put pleasure above duty most of the time!”
Shigeru laughed. “I am sorry I scolded you so often for it when it was no more than a pretence.”
“I forgive you,” Takeshi said. “I forgive you everything because we will finally have our revenge. Where shall we meet? Where is this village anyway?”
Beyond Inuyama, Shizuka had said, in the mountains on the edge of the Three Countries. Shigeru had never been that far to the east. The brothers pored over such maps as they had, trying to make sense of their rivers, roads, and mountain ranges. Mino was too insignificant to appear on them. Shigeru turned to the records he had compiled from Shizuka’s information, but Mino and the surrounding areas must have had no Tribe families, for there was no mention of them.
“In the mountains behind Inuyama,” Takeshi mused. “We used to know the area around Chigawa well. Why don’t we meet there, near the cavern that Iida fell into? We can pray that the same gods who led him there will oblige us and enable us to finish their work.”
They arranged to meet there a few days after the Star Festival. Takeshi would ride from Yamagata; Shigeru would take the northern way across Yaegahara.
“Now I must go to my Tase and tell her the good news,” Takeshi said. “She’ll be happy if we go to Yamagata. She longs for me to meet her family. I’ll see you at the Ogre’s Storehouse.”
“Till then,” Shigeru replied, and the brothers embraced.
SHIGERU WANTED to leave immediately, but while he was making preparations for his departure, his mother began to complain of feeling unwell. She was often affected by the summer heat and he thought little of it. Then Chiyo told him there was some virulent fever going around: many people were dying in Hagi.
“Almost from one day to the next,” she said with foreboding. “They are well in the morning, in the evening they are burning, and by dawn they have passed on.”
She encouraged him to leave at once to protect himself.
“My brother has already gone away. I cannot leave my mother to die with neither of her sons present,” he replied, filled with concern for her and anguish at the delay her sickness would cause him.
“Shall I send word to Lord Takeshi?” Chiyo asked.
“Insist he does not return home.” Shigeru said. “There is no point in him risking infection.”
That night, two of the household servants died, and the following morning his mother’s maid followed them into that other world. When Shigeru went to his mother’s room, he saw that she, too, was near death. He spoke to her, and she opened her eyes and seemed to recognize him. He thought she might reply; she frowned slightly, then murmured, “Tell Takeshi . . .” but she did not go on. Two days later she was dead. The next day he felt a sense of doom descend on him; his head ached fiercely and he could eat nothing.
By the time his mother’s funeral took place, Shigeru was delirious, burning with fever, assailed by terrible hallucinations, made worse by his sense of urgency that Takeshi would go to the Ogre’s Storehouse and Shigeru would not be there.
Chiyo hardly left his side, tending him as she had when he was a child. Sometimes priests came to the doorway and chanted; Chiyo burned incense and brewed bitter infusions, sent for a spirit girl, and muttered spells and incantations.
When he began to recover, he remembered her weeping beside him, the tears falling, it seemed, throughout the night, when they were alone in the struggle against death and all formalities were removed between them.
“You did not need to cry so much,” he said. “Your spells worked. I have recovered.” He had felt well enough to bathe, and he sat in a light cotton robe—for it was still very hot—on the veranda while the upstairs room where he had spent so many days of sickness was cleaned and purified.
Chiyo had brought tea and fruit; though she was delighted that he was well, her eyes were still puffy and red-rimmed. She looked at him and could not control herself. He saw the grief was for something else and fear stabbed at him.
“What has happened?”
“Forgive me,” she said, her voice breaking with sobs. “I will send Ichiro to you.”
Shigeru waited for his old teacher with mounting dread. The man’s face did not reassure him: he was as grief-stricken as Chiyo. But his voice was firm, and he spoke with his usual self-control, without shrinking from the blow or trying to soften it.
“Lord Takeshi is dead. A letter came from Matsuda Shingen. He died in Yamagata and is buried at Terayama.”
Shigeru thought stupidly, He will not be waiting for me. I don’t have to worry about that. Then he could hear nothing but the sound of the river beyond the garden. Its waters seemed to rise around him. He had lost Takeshi in its murky depths after all. Now all he wanted was for the water to submerge and choke him.
He heard a harsh sobbing and realized it was himself, a terrible pain spreading through chest and throat.
“It was the fever? He did not escape it?”
Why now, just when they were about to act together? Why had the plague not taken him in his brother’s place? He saw Takeshi on Raku’s back, galloping through the water meadows, his look of delight when he won the race, his face bright, intensely alive, the emotion with which he spoke of the girl, Tase.
“I am afraid not,” Ichiro said bleakly. “No one knows what happened. Matsuda says the body bore many wounds.”
“He was murdered?” Shigeru felt the sword
cuts in his own flesh. “In Yamagata? Did anyone know who he was? Has any reparation been made?”
“Believe me, I have tried to find out,” Ichiro said. “But if anyone knows, they are not telling.”
“My uncles have been informed, presumably. What has their reaction been? Have they demanded apologies, explanations?”
“They have expressed their deep regret,” Ichiro said. “I have letters from them.”
“I must go to them.” Shigeru tried to rise but found that his body would not obey him. He was trembling, as if his fever had returned.
“You are still not well,” Ichiro said, with unusual gentleness. “Do not confront them now. Wait a few days until you are fully recovered and have regained your self-control.”
Shigeru knew Ichiro was right, but the pain of waiting, while he did not know how Takeshi had died or what the Otori clan’s response would be, was intolerable to him. The days of grief and mourning dragged slowly by. He could not comprehend the cruelty of fate that had given him a nephew only to take his beloved brother.
Kenji will know, if anyone does, he thought, and wrote to his friend, sending the letter through Muto Yuzuru. He tried to heal grief with rage. If his uncles would do nothing, then he himself would have to avenge his brother against the men who had killed him, against their lord. But the lack of knowledge paralyzed him, leaving him unable to act. He longed for the days of fever to return, for with all their torment they had been more bearable than this terrible helpless grief. He had thought himself not made for despair, but now its darkness closed around him. When he slept, he dreamed of Takeshi as a child in the river. He dived repeatedly, but his brother’s pale limbs slipped from his grasp and his body disappeared with the flow of the tide.
Awake, he could not believe Takeshi was dead. He heard his footfall, his voice, and saw his shape everywhere. Takeshi seemed embodied in every object in the house. There he had sat, this bowl he had drunk from, this straw horse was one he played with years ago. Every corner of the garden bore his imprint—the street, the riverbank, the whole city.
Seeking some activity to distract him, he thought he should check on the horses now that Takeshi was no longer there to care for them, and found that Mori Hiroki had taken it upon himself to oversee them. They grazed unconcerned; he was relieved to see the black-maned gray still there, Raku, who would forever remind him of his brother, and the black colt from the same mare as his own horse, Kyu.
“Where is the bay?” he said to Hiroki.
“Takeshi took him,” Hiroki replied. “He made a joke about it, saying Raku was too recognizable, and Kuri was a better disguise.”
“Then we will never see the horse again,” Shigeru said. “If he survived, someone will have stolen him by now.”
“It’s a shame. Such a clever horse! And Takeshi had taught him so much.” Hiroki continued to stare toward the horses while he said, “His death is a terrible loss.”
“So many of us are gone,” Shigeru said. So many of the boys who fought each other with stones.
TWO WEEKS LATER, when he was beginning to recover some of his physical strength, Chiyo came saying a messenger had arrived from Yamagata.
“I told him to give me the letter, but he insists he’ll put it into no one’s hands but yours. I told him Lord Otori did not receive grooms, but he won’t go away.”
“Did he give his name?”
“Kuroda, or something like that.”
“Send him to me,” Shigeru said. “Bring wine and see no one disturbs us.”
The man came to the room, knelt before him, and greeted him. His voice was uneducated, the accent that of Yamagata. Chiyo was right: he looked like a groom, possibly once a foot soldier, with an old scar across his left forearm, but Shigeru knew he was from the Tribe, knew he would be tattooed beneath the clothes in the Kuroda fashion, as Shizuka had told him, could no doubt dissemble his features and appear in many different disguises.
“Muto Kenji sends you his greetings,” Kuroda said. “He has written to you.” He took the scroll from the breast of his jacket and gave it to Shigeru. Shigeru unrolled it and recognized the seal, the old way of writing “fox.”
“He has also told me everything he could find out, and I myself already had some details,” Kuroda said, his face and voice expressionless. “You may ask me any questions when you have finished reading.”
“Were you there?” Shigeru asked at once.
“I was in Yamagata. I knew of the incident as soon as it happened. But no one knew until some days later that the murdered man was Lord Takeshi. He was in traveling clothes: everyone else with him perished inside the house. It seems the Tohan surrounded it and set fire to it. Your brother escaped the flames but was cut down outside.”
Shigeru read the letter, his face muscles clenched, saving other questions for afterward, when he might be able to speak without weeping. When he had finished reading, silence fell on the room. The cicadas droned; the river ebbed.
Finally, Shigeru said calmly, detachedly, “Kenji writes that there was a fight earlier, outside an inn?”
“Lord Takeshi was provoked and insulted by a group of low-rank Tohan warriors. He was not drunk, but everyone else had been drinking heavily. The Tohan often act in this way in Yamagata: they swagger around like conquerors and always end up insulting the Otori and—forgive me—Lord Shigeru in particular. Lord Takeshi bore it as long as was humanly possible, but inevitably a fight broke out—six or seven of them against one. After Lord Takeshi had killed two of them, the rest ran away.” He was silent for a moment. “It seems he was an excellent swordsman.”
“Yes,” Shigeru said briefly, remembering the strength and grace of the young man.
“He returned to the house where he was staying. He was with a young woman, a very beautiful girl, only seventeen years old, a singer.”
“I suppose she is dead too?”
“Yes, and her entire family. The Tohan said they were Hidden, but everyone in Yamagata knows they were not.”
“The men were definitely Tohan?”
“They wore the triple oakleaf and came from Inuyama. They forbade anyone to move Lord Takeshi’s body—no one knew who he was, but a merchant from Hagi who was visiting Yamagata recognized him. He spread the word, went to the castle himself, and demanded the body be released to him. It has been very hot this summer. Lord Takeshi needed to be buried. The merchant took the body immediately to Terayama. The murderers, of course, were aghast: they had had no idea they had killed Lord Otori’s brother. They surrendered themselves to the lord at the castle, pleading only to be allowed to kill themselves honorably, but the lord advised them to return to Inuyama and inform Iida themselves.”
“Iida has punished them?”
“Far from it. He is reported to have received the news with pleasure.” Kuroda hesitated. “I don’t want to offend Lord Otori . . .”
“Tell me what he said.”
“His exact words were, ‘One less of those Otori to worry about. Too bad it wasn’t the brother.’ Far from punishing them, he rewarded them and now looks on them with favor.” Kuroda pressed his lips firmly together and stared at the floor.
Rage seemed to lick his gut with its molten tongue. He welcomed it, for it dried up grief and tears instantaneously. Rage would sustain him now, rage and his craving for revenge.
His uncles’ behavior did nothing to dull his rage. They expressed their profound regret for Takeshi’s death and for his mother’s, as well as their deep concern for his health. When Shigeru demanded to know what their response would be and when they would seek apologies and recompense from Iida, they were first evasive and finally adamant. No demands would be made. Takeshi’s death was an unfortunate accident. Lord Iida could not be held responsible.
