The Harsh Cry of the Heron

by Lian Hearn

  He spent most of the night awake in the company of grief, and at first light called for Minoru and dictated the letter to Sonoda and Ai, but before affixing his seal he spoke again to Taku.

  “I find myself more than usually reluctant to order the deaths of these young people. Can we turn to any alternative?”

  “They were involved in an assassination attempt on your own family,” Taku replied. “You yourself established the laws and the penalties. What would you do with them? To pardon them and set them free would seem like weakness, and long imprisonment is crueler than swift death.”

  “But will their deaths prevent future attacks? Will they not simply enrage the Kikuta further against me and my family?”

  “Akio’s feud against you is already absolute. He will never relent while you remain alive,” Taku replied, and then added, “But the deaths will remove two more assassins, and sooner or later they will run out of those willing or competent. You must outlive them.”

  “You sound like Kenji,” Takeo said. “As realistic and pragmatic as he always was. I suppose you will take over the leadership of the family now?”

  “I will discuss it with my mother. And my brother, of course, for form’s sake. Zenko has few Tribe skills, and carries our father’s name, but he is still my senior in age.”

  Takeo raised his eyebrows slightly. He had preferred to leave the handling of Tribe matters to Kenji and Taku, trusting Kenji completely. He was uneasy at the idea of Zenko sharing in some of their secrets.

  “Your brother has approached me with the proposition to adopt one of his sons,” he said, allowing a note of surprise to enter his voice, which he knew Taku would not miss. “Sunaomi will accompany me to Hagi. I’ll leave within the hour. But there are many things we must discuss first. Let’s walk in the garden.”

  “Lord Otori,” Minoru reminded him, “will you finish this letter first?”

  “No, bring it with us. I will discuss the matter further with my wife before I come to a decision. We will send it from Hagi.”

  The early light was gray, the morning damp and humid, with more rain threatening. The journey would be wet and uncomfortable. Takeo could already anticipate how the ache in his old injuries would be made worse by the days on horseback. He was aware that Zenko was probably watching him, resenting his closeness to Taku, knowing he would be confiding in his brother. The reminder that Zenko was also Muto by birth, and related, like Taku, to the Kikuta, had put him on his guard. He hoped it was true that Zenko’s Tribe skills were negligible, and spoke quietly, telling Taku briefly about Lord Kono’s message, as well as the smuggled weapons.

  Taku absorbed all this information in silence; his only comment was, “Your trust in my brother has been eroded, I imagine.”

  “He has renewed his oaths to me, but we all know oaths mean nothing in the face of ambition and the lust for power. Your brother has always blamed me for your father’s death—and now it seems the Emperor and his court do too. I do not trust either your brother or his wife, but while their sons are in my care I think their ambitions can be contained. They must be contained—the alternatives are that we fall again into civil war or I must order your brother to take his own life. I will avoid this for as long as I can. But I must ask you to be more than usually discreet, and to disclose nothing that might advantage him.”

  Taku’s habitual expression of amused cynicism had darkened.

  “I would kill him myself if he were to betray you,” he said.

  “No!” Takeo replied swiftly. “That brother should kill brother is unthinkable. Those days of blood feuds are over. Your brother, like everyone else—including yourself, my dear Taku—must be contained by law.” He paused for a moment and then said quietly, “But tell me: Did Kenji ever speak to you about the prophecy that was given to me, that I am safe from death, except at the hands of my son?”

  “Yes, after one of the attempts on your life, he remarked that the prophecy might be true after all—he was not usually credulous about prophecies and signs. He told me then what had been spoken about you. He said it partly to explain your constant fearlessness, and why the threat of attack did not paralyze you or make you ferociously cruel, as it would most men.”

  “I am not credulous either,” Takeo replied, smiling ruefully. “And sometimes I believe in the truth of the words, and sometimes I don’t. It has suited me to believe because it has given me time to achieve everything I wanted, without living in fear. However, the boy is sixteen years old now, easily old enough, in the Tribe, to take life. So now I find myself trapped—can I cease to believe when it no longer suits me?”

  “It would be easy enough to get rid of the boy,” Taku offered.

  “Taku, you have learned nothing from all my efforts! Those days of secret assassination are over. I could not take your brother’s life when my knife was at his throat in the heat of battle. I could never order the death of my own son.”

  After a moment Takeo went on, “Who else knows of this prophecy?”

  “On the occasion Kenji told me, Dr. Ishida was present. He had been treating the wound, and trying to control the fever. Kenji spoke as much to reassure him that you might not be at the point of death, for Ishida had given up all hope.”

  “Zenko does not know?”

  “He knows of the existence of your son—he was in the Muto village when news came of Yuki’s death. Everyone talked about little else for weeks. But I don’t think Kenji spoke of the prophecy on any other occasion save the one I have just told you about.”

  “Then let it remain a secret between us,” Takeo said.

  The younger man nodded. “I will stay here with them, as you suggest,” he said. “Watch closely, make sure Chikara leaves with Ishida, and maybe discover more of his parents’ true intentions.”

  As they parted, Taku said, “Just one more thought. If you do adopt Sunaomi, and he becomes your son…”

  “That is when I definitely choose not to believe!” Takeo replied, assuming a lightness he did not feel.

  12

  Takeo set out around the Hour of the Snake; the rain held off, but toward evening it began to fall heavily. Sunaomi was quiet, eager to behave correctly and with courage yet clearly apprehensive about leaving his parents and family. Two of Zenko’s retainers came with him to take care of him, while Takeo was accompanied by Jun and Shin, as well as a band of about twenty warriors and Minoru. They stayed the first night in a small village, where several inns had been established in these years of prosperity now that merchants and their goods traveled frequently between Hofu and Hagi. The road was kept in good repair, graveled or paved for its entire length; each small town was guarded, and travel had become safe and swift. Despite the rain, they came to the confluence of the rivers on the evening of the third day, and were met by Miyoshi Kahei, who had already been alerted by messengers that Lord Otori was traveling north.

  Kahei had been rewarded for his loyalty to Takeo with the city of Yamagata and the lands that surrounded it, the luxuriant forest that made up the heart of the Middle Country and the rich farmland on either side of the river. Yamagata had been ceded to the Tohan after the Otori defeat at Yaegahara, and its return to the Middle Country had been an occasion of prolonged and ecstatic celebration. The Miyoshi were one of the greatest hereditary families of the Otori clan, and Kahei was a popular and effective ruler. He was also an inspired military leader, an expert in strategy and tactics who, Takeo thought, secretly regretted the years of peace and longed for some new conflict to test the validity of his theories and the strength and skill of his men. His brother, Gemba, had more sympathy for Takeo’s desire to put an end to violence, and had become a disciple of Kubo Makoto and a follower of the Way of the Houou.

  “You will go to Terayama?” Kahei questioned after they exchanged greetings and were riding side by side northward, toward the city.

  “I have not yet decided,” Takeo replied. “It is not that I don’t deeply desire to, but I do not want to delay getting to Hagi.”
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  “Shall I send word to the temple, and they will come to the castle?”

  He could see no way of avoiding one or the other without offending his oldest friends. However, Kahei had several lively children who did not seem much in awe of their powerful father, and that evening, as Sunaomi opened up in the affectionate teasing atmosphere, Takeo thought suddenly that it would do the boy no harm to visit the most sacred place of the Otori, see the graves of Shigeru, Takeshi, and Ichiro, and meet Makoto and the other warriors of great spiritual maturity who made the temple their center and home. Sunaomi seemed both intelligent and sensitive—the Way of the Houou might be the correct discipline for him, as it had proved to be for Takeo’s daughter Shigeko. He felt an unexpected spark of interest—how wonderful it would be to have a son to raise and educate in this way; the strength of the emotion surprised him. Arrangements were made to leave early the next morning. Minoru was to remain at Yamagata to oversee administrative details and prepare such records of evidence as might be necessary for the current tribunals.

  The rain had turned to mist and the face of the earth was shrouded in gray; above the mountains the sky was leaden, and swathes of pearl-white cloud drifted like banners on the slopes. The cedars, their trunks streaked by the rain, dripped moisture. The horses’ tread was dulled by the sodden ground. They rode in silence; Takeo was in no less pain than he had anticipated, and his mind was occupied with memories of his first visit to the temple and those who had ridden with him so long ago. He recalled in particular Muto Kenji, the most recent name to be written in the ledgers of the dead. Kenji, who on that journey had pretended to be a foolish old man, fond of wine and painting, who that night had embraced Takeo. I must be getting fond of you. I don’t want to lose you. Kenji, who had both betrayed him and saved his life, who had vowed to protect him while he lived, and who had kept that vow despite all appearances to the contrary. He felt an aching sense of loneliness, for Kenji’s death had left a gap in his life that would never be filled, and he felt freshly vulnerable, as vulnerable as he had first felt after the fight with Kikuta Kotaro that had left him crippled. Kenji had taught him to defend himself with the left hand dominant, had supported and advised him in the early years of establishing his control over the Three Countries, had split the Tribe for his sake and brought four of the five families under his control, all but the Kikuta, and had maintained the network of spies that kept him and his realm secure.

  His thoughts then turned to Kenji’s only surviving descendant, his grandson, held by the Kikuta.

  My son, he thought, with the familiar mixture of regret, longing, and anger. He has never known his father or his grandfather. He will never say the necessary prayers for his ancestors. There is no one else to honor Kenji’s memory. What if I were to try to recover him?

  But that would mean revealing the boy’s existence to his wife, his daughters, to the whole country. The secret had lain hidden for so long he did not know how he could speak of it. If only the Kikuta would be prepared to negotiate in some way, to make some concession. Kenji had thought they might be; he had chosen to approach Akio, and now he was dead, and two more young people would die as a result. Like Taku, Takeo wondered how many assassins the Kikuta had left, but unlike Taku the idea that their number must be dwindling did not lift his spirits.

  The path was narrow, and the small group—Sunaomi and his two retainers, Takeo’s two guards from the Tribe and another three Otori warriors, and two of Kahei’s men—rode in single file. But after they left the horses at the lodging place at the foot of the holy mountain, Takeo called to Sunaomi to walk beside him, telling him a little of the history of the temple, of the Otori heroes who were buried there, of the houou, the sacred bird that nested in the deep groves behind the temple, and of the warriors who dedicated themselves to the Way of the Houou.

  “We may send you here, when you are older; my own daughter comes here every winter, and has done so since she was nine years old.”

  “I will do whatever my uncle desires for me,” the boy replied. “I wish I might see a houou with my own eyes!”

  “We will get up early in the morning and go to the grove before we return to Yamagata. You will almost certainly see one, for there are many of them now.”

  “Chikara gets to travel with the kirin,” Sunaomi exclaimed, “and I get to see the houou! That’s fair. But, uncle, what do you have to learn to follow the Way of the Houou?”

  “The people we are coming to meet will tell you—monks like Kuba Makoto; warriors like Miyoshi Gemba. The main teaching is to renounce violence.”

  Sunaomi looked disappointed. “So I won’t learn the way of the bow and the sword? That is what my father teaches us, and what he wants us to excel at.”

  “You will continue at training with the sons of warriors in Hagi, or in Inuyama when we reside there. But the Way of the Houou demands greater self-mastery than any other, and greater strength, physical and mental. You may not be suited for it.”

  He saw a light come into the boy’s eyes. “I hope I will be,” Sunaomi said, half-aloud.

  “My oldest daughter will tell you more about it when we get to Hagi.”

  Takeo could hardly bear to speak the name of the town, so great was his longing to be there and to be with Kaede. However, he hid these feelings, in the same way as all day he had masked pain and grief. At the temple gates they were greeted with surprise and pleasure, and a monk was sent to apprise the Abbot, Matsuda Shingen, and Makoto of their arrival. They were escorted to the visitors’ residence. Leaving Sunaomi and the men there, Takeo went straight through the garden, past the fish pools where the red and golden carp milled and splashed, to the sacred grove behind the temple, up against the steep rise of the mountain, where the Otori lords were buried.

  The mist was heavier here, shrouding the gray lanterns and tombstones, which were darkened by moisture and speckled with green and white lichen. Moss, deeper green, covered their bases. A new straw rope gleamed around Shigeru’s grave, and a small crowd of pilgrims stood with bowed heads before it, praying to the man who had become a hero and an avatar, the spirit of the Middle Country and the Otori clan.

  They were mostly farmers, Takeo thought, possibly a merchant or two from Yamagata among them. When they saw him approach, they knew him at once from the crest on his robes, from the black-gloved hand. They dropped to the ground, but he greeted them and told them to get up, then asked them to leave him alone by the grave. He himself knelt, gazing on the offerings placed there, a handful of scarlet flowers, rice cakes, flasks of wine.

  The past lay all around him, with all its painful memories and its demands. He owed his life to Shigeru; and he had lived it according to the will of the dead. His face was wet from the mist and from tears.

  There was a movement behind him, and he turned to see Makoto walking toward him, carrying a lamp in one hand and a small incense holder in the other. He knelt and placed both before the grave. The gray smoke rose slowly, heavily, mingling with the mist, scenting the air. The lamp burned steadily, all the brighter for the dullness of the day.

  For a long time they did not speak. Then a bell rang out from the temple courtyard, and Makoto said, “Come and eat. You must be hungry. It is so good to see you.”

  They both rose to their feet and studied each other. They had first met in this very place, seventeen years earlier, had taken an instant liking to each other, and had been lovers briefly in the way of passionate young men. Makoto had fought alongside Takeo in the battles of Asagawa and Kusahara and for many years had been his closest friend. Now with his usual swift understanding, he said, “What has happened?”

  “I will tell you quickly. Muto Kenji is dead. He went to try to negotiate with the Kikuta and did not return. I am going to Hagi to break the news to my family. We will return to Yamagata tomorrow.”

  “I am very sorry for this loss. Kenji had been a loyal friend for many years. Of course you will want to be with Lady Otori at a time like this. But must you leave so soon? Fo
rgive me, but you look terrible. Stay for a few days here and recover your strength.”

  Takeo smiled, tempted by the idea, envying Makoto his appearance of perfect physical and spiritual health. He was now in his mid-thirties, but his face was unlined and calm; his eyes were filled with warmth and amusement. His whole demeanor exuded serenity and self-mastery. Takeo knew his other old friend, Miyoshi Gemba, would look the same, as would all the followers of the Way. He felt a certain regret that the path he had been called to walk on was so different. As always when he visited Terayama, he fantasized about retreating there, devoting himself to painting and designing gardens like the great artist Sesshu; he would donate Jato, the sword he always bore though he had not fought with it for years, to the temple, and give up the life of warrior and ruler. He would for-swear killing, abdicate the power of life and death that he held over every person in the land, unburden himself from the agonizing decisions this power entailed.

  The familiar sounds of the temple and the mountain enveloped him. Consciously he opened the gate of his hearing and let the noise wash over him, the distant splash of the waterfall, the murmur of prayers from the main hall, Sunaomi’s voice from the guests’ residence, kites mewing from the tops of the trees. Two sparrows alighted on a branch, their gray feathers made distinct by the dull light and the dark foliage. He saw how he would paint them.

  But there was no one else to take on his role—it was not possible simply to walk away from it.

  “I am fine,” he said. “I drink too much, but that eases the pain. Ishida gave me some new draught, but it dulls me—I won’t use it often. We will stay one night here—I wanted Arai’s son to see the temple and meet you. He is to live with my family. I may send him here in a year or two.”

  Makoto raised his eyebrows. “Zenko is causing problems?”