Chapter Two Sen #2
He trailed off, punctuating his words with a flick of his heels, and together the three of them left the main path, tracking through the trees and the red-fresh trail of blood in the woods.
They followed its winding trail into a gorge, where the slopes began to rise up against them and the endless sea of trees of the Blue Woods scored along like waves, reaching almost vertically into the mountains.
There Nihira slowed, staring through the gulley, his eyes sharp as glass.
He began maneuvering his horse like he wanted to climb down.
“What is it?” Sen called. And then he saw.
Hakaru gasped. “Oh, horrible—”
A serow, the sacred goat-antelope of the woods, lay wedged between the rocks where it had fallen. An arrow protruded from its side, cutting in each time the poor creature tried to move. Someone had shot it and left it to die.
“Heartless,” Nihira said.
“Who would shoot a serow and abandon it to rot?” Sen muttered. “Gods bless these animals…”
“A dead serow,” Hakaru swore. “That’s bad luck. The gods will come into this land… they won’t abide the death of one of their own.”
Sen looked to Nihira. “Help me.” He dismounted, got down on his hands and knees and began trying to roll the serow over, gripping beneath its forelegs to drag it up the hill.
A loose rock shifted in the soil and spilled out from under him, sending him sideways on the dirt beside it.
But after a moment, his brothers came down to join him, and together the three of them began to work their way around the panicked animal, grunting and whining in its pain.
“Who would do such a thing?” Hakaru rose suddenly, face contorted in a scowl. Sen wondered if he was going to heave. “Who would do this…” Then, like a decision, he muttered, “Stop. Just stop. It’s going to die.”
“We can save it,” said Sen. Hakaru shook his head.
“It’s too late. Put it out of its misery.”
Hakaru strode in and made to stab the animal at the base of its skull, but the serow screamed – almost human-like, thought Sen – and bucked away, squirming out of his grasp.
It kicked Hakaru in the gut and flailed about on its back for a terrifying, chaotic moment, before it found its feet again and vanished down the trail.
“Help me!” Sen cried. But the creature had scrambled through the underbrush, and was gone.
“It seeks a quiet place to die,” Nihira said to him, “on the Godspath. Let it go.”
The sun had gone much lower now, turning the sky a brilliant splash of red and purple and near-gold, and the meadows of the valley hissed as they returned to them, rising above the no’in peasant towns and farming villages that lay shining in the sunset light.
Green fronds and rice paddies bright as mirrors, bright as flame, glimmering and edged with mud.
They were about to pass the rise again when they heard it.
Someone was shouting, in the hidden dips of the hillside between them and the no’in town. The horses bucked nervously as half a dozen voices, louder, more masculine, rose over the waving grain.
It was the sound of people fighting.
“The other side,” Nihira hissed. “Hurry!”
They crossed over the crest and rode through waves of pampas grass to find a strange sight.
At the bottom of the hill, four monks in robes of red and gold were beating a young no’in peasant woman beside the trail.
Their hired hands, local ge’in trappers by the looks of them, watched in startled disbelief.
Shouts – of anger more than pain, or fear – echoed through the valley.
Sen was reminded what violent reputations the monks of the west always had.
The woman was crying, cursing them, trying to get to something that was strung up on their horses.
Another serow, Sen realized, black of fur, riddled with arrows and tied up on one of the trappers’ mounts.
But the monks had thrown her back, and were assaulting her with staves and fists and sandaled feet. One grabbed her by her shoulder-length, deep-maple hair, and threw her to the dirt again.
“What is the meaning of this?” Hakaru shouted. The monks turned, foreign in their western garb, and for a moment there was a strange pause, until Nihira, sensing danger, rode before his brother and commanded them, in a surprisingly strong voice:
“Stop this now!”
He brought his mare between the two groups. “This is a wedding day, a holy day! You of all people should know better, monk!”
One of the monks still had the no’in woman by her hair, and she cried at him now: “Let me go! You killers, you—”
As the Kitano brothers drew forward, the monks came up to face them, red-robed and tinged with gold, bald heads shining with perspiration.
The woman cried out again, cursing them for killing a sacred animal.
Sen couldn’t hear the remainder of her words, because, in that instant, she was attacking again.
She rammed the closest of them, trying to get to the carcass.
Trying to pull the cord that bound its feet, and shove off the hands of the monks who came to push her away.
The one she had struck, rough, square-built, with flaming, furious eyes and a huge, flat nose, roared at her:
“You dare to strike a priest?”
He moved as if to swing at her with his long oak staff, to crush it into the side of her head.
“The heavenly discord has come to earth,” he said. “How dare you strike one of the Middle Path!”
Sen did not know exactly when he’d dismounted, sometime in the initial scuffle, when the hunters turned and the no’in woman ran toward the corpse of the serow-of-the-woods. But now he was on his feet.
“Did you kill this animal?” he shouted.
The monk stopped, scowling at him. “We are monks of the True Path of Righteousness. Who do you think you are?”
“My name is Kitanohara-no-Sen Hoshiakari,” Sen announced.
“Adopted son of Lady Ogami’in, who was married today.
You call yourselves followers of the One True Path?
You trespass on our land. You kill this creature, sacred to our woods.
You leave it there to rot.” He nocked an arrow to his bow.
“I am here to tell you, lord, you have chosen a very bad day for this mistake.”
The monk laughed. “Bow before your emperor’s envoy, boy.”
“Never. Not when you disrespect the creatures of our lands.”
Beside him, Hakaru spat his wood-grass to the dirt. “You think you have your royal powers here?”
The monk, clearly the leader, came forward again, and his narrow, piercing eyes met Sen’s.
He was of middle age, a squat, boar-like man, with a thick neck, rough features, and heavy hands.
His flat nose had once been broken. “We’ve come here for the wedding, child.
Would you put a stain upon this day, by starting conflict? ”
“You have started conflict!” Hakaru began, and the other red monks stormed closer. But now they had grabbed the no’in woman, and thrown her back to the dirt, and the squat one towered over her, rage billowing across his pockmarked face.
“On the ground, peasant,” he shouted, staff rising in his hand.
Instantly, Sen raced forward. He caught the squat monk’s staff as it came down, twisting and using the momentum to flip the heavy, red-robed man over his shoulder and wrenching the weapon from his hands.
There was a cry of outrage, and the great staff went clattering away.
Sen hit the dry dirt hard. But in the moments he had risen to his knees, the big monk came at him again, bellowing, surprisingly fast for one of his bulk.
He grabbed the staff from where it had fallen, reversed his grip and switched with his feet to land a sharp blow from the backside of his swing, but Sen recovered quickly, and as the monk came down with a strike that would have split his skull, Sen parried, drawing his short-sword from his waist and cutting in too quick for the monk to counter, closing the distance and landing with the sharp edge of the blade less than a handsbreadth from the boar monk’s scowling eyes.
“How dare you,” spat the monk.
He moved to lash out, but Sen grabbed him, shoved him off, strong and lean against the red monk’s bulk. “You will not touch her. These no’in are of my mother’s land!”
Behind him, his brothers were shouting. “Sen, put your blade away!” Nihira called. Sen stepped into a crouch, but with a scowl the monk shifted away from him, spitting to the ground and lowering his arms.
“You have drawn your blade in the presence of a holy one,” he said, voice low. “I am Ryaku’in of the mountain, and you will know my name.”
He shoved Sen off, but by then the young woman had darted away into the trees, and as the other monks went to follow, Hakaru stepped in their path.
Sen stood over the red-robed leader, who was wheezing, cursing with heavy breaths. The furor in him had boiled into something even worse.
“You call yourself a monk? You attack a no’in, a peasant!”
“She assaulted us!” The monks crowded him. Nihira called out in alarm, but the leader pushed them back.
“We have a decree to travel in these lands,” he said, reaching into his robe. He withdrew a paper envelope. “Marked with the seal of the retired-emperor’s court! You have no say on where we pass in the sovereign’s realm.”
“Sen, come back here,” Nihira called, from his horse.
But Sen would not. “The emperor,” he said. “The emperor?” He tore the paper from the squat man’s hands. “What do I care for the emperor? This is not the emperor’s domain.”
“How dare you,” began the monk again, seething. He reached forward, to grab Sen by the shirt.
And then he stopped.
Sen’s jade bead, the necklace that he always wore, had come loose in the confrontation.
It hung, glinting in the light.
The boar-like monk released him. Suddenly. Completely.
“Where did you get such a treasure?” He spoke as if he recognized the bead, as if he knew what it was.
“What do you care?” Sen said, pulling away. “It’s nothing to you.”