Chapter Three Yora #2
“Why have you really called me here, lord?” Yora saw the lines under Seikiyo’s eyes, saw the shadow in his gaze.
Something was weighing on him, he knew, something that hadn’t been before – or perhaps, thought Yora, something that had been there, yet subtly, slowly growing all the while.
Too many know of Keishi arrogance and pride; not many get to see the heart.
“I know what you would say.” Seikiyo’s voice had grown thicker this last year, deeper with its gravel edge.
“And I would agree with you. It’s the court.
They spend too long in the confines of this place, growing fat and happy with their poems and their songs.
And what does the Ten’in do? He is emperor, and yet… ”
“Yet I’ve written poems for all of them,” Yora said. “So, what does that make me?”
The two men regarded each other for a moment, then at last Seikiyo broke into a smile. “Welcome back, old friend. I hope your journey wasn’t difficult.”
“Five provinces in as many weeks. And I complain of being tired, when young men wish to see the world… Still, nice to sleep in one’s own bed again.”
They walked the long hall between the emperor’s greeting room and the main chambers. “They say the emperor is a ship,” Seikiyo muttered quietly. “And the subjects are like water. So, we must be very careful not to let the waves grow too great, or we’ll be capsized in a storm.”
At the end of the long hall there was a window, and there Seikiyo stopped, giving Yora a look as open as the palms of his hands.
“The courtiers. They come up with excuses. They say the fields have not been bearing crops the last few years… They know we have too many estates to watch over, and must rely on local deputies for help… Of course they say they cannot pay.”
“There has been famine,” Yora offered. “That part was not a lie.”
“Famine.” Seikiyo waved it off. “Don’t talk to me of famine. I’ve schemers and snivelers enough to tell me that. I have an entire council to tell me about the woes of the agricultural estates.”
“It does not mean they’re wrong, lord.”
He smiled, ruefully. “You are a pesky fly, you know that? And sometimes, I think, the only one who speaks the truth. You never answered, about the Mountain.”
Yora paused, for this was a delicate subject, and one much closer to home. The Mountain and the Gate, the two largest temple sects, lay at their doorstep, on Mount Eizan, whose shadow lingered above the city even as they spoke.
“The local manors have been going to the monks for their protection, lord,” he said.
“Those that aren’t under watch of the lower houses.
Lord Zusho and his neighbors told me they are concerned.
He said as much last year: on the mountain, the monks are divided, arguing bitterly over the Age of Plagues.
” He shook his head. “A monk known as Moro leads a faction that supports imperial control, and House Hara support him because it increases their power as regents to the emperor. Against you, lord, in the chancellorship. At the same time, an exiled monk named Ryaku’in leads a group against Moro and the Hara interference with their temples. The whole thing is a mess.”
“What of the Gate?”
“Loyal,” Yora said. “To the sovereign. They have no love for the Mountain but are waiting to see how this internal conflict is resolved.”
Seikiyo scowled. “Those monks, they have too many faces, too many names. You never know what they intend.”
“They’re important for the regents and the old Hara clanline,” Yora said. “You know this. The emperor listens to their advice.”
The Hara clan, one of the great families from the south, had held the position of regent-to-the-throne for generations.
“The emperor’s regents do what they’ve always done,” Seikiyo snarled. “Which is to suck power from the emperor’s bones.”
“Regardless, the temples are divided,” Yora said. “They disagree over whether the Age of Gods will return, or the Age of Monsters. Ryaku’in says the spirit-world is in decline. There may be a change in leadership, and depending on how it goes, it may be beneficial to the throne…”
“Or not?”
He gave a pause. “Some of the factions are not supportive of the emperor – or his father,” Yora said. “Some believe the so-called cloister system leads to too much manipulation.”
“What can I do about this?” Seikiyo turned. “I’m merely chancellor of the ministry… one of many. Emperors have taken religious vows for generations.”
“The former-emperor named you chancellor before he took the cloister,” Yora said. “Surely you can speak to him. His son Ashihara-the-Emperor has a Hara regent… And his son will have a regent, yes, but the regents…”
Yora trailed away. No one would say it aloud, but all knew Seikiyo was the power behind the throne. The regents grudgingly obeyed, and they both knew how hard Seikiyo worked to make that happen.
Seikiyo coughed a bitter laugh. “The former-emperor has not been known to give up power easily. Even retired, he still plays his games. We need the monks to be a strong source of support for this government. And if they’re not, we’ll have to take actions.”
A silence fell. Yora knew not how to fill it. He saw that, in his hands, Seikiyo held a smooth black stone, a totem from his youth. “Enough of this,” the chancellor said. “There’s more pressing business for us today.”
“What is that, lord?”
“I hear things, Yora,” he said. “There are rumors… There is a plot against me.”
He moved on. “The exiled monk, Ryaku’in. He has been seen east of the barrier plains. They say he’s looking for something. Or someone. In Lady Ogami’in’s lands.”
Yora felt his chest go tight.
“What does that sound like to you, poet?” Seikiyo asked.
“It could be a great many things,” Yora replied, cautious. “I can’t claim to know Ryaku’in or the workings of his mind…”
“And yet you should. We never found Sen Hoshiakari after your brother’s war. There are some who say he lives.”
“Hearsay,” Yora said. “There will always be rumors.”
“Yes,” said Seikiyo. “But are they true?”
When Yora didn’t answer, Seikiyo frowned: “You were there, Yora. Seventeen years ago. You went to Azemichi.”
“I did, lord,” Yora said. Seikiyo turned to him.
“Then tell me. What did you see?”
And so, Yora thought, the memories come back.
They come back and they come back. Suddenly it was a different night, a different province, a dozen leagues from the capital where they now stood.
Suddenly Yora was back, as he was in dreams, in the flames of Azemichi, and it was the night he’d learned his brother had died.
When he’d stood, as it seemed he’d always stood, surrounded by a ring of bodies.
He had called to them at first. Five men, sent by his lord Seikiyo in the night. He went to them with his hand held high, and they turned as one when they heard him, watching as the last of the town lay burning into ash. And then, the blades came out.
They were your friends, he thought. How had it come to this?
In the fieldridge town that night, there stood Hara Akugenta before him, the Tiger of Omori; and Genma Sanbatsu of the Shelterwood, Onoe Kizan, the Blackcloak, and brothers Tokeishi Nobuhira and Nagahira.
But they were wearing their helms and iron masks, and with the darkness and the smoke trails roiling all about them, he could not tell the men apart.
The flames had died. There was no sound, save the pounding of his heart in his ears, the sudden shifting of a snowdrift in the wind.
He felt the sword in his hand and feared the blood on it that would come.
The five men spread before him. They were men of the capital, men he had dined with and trained with for fifteen years, men he laughed and rode with in his youth.
Now they were men who had attacked his family. Now, they were men he would kill.
The first came at him with a longsword gleaming in his hands.
Another sword flashed sharply in the moonlight.
The clouds had gone. The smoke remained in the air and he could taste it, taste it as he tasted the blood when the first man struck and smashed an elbow in his face when he parried the blow.
“Why are you doing this?” he’d cried. “What are you doing?”
The men didn’t speak, didn’t answer. They came at him together, five men with swords, and even as the second struck, Yora called, Stop! again. Even as he cut down, once, twice, and the first two of the men were dead.
Even as the third came up behind him. Yora cut backwards, stringing his own sword into the man’s waist and turning so they both fell hard into the mud.
Even as the fourth stepped back, younger, suddenly, utterly afraid.
It was Genma, he realized. Just a boy. But the blood was in him now. Yora knew he couldn’t stop.
He found himself in another place, a different place, deeper and more silent, where his body moved far quicker than his mind.
He cut down against the backside of the young one’s swing, sending him off balance with his sword pushed like lightning into the earth.
Then he was on him, one soft breath and his own blade opened the side of the man’s neck.
Hara Akugenta, the last of them, had charged, but slowly, hampered by Genma’s fall, and now Yora met him, spinning upward, spinning close enough to catch the last of the man’s blade inside his own, just as he had caught the other’s, and when Akugenta came back, shoving with his sword, Yora let him, and he used the momentum to pull around onto the opposite, unbalanced side – the side that was now open, where the man’s neck and heart were now exposed.
Then it was done.
In his mind’s eye, Yora still felt the heat and cold, still smelled the soot, the iron stench in the air; in his mind, he saw the burned ruins of the town again. But now there was a silence.
“There was no one there,” he said at last, turning to Seikiyo once again. “The town was burned to ash.”
He’d crossed then through the ruins of the village, dead and dying all around him. At the crossroads up above, his retainer, Kyohara-no-Shigeki Reizan, had come and was calling his name. Yora. Yora.
“But you found her,” Seikiyo said.
“… I did.”
His brother’s wife, Sumiko, of the Kyohara line, dead of a spear wound through her heart.
But that was not all that Yora found, in that night of flames, that night of howling wind.
He heard a sound, coming from the cellar.
And there, amid the chaos of the house, amid the bodies of his family’s servants and retainers who had tried to shield his brother’s wife, tried to help and get her out, he saw them.
Two children, hiding in an empty storeroom for roots and grain.
They were tiny: a boy and girl, holding hands, no more than three or four years old. Shaking in fright, they had remained, miraculously, alive, while their families were murdered in the other room.
He’d leaped forward, calling his nephew’s name. “Sen,” he whispered. “It’s me, it’s Yora, it’s your uncle.”
Only then did the boy begin to cry. Huge eyes welling with tears, Sumiko’s son clung to the other child, a lowborn girl maybe a year older than he. The child of the house, thought Yora. The servants had a daughter…
She had a small jade bead around her neck, just as Sen did, just as every Gensei child was given at their birth. But she was just a no’in. It must have been a gift from the clan, from the mother who now lay dead…
“Gods help them,” Yora said, and took them in his arms, and raced into the dark.
He never told a soul what he had seen that night. To close his eyes was to, again, see flame. He never spoke of when his brother died.
“Is there a chance the boy survived?” Seikiyo asked him now. “From what you saw…”
“I did not find a body,” Yora said. The same line, the same words he’d told them, years ago…
“That is not what I have asked you.” Seikiyo was watching him.
Yora took his time. The boy would be nearly twenty now, and the no’in girl too. If the Keishi were to find them – either of them…
But no. He could not bear to think of it.
Of course there had been rumors that the boy survived.
But if the Keishi were to get their hands on him, if they were to bring him, or the no’in girl, back to the court, and find out what he’d done…
The consequences would throw the nation into war.
It would be the ruin of them all. He answered as carefully as he could.
“I advise you not to listen to these rumors, lord,” he said. “Without proof…”
“So, the boy is dead?”
Silent, Yora gave a nod.
“To any extent, it seems the monks are searching for something,” Seikiyo continued. “They were seen fighting, in a no’in town. With one of the Ogami’in’s sons. And it makes me wonder…”
Yora waited.
“Goshira sends his servants to the east,” Seikiyo said. “He seeks to use his influence as retired-emperor to get those monks to do his bidding. Why?”
He put a hand on Yora’s shoulder, and the two old warriors returned to the grand hall, side by side.
“You are my strong hand,” he said, “the only loyal member of the Gensei family. I want you, Yora, to find the truth of this. Why have there been whispers in the east? Is Former-Emperor Goshira using some sorcery against us? Is he stirring up the monks? Is it something else? I need to know. You will find the truth of these rumors. And when you find them, root them out. We need this taken care of, quietly. I don’t want to burden the emperor-who-reigns. ”
“As you wish,” Yora said.
“Good.” Seikiyo offered him a hand. “I don’t need to say, but I’ve allowed your family’s daughter to live in peace these last eighteen years.
Kai Gekko’in survives but with our grace.
That was my gift to you, Yora, for your loyalty.
Understand that. She didn’t need to suffer her father’s fate.
” He gave Yora a pointed look. “So make sure that she does not.”
“I understand,” said Yora.
“I’m trusting you, poet,” Seikiyo said, before Yora bowed low, and left his friend in the great council hall. Seikiyo called out when he was at the door. “Find them, Yora,” he said. “Find out what these monks are doing in the east. Find out what they want there. Find out what they know.”