Chapter Five Kai
CHAPTER FIVE
Kai
Her clothes were wrong.
Seven of the twelve layers of Kai’s imperial dress had the incorrect color, and their lengths made her feel mismatched; nothing like the perfect folds worn by nobility who lived here in the capital full-time.
She stood at a mirror, fussing with her makeup to get it right.
Fussing with her hair, her clothes. They were in the waiting room at the retired-emperor’s manse on the slopes of Mount Eizan, seat of his cloistered government, which ruled alongside the official one of his son, nineteen-year-old Emperor Ashihara.
She’d come to offer a petition to the chancellor: give us back our land, she’d say.
Allow me to reclaim my family’s home in Amayari.
Make the Gensei governors again, as once we were, as Yora is on paper, but with the rights, the real powers, it demands.
No – don’t say demands, she told herself. They’ll take you for an upstart.
She was Kai Gekko’in after all, Kai of the Moonlight, firstborn daughter and heir of Katsusada Asa’in of the Gensei clanline, the traitor, the man who had nearly destroyed the realm. It would be hard enough as it was.
If only she could fix the clothes. She was twenty-seven now; she knew how to present herself, she knew the significance and the status that these clothes would bring.
But she felt like an imposter wearing them.
The layering was important – get the colors wrong, they’ll mark you an outsider.
A child from the provinces, who didn’t know what she was doing.
Get the colors wrong, they’ll laugh behind their gentle hands.
“Take care when you’re in public,” her stewardfather, Lord Zusho, had told her. “In the capital, even birds fly tittering to the regents. They’ll watch you, judge you, test if your loyalty is real.”
She knew the layered robes were expected of her, but couldn’t escape feeling like she’d be found wanting no matter what she did.
So she rearranged the folds and pleats again.
Her hair was pulled so tight it pinched.
She’d felt the truth of her stewardfather’s words the moment she arrived; the wary guardsmen on the road, the workers at the banks of the river, and the eyes, hungry in a thousand different ways, that watched as she had entered the gate-of-the-world.
We are kijin, her stewardfather said. Warriors.
We do not ride in palanquins or flee to hide our face.
She’d ridden high in the heat of the sun; merchants, peasants, the imperial guard, it made no difference. The eyes were watching her.
Now she gazed into the mirror again, wishing for some lucky god to make a change in her appearance.
My nose is crooked, she thought. My brows too heavy.
She checked to make sure her face and neck were perfectly painted, sighed, stepped back, adjusted the elegant robes once again.
Twelve layers of clothes weighed as much as armor, which, in a sense, it was.
She pictured her father – her dead father – as he was that day, seventeen years ago.
The look of fear on his face, wild, untamed, in those last moments before the enemy came, and their general, green-eyed Akiyo Musha’in, had pulled her out of the little wayhouse where they’d been forced to hide.
“Come with me, girl,” the Musha’in had said, her long hair glinting black in the night. “You don’t want to see this.”
I was too old, Kai thought. I remember it too well. If only she’d been young, a baby, then she never would have known him at all. Her father. It would be just a story to her, and just as easy to put away.
Instead, she felt his grip on her arm, the stench of rice-wine on his lips. His voice, as he called to her, his daughter-of-the-moonlight. The stained, wet smell of sweat on leather. And fire: torchlight, burning straw, wood paneling, rice-paper doors when they pulled his body from the house.
“That was my family,” she muttered, finishing the robes at last, “not me.” It was the past. And I will not live for ever in that shadow.
“Truly, you look wonderful,” Ayame Hayo said.
Sitting on her cushion by the window, Yora’s wife was from the Satsuki-Zusho family, sister of her stewardfather, and one of the kindest people Kai had met.
“People said that in Satsuki,” Kai grumbled. “Here, I’m just another face.” Girls are so pretty, in the center of the world.
“You’re nervous.”
“Of course I’m nervous, I’m about to meet the retired-emperor.” Kai frowned. “I have to keep face.”
So she took her time, powdering her skin until she was – if not happy, at least satisfied – with how she looked.
In truth, she enjoyed perfecting the arrangement of her many-layered robes, feeling the soft cotton, the fine silks overlapping; she liked the cloth against her skin, the beauty of soft touches of makeup on her eyes, and her hair tied back in waves.
She only wished she could feel more confident about it.
“Why try so hard pretending you’re a noble?” Hayo asked her later, as they were preparing for her audience in the hall. “You’re not an aristocrat.” Kijin houses were not nobles, and would never be accepted by them here.
“If I am to work with them,” Kai said, “I will need to know them very well… especially if I ever want to gain their respect.”
She turned. “Aunt, do you think the retired-emperor remembers me?”
Hayo gave a smile. “Of course he does. The retired-emperor is nothing if not… meticulous with his knowledge of what’s happening in his city.”
“And it is still his city?”
“What else?”
“He has taken the vows, he’s retired…”
“He’s the head of the imperial family,” Hayo said. “And will be until he dies. He is the Chiten. It will always be his city.”
“I wonder what the chancellor thinks of that.”
Hayo shrugged. She was not a tall woman, by kijin standards, though she towered over the no’in and the ge’in commonfolk.
Twice Kai’s age, Hayo was older than her husband, Yora, and the confidence and heft with which she moved gave lie to any who would think her past her prime.
She was not as athletic as Akiyo or the other warriors.
No, she was softer, rounder, more comfortable in herself, her body and her mind; she had better discipline.
She was well read. She’d been trained at kijin schools.
She knew how to use a blade, could ride a horse as well as any, though none could match her in the game of politics; she was proud, as were all kijin-tai, and she commanded every room that she was in.
She was, in many ways, everything Kai hoped to be.
“I’ve written a poem,” Kai said, tucking the folds of her dress. “About the moon, like my name. I’ll give it to the retired-emperor today. For goodwill. He’s said to love his verse…”
“He’s famous for it,” said Hayo. “I’m sure he’ll be quite pleased.”
Kai bit her smile – her anxieties were coming back. “I worry he’ll dismiss my hand. My calligraphy, it’s not what it should be.”
“Goshira’s the biggest goblin in the country,” Hayo said. “He’ll hardly care. He knows who you are.”
Then a smile: “Don’t tell him I said that, about the goblin.”
Kai laughed. “Oh, I’ll make sure to, first thing I’ll do. ‘Ayame Hayo, she thinks you’re a monster, O lord.’ That’ll go well.”
“They call him the windswept emperor, you know,” Hayo went on. “No one knows which way he’ll go. He changes always, depending on the turning of the times. He’ll do anything to help himself.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Kai said, and fussed with her robe again.
The retired-emperor was older than she’d expected.
Bigger. Tall, like most of the nobility, Goshira had a wide, gentle face with lidded eyes like points, a round belly, thin hands.
They were not hands of a man who’d drawn a bow or ridden a horse in the rain.
They were not hands that had killed. No, she knew, this was the kind of man who had others do the killing.
Much cleaner that way. Gentler on the skin.
She caught a scent of perfume in the air; lilac, she thought, sweet orange.
“It’s been too long, Kai Gekko’in,” he said, in a solemn, silky voice.
“I’ve had some tea prepared, if you would join me.
Ah, but I remember the days when you were young.
Such a quiet little thing, yet you grew to like it here.
You came in summer with the Lord Zusho and his people from the southeast provinces.
How is your stewardfather? What tidings from the Kanden? ”
“Lord Zusho is well,” Kai said respectfully. She had been sent to foster with the Zusho – a tributary to the Keishi clan – after her father’s death. “He’s been spared the poor harvest that’s plagued the lower valley these last two years.”
“Good,” the Chiten said. “Yes, that is good news. Would it were in Muzo. But – enough of that. Tell him to visit more often. He never comes to see me anymore… the tragedy of it… yet I think we’d have so much to say.”
“To be honest,” said Kai, “he prefers to stay in Zusho these days. Satsuki is his home, his people are there. And the capital…”
“Has too many eyes?” Goshira was watching her.
“I was going to say, the capital is too crowded for him.”
The Chiten laughed. “Well, he’s always been a smart man, I’ll give him that.
I won’t deny, of course, too many of our people here, in the palace, they never leave.
Never see outside the city; why would they?
They prefer to sit in their courts and their tearooms, not ride out for weeks to reach some muddy manor, the fields where they own their shares. That’s what deputies are for.”
“It’s true.” Kai wondered what the Chiten could have to talk to her stewardfather about. “Many of the estates around my lord Zusho’s lands are almost independent now. The governors hardly visit.”