Chapter Thirteen Kai
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kai
Lunar New Year
“Come in,” said the Minister of the Left.
The doors creaked open and the glare blinded Kai with light.
The great council hall welcomed her within, long, tall-ceilinged and paneled with wood, oak and maple, adorned with hanging scrolls.
Ministers faced each other in their sub-chamber, two of each: two Ministers of the Left and two of the Right sitting beside each other, the Ministers of the Center below them, and at the far end, the Grand Chancellor of State, Keishi-no-Seikiyo, at the dais.
Hara-no-Ichiei Hoin, First-of-the-Above and Minister of the Left, was a small man, round at his waist and wide in his smile, with oiled, thinning hair, expensive robes, and the lordship over history, record-keeping, the census, and cultural affairs.
“He’s a bank more than anything,” her stewardfather Zusho Masashige had told her once, before she made the trip from Satsuki on the coast. “He hoards things. Histories, temple plans, architects’ levies, profit shares and land rights from estates all through the realm. He’s never set a foot in any of them.”
The Second Minister of the Left seemed a scholar.
Though under fifty, he was rail-thin, with a beard and mustache, and looked a man who had to squint when he staggered from his books and went into the light of day.
His clothes were simple, unlike the colors of his partner, with a scant brocade of gold his only ornamentation.
Yora sat in his position at their feet, observant and respectful.
“Ministers,” he announced. “Lady Kai Gekko’in.”
“It’s been many years since a Gensei sat this council,” said the Minister of the Right, a plump, balding man in shimmering silks. “Excepting your uncle Yora of the guard. Thank you for traveling all this way, lady.”
“Things haven’t changed so much here, I think,” Minister Hoin said, casually. “How does it feel to be back?”
“It feels like an opportune time,” Kai said. “It feels like fate, if I can be so bold.”
The Minister of the Right laughed. “She’s honest, at the least. Refreshing.”
“And what can we do for you today?” Hoin’s scholarly partner asked. “Tell us, why have you come all this way? It is such a very long journey from the Kanden…”
“I must thank the lord chancellor first,” Kai said. “He is, after all, the man who spared my life.”
“My wife spared you as much as I did.” Seikiyo spoke quietly. He hadn’t moved much when she came in, only sat leaning on his elbow, watching her, as if considering a foreign object, and valuing its worth.
“And if she were here, I could kiss her hands.”
Kai paused.
“Ministers,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you of the insult my clanline has received these last years.
We are scattered to the winds, those few of us who survived.
Our lands, once great in the east, are no longer our own.
I’ve come to change that. I request a grant of land from the sovereign, as befits my hereditary claim, and appeal to have the land rights of my clan restored. ”
“The Gensei stood against the emperor,” said the Minister of the Right. “Your father rebelled.”
“And he was killed for it. I have no illusions, lord, about what my father did. But as the lord chancellor told me the day he allowed me to keep my life, we should not be judged for the actions of our fathers. My father’s sins were his, his mistakes were his.
Why should his children be made paupers and beggars on the streets? ”
“You’re hardly beggars,” said Hoin. “You’ve a comfortable life in Zusho, I’m told.”
“I am a ward of House Zusho. It’s true, I have learned from them.
They’ve become a kind of… family to me. And for that, I am grateful.
But I deserve lands of my own. The lands of Amayari in the Kanden have deep roots in my family; the people are friendly to us there.
They wish only for their peace. It will be a blessing for the court if we were to be allowed to rule once again, as managers for the manors and estates, many of which I know are jointly owned by you, here, in the capital.
“The truth is simple,” she said. “I loved my father. He was trying to stop a great evil in our country, but… he made mistakes. It’s clear the lord chancellor was trying to do the same thing, and their rivalry got in the way.
It ruined my father… He should have been at your side, as in the old days when you were young.
His folly was his selfishness. And that is not something I am likely to repeat. ”
Seikiyo considered his tea. “I wonder. Tell me, you think it is only a sign of weakness for people to obey the law? To sit on their heels and bow low to touch the ground when the emperor walks past.”
She shook her head. “No, lord.”
“And yet that is what your clan believes,” he said.
“Why? Because you remember where you come from. You cling to it… You remember the days when the only way for minor nobles to make their name was to run off to the provinces, hire hunters on the local tracks. You define yourself by what you fight; just as this empire defines itself as what it is not: barbarian. You fight them and you bring us back their heads. Thus the kijin-tai gain stature. This is what your line has always done. And you seek to do it now. But you must remember, Lady Kai, in the capital, the Ten’in reigns. ”
“Or their regents,” she said. “You are kijin too, lord. Is that not also the story of how the Keishi came to be?”
“Not now,” Yora began, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“What? Are we not allowed to talk of it? Are we not allowed to speak?”
A murmur of unease swept the hall. “We need not listen to this woman,” said the Minister of the Right.
“‘This woman’? What of our founders, lord? Was Empress Sora’in not a woman? Did the god Ohirume not take a woman’s form?”
“Kai,” warned Yora.
“Why is it a sin to seek some independence?” She addressed the powdered nobles. “Answer me.”
“Child,” one of them hissed.
“Why am I so ill-marked in this city?” She wheeled around; everyone was watching her, and she knew she should find a better way, but it was too late. “You are punishing me because of what my father did.”
“Your father rebelled against the throne,” the papery Left Minister said.
“No, my father protected the throne. He put our former Ten’in in power to stop the demon-emperor, just like you did. We are no different. You were friends.”
“Then why make war against his ‘friend’? Why help restore order, then two years later, begin another uprising, another war? Has your family not had enough bloodshed?”
Kai laughed. “It’s a joke. You are, you’re blind. You’re so consumed by your own petty intrigues and your poetry and your fucking games behind your screens. You don’t even know it.”
“And what,” the Minister of the Right said icily, “is this joke that we don’t know?”
“I’ll ask you a question, lord.” She turned to him. “What if he’d won?”
The plump man bared his teeth. “What did you say?”
“What would you have done, if my father won? You would have supported him. The regents would still have sway in this court, and not—”
“Not what?” Seikiyo looked down at her with his shaved head, eyes flared in anger. “You come close to treason here, Gekko’in. You should listen to your uncle. You should listen to those who know more than you – especially about what happened then.”
“You mean when you had my father killed?”
A gasp spread out across the ministers. “Take your seat,” Seikiyo said.
Instead, Kai turned on her heel and left, burning with embarrassment and unbridled fury.
“Kai.” Yora rose sharply, but it was too late. Kai turned her back to the hall. Seikiyo muttered something to her uncle as she went, but whatever it was, the words were lost under the pounding of her own angry footsteps, and the creaking of the cicada floors.
Outside the chamber, the world seemed calm and quiet, but Kai could not keep still. She swept past the startled guards and found herself in the main hall, looking at the picture scroll, color on silk, of her uncle Yora slaying the devil nightbird.
Bureaucrats, she thought. They can go to hell. I’d do better than the lot of them combined.
She didn’t know what to do. That banking Minister of the Left, Hara-no-Ichiei Hoin, was supposed to be Goshira’s friend, but he’d done nothing to help her.
Everything the former-emperor had said was right; the Keishi were not even regents, not officially, but as grandfather to the newborn prince, Seikiyo would do what he wanted.
The baby’s father, Emperor Ashihara, suffered under his thumb.
All Ashihara does is perform ceremony, she thought, scowling. This system is so broken. I have to do something better. I could do something better.
But because of a moment of anger, her father had ruined it all.
“You ever miss your brother?”
Her uncle had followed her from the chambers. Now he approached, the same sad look in his eyes she’d seen before.
“I didn’t know my brother,” she said. “He was a baby.”
“And yet,” he said, “you mourn him. You mourn your family. I do, too.”
She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Instead, she stared at the painting, the arc of the arrow in the monster’s breast, the smoke and the clouds of doom that surrounded the rendering of her uncle as he was, thirty years before.
“How old were you, in this picture?” she asked abruptly.
“About your age. After that, everyone knew my name. Those days are long gone now… Now people only know me as the Gensei brother who didn’t take part, when his elder wanted to be king.”
“You were loyal to the Ten’in.”
“That may be, but enough people outside these walls hate me for it, too. I did what I had to do to survive. And yet I mourn, like you do, Kai. Let us walk.”