Chapter Eighteen Yaeko
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Yaeko
Autumn
The bells were ringing. Yaeko Eiga, of the sixth rank in the court, last of her house, student of Yora Shijin and guard of the Keishi clan, could hear the distant alarm of people throwing themselves about in the courtyard.
Mounting horses in disarray, speeding off.
As she crossed the steps, she saw them rushing to their stations, and above them: smoke, rising from the slopes of Mount Eizan.
The Temple of the Mountain was burning down.
The monks of the Gate had come at last.
An hour before, her lord Shigeo Keishi, with his smooth hands, gentle features and thin shoulders, saw her in the palace courtyard with the soldiers and invited her to walk.
At thirty-eight, he was the kindest, and most soft-spoken, of Seikiyo’s three sons.
He was also the eldest and the man most suited to take over Keishi affairs when their great father was gone.
“Tell me, Yaeko,” he asked, gazing out over the smoke that was still rising from the mountain, “what do you seek most in all the world?”
“I don’t know, ame’in.”
He laughed. “Come, when we were at the Hermitage you said you wanted to be the finest short-sword fighter in the sixty provinces and go to the continent to challenge all of Souchou for the best in the world.”
She smirked. “I was a cocky child.”
“You had ambition.”
“And now?” She laughed. “Do I not?”
“The Poet,” he said. “You were the best student he ever had.”
“He was a good teacher.”
Some people are more social creatures than the rest of us, she mused; speaking comes so naturally to them.
Shigeo had been like that since they were young, no more than children, learning the classics and martial arts at the Hermitage in Yamano.
He could talk to anyone and make them feel heard, feel valued.
It was a skill she admired more and more, and she found herself reflecting on it as they walked the palisade under the pines.
“Sometimes I listen, at night, to the stories they read to my little one,” he said idly, gazing at the branches. “And I think, what did we do, to make a world that fates our children’s lives to be destroyed? Sometimes I think: better never to grow up.”
He paused. “I heard your mother died.”
She turned away, jaw clenched. “It doesn’t matter.”
The urn had arrived that morning.
She hadn’t known what to do, or how to feel.
She wanted to break something, to fight, to crush her anger in violence and let it wash her clean.
She moved in a daze. Setting out onto the street, with the urn still in her arms, she looked around at the bustle and churn of the great city on all sides.
The trees were barren, but soon they would be brimming with cherry and apricot blossoms, and beyond them, you could sometimes see a flight of cranes below the mountain.
Then she saw the smoke. People, shouting on the street.
“It’s coming from Mount Eizan,” someone said. “It’s the Temple of the Mountain.”
The monks again. She set off toward the palace, realizing too late that she still had the urn with her. She dumped it in a sewage ditch as she left.
Now Shigeo turned with sympathy in his eyes. “Yae…”
“Don’t.” She cut him off. “I’m fine.”
“Yaeko… you’re allowed to grieve.”
Her scowl was response enough. “Let’s just get this over with. Look. My mother didn’t raise me. She left me to go to some monastery on the Island of Shoals.”
“She was banished.”
“And my father was one of the first to be executed since capital punishment was abolished two hundred years ago.” Yaeko shook her head. “You know what I want?” She showed him a smear of ash that stained her fingers. “I want to wipe the whole thing clean. My family wanted to kill you, lord.”
“I was a child. I don’t think they wanted to kill me.”
“They wanted to kill all of you. They were traitors.”
It was the worst word she knew. Betrayal.
That was what led to such bloodshed in the past. That was what led to the war of succession, and the War of the Morning and the Night.
It was what led Gensei-no-Asa’in to rebel against the Keishi, what led Yaeko’s family to be stripped of their titles and murdered or left powerless for supporting him.
A stab of pain, a distant memory: her mother, drinking herself to a stupor, muttering about the brothers she’d lost in the Asa’in’s battles.
She’d known, even as a child, that during Asa’in’s rebellion, the Eiga house switched sides, turned against the Keishi, their liege.
Her father faced his own masters on the field before he was captured, and then killed.
As a child, Yaeko could only watch as her mother, heartbroken, would stand staring at her husband’s helmet and his bow. She would speak to it, as though the ghost of her husband was there, watching her, as she stood before the helm and the empty eyes stared back.
Yaeko hated those nights. Sometimes, she’d find her mother passed out on the floor.
Sometimes she’d come into Yaeko’s room, sit with legs crossed and her head in her hands, and she would cry.
Yaeko knew it would be better to pretend to be asleep, while mother wept silently for her dead husband and the war that tore their family apart.
It was a kindness; even then, at eight years old, she’d known.
When her mother was finally exiled by the court and took the nun’s vows, Yaeko, as the only remaining child, was put into Keishi care as a ward.
Just like the Gensei heir, people said. She was sent to the Hermitage at Yamano to learn to read and write and use a bow.
There, she’d made a single, simple promise: I will make a name for myself.
I will redeem my house. I will not turn into my family.
She excelled at the imperial school, first under the Poet’s daughter Tsuna, who was her mentor and first lover, then with the Keishi’s greatest general, the Musha’in, Akiyo, whom she served for three years as a runner before being invited to join the palace guard by Seikiyo himself.
He knows I am the only one left in my family, she’d often thought.
He knows I’ll do what I have to do, to remove the stains of the past.
Maybe that was why he chose her.
Seikiyo was the one who stopped the pain. Who placed her at the Hermitage. Who gave her an education. Who put a bow in her hand. She owed him everything for that. And his aide, Lord Shijin the Poet, who trained her when she returned to the capital and joined his guard.
And now, her mother was dead.
Word had come the year before: her mother, now a nun at the island of Sentaiji near the inner sea, had fallen ill with a sickness of the lungs, and wanted to see her again.
She intended to make the journey south and visit Yaeko in the capital.
She never made it. She had only gone as far as the Hermitage in Yamano when she collapsed.
Good, Yaeko had thought.
“My little rose,” her mother always said. “Yaeko, you are a rose among the peonies… May you never have to use your thorns…”
But I will, she thought. Mother, you always wanted me to.
The last time she saw her mother, the old nun was a shell of the woman she had been, skin and bones and failing body that was tearing itself apart in an effort to survive.
The last time she saw her mother, the old nun had told her to remember her duty.
Yaeko had to wait in the hall outside her mother’s room for almost an hour before the doctors let her in. The monks were doing their best, but the disease in her mother’s chest was beyond their powers to heal. My mother, so pious, cared more about those holy books than she ever cared about me.
No, she thought. She’s not my mother anymore. She’s a dying nun who wants me to forgive her. She’s some woman I don’t know.
I owe her nothing.
The doors slid open. She was finally allowed inside.
The woman lay, frail and papery beside a dying fire.
The shutters were closed, casting the place into a cave of death already, fumes so thick with incense Yaeko could hardly see, and as she sat, the woman who was her mother tried to rise to meet her; pale, yellowed, with a shaved head and an ascetic look, bones jutting through her skin.
She huffed and groaned with pain in trying just to breathe.
“Yaeko,” the woman said. “Yaeko.”
“Nun Shizen,” Yaeko said coolly, using her mother’s religious name. She hadn’t spoken her mother’s real name in years. “What do you…”
She faltered. Somehow a part of her still wanted to repair this, to recover an element of the love. Somehow, a part of her still wanted to say, Mama, help.
“How’re you feeling?”
“I’m dying,” the woman spat. “Don’t try to ease me up, I know it. Everybody knows but no one says it to my face.”
Yaeko bit her tongue. “As you say.”
At the Hermitage, her mother had visited only once, in summer, when Yae was fourteen.
“You’re growing up among them,” her mother had said.
“You have a special place in Seikiyo’s heart.
His compassion, his soft heart, it will be his undoing.
He promised to raise you, he placed you in his family’s schools.
Use that. Grow up with them, be as a rose among the peonies…
and when he has your trust, when the time is right, you will know what to do. ”
I was fourteen, Yaeko thought. A child. You knew how to manipulate me even then.
Her mother, helped by the old monks, had made her sign a blood-pact before an image of their tutelary gods from Sentaiji, the island of shoals. A pact they wrote in ink and signed with blood, then burned; they drank the ashes in rice-wine to seal it before the gods.
Yaeko still remembered the bitter taste, the coating on her throat as they made her recite the words: “I will redeem the great shame of our family. I will do what I must, to end this reign, and end the corruption of the capital. I will stop Keishi oppression once and for all…”