Chapter Twenty Sen #2
Sen had learned to stand in stillness while the crow monks sang with their swords around him, blades glinting and whistling under the trees.
Tokuon’s men trained differently. It was not the dance of the crows.
These men were bigger, heavier, scarred.
They would trample through the autumn paddies.
They knew the resistance that a body gave a sword, the extra power you had to give to facilitate a cut.
He watched as Daijin Kanesuke, milk-brother to his cousin Tokuon and sibling to his wife Ohori, barked orders and stomped about with the cold gaze of a mountain ram.
His face, larger and sterner than flint Tokuon’s, revealed a wild soul: scars criss-crossed his beard, his hair was flat and thick, and his eyes shone black like tar.
They wouldn’t hesitate to kill, Sen thought. So why do I? They would do it calmly, with no emotion, just pull the knife and watch the reddening flow. They were kijin; they knew why warriors were called ghosts of the gods.
“The sacred spear,” he heard Tokuon say, approaching his teacher at the end of the path. “They say you have it. It would be a great power to the one who would wield it.”
“We should not strive for such things, lord,” Jobo said.
Just then a shout drew their attention. On the sparring fields outside the gate, Rui had gotten into another argument with the riders. She called out, arms in the air, demanding to know who’d tied the horses up.
“You treat them like tools, they’ll throw you!” she was shouting. “Who’s taking care of these horses!”
“What’s this?” Sen’s cousin Tsuna, the stark sister, had come over now. She turned with curiosity. “You know her?”
Rui shouted again. The Gensei bannermen from Gisan ignored her.
She was no one; a no’in, a blade of grass.
They were by the camphors at the northwest end of the estate, near the road to town, setting up targets for archery.
Some of the lower ranks had started using the road shrine for practice, for who would give a care?
The shrine meant nothing; it barely stood, decrepit, and no one took care of it except for Rui, by the camphor at the edge of the woods.
The paint had chipped, the prayer ropes hung green and mildewed, and the offering bowl had only rainwater.
“Stop what you’re doing!” Rui hollered with force enough that the horsemen from the western mountains now stood, staring open-mouthed: who was this no’in, in crow monks’ clothes, who came striding through their field?
Rui, Sen saw, had caught them firing carelessly into the fringes of the woods. He knew the anger blooming in her face. Arrows lay scattered on the hillside, the camphors themselves struck here and there by a stray. The grounds near her statues lay littered.
Rui pulled down the straw targets, ignoring the men with bows in their arms; ignoring the thought of an arrow coming her way.
“This is a sacred wood,” she said, turning. The bannermen just stared.
“You. No’in,” Myorin called. “What is your name?”
She stopped, sullen, stiff. “Rui.”
“Why do you speak against us, Rui?”
“You disrespect the gods.”
Daijin laughed. “Maybe we will take an offering for peace. Your hand would strike me. We’ll offer that.”
“She’s an acolyte,” Sen said.
He waved it off. “What matter?”
“She’s my friend.”
He laughed again. “Oh. Gallant, aren’t you, pretty Gensei? Reach out for nothing, even for a shit. She’s no’in.”
Daijin laughed once more. “Do what you want,” he muttered, coming close – close enough that Sen could smell the camp-meat on his breath. “But when it comes to these men, Hoshiakari, my soldiers? You better keep track of your birds.”
He shoved off. Sen fought the urge to follow him, to speak against his words.
But Rui was standing at the edge of the meadow now, her brown eyes meeting his, and suddenly he wanted to say something, to call for her, but found himself stopped by a twisting in his throat.
What are you doing over there, she seemed to say, among the kijin-tai?
When will you come back?
He made to step toward her, but too late. Rui scowled, running off with a hand to her face and a hollow look behind her eyes. Before he could go two paces, she was gone.
“Your friend’s quite the fighter,” Myorin said.
From the palisade at Kitaiji, the afternoon sky lay endless, and the clouds seemed closer than they should have, as if the world had twisted on its axis and the rolling hills had reached up to meet them. A shrike dove through mackerel clouds. The temple chimes rang in a wind.
“Don’t blame your friend,” Lady Iyo said. “For the world she was born in.”
Sen had found his stewardmother on the veranda, her father’s sword in hand, its ceremonial wrappings lined with gold.
“That’s exactly something a lord would say,” he said. “Why does she hate them so much?”
“They come from the capital. The nobility know nothing of life out here. They look down on the rest of us while they drink their wine and write their pretty poems. My people used to say there was a disease growing, up there, in the capital. A disease of wealth. My family could never trust them.”
“That’s why they say you’re wild,” Sen said. “‘Raised by wolves.’”
Iyo gave a subtle smile. “Maybe I was.” She let that lighten the air for a moment, then sighed.
“There’s a reason they call our lands ‘beyond-the-mountains’.
On the northern coast the winters are long, and after so many years of war they feel they still don’t totally control us.
They remember we’re not subject to the court far away. ”
She gestured out over the land, wild, windswept. “I have both in me, Sen. Your family’s imperial blood, the blood that carved a peace between our world and the gods’, and the blood of Iteki, who sided with the gods, and lost.”
Iyo’s family had come from a long line of Iteki rulers, who lived in the northeast for centuries before the empire came.
But inevitably, come the empire did, and soon the lands beyond the mountains became the frontier of annexation and conquest. Join us, the empire said.
We of the civilized world. Join our sacred Ten’in under the sun.
Sen’s ancestors, two hundred years before, had been generals in those campaigns.
“Your hair’s getting gray,” he said, poking fun the way he used to, when he was a child.
“I’m not so young anymore. Weight still grows upon one’s shoulders. The muscles get weak.”
“Train more,” he said. Iyo laughed.
“I should.”
She indicated the blade in her hands. “My father’s sword. They say, such a great horseman and archer was he, he was never forced to draw it. The sword is clean.
“I know what you would ask,” she said, looking east, to the Kitano River. “You want what is yours. Your birthright. And that is your right. Take it.”
Sen accepted his stewardmother’s sword with trembling hands.
Below them lay the city itself, the great hope of the east, and the seat of Iyo’s domain.
To the west, winding hills, the Blue Woods; to the south, rice paddies, criss-crossed with smaller ridge-roads and outvillages.
A pair of ducks lazed around the pond at Kitaiji temple. A songbird twittered in a tree.
“You smell that?” Iyo asked, after a moment. “The trees. They smell better this time of year. It’s the changing of the wind.” With a flurry, the ducks took off, sending an explosion of crystal water into the air. “Reminds me how old I have become.”
They watched in silence for a heartbeat. “You’re unhappy,” said Sen.
“Do you know why I am allowed to be lord of the eastern provinces?” Iyo asked, carefully.
“Do you know why we have fortresses here, why I have lands at all? I’m here because my grandfather turned against them, and sided with the armies of the Ten’in, rather than be killed.
We’re trapped in these memories of violence.
We cannot forget that. We have stability now, but one day they will want me to lead their army through the east again, across the narrow straits to the islands of the north, and then what will we be?
We must not forget the blood and the bones we stand upon – you as much as me.
If we do, there will never be an end to it.
If we do, whatever hopes we have for a better future will be lost. The truth is, it was my grandfather who decided he’d had enough.
Decided it was better to serve than to die. So he served.”
She looked out over the valley. “My grandfather killed people for the emperors, and was rewarded for it. With land, a manor, a fortress… and an army, and a name. That is how we became the Northern Hara clan. Not by blood or marriage. By imperial decree. A contract. I have more Iteki blood in me than Hara. And yet, I have their name, as do my sons, and their sons and daughters will as well. Because we belong to them.”
Sen knew the stories. When his ancestor Rai Gekko’in was sent to subdue the barbarians, a terrible war began.
It lasted ten years and changed the shape of the region for ever.
The native Iteki were too mobile for the emperor’s conscript army; raiding on their fast horses and disappearing into the Blue Woods, they cut off shipping lines through the inner sea.
For years, Rai fought a losing battle, until finally she made a treaty with Lady Iyo’s family, an Iteki house open to finding alternatives to war.
The new coalition attacked Iteki strongholds in Kurogane and Unasaka, diverting the water supply and setting the wooden fortresses ablaze.
The remaining houses soon surrendered. Rai Gekko’in and her daughter, Makoto Ie’in, were hailed as heroes, Sen knew.
Makoto was called the daughter of the god of war, given the investiture and revered as a deity in her own right as the decades turned.
“Our peace,” Iyo continued, “is born from the bloodshed of the past. This is how it always is. But now we have something that resembles stability. Now, we have something that resembles independence, so who’s to say it wasn’t good?
There is good and evil both. But we must keep hold of it.
We’re the only Iteki ever to have been allowed to rule our own lands: I won’t give that up.
The capital has been begging at my gates.
They want to promote me in the ranks of their court.
Give me some symbolic title as a means of bribing my support.
The more I reject them, the more they see me as a rebel, the more I remember I’ve harbored the son of their enemy all these years.
“The truth is,” she said, “they’ll call us to join the march and serve again. And if we don’t, the march will lead to our homes, and when they leave, they will leave nothing but ash.”
A light rain had begun to fall across the hillside, the grove of whistling pines. “I’m trying to finish Kitaiji before I die,” she said. “My father began construction when I was a child… I hope one day to see it done.”
Sen realized. “You’re afraid of them. The Keishi, the regents…”
“I’m afraid of what they’ll do. As is the retired-emperor.
It’s why he’s in such a tenuous position.
We massacred an entire countryside in the name of the emperors; the stories of your ancestor Makoto Ie’in and her mother are true, they killed my ancestors and the old lineages in these lands, yet my grandfather allied himself with the lady Makoto and forged a peace.
My family, my father and my grandfather and me, we only exist because of them.
We live on land that belonged to them. I have Iteki blood. That is why the Ten’in fear me.”
“The emperors don’t fear anything.”
“They’re human.”
“They’re descended from the gods…”
“And yet,” Iyo said, “all humans fear. There’s nothing wrong with that. One day, they’ll fear you, too. We’re not what they make of us, Sen. Remember that. No matter what they tell you. We’re not what they make us.”
She paused. “We were defeated because we weren’t bloodthirsty enough, Sen.
Because the imperials were willing to do anything – anything – to take what they wanted.
Even if it meant unspeakable horror. Even if it meant upsetting the gods.
They used their dark magic and corrupted themselves, they turned themselves into those who killed for power, rather than those who had power, through stopping killing.
The Iteki weren’t willing to do that. They cared too much. ”
“About what?”
“About the earth. About their souls… We’re still paying that debt. All of us. The very houses you want to know now are the ones who beheaded my great-grandfather with a blunted sword.”
“I know,” Sen said, quietly. “But your grandfather made peace.”
Iyo looked away. “Better to assimilate than stand out.”
She released a little feather off the balcony, watching as it whirled and spun away in the mountain air.
“I know very well what I’ve benefited from, and what I’ve paid, to get to where I am.
But I’d be lying if I said I did not hate what I’m now the representative of.
They call this the country of gold for a reason, Hoshiakari…
But the thing that is eating at my heart is that I know the things my people had been fighting for have all been given to me on the back of compromise and submission.
I’m only where I am, it has only been made possible, because I’m standing in the pool of complicity and on the shoulders of those who came before me…
who fought for what we now have, and who died for it…
And I’ve done nothing but benefit from that choice.
It would make the spirits of those who came before me shrink away in shame, and I will do it anyway, because I know the fires that the only alternative will bring. ”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Sen said. “It doesn’t have to be the only way.”
“I wish you were right.” Her hands brushed the fine grain of the wood-rail, and she breathed deeply, as if in one breath she could hold the entire world inside herself, and let it free. “Maybe one day, you’ll prove that you are. Come. Let’s get home. The weather has turned again.”
Sen looked up and saw a flat, slate-colored sky. “It’s been like this all the time, these days.”
“Yes,” Iyo said, eyes passing through the clouds. “Yes, it has.”