Chapter Twenty-Seven Yora
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Yora
Yora watched, silent as a hawk, as Seikiyo signed the order. Long, graceful strokes, a brush on rustling paper, and it was done.
Deer Valley, mountain refuge of the Hara clan, was to be destroyed.
Shosei read the words. “‘By divine command, his majesty Ashihara Ten’in declares that our lord Keishi, Shosei of Isawa, is to raise an army in the name of the Heavenly Throne and subdue those who conspire against us.’”
The youngest Keishi was already calling to the yard. “Conspiracy!” Seichi shouted. “Betrayal!”
“Deploy your horsemen,” Shosei called.
Seichi led the assault. They churned up the slow-rising path that led to the mountain, to the low Deer Valley trail. Seichi shoved to the fore, snarling. Surrender, he shouted as they ran up against the gates. Concede now. By order of the Ten’in.
Already his soldiers had surrounded the villa and were preparing to break through the walls themselves. Mostly bannermen in service to the clan in Isawa, they were all but foreigners to the royal city, and had no reluctance in killing perfumed nobles of the court.
As Seichi’s blue armor flared in the sun, his men drew their swords and the gate was opened.
Yora, tight-lipped, remained at the back.
Kaji Getoh and his guard floated nearby, but he had told them not to move unless he did.
At the manor, Seichi held an arrow in his hand, waiting for a response.
When none came, the youngest Keishi whistled sharply, digging his heels into his great black courser, and nocked his bow.
His horsemen trampled the gate into the mud.
Yora forced himself to stay where he was, on the wood-lined turnoff from the road. “Do nothing.” Getoh grunted; his household remained as they were.
Inside the gates, fighting had begun.
There was no hope. Only a few of those who remained at Deer Valley had any martial training; they were nobles, not warriors. Yora angled up, saw a frozen piece of sky, the jagged tips of trees. A blinded sun.
They thought they could control us, he mused. They thought they could control the warrior houses they had made. And now?
You don’t go hawking without a gauntlet or a hood. The birds may do your bidding, but they are never on your side; they are predators. They hunt for themselves.
So do we.
Seikiyo’s son Seichi had stormed beyond the gates. He’d drawn his dagger, too close to use a bow. The bow is the symbol of a warrior; he disregards it so easily.
It all happened quickly. Sounds of pain and chaos rose from within the gates – gates Yora himself had passed through not long ago, and left, fearing what they’d bring. They’ll all be killed for this, the young warrior, Tano, had said. Well, Yora thought, what other answer could there be?
A young woman tried to run – and was ridden down by the Keishi rearguard. A stout lad named Onoe Genichi, one of Seichi’s bedfellows, loosed an arrow into her back, and she disappeared down the slope.
“Hell,” Getoh cursed. “That was Shigeo’s wife.”
Nariko, Yora thought. Blue Lady of the Hara, whom he had seen, with them, that day they wanted him to join.
She was an heiress and a mother. His heart had risen to his throat and he tensed with his reins in his hands.
His men were uneasy, canting from side to side on their horses.
“Do not move!” Yora hissed. But his heart was pounding. Nariko…
How could he do this? Yora thought. Seichi just killed his own brother’s wife because she was from the wrong clan…
He found his fists were shaking. The aftershocks of this would shatter through the court.
“We can’t just sit here,” Getoh said.
“What would you do, Kaji? Stay.” I can’t condone this. But what would we do? Stand against them? Be hunted down ourselves?
By now smoke covered the entrance to the villa and the fighting within had splintered into small, single affairs. Men died there, in the ash-strewn swathe of the morning. Men whose only crimes had been pride of their own, and a vain thought that they could stand against the Keishi.
“Be quiet!” Seichi had come back out now, and with his bodyguards, was stalking on foot through the open road.
“Be quiet! Shut up!” He hissed and shouted and shoved his men to the side, blade in hand, wanting to be the one to kill the few remaining conspirators himself.
He cut down one, then another, as they fled.
Yora watched as one of his soldiers, a great dark-eyed man with blue robes hatched with black, lifted something to the wall and smashed it there, like a melon. Gods’ hands, Yora thought, was that a child? The high, keening sound in his ears was a constant scream.
In that moment, he blanched, and his heart caught, and instantly he felt as he had in his dreams. In his nightmares.
He felt as if he were young again, facing the same divergence of two paths.
Was this what it led to?
He’d lived on this shattered earth for forty years the first time he’d been forced to fight, and murder, men he once had called his friends. He’d been forty years, and at the start of it, had been sure that he was right.
And now? Now he was older. Now he succumbed to the exhaustion that lay across his shoulders, his heart. He fought against the folly of it all.
I will do what I have to, he’d sworn once, to make sure this never happens again.
I will draw my sword no more. But now he looked around him and he saw nothing but the flames, the bodies.
Now he sat his horse and saw it all again.
Life is suffering, the old ones always said.
And all he’d done, in his vain hope to ease it, had just failed.
I have allowed this, he thought, meeting his guardsmen’s eyes. This was because of me.
In the end, the fires settled. The monk Moro, the nobleman Hara-no-Ichiei Hoin, and his daughter Chiyome, consort of the mirror prince, were captured alive; all else were killed.
Yora recognized some of the bodies when they were laid out.
Nariko. A retainer from the Zusho clan, Tokeishi Yasuo.
The Gate monk Shun’en. His stomach churned.
A sound brought his attention to the road. Yaeko had arrived, and behind her, Shigeo, Seikiyo’s heir, eyes red-rimmed, mouth agape.
“What have you done?” he croaked. The younger Keishi wouldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. “Seichi… by the gods’ hands… what have you done…”
Words left him, then. And where Shigeo dissolved into rage, Yaeko was a mask. Yora caught her glance, read the pain in it, which she was trying to suppress. She had no taste for this. But she did her duty; with a nod, she dismounted, led the Keishi newcomers into the grounds.
Shigeo dismounted too, grabbing Seichi by the collar. A taller, thicker man, Seichi shoved him back, hollering, but Shigeo turned with a stifled cry and found his horse again. Yora wanted to go to him, to say something, to help forge something that would make this be undone.
Their eyes met; Shigeo wheeled away.
Finally Yora could conscience it no longer. He pushed toward the gate, but there Seichi whirled about, raging at him. “Poet! Don’t think you got off clean.”
“Take your anger somewhere else,” Yora said.
Seichi roared. “I saw you, poet, I saw what you did in the attack. Or rather, what you didn’t do. You’ll speak for this!”
“Follow your conscience, Seichi.”
The younger man spat at his feet.
“Lord!” Stout Onoe Genichi came running. “Lord poet. Come.”
Yaeko, it seemed, had found something in the manse. She came out, holding a slim paper marked with calligraphy, from among the ruin.
“I know it,” she said, mutely. “I know this poem…”
Yora stopped now. Seeing her. His heart went cold.
“This is the Gekko’in’s,” she said.
Yora stepped forward. “Let me see it.”
Those familiar words: Watching the moon above…
“Let me see it.”
“Stop.”
Seichi had followed him through the entry-gate. He stood taller than Yora, wider in the shoulder, but Yora was certain he could still move faster than the boy if he had to.
“Give it here.”
“It’s nothing,” Yora began, but Seichi’s eyes flared.
“Give it to me,” he said quietly. “If you would be so kind. Yaeko.”
She did.
Seichi pulled the sheet from Yaeko’s hand, gave a little laugh when he realized what it meant. “Gekko’in,” he said. “Oh, you’ve been sloppy, girl.”
“Listen to me,” Yora said, but Seichi silenced him with a smirk.
“You were part of this.” A demand.
“How dare you.”
Seichi laughed again. “Well, we’ll find out. We’ll see.”
“You are not in charge here, Seichi!” Yora said.
Seichi flicked his head back, an impish smile on his face and another laugh halfway through his chest. “Am I not? Well… neither will you be, lord.” He stepped close, staring into Yora’s eyes. “My old teacher. I’ll make sure of that.”
Yora moved away.
He remembered when Seichi was just a boy, learning to hold a bow, to loose an arrow at twenty paces.
Such a promising child. What happened? When Seichi was sixteen or seventeen, he changed.
He lost the baby fat that defined his youth and led to countless days of teasing from the other children.
He grew tall, taller than the others, and lean, and mean.
What happened to you, Seichi? What happened to that little boy he knew?
Who painted flowers, who told him how much he loved to sing?
You had a good voice, Yora thought. I used to listen when we rode out to the fields, you wanted to race horses to see who’d get to the top.
He would sing every song to which he knew the words, and many that he didn’t, humming the melody and smiling with his teeth.
What happened to the boy I knew? When did little Seichi become Keishi the Arrow, always seeking blood?
What hurt lies inside you, child? What should I have seen?
Yora felt impossibly old.
Seichi hesitated, sensing Yora’s glance. For an instant, Yora saw the little boy’s eyes staring at him again, eyes of the boy who called him “teacher” and who raced him up those hills.
Then the image vanished. In its place, only the man.