Chapter Twenty-Nine Rui
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Rui
The grass lay like a sea below them, rippling waves of dry and faded green. Above, the silent churning of the sky.
They had been traveling for weeks. Rui paused on her walk, tasting grit and burning charcoal in the air.
Some of the Jibashiri had started their cooking fires already.
Flickers of ash floated up toward the evening, and the air unfolded with the smell of roasting waterfowl.
A few of the men, in the gap between their tents, had started some kind of drinking game, throwing dice beside the fire.
But the sky was heavy, and Rui didn’t like the feeling of impending rain.
A chill passed through her. She ignored the calls and wolf-whistles of the men and made her way along.
With the low wind coming down over the southern slopes of the Gisan mountains, she wondered where Lord Tokuon and his homeguard were.
They had ridden north while Rui followed the sisters and their Jibashiri directly south, and then west, through the fertile valley plains and into the townlands at Kiseda.
Gisan was above them; Tokuon’s lands. He was there, with his homeguard, praying at his family’s temple and raising the bulk of his army.
And Sen was with him.
She turned back from the edge of the camp, where she’d been watching the sunset under the gaze of the solemn mountains. The smells of the cooking fires made her stomach rumble.
She thought of her god again.
Are you there? she asked. Are you listening? Above her a round moon peeked through drifting cloud, and she wondered if the Hososhi was watching, waiting within her or around her in the fabric of the world itself.
Hello?
The night, the god, they didn’t answer.
Are you there? she asked. Please, can you hear me?
She didn’t ask another time. She walked the edges of the camp, thinking, Perhaps they’re gone, but she knew it wasn’t true. Knew that whatever she did, the god was with her, and would be, until they got whatever it was that they wanted.
I have a use for you, they said.
She wondered what it meant.
She hoped Sen would be safe with the protection of Tokuon and his guard. She hoped they all would be.
A storm grumbled at the edge of the horizon: a clash, thunder and lightning like a battle somewhere over the royal city to the west.
She had never seen the royal city. She did not know the color of its gates. But she knew enough. She knew how it would feel.
It was the same. It was why the Lady Ogami’in had done so much to forge a peace, to break away and lead the eastern lands with independence. Because the empire would do what empires always did, what they were designed to do: grow. Take land, bring the wilds into itself, and claim dominion.
A sound in the bushes to her right. A small movement, a fox, or a raccoon-dog, running in the dark, and for an instant, she thought she saw two shining eyes, reflective as mirrors; but the moment that she turned, they slipped away. A quiver in the brush, then silence, and the fox had gone.
“So happy birthday,” Jobo said, stirring a pot over his fire. She smelled the fragrant broth; mushrooms, and turnips or white radish.
“How’d you know it was my birthday?”
“I’m a wise crow monk. I know things.” Jobo slurped the stew noisily with a wooden spoon. “So, you grown up yet, or what? How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one,” he echoed. “Hell. Old, and young at the same time. Well. Hope you’re hungry, old-young one. Today, it’s salted mackerel in rice-bran, and soup.”
The soup steamed, flavorful and a little spicy from the roots. “This is really good,” she admitted.
“It’s the mushrooms.” He showed her a little hemp bag filled with dried beech-mushrooms from the Godspath. “Only way to make a decent broth. Better if I could’ve left them overnight. And I ought to have some kelp. Give it depth.”
“I’ll take it anyway,” she said, reaching for her bowl.
He muttered a silent prayer and took the pot off the fire. The barley-and-millet was already done. He tipped the lid with his spoon, wafting the steam away, and she felt warmer already. “Almost good as home,” he said. “Here. Eat.”
She did, gladly. They ate in companionable silence for a while, drinking down the steaming broth of radishes and beech mushrooms, and she still had her jar of the salted plum Koroku had given her, what felt like years ago.
The salty tang of the pink plums made her mouth water; she spread some on the millet and washed it down with the last of the broth.
“Winter births are good,” he observed. “Means you were conceived in spring. Yes. A reawakening. A new life, beginning with new life.”
“And ending at the end?”
He gave her a look, then grunted with a one-shouldered shrug and began picking bits of barley-and-millet from the bottom of the pot with his chopsticks, one grain at a time.
“Perhaps. I told you, we never know the way our path will take us. But after winter comes another spring, new life again. Let’s wait until we get there, neh? ”
When they were done, she went to wash the dishes in the river.
One of the Onji tributaries flowed there, beside the fields, and the sky hung flat and full.
Rui wondered what Otsu and Koroku were doing, in their stablehouse by the Noji road.
They would be stitching raincoats made of straw, she supposed, for the rains, and the winter.
When will I be able to see them again? The question came with the force of a tide. When will I go home?
The feeling of being lost grew worse. War was coming.
And with it, who knew what destruction. What would be left?
The western forces, rumor said, had streamed into the capital like a swarm, and Keishi allies from the islands arrived each day: salt-eyed, stiffened predators, still wet with seafoam, sensing prey.
And if they see us in the farmlands, she thought, they will strike us down.
The Gensei army is not strong enough. Not yet.
“All beings are inherently enlightened,” Jobo had told her the week before, riding down the barrier road.
“But our eyes become so clouded. We’re too tightly wound to see our own mistakes.
Too many attachments. It changes our vision, makes us unaware.
And we forget the fact that our lowly spirits are actually the same as even the most enlightened masters of the ancient kingdoms.”
He urged her to look inside herself to find that enlightened spirit. “That’s what the god wants you to find. That’s why the god has found your heart.”
“But why me?” she asked. “I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t want to be special.”
“Who says you’re special?” Jobo chuckled.
“It’s not just you. It could have been anyone.
You happened to be the one the god found.
You happened to be the one to insult them.
And then, when they saw you, you happened to be the one the god Hososhi saw in their multitude of directions. What did they tell you?”
“They have a use for me.”
“Exactly.”
“But I don’t know what it means.”
“Maybe you’re not meant to. They’re trying to stop this evil; you must help them. The masters say, encountering the paradox is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball; you can neither disgorge nor pass it through. Yet, until you digest this ball, you will never be at peace.”
Now, walking by the cooking fires and the tents, she felt the inherent paradox of it all still gnawing inside her.
She’d recovered from her sickness; the god hadn’t spoken to her in days.
But every so often, when the sun came up or settled down behind the westward hills, she felt the pain in her heart, and she heard the whisper of wind on the changing earth, and in it, she felt the Hososhi’s presence, laughing, whispering, telling her something she couldn’t understand.
Why won’t you talk to me? she thought; but the god responded with silence.
Rui paused, taking in her new surroundings.
The soldiers, the men and women of the ground-runners’ unit, the scouts who called themselves Jibashiri, were preparing for night.
Some were suiting for a ranging mission; there would be a second watch after the hour of the rat.
Myorin had said that Rui was an equal soldier, just as any of them, though she would need to be trained.
So she’d become a porter. She didn’t know anyone but the sisters, and they were busy planning troop movements with the other lords.
They introduced her to several soldiers whom she would serve, but she could barely remember anyone’s name.
And in it all, her heart still hurt, still pulled at her, still ached.
She walked the footpaths and little lanes beside the tents, watching as the army continued to gather in pieces as lords and generals arrived.
She was surrounded by people, and she was alone.
The army grew and sprawled around her, cooking fires flickered and spit; tents came up at every angle, and teams were drilling on the field to the west. Sentries on the road.
She watched the guards shout a greeting to some of Tsuna’s riders who were coming in, and a moment later, another team of scouts passed by, heading to the local towns.
The whole operation moved and breathed like a living thing.
She soon found herself sitting by a small fire by the dykes, feeling a chill in the air and trying to settle the hollow uncertainty in her heart.
She listened to the bustle of the war-teams as they grew, and planned, and prepared around her, and set about their work.
Finally, she was placed beside a young woman her own height but much thinner, with big eyes and a refined hairstyle that told Rui she was from the capital.
This girl looks like some spirit-princess, Rui thought, looking at the flowers on the girl’s robes. Like Akihime the autumn-daughter, not a warrior. I could break her like a twig.
“What’s your name?” The girl looked at her with a flash of surprisingly light, speckled eyes.