Chapter Thirty-One Yaeko
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Yaeko
Yaeko bent her way through the sleet. Could have picked a better day for this.
The roar of it, an angry tide like waves crashing down from a tempest sky.
Unrest sluiced through the edges of the town.
The city heard, and whispered. A broadsheet fluttered in the breeze, brushing against her leg as she entered the palace.
She batted at it with a scowl. They were everywhere.
Satirical illustrations by anonymous authors, they were crude, humorous, and mocking of the court.
She’d seen one depicting a naked monk atop a donkey riding through a burning temple; another of impotent councilmen, fainting as they watched a wall of fanning flames.
A third showed great ministers too busy bedding courtesans to bother, with their bare feet pointing to the sky, thin smiles cracking in pleasure as one of them said, “Oh! It’s hot in here! ”
People had spread these pamphlets and other caricatures for a full moon-cycle already, and she was weary.
This particular one showed a holy monkey in a priest’s robe, prostrating himself before a frog with rolled-back eyes who was meditating on a stupa.
Behind them, all manner of animals read the scrolls of enlightenment with great discernment while a cat and fox with human bodies cavorted, half-nude as they lay among the reeds, their comically oversized breasts and genitals meant to draw the eye.
In other times she would have found the mockery quite funny – each broadsheet seemed intent on laughing about one particular element of the courtly life; some she found crass, while others were objectively good – but not today. Today she had too much to do.
Today she had to tell her lord what his sons had done.
The death of their brother hit them hard. Murdered in his own home; Shigeo had never gotten along with his brothers, and lately stood up against his father in the court, but he was still Keishi. He was family. And he was dead.
She found Seikiyo praying at the fox-shrine outside the Hall of the Morning. His indigo robe, normally immaculate, its white patterns braided with yellow, lay in wrinkles on his shoulders. She was struck with a sudden urge to protect him. He had, after all, protected her.
He asked her what happened, as though he already knew. His face, drawn, and lined, and tired; like something carved of wood. Seventy years on this shattered earth. Five children, two of them now dead.
“Your son, Lord Muzo,” she began. “Seichi, he’s gone on a rampage.”
Seikiyo sighed. “He’s always been a firebrand. Often it is, with the youngest.”
Seichi had demanded Yora’s head, blaming the older Gensei for his brother’s death, and damn the gods, he’d called for the retired-emperor Goshira’s head, too.
The Chiten had conspired with rich Lord Matsubara Taiho, Minister of the Right, to confiscate Shigeo’s provincial holdings in the days following his death; Seichi, hearing of this, upended a cart of lotus roots in the marketplace, drank himself into a rage, and proceeded to blockade the minister’s home, threatening to burn it to the ground.
“My lord…”
She stopped herself. How old her lord had grown, how frail. Once renowned for strength, he was but a small man now, muscles swapped by skin and bones, circles underneath his eyes. “You are a member of this family,” he told her once. She hoped it was true.
“My lord,” she said. “Your daughter is here. She… wishes to speak to you, she’s waiting in the Violet Mansion.”
“So, the sons die, and the daughter returns.” Yaeko wasn’t sure if she was meant to hear.
“Well.” He rose. “Let us go.”
In the harbor of Isawa, there was a place, when the tide was low and the season was just right, where the blue waters would recede, pulling back from sand and stony shores, and a cave would emerge, loping curves of rock and cobbled stone, polished by saltwater and lashed with weeds, bordered by the calls of gulls.
In these caves, they said, the boys of Keishi used to climb, and play and bring their friends, when they were young, descend the glistening depths while half-afraid the waves would come and crush them down.
A second cave emerged, another; it was said, among the sea-lords of the Keishi of the west, that somewhere in the deepest cave there was a holy place, a shrine dedicated to the god of winds.
It was said that Seikiyo had put it there himself, carving pieces out of driftwood.
It was said he went down there alone, in the days of his youth, in the quiet hours; it was said he stayed until the tide came back and the entrance flooded, cutting him off from the earthly world, and left him with his gods.
It was said he would emerge inspired and refreshed; his mind had better focus.
It was said that this – that shrine, that cave, those waves – this was how he’d made his plan.
We’ll be buried at the borders nevermore, he’d said. The Keishi will find a way. We will grow. We have been their ship-tenders far too long.
It’s time to act.
She looked at him now, sitting silently on his small cushion while the brothers argued at his feet. Hagane, too, was there, quiet like her father, eyes missing nothing, her handmaid Taneko but a pace behind.
Seikiyo’s face had changed in these last days. Shigeo’s death had devastated him, and it marked a final straw in the breakdown of relations with Goshira.
He looked into his only daughter’s eyes, and a communication seemed to pass between them.
“Father,” round-faced Shosei said, “Nioh intends to make a claim. He intends to gather the clans.”
Seikiyo’s voice was so burdened, so harried, it sounded bored. “Under what banner?”
“The Gensei, lord.”
“You see?” Seichi roared. “I told you. Where’s the Gensei heir? Where is Kai?”
“She has left the capital,” Yaeko said.
“Then find her! Bring her back!”
Hagane warned them not to antagonize the court any further.
“The court is under our supervision,” Shosei said, dismissive.
“Not the Hara, they see you as usurping their place as regents.”
“I don’t care about the Hara!”
“You should,” Hagane said. “There’s a reason those traitors at Deer Valley worked against you. If the Gensei rise, they may find more support than you think.”
“Which is why we must find the—”
“Listen.” Seikiyo stopped them. “Listen to me.”
“Father, we must do something,” Shosei began, weakly. Seikiyo waved him off.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
So soft, so weary now. Yaeko waited. She wanted to stand, to say, Kai Gekko’in did not kill your son. She wanted to say, Remember your friends. She held her tongue.
“Yaeko.” He spoke. “Have I ever told you the story of how I found this seat at court?”
“You won the wars,” she said.
“I did. But that’s not how. When I was young, I made a promise: my son died. My first son, Shigemune. After the rebellion. I vowed: no more. I promised: never again. I told you, each of you, when you were young, that everything I do is for you. To ensure your future. I will not give that up.”
He looked to the lamps then, and seemed nothing so much as an old man, lost in his past.
“My father,” he said, “was nothing at first, a middling rank, a junior guard. We had to scrape for everything we ever had, stand in the face of them, those aristocrats who sneered at us over their noses. And now, we are here. The realm prospers because of us. Because of Keishi ships, Keishi sailors; Keishi fleets are the reason we pass safely through the inner straits and to the continent. And still, those nobles look at us with scorn. No kijin will ever be an equal in their eyes… They fight us. They always fight us…”
Stop him, Yaeko thought. Stop him before this goes too far.
She did nothing. You’re the only one I trust, Seikiyo told her once. She forced herself to remain silent. I am not a person, she reminded herself. I am a kijin of the Keishi clan. I am a stone lion-dog that guards the palace. Seeing everything, saying nothing.
That is the only way to get through in this world.
That is the only way to survive.
“I thought that we could make a change,” Seikiyo said now. “But… death comes back. It always comes back.” He touched a candle with his finger. “No more.”
“Kai will call her bannermen,” Shosei stuttered. “She’ll raise the Gensei army.”
“You don’t know that!” Hagane stood. But Seikiyo raised a hand.
“The news?”
Yaeko found the envelope. A runner had come, breathless, in the morning. “A message from the Musha’in. The lord Gisan is assembling an army in the Kanden Plain…”
Seikiyo sighed. “Akiyo told me she was following Goshira. He sent his killers to the north. Send for her. Tell her to give me all the information she has. Watch their movements. Send her mountain-wolves. We must support our true emperor now; news will travel quickly, and the Gensei will not take it well. They – what remains of their line, in the Kanden – have always supported Goshira’s older son, Nioh.
They will use him to contest the throne. ”
A dark mood had come over him. He shook his head. He’s sad, she thought, so sad that it had to happen in this way.
“This chaos in the capital,” he said. “These pamphlets… They’re trying to sow discontent. Trying to make us look like fools.”
“I’ve seen the broadsheets,” Yaeko said.
“Well now it’s not just broadsheets. There are letters, spilling out of every window and inn and wine shop on the roads from here to Naruji.
Pamphlets calling for the overthrow of this government, my own imprisonment, mocking us.
‘My name is the Prince of Victory,’ they say…
‘I will bring the tyrants down. The high will fall, the low will rise to take their place…’”
Seikiyo motioned to Hagane. “Go to Ashihara. Go to your husband. Tell him: he will make the proclamation in his son’s name; don’t let the regent do it. Ashihara gives the order. Authorizing us to hunt the remainder of these traitors.”