Chapter Thirty-One Yaeko #2
The young emperor had a kind heart, people said. But he’s barely twenty now. He has pimples on his face. His wife is a Keishi.
“Emperor Ashihara is tired, bored, and doesn’t like feeling useless,” Seikiyo said.
“He performs his duties, but when you get to the other side of the screen, you’ll see the young man for who he is.
Now that he’s stepping down, he’ll think he’ll be able to exert more will outside the burden of his office. We use it.”
Things moved quickly after that. Keishi swept into the capital.
Troops from their lands in Isawa had been mobilized; they were already on the way.
Shosei, now Seikiyo’s heir, armed the palace guard.
Keishi retainers arrived from their many strongholds in the west. We come to protect the capital, they announced. None stood in their way.
Shosei called his brother Seichi to help the Musha’in hunt traitors in the provinces.
They agreed to move within days. An impulsive man, Seichi lacked the nuance of his brother, but made up in strength and a willingness to kill.
He stood as the antithesis of the imperial court, and its scholar-courtiers; Yaeko could only watch as the nobles fluttered and scowled about, and did nothing.
They were bureaucrats. Seichi’s men had spears, and knives, and bows.
The coup began.
Sunlight. A draft in the Hall of the Morning, where Seikiyo had set up his camp. Yaeko shivered in the cold. They’d sent riders under the command of Akiyo Musha’in to begin finding the Gensei lords in the provinces: a tactic that the poet Yora, once advisor to her lord, had now arrived to critique.
Seikiyo had no time for him. “The barrier lands resist control. As they have always done. This… is a force of unification.”
“They will not like this,” Yora said.
“When have they ever liked us? Your nephew Tokuon has been building his army in those high mountains for years, don’t tell me you didn’t know. Are you in contact with him? This Gisan lord? The revolt must stop. The houses must submit, or be destroyed. We have no choice.”
“This won’t end well,” Yora said.
Seikiyo waved him off: “Akiyo knows her duty.”
He called the ministers before him, turned to Goshira’s former aide, a sliver of a woman named Chikae Ikariya. “I’m appointing you the new regent-mother to our young emperor. You have been a loyal advisor to the retired-emperor in the past. Will that be a problem?”
Chikae considered this. “My loyalty is to the legitimate government.”
“Which means what, to you?”
“Goshira has no official status anymore,” Chikae said smoothly. “Let the old man grow angry if he wants, but let him do so in the comfort of his home. He need not have a voice.”
By the end of the day, she had been named official guardian to the infant Seitoku.
Her adopted son, Onoe Naotora, was promoted into Seikiyo’s new Council of Four, and the next day Goshira was put under house arrest and young Emperor Ashihara made a final, poetic speech about his decision to step down.
“My heaven-blessed son, whose true name was Noriyasu, will succeed me,” he said to the crowd of ministers. “He accedes and becomes Seitoku Ten’in Soramitsu, sky-seen, of the Thousand Autumn Throne in our realm under heaven. May he live a long and happy life.”
That night, Yaeko stood silent as a stone guardian outside Seikiyo’s hall.
Within, the Keishi leader muttered, walking in circles.
Nightmares and memories invaded his rest, and it brought a pain to Yaeko’s heart to hear him suffer.
But he could never show anyone in the court – he hardly showed his children.
He spoke, mumbling, pacing as if talking to someone who wasn’t there.
At the hour of the ox, Yaeko found him staring out the open window, to the garden.
“Do you see them?” he asked sadly. “Or is it only me?”
“See what, lord?”
“The skulls.”
Outside, the garden lay quiet, buried in winter. The apricot tree he planted years ago stood barren in the corner.
“I… see nothing, lord.”
He gave a small, painful laugh.
“It’s the gods. Every night. They speak to me, and I cannot understand.
The old words say a sign of flames will save the future of this family…
but I cannot see it. They speak in riddles, Yae.
Games. They’re mocking. Or… warning me of something…
By the time the sun rises, they’re gone. I’ll get no sleep tonight.”
“Let me find the Poet,” she began.
He waved her off. “Do you enjoy the western tea, Yae? Here, have some. You see… old warriors, those of us who survived…” His hands folded themselves on heavy sleeves. “The monks say it is not for us to see such horror and come through unscathed. Yora was right.”
He didn’t say the rest. Didn’t say, I am plagued by ghosts of men. He wants someone to help him, Yaeko thought. Instead, he sat in silence, rubbed a smooth, black pebble between thumb and forefinger.
“He lied to me,” he said at last. “Yora. He said the boy was dead. He knew, then, what was in my heart.” A hand before his face, the knuckles, spots.
“After so many years I do not recognize myself. Who wants to kill a child? Yet now…” The change in his voice seemed to be one of determination.
“It seems that I was right. I mean to make you part of our army, Yae. You will be with Shosei. He’ll need guidance, when the time comes. ”
“You believe there will be war?”
“There’s always war.” He placed the kettle back over a dying flame. “I don’t know what’s coming. I see things, a white woman in the smoke. There are rumors. A demon from the east. She’s come this way. She’s coming to us… I fear she may have already struck.”
When he turned to her, Yaeko saw that he was crying.
“I mourn the violence I must do, Yaeko. I try… so hard… to make sure the realm is strong again, strong to resist all the division, the factions squabbling for power… Only a sure hand can stop this death. Or else every country lord is going to get ideas in his head that he might pay some ruffians to kill for him, and they’ll all become kings. It’s madness. Just madness.”
He poured the remains of his tea into the fire, sending clouds of ash toward the ceiling. He whispered, so quietly she almost couldn’t hear.
“I have to stop it.”