Chapter Forty-Nine Sen
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Sen
His summons came at dawn. There was ice in the air, and weariness, and a cloying scent, stale and hollow.
The smell of death. Sen hadn’t slept. He’d tried.
He’d fallen to his cot and thought he’d pass out from exhaustion, but instead the night wore on, and he had only the sounds of the wounded to keep him company.
In the darkness before dawn, his spirit broke, and finally, finally after it all, he allowed himself to feel.
To mourn the loss of a hundred men he never had a chance to know.
To grieve his horse, his Kaminari, who died for him.
To feel the gritty taste of dirt mixed with blood.
He slipped into tortured dreams, flashes of gore and horror, and woke again.
Then, in the dark of night, Kai came.
Sat with him alone in the medical tent, a gash in her shoulder that the doctors bandaged before his eyes.
She said, “I’d be dead if not for you.”
She said, “Yora never told me you survived.”
It was only then, at the end, when the two of them were left alone and the night stretched on, that they shared what had happened, what each of them had seen when the battle came.
How the Keishi crossed the bridge.
How Akiyo ambushed them from the wooded hills.
How their uncle, Yora, died.
It was only at the end, when they’d gotten past the first few awkward moments, that the weight of it came back.
It was only at the end that Sen saw his sister cry.
Now it was morning. Now the summons came. Sen winced as he dressed in fine clothes that Tokuon had given him, smooth silk running over cuts and bruises on his side, and made his way to the generals’ pavilion again. Saying, if only to himself, I’m ready.
On the hill, it was like he’d passed into a different world.
The men gathered, great generals and sword-saints of the Kanden kijin-tai. The combined force of the Gensei army, all of them ready to fight, all of them loyal to Kai’s claim.
White cloth of their banners fluttered in the breeze. A bite of cold struck the air. The tent lay at the top, overlooking the plains and the massing army that had come.
Kai waited on a stool at the center.
A queen.
Gone was the vulnerable woman Sen had met the night before.
Gone was the hurt, the pain and the openness with which she said, You saved me.
Gone was the child she showed within her heart.
Instead, dressed in red-and-white, Kai had swallowed everything, pushed it down until the mask was all there was. She kept her face like stone.
Sen was summoned to the inner ring.
There were messengers. News had come, saying that far-off Lord Zusho had risen in support, and, with the help of uncle Kiie’s daughter Mitsuko, defeated the Tokeishi in Muzo. War had begun.
The message said: We have the Kanden plains.
The entire weight of our clanline now rests on her shoulders, Sen thought. I hope she knows what she’s doing.
The second thought came unbidden:
I hope to the gods that I do.
Iyo’s broken sword lay in its scabbard at his waist. He removed the helm he’d donned for the ceremony, stepped through the silken screens.
Before him waited his family.
Kai, sitting near Tokuon and his diviner amid the quiet bustle of large men moving to and fro, opening maps; the shift of armor; the shuffle of their steps. She gazed at Sen. He gave a nod.
The clansmen raised a flag behind them.
Their flag. The gentian flowers, the fan of leaves.
Our father would be proud.
He stepped forward, bowed on his knees. Rose just long enough to look into his sister’s eyes, searching for that person he had met in the medical tent, but whatever it had been, it had vanished.
In its place, all that remained was the heir.
Kai had changed, or the world changed around her, it made no difference. She was a woman at war.
Eight years older than him, Kai looked like she’d emerged from myth: imperious, impenetrable. When the page announced him, Sen bowed again, hands on the dirt, and the ceremony began.
“Welcome, Sen Hoshiakari,” the Shiden, Kanesuke, said. “Will you receive the service of your lord?”
“I will.”
With his helmet under one arm and his sword grasped at his waist, Sen stepped into the clearing and kneeled before his sister in the red-and-white. One knee on the ground, one palm touching earth.
“Whom do you serve?” the Shiden asked.
“Amayari-no-Kami Gensei-no-Toryo Satsuki Kaihime Gekko’in,” Sen said in full formality. “Heir to Katsusada Asa’in, successor to Yora Shijin as head of the Amayari-Gensei, and all its houses.”
He lowered his head. The air hung still. The ground pressed cold and wet under his hand. He felt the damp seeping through the armor and the bloused trousers at his knee. Above them, somewhere, a bird called.
Tokuon stood at Kai’s right hand. The ancient Hassho Tayu muttered prayers and spread salt into the air, and it was done.
Kai stood. Her red-and-white robes billowed lightly in the breeze; the birds fell silent. No sound, save the distant hissing of the trees. Sen caught a glimpse of a giant pine, dark green and spindly, swaying in the lonely wind. The sky beyond it, gray, and cold as steel.
As was she.
“Rise,” Kai said. “Rise, brother. Come beside me. We will have time to get to know each other. But for now, you have my thanks. We will need each other. This war is just beginning, the outcome is far from certain, but we have the blood of the old Gensei in our veins, we have the god of war on our side, and their daughter, who is our patron. We have the east, brothers and sisters in the valleys who have long suffered under the weight of Keishi rule, and now the whole of the land, every country within it, knows how they’ve overstepped their bounds.
“This is a new world,” she announced. “Free from the bureaucracy and the idleness of the court.
Free from the corruption of the royal city.
The emperor has been reduced to a puppet.
We fight to free him! His grandfather, the retired-emperor, has been put under house arrest. He needs our help.
The capital needs our help. All the countries of the Kanden, and the highlands to the west, and the islands to the north above the inner sea. They need our help.
“This war,” Kai said to her assembled clan, “is not about conquest or dominion. It is about freeing our lands from the system that has grown fat off our labor and pushed us to the shadows. We will do what our father could not, but his dream will live within us. We will save our empire. And we will bring peace.”
“Peace!” the warriors shouted. “Peace!” They raised their swords and bellowed the word with such violence it sounded to Sen like a cruel blow.
“Peace!”
Sen drew his own broken sword, remembering his stewardmother’s words. You know who you really are, Sen, she’d told him once. You know who you are. Don’t lose it.
I won’t, he thought. I won’t.
The warriors shouted to the sky, loud enough to echo through the plains like thunder, shouting to the dead and the damned that would meet them.
Peace! Peace! Peace!
This.
This land. This earth. This is the sky-seen world of the emperor, these shattered islands in the sea. They defend us from the storms, the Ten’in, for they are descended from the great god Hirume, descended from Sora’in, who slew the serpent and banished all the gods. Descended from the land itself.
Ohori said that on the tallest peaks of Eizan, and the Gisan mountains to the north, you could see the stretch of the islands reaching out into the giant blue, the shape of a dragonfly curled about its wings.
She said that, on a clear day, all of the emperor’s lands came into view.
Every mountain, hill, and river; every estate of the Ten-Thousand-Autumn Throne.
But we don’t believe in your dominion, east, Sen thought, stripping off his armor in the tent.
We don’t believe in your country, where I’m from in Kitano.
We have our own country there. He frowned, felt a sense of shame; our country.
He was not of Iyo’s blood. But Iyo raised me.
They’re my family as much as anyone. I really do have two souls.
Remember where you came from.
Remember what your people have done. For good, for ill; remember their actions have led you to the life you have.
What if I want to change?
He’d caught his reflection – wearing the armor his stewardbrother gave him – in a puddle on his way to the tents. It held him there, his own dappled face in murk. He didn’t know what to think.
In the lowlands and the gardens of Kiseda, there was no view of hills.
No arc of sky over the mountains; here, the peaks themselves seemed the edges of the world, crag-curtains swept up high and impenetrable as a wall at the border of a damp horizon.
He had no view from in the farmers’ land; he had only the chill, the wet-earth smell of thawing ground, and the shudder that still rippled through his bones.
How many would have to die, he wondered, so the Ten’in might claim peace?
We fight for the realm, his sister Kai had said; to save it from itself.
“Are you sure she’s gone?” Sen asked. But Saito kneeled before him, the bringer of bad news. Rui had last been seen with Jobo in the middle of the temple. They’d been swept up in the chaos and the slaughter. The monks had stayed to the end; none came out.
“There was no body,” Saito said. “But they were the last ones seen behind the gate. No one’s sure…
there are reports… Some of the Poet’s men say they saw a woman dressed in white, like a shrine maid, in the courtyard.
Some say she’s the one who killed Prince Nioh.
They saw Jobo fall. The girl… your friend…
I’m sorry. They say no one could have gotten out. ”
“Well, they’re wrong,” Sen said.
“Lord, they were surrounded by the enemy. Even if she managed to escape—”
“She’ll come back,” Sen said. “We’re nothing if we don’t have hope.”
Saito acquiesced. He knew what hope would mean, and he knew better than to argue.