by Nick Lake
‘Maybe he’s never seen a samurai before.’
‘He is a peasant, after all.’
Taro stood up, trembling. He didn’t understand what was happening. One moment he had been in the sea, and now he was on this ship. Someone had stolen his ball.
But he was still a trained fighter, and he had his pride. He drew himself up and took a step towards the big samurai holding the ball.
‘That’s mine,’ he said.
The man laughed louder this time. ‘He has spirit!’ he said. ‘I like that.’ But he didn’t make any move to hand over the ball.
‘Give it back,’ said Taro.
The man sighed. ‘He has spirit, but he grows wearisome.’ He gestured to someone behind Taro. ‘Seize him.’
Several things happened at once. Taro heard someone behind him reach out to grab him, and ducked. At that same moment, there was a whhhhhip sound, and one of the samurai spun, then crashed to the deck, blood trickling from his ear. An arrow shaft stuck out of his eye. Taro dived away and rushed to the other side of the deck, dodging one of the samurai as he tried to slash at him with his katana.
There was another whhhhip, and Taro saw some of the samurai crouch. Following the sound, he looked to the west. There another ship sat heavily in the water, no lanterns lighting its rigging or deck.
‘Pirates!’ said one of the samurai. ‘They’re firing at us.’ For a moment no one paid any attention to Taro as he backed towards the railing.
The leader grimaced angrily. ‘Stay standing!’ he said to his men. ‘You’re wearing armour, aren’t you? They’re only pirates with bows! Nothing for a samurai to fear.’ At his feet, the dead man with the wooden shaft for an eye silently disagreed.
‘Just common pirates!’ repeated the leader, and Taro felt the power of the man’s authority, because even he felt somehow reassured. He sensed the other samurai becoming bolder too. One of them started to move towards him, only half ducking, even as another arrow whined overhead and buried itself in the deck.
But then Taro saw a flag unfurl, halfway down the other ship’s mast, before being winched to the top. On it was a symbol Taro would recognize anywhere.
The mon of Lord Oda.
The leader gave a hiss of anger. ‘They will not have the ball,’ he shouted. Clutching it in his hands, he raised it to the sky. Addressing the ball, he said, ‘Strike them down with lightning! Sink their ship.’
Taro held his breath.
Nothing happened.
Frowning, the leader shook the ball. ‘Destroy them! Raise up the sea to dash them to pieces!’
Again, nothing happened.
The other samurai were all down on their knees, as arrows continued to fly overhead, tearing the rigging and slamming into the mast. Taro felt one pass over his left shoulder and bent his knees to lower himself below the rail.
Only one samurai remained standing – the big one who was so obviously in charge. The hooded figure had gone down on one knee and was moving its head from side to side, as if listening to the arrows.
As arrows whirred around him, the big samurai stood screaming at the golden ball in his hands, ordering it to wreck the other ship, even asking it to stop the arrows in the air and send them back where they had come from.
But still, nothing happened.
Then there was a lull in the firing, as the other ship drew closer, and Taro saw the gleam of swords from its decks. They’re going to board, he thought.
Smack!
A blow caught him on the temple, and his head snapped round, hitting the rail, as if the ship itself were turning against him and beating him for his insolence. Dazed, he looked up at the leader, who glared down at him furiously.
‘You tricked me!’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work. Tell me where the real ball is.’
Taro stared at him. ‘B-b-but that is the real ball,’ he said, stammering not out of fear but out of the ringing in his skull. ‘I recovered it f-from the wreck.’ But then he fell silent. He’d seen this man holding the ball in his hands, directing it to do his bidding. And it hadn’t worked.
It’s nothing, he thought. It’s a golden toy. I wasted my time looking for that thing, and now I have nothing to take back to Mount Hiei. . . He closed his eyes, a tear running down his cheek. He had failed. He was, suddenly, glad that this man was about to kill him.
‘You are beginning to irritate me, boy,’ said the man. He turned to the samurai and roared, ‘Get up! We have a few moments before the pirates arrive. Anyone can fly an Oda flag – do not let it scare the wits out of you! Let’s see if the boy will talk with his guts pooled around his feet.’ He reached into his kimono and withdrew a beautiful katana, chased with a grey wave along its edge.
The samurai seemed wary, keeping their heads low as they advanced, but they were advancing all the same. And they all carried swords. But the leader was closer, and it was he who struck first, aiming a stroke at Taro’s belly that opened up his insides to the—
No.
Just as the blade was about to bite into his skin, the hooded man stepped out from behind the leader and raised a sword that was suddenly in his hand, blocking the strike with a ringing clang. Taro was briefly surprised at the speed of the man’s action and the way he had produced that sword from nowhere, but he didn’t have long to think about it, because in a continuation of his blocking movement the man in the dark hood brought his shoulder heavily forward and rammed into him, knocking Taro off balance.
He fell backwards against the rail, his heavier top half pivoted over it, and then he was falling into the sea, the side of the ship catching him a glancing blow on the thigh. He spluttered, momentarily furious that he was still alive, in a world that didn’t contain his mother or Hana.
From above, he heard a voice call down to him.
‘Go,’ it said. ‘None of them can swim.’
He would know that voice anywhere. It belonged to Shusaku.
CHAPTER 43
SHUSAKU SMILED to himself, then lowered his sword to the deck. Very slowly, he knelt on the hard wood, inclining his head. He waited for the blow that would end his life.
But no blade severed his neck. Instead there was a shocking, sudden impact that shivered through the whole fabric of the ship, and up through the bones of his legs. A crashing, splintering sound filled the air. He was reminded of the earthquakes of his youth, when he had lived on the western coast of Japan, but this was no earthquake – they’d been rammed.
Shusaku heard men screaming in the way they do when they attack, to give themselves courage, and the ringing of metal on metal. Above him, Lord Tokugawa made a tut sound of annoyance. ‘Kill them all,’ he said, and then there was the sound of men rushing towards where the pirates had boarded.
Shusaku held his breath, waiting again for the final blow – Lord Tokugawa could never bear betrayal, and Shusaku knew he would mete out punishment even as pirates swarmed his ship. It was a point of honour. No doubt even if his men were overcome by the wako, and the pirates surrounded him with their swords drawn, he would ask them to wait while he beheaded the man who had embarrassed him.
Instead he felt something hard and round being pressed into his hands.
‘You realize,’ said Lord Tokugawa, in a dangerously calm voice, ‘that I have no choice but to kill you now? You stopped my blow, in front of my men.’
‘Yes,’ said Shusaku. He could have said, But the boy didn’t know the ball wouldn’t work – he wasn’t lying to you. He didn’t deserve to die. But what would be the point?
‘You can take that piece of shiny junk with you,’ said the daimyo, and Shusaku felt the weight and heft of the ball in his hands.
Only it wasn’t the Buddha ball. It was a just a ball.
He lowered his head again but instead of a blow, what he felt was hands under his armpits, and then he was being hauled up and against the railing. In an angry whisper, Lord Tokugawa said, ‘I wasn’t really going to kill him, you fool.’
Then he thrust his sword into Shusaku’s
stomach, withdrew it again in a swift, economical movement that opened the wound upward, and shoved Shusaku over the side.
CHAPTER 44
LIGHTS THAT COULD have been stars or sea creatures or just the pounding of the blood in his temples danced on the water around him, as Taro pulled himself exhaustedly through the water towards the shore. A moment later he felt the scrape of the shallow bay floor against his legs, and then he was able to haul himself up. He stood in the shallows, gradually regaining consciousness, after the long and terrible trance of swimming for his life.
He turned. Far out, beyond the farthest embrace of the land, was a dark shape that could have been two ships locked together in battle. He stared down at the glimmering lights around him. He was among miniature glowing boats, and the people gathered on the beach stared at him as if he were an apparition.
The o-shoryo-bune – the boats of the honourable shades – drifted past him and out to the deep ocean.
Taro felt as if he were in a dream. Water dripped from him onto the glowing surface of the sea. The little boats, each one painted and hung with bunting, bobbed on the lapping waves, lit from within by whale-fat candles. As they floated out to sea, they took the souls of the dead with them, back to Enma’s realm. Inland, Taro had seen it done by Yukiko and Heiko with lanterns, on the surface of a stream. But the people of Shirahama were of the sea, and their dead, who had spent their lives on boats, sailed into death on them too.
So captivated was he by their beauty, that it was a moment before he realized what this meant. Mother! She would be leaving too, drifting ever farther from him as the tide took the boats out. Then, as he walked up out of the shallow water on gently shelving sand, his eyes swept to the north. He saw something that made him stop suddenly and stare in disbelief.
Dead men were walking out of the water beside him, seaweed dripping from their rusted armour, starfish in their hair and barnacles on their swords. They wore a mon that Taro didn’t recognize, but by their numbers and the weapons in their hands, he knew what they were – they were the Heike, who had been destroyed in the bay, and to whose ghosts Hoichi had sung his song of their defeat. And their ghosts were coming up out of the water in the thousands, passing through Taro, some of them. They didn’t see him – fish had eaten their eyes, and anyway they stared only ahead of them, fixed on the land, their features skeletal under their armour, skulls looking out blankly from helmets. Then, slowly, they began to fade downward, shrinking almost, as if melting into the sand.
No, not melting. Taro gasped as he saw a ghost gradually dim to a dark shadow, then grow claws and a shell, and go walking sideways – clickety-click – down the beach. On the giant crab’s back was a skull. These were the crabs that were seen only in Shirahama, the ones people said were the spirits of the Heike. Taro felt something wet on his cheeks, and it took him a moment to realize that it was not seawater, it was tears.
They are real, he thought. They are real and the dragonflies must be real as well, and they were free to take human form again for obon, but now they must be crabs once more. Suddenly he felt a pang of fear. The Heike were crabs again – all along the beach they were morphing into the creatures – and that meant his mother’s ghost would be disappearing too.
He staggered up to the beach, and then to where the priest stood in front of the village people, declaiming a monotone mantra to the departing souls. Some of the children stood off to the side, laughing and singing one of the little obon songs.
O, lantern, bye bye bye,
Throw a stone at it,
You’ll die, die, die.
Taro had been one of those children once – singing as the dead went on their way. The thought nauseated him.
‘Shut up!’ he roared at the children, and the adults whirled to stare at him. The priest faltered in his recitation.
‘My mother is going, and I can’t speak to her now!’ he screamed. One of the women stepped towards him, her face radiant with sympathy, and he could bear that least of all so he turned on his heel and ran towards his hut, and his shelf of offerings. Perhaps his mother would be there – he could tell her how he hadn’t heeded her warning, but the Princess had saved him anyway. He could tell her how he had lost the ball, which was his only chance of saving Hana, and how he wasn’t sure it was truly magical anyway, how it had failed to work when the samurai on the ship used it. He would tell her all this, and maybe she would take him into her ghostly arms.
But when he reached the hut, it was empty. He sank down onto the floor. It was all real, all of it – ghosts, demons, goddesses. But if all that was real, then what about the ball? He needed it to save Hana, he needed it – and it had turned out to be a useless lump of gold.
He drew in great sobbing gasps as he cried.
Then, from the door, came a soft tapping. Taro looked up, confused. Was this his mother? If so, would she knock so politely? He jumped to his feet.
‘Come in,’ he said.
It wasn’t his mother. It was the priest, and there was a look of sad kindness in his eyes. ‘She’s gone,’ he said.
Taro nodded. ‘Yes. I know.’
The priest brushed away one of Taro’s tears. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Did you find what you were looking for, out there in the bay?’
‘No.’
‘Then I am doubly sorry.’ The priest sat down on the ground of the hut, and after a moment Taro sat beside him. ‘You love your mother very much, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And she loved you, of course. It is no wonder she returned, to see you again.’
Taro smiled. ‘She was a good mother.’
‘What do you think she wanted?’ said the priest.
‘I don’t know. I think, maybe, to warn me. To tell me the bay was dangerous.’
‘I could have told you that. I did, I think.’
‘Yes.’
The priest closed his eyes as if thinking. ‘I wish I could help you,’ he said. ‘To lose a mother is a terrible thing. Of course, that’s what obon is all about – the death of a mother. It is meant for us to help the dead, but it seems to me that for many people it is merely painful.’
‘The death of a mother?’ said Taro. ‘Obon is when all the dead return. Not just mothers.’
The priest gave an indulgent smile. ‘Yes, yes. But originally it was something rather different. People don’t seem to tell their children about the first obon any more,’ he said wistfully.
‘The first obon?’ said Taro. He didn’t know much about anything, it seemed.
‘Yes, when Mokuren went to hell and spoke to his mother, and saved her soul.’
Taro sat up straighter. ‘He saw his mother again? After she’d died?’ He dimly remembered the abbot saying something similar, about someone conquering death.
‘Yes, and not as a ghost, either. He actually entered the land of the dead.’
Taro’s thoughts raced. If it was possible that crabs and dragonflies were ghosts, and that demons existed, then might it not be possible that this story – like the story of the Buddha ball – was in some sense true? If it was, then perhaps he could speak to his mother again. He could ask her about the ball – he was sure she’d hidden it in the wreck, so why had it not worked for the samurai? Did it require special words; the touch of a special person? Her shaking of her head had seemed to him a warning not to dive for it – what did that mean?
He needed that ball. He had to save Hana’s life. Otherwise he was just a curse that brought death to people.
‘Tell me,’ said Taro. ‘Tell me everything.’
CHAPTER 45
MOKUREN WAS THE son of one of the emperor’s many consorts, and because he was not a true heir, he could never hope to be emperor himself. Mokuren’s mother, knowing that in her son lay her only remaining chance of social advancement, encouraged him day and night to devote himself to his studies. And when he came of age, at twelve, she indicated her desire for him to enter monastic service. Many years before, a serving girl had
whispered to her during a Noh performance, ‘Flattering the emperor with your beauty will get you somewhere, but not everywhere. Better to have a son who reaches enlightenment. As a woman, you are barred from the Pure Land of paradise as firmly as you are barred from the most elevated positions. However, your son is not subject to these restrictions. Maybe, if he achieved enlightenment, he could even save you from whatever lowly realm you are reincarnated into.’
Soon after, a visiting monk had told her that the greatest merit lay in sending one’s son into the Order – and it seemed to her that these two pieces of advice constituted more than a coincidence.
Mokuren was not sure he wanted to be a monk – he was a boy of naughty inclinations, who loved to play pranks on the guards and pinch serving girls’ bottoms. Nevertheless, to his dismay, the abbot from the great Tendai monastery at Mount Hiei had already been sent for.
Mokuren loved his mother more than anything. More, even, than poetry and dancing and young women, all of which he loved very much indeed. As a result, when his mother told him she wished for him to be a monk, he accepted it with a glad heart. So it was that when the abbot arrived, Mokuren prepared for his departure. There was not a dry eye in the palace – all the serving girls loved Mokuren, though they looked forward to being able to turn their backs without fear of him pinching their bottoms.
As Mokuren walked out of the door, his mother came running out after him in tears. Until now, he had never once left the confines of the palace’s jewelled doors; he had never once been seen by anyone of importance except through his mother’s screens. Mokuren didn’t want to leave either, but he knew that any show of weakness might dissolve his mother’s resolve. ‘Although I shall be far away on Mount Hiei,’ he said, ‘in the end I will come back and show myself to you, wearing the robe of liberation. Since it is my fate to follow the path of Buddhist practice, let it at least be a blessing for my future and my family.’