by Ben Stevens
‘I beg forgiveness, Empress,’ he said; and I could detect the words being said through gritted teeth.
‘And forgiveness is granted!’ declared Sesshu almost jovially. ‘While you are forever banned from again entering the Imperial City, or from having any contact with the Empress – indeed from having any contact with any member of the Japanese royal family during your remaining lifetime – you will be gladdened to know that you will not be executed for your crime. You can gather up your possessions immediately, and leave the palace and the Imperial City with your servant.’
‘No.’
The single word emitted by my master was like ice.
‘No,’ he said again. ‘The rule is quite clear: anyone found trespassing in the Royal Chambers is to be punished with death. Do not attempt to negate that, Sesshu-san, by offering me instead a lifetime to be spent in the shadows of shame and disgrace.
‘No – I have been caught committing a capital offence, and now I must pay the price.’
I could detect the confusion being felt not only by Sesshu, but also by the Empress. Here was my master being offered life; and yet he appeared determined to insist upon death. But of course, if he left the palace now, the story of what had happened here, within the Imperial Court, would follow him around like a curse for the rest of his days.
Already the reputation he had – as a solver of mystery and intrigue – was quite destroyed. No one would ever again seek him out, desiring his help and assistance. The best he could do, following his disgrace within the Imperial Court, was to seek refuge on some remote Japanese island – there to remain until the end of his days.
Again, the monk named Sesshu spoke in place of the Empress. Really, this breaking of protocol was quite extraordinary. It was almost as though Sesshu considered himself to be Emperor already.
‘Very well, Ennin,’ (said the monk). ‘But you are aware that the penalty for your crime is death by seppuku?’
‘I expected no less,’ returned my master, ‘and I would do it within a heart-beat. And yet…’
‘Yes, Ennin?’ said the monk, and a detectable sneer was again in his voice. ‘Does your nerve now fail you?’
My acute feelings of grief and despair now suddenly metamorphosed into an insane feeling of anger. I made ready to hurl myself at that mocking monk, uncaring for the consequences. My master was already as good as dead – so let me die, too…
‘Kukai,’ said my master; and although his voice was low it was still as strong as steel. It immediately made me recall that I had promised to do exactly as my master said – regardless of the fact that he would soon be dead.
‘No, Sesshu-san,’ said my master then. ‘My nerve does not fail me at all. But before I cut open my own belly to atone for the heinous crime I have committed, I should like to make just three requests.’
‘You may ask for them, Ennin,’ replied Sesshu. ‘That may be all.’
‘Ennin-sensei – please,’ broke in the Empress at once. ‘Just go from here; take your servant and go…’
‘A thousand apologies, Empress, but the law is quite strict. I must die – and by my own hand,’ declared my master. ‘But before I do, all I ask is that I be allowed to write my death poem as the sun rises in just a few hours time; and that my servant, Kukai, be permitted to attend the banquet that I believe is taking place within the same dinner hall from which I made my ignominious departure a few hours before, tomorrow evening – or rather, I should say now, this evening. I know Kukai was rather looking forward to it; but then I felt ill so quickly, and had to leave so suddenly…’
I risked a quick glance at Sesshu, who was now wearing an embroidered kimono of many different colors. Again, it almost matched the kimono worn by the Empress…
‘Finally,’ said my master, ‘after I am dead, I would like Kukai to be one of those who carries my body down to the East River, where I wish it to be placed so that it flows along and then out to sea.’
Sesshu’s arrogant, handsome face was attempting to conceal its owner’s utter sense of confusion. That much was obvious. It was my master himself who said that this mysterious monk had wished to pit his wits against the great Ennin-sensei… And yet here was my master, apparently throwing away his life following the clumsiest of entries into the Royal Chambers…
Had he been intent on suicide, even, I doubt my master could have committed a more self-destructive action.
‘Incidentally,’ continued my master, ‘when I say that I wish to write my death poem, I mean that I be allowed to leave this palace – to watch the sun come up and to formulate my last written words outside the walls of the Imperial Court. I will then return, and commit seppuku.’
‘Your requests are granted, Ennin-sensei,’ said the Empress at once. ‘I do not understand you, not in the slightest – but you can go and return as you wish, and your servant here may attend the banquet to be held tomorrow evening. Your… body may also be placed in the East River. Goodbye, Ennin-sensei – goodbye.’
With that, the Empress suddenly turned and left this stinking dungeon cell. With one last, quizzical look at my master, Sesshu did the same. Clearly, not even he could stay and continue this conversation, once the Empress had decided to leave. To the guard stationed outside the cell, I heard Sesshu sullenly inform him that my master be allowed to leave as the dawn grew near. It was obvious that my master would not try and escape – certainly not after he had directly refused the chance to avoid death at his own hand.
‘Wait!’ called my master then.
‘Yes?’ returned Sesshu, not even looking back into the cell.
‘Let my servant return to the room upstairs,’ requested my master. ‘He had nothing to do with my actions, and so should not be here with me now.’
‘Master…’ I began.
‘Silence, Kukai,’ said my master sternly. ‘Enjoy your meal this coming evening. That is all.’
‘Someone will be down shortly to collect your servant,’ declared Sesshu. ‘Who will, however, be in attendance when you slit your own belly – as will I.’
6
In a light, circular-shaped room at the very top of the palace, my master knelt on the stone floor with a knife held in both hands. He stared down at the blade, as it moved towards his belly. He had not unfastened his brown kimono; the blade began to cut through this…
The silence of the room seemed almost to hum in my ears. Beside me was stood Sesshu and two samurai, here to witness my master’s suicide. My master had expressly refused to have one of the two samurai cut off his head, the moment he had finished slicing open his own belly. He would bleed out, there on the stone floor, and take several hours to die.
It took everything I had just to stand and watch what my master was doing. I wanted to cry out, to beg that he stop this and accept the Empress’s forgiveness – and yet I knew that this could never be. That a man as clever as my master, whose nimble mind had borne us through so many mysteries and dangers, should meet his end like this…
As the blade bit into my master’s belly, he couldn’t help but give a groan of pain. Blood immediately began soaking his kimono and running onto the floor, as my master dragged the blade from left to right. Finally, the action completed, the knife spilt from his fingers and he pitched forwards.
‘Goodbye, Ennin-sensei,’ said Sesshu – and the last word was said with evident, mocking contempt. I would have thrown myself at him; have dragged him over to the window in this lonely, high-up room and hurled him from it… But my master had been insistent that I do exactly as he’d said, there in the castle dungeon. Even now, as he died, I would obey his orders.
I was the last to leave the room, looking at my master’s slumped, dying body as it lay on the stone floor, spring sunshine splashing in through the window upon him. My eyes misted with tears – yet I was damned if Sesshu or the two samurai would see me cry.
‘You,’ said Sesshu, his snakelike eyes regarding me with dislike. ‘You will return to your room and remain there until someone is se
nt to get you, when you will help carry Ennin’s body to the East River. It seems I have to oblige this nonsense that you attend the banquet this evening. Yet once it is finished, you are to leave this palace and the Imperial City immediately.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied quietly – and never had two words been harder to say…
Back in the room with the two futon, I stared at the poem my master had written, when he’d left the palace for a couple of hours early that morning –
Tightening my abdomen
Against the pain
The caw of a morning crow
A reference to the act of seppuku, of course. And now he lay in pain and blood at the very top of the palace, slowly dying…
As I held the piece of paper with my master’s final words inked upon it, I began to cry. I just couldn’t imagine an existence where I wasn’t by my master’s side. It was unthinkable. I should have died with him… and yet my master had expressly forbidden this. Strangely, I almost felt anger towards him because of this – an emotion mixed in with the overwhelming sense of grief…
By the time two samurai entered the room, a number of hours later (it was now certainly well in the afternoon), I’d quite composed myself. The samurai grunted at me to follow them back up to that circular, lonely room right at the very top of the palace, traditionally constructed for the purpose of seppuku.
Up many, winding flights of stairs – and there by the room’s entrance had already been placed a coffin. We entered and my master’s body was lain out on the stone floor, quite still. Blood was everywhere around him.
The samurai demanded that I take my master’s legs – they would lift him up by the arms, so to put him in the coffin. But at this I almost snarled, my eyes blazing at them. I said that I alone would place him in the coffin, and by the East River, I alone would put his body into the water. (The coffin was, of course, being used to conceal my master’s bloody corpse from anyone we might happen to meet during the short journey through and then out of the palace.)
The samurai merely shrugged, and let me do as I wished. It was a struggle. My master’s body was so heavy, and his face so white… I stared briefly at him lying in the coffin, his eyes closed but his mouth still twisted in pain… and then I put on the lid. In life my master had had almost a phobia about enclosed spaces – but this, at least, wouldn’t trouble him now…
The samurai and I carried the coffin down those winding stairs, along the various corridors and finally out of the Imperial Palace. The East River ran away from one side of the palace’s great moat. There was a complicated dam system in place – as there was on the other side, for the West River – so that regardless of whether it was the rainy season or high summer, the level of water in the moat always stayed the same.
Beyond the large damn for the East River, there was rocky bank either side of the wide river, which ran straight for a hundred yards or so before taking an almost sharp turn to the left. It then ran on for several miles, before meeting the sea. The river was swollen by recent, heavy rain, and due to the water continually issuing from the dam there was a strong current.
The samurai assisted in carrying the coffin down onto one of the rocky banks. Then they stepped back, watching in silence as I opened the coffin lid and lifted out my master’s body. This I tried to do as tenderly as possible, but he was so heavy… I was also much covered in his blood, as I carried his body in my arms to the water, and waded out slightly before letting the current take him away.
In a few moments, revolving slowly with the current, my master’s body reached the turn in the river and so disappeared from sight. It would head on towards the sea, and –
I waded back to the bank, my heart as heavy as a rock. With the samurai, I had to carry the coffin back into the palace, depositing it in a large storeroom just beyond the palace gate before being escorted back to my room.
Here I washed, changed my clothing and then waited for this wretched banquet to commence. Never had I felt less like eating, or seeing anyone – and yet I had promised my master I would attend. He’d presumed that I’d actually want to be at such an occasion; that I’d been disappointed at having to leave so early the previous evening – and so in his last act of kindness, he’d arranged for me to be invited to the banquet this evening…
As I sat there and waited, thinking of this and my master’s many acts of kindness towards me over our years together, the tears flowed again.
7
At a little before seven o’clock a servant came to fetch me. I was again escorted to the large dining room – or hall – with the low tables. It was as ill-lit and gloomy as before. I judged that this banquet was held almost nightly; a way, I then realized, for Sesshu to show to those important enough to be invited just what sort of hold he had over the Empress. And my master – the only man who might have been able to stop this monk from accumulating his foul power – now lay dead, his reputation also having been destroyed in the space of just a few hours.
I was surprised to find myself sat almost in the middle of the tables, while Noami and some other, seemingly important-looking courtiers were seated virtually at the end furthest away from the Empress. But of course – this was just another display of Sesshu’s power. If these courtiers wished to find themselves seated closer to the Empress, they would first have to start paying heavy homage to Sesshu – the monk prophesized to become Emperor.
The sake flowed and the food was as delicious and plentiful as before, But I ate and drank scarcely anything. Conversation took place around me, but I did not participate. In any case – I was just a servant. The fact that I was even sitting here was utterly bizarre. I wanted only to leave this wretched palace and travel far, heading into the mountains and avoiding all human contact. With my master gone, I cared nothing for my own life. I felt as good as dead myself.
‘Sesshu…’
The monk’s name was emitted like a groan. It was hard to know where it was coming from. People began looking around this great room, eyes trying to penetrate the gloom beyond the low tables. Conversation quickly died down.
‘Sesshu…’
It came again. And now a figure appeared out of the darkness, beyond the table furthest away from the Empress, the monk and their innermost clique. I saw Noami and two other courtiers shrink back with a cry of horror. The dripping, soiled figure was crouched over, arms crossed across its abdomen. The head was bald, smeared with black mud. A rank smell emitted from it.
Then the figure raised its head slightly and I cried out myself. It was my master – or rather, some horrific ghoul that had once been my master.
This thing walked in a horrible, lurching fashion. Its eyes were dark and much smeared with mud. Then, as it advanced, people crawling away from out of its path, it raised one trembling finger –
‘I have been sent to give you a warning, Sesshu,’ the thing rasped, and as it passed me by on the opposite side of the table, I saw that the ragged, torn brown kimono was stained with blood.
‘Get away from me!’ yelled Sesshu, who’d risen to his feet and was pointing back. ‘Get away!’
He turned to the two members of the samurai bodyguard –
‘Get him!’ he demanded in a feverish voice.
‘You murdered Okubo the courtier, and you have caused an oracle to issue a false proclamation – you will never become Emperor. But for those you have murdered, Okubo and others, justice awaits you in the next world.
‘Unless…’
‘Yes?’ Sesshu almost whispered, his snakelike eyes now wide with terror, his mouth gaping open.
‘Repent, Sesshu – show true remorse for all your evil actions from the very bottom of your heart. Only in this way can you avoid true, never-ending torment, when your existence in this world ceases…’
Sesshu fell to his knees, his eyes fixed upon the hunched-over, rasping ghoul that had once been my master.
‘I… I am sorry for what I have done,’ he said in a low voice.
‘For murdering Okubo by
poison…’
‘Yes…’
‘And those others you have killed – right from the Abbot you so treacherously pushed down the stone stairs…’
‘Where have you come from, to know such things?’ cried Sesshu, his voice high and hysterical. ‘Yes! Yes! I am sorry for all the bad I have done; the murders I have committed; the lies I have told. I’m sorry – sorry from the very bottom of my heart! There – is that enough?’
‘I believe so,’ returned the ghoul – but his voice was no longer that rasping, foul croak. It was my master’s voice. And my master now straightened himself to stand tall and upright; gone was the shuffling, hunched-over gait of before.
Like everyone now sprawled around the dinner tables, I was watching dumbstruck. My master was – alive? Yet I had seen him cut into his own belly with a knife! Had seen all that blood… had carried his body into the river and watched it spin away, borne by the current…
With a horrible, cheated snarl, Sesshu made to leap across the table at my master, his snake-eyes blazing with hatred. Yet though they had been slow to obey the monk’s order of before – perhaps too shocked like everyone else by what they were seeing (and hearing) – this time the two samurai were quick to act. They caught Sesshu by both arms, and forced him down to his knees.
‘Unhand me – unhand me now,’ repeated Sesshu; but they held him fast. I considered that Sesshu had most likely been as unpopular with the royal bodyguard, as he had with the courtiers of the Imperial Palace. As such, they were not about to pass up this opportunity to manhandle and restrain the monk.
‘Empress…?’ said one of the samurai quietly.
The Empress continued to kneel with her long, flowing kimono about her. Her trembling hands were covering her mouth, her eyes wide and fixed upon my master.
He now dropped to his knees, and bowed his head.
‘Empress, if you order me to die in punishment for my deception of before, I will truly commit seppuku this time,’ he said in a low, sincere voice. ‘But this was the only way I could think of to show you Sesshu’s true, evil, scheming nature; and to prove to you just what extreme danger you have been in these past few months.