by Ben Stevens
‘I was not aware that this was precisely what the two arrested monks were claiming,’ returned my master quietly.
The magistrate – a short, pompous-looking individual clad in a splendid kimono befitting his superior rank – irritably shook his head. Clearly, he was determined not to be cowed by the presence of my famous master.
‘You may choose to twist words, split hairs or do whatever it is you wish to do, Ennin-sensei,’ declared the magistrate rudely. ‘The fact remains that the monks’ entire defense against their murder conviction rests upon their claim that the Chinese priest somehow magically appeared inside the temple’s mausoleum – carved out of a cliff face, with there being no other way in except for the stout wooden door which has no less than three locks – and was then struck down by one of the demon guard statues, positioned either side of the gold Buddha statue, which somehow magically came to life!’
With an almost triumphant expression, the magistrate finished and stared at my master.
‘But I understand that the monks say that they heard the Chinese priest – that is, Ganjin – declare with his dying breath that the statue had struck his head with the sword,’ persisted my master. ‘But by the time the monks reached him, he was lying dead just before the altar and the temple’s gold Buddha statue.’
‘Yes, yes, that is what they say,’ declared the magistrate irritably. ‘But what really happened is obvious. For a start, the monks have long been known to be greedy and deceitful, for instance selling their services for the dying at well-over standard rate, with the threat that the deceased will be permanently trapped in some kind of spiritual limbo if the relatives do not pay the sum being asked.’
‘Yes, yes, that is unfortunately common practice amongst some monks,’ nodded my master with a rueful expression. ‘In any case, it is hardly one limited to the two prisoners you now have under lock and key.’
The magistrate shook his head, as though not wanting to hear my master’s words.
‘I have my religious beliefs, Ennin-sensei, as do many people in Japan,’ continued the magistrate. ‘But I am not a fool, and I refused to be threatened by such specimens, masquerading as monks, who I have locked up.’
‘May I ask you, Okami-san,’ said my master, his voice hardening slightly, ‘exactly what you consider happened, and how? After all, two men are now under sentence of death because of it…’
‘Doubtless – given their greed – they’d hatched some nefarious plan with the Chinese priest, Ganjin, to rob something from inside the mausoleum,’ began the magistrate. ‘Perhaps even that gold statue of the Buddha, which would certainly fetch a fine sum, if a buyer could secretly be found for it.
‘Anyway, it was inside the mausoleum that they had a sudden argument over some matter – most likely how any potential profits were to be split – and so grabbing the sword from the demon-statue, one of the monks struck the fatal blow.’
‘And then replaced the sword in the demon’s hand, as ‘proof’ of the story they quickly set about concocting, concerning that statue having magically come to life?’ suggested my master.
‘Exactly!’ cried the magistrate. ‘It was the best story they could come up with, given –’
Realizing that my master had, in fact, been mocking him with his previous words, the magistrate abruptly stopped talking. He instead glowered at my master, his brow low and stern.
‘And as concerns the Chinese priest, Ganjin, apparently being nothing more than a wretched temple-robber in disguise… What proof do you have for this?’ demanded my master.
‘I am not answerable to you, Ennin-sensei, and in any case I have work to be getting on with,’ retorted the magistrate. ‘Though I will finish by saying that the very fact that the deceased was Chinese is proof enough for me – for a slyer, more deceitful group of people you would be hard pressed to find.
‘In any case, I bid you good-day.’
A low exhalation of air, emitted through my master’s nostrils, told me perfectly just what he thought of this arrogant oaf of a magistrate. However, when he spoke again, my master’s voice was oddly humble. I realized that to have any chance of his request being granted, my master had to conceal his true opinion of this man.
‘I appreciate you are busy, Okami-san, and I am grateful to you for having devoted some of your precious time to seeing me,’ declared my master, his expression now perfectly grave.
‘However, I wonder if I – accompanied by my servant here, Kukai – might be permitted to see the two convicted men?’
Okami stared hard at my master, trying to discern the slightest trace of mockery. But when it was required, my master was expert at concealing what he truly thought and felt. And in spite of the magistrate’s earlier rudeness, this was the legendary Ennin, who’d previously saved the life of the very Empress herself…
Clearly any request of his, regardless of how humbly it was put, could not easily be refused…
‘Very well,’ said the magistrate at last, his expression somewhat pained. ‘As you insist. I will take you to see them.’
The few cells were located behind the magistrate’s office. Wooden barred, with filthy straw on the floor and a small wooden ‘cot’ fixed to the wall. All the other cells except for the one occupied by the two monks were empty, the solitary guard on duty clearly bored almost out of his wits. The monks sat together silently on the cot, the remains of the wretched meal they’d been served earlier set down by their feet.
‘You can speak to them through the bars,’ Okami informed my master. ‘The guard will remain nearby – as for me, I have any number of important and pressing matters to be attending to.’
With that, the pompous idiot walked off.
The monks wore a spoilt, sullen air. It was not hard to see that – when they had held their positions of relative power and authority, here in this large harbor town – they had indeed been a greedy and arrogant pair. But now, in just four days’ time, they would be beheaded for murder.
‘If you wish to save your lives,’ declared my master, ‘you must tell me everything you know, concerning what happened that morning.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded one of the monks, his voice weary – almost suggesting that he was resigned to his fate.
‘I am Ennin,’ returned my master.
Now both monks appeared slightly surprised.
‘I see,’ the same monk then said carefully. ‘Then perhaps you can make sense of what we heard, entering the mausoleum that morning – ’
‘Wait,’ cut in my master. ‘First of all – your names, please.’
‘I am Fujioka,’ returned the monk, ‘and this is Matsuda.’
‘Thank you – the man stood beside me is my servant Kukai, incidentally.’
‘I presumed as much,’ declared the monk named Matsuda, speaking for the first time. ‘I have heard some stories, concerning your adventures together. But never have you come across a tale as strange as this one now.’
Even in such desperate circumstances, under very sentence of death, a strange pride sounded in the voice of the rather porcine-faced monk. (In appearance, indeed, he was not dissimilar to the man sat next to him, although as far as I was aware they were not related.)
‘Indeed?’ said my master perfunctorily. ‘Anyway – you opened the mausoleum that morning because…?’
‘Because we do so every morning,’ returned Fujioka, as though it was entirely obvious. ‘Starting at six a.m. – not just the mausoleum, but the whole temple. We must chant as we do so – it is a ritual going back several hundred years, to when the temple was first constructed.’
‘But when we opened the door to the mausoleum,’ continued Matsuda, ‘we suddenly heard the Chinese priest Ganjin cry out – ‘The demon-statue has struck me with its sword! I am dying!’’
‘How did you know the voice was Ganjin’s?’ questioned my master.
‘Well – it was his body lying on the floor!’
‘Did you first see the body before or after you heard the
voice calling out?’ returned my master.
‘Well, after –’
‘How long after?’
Matsuda shook his head with apparent irritation.
‘I don’t know – does it matter exactly? Maybe ten to fifteen seconds after, at most, for Ganjin’s body was lying almost at the back of the mausoleum, by the statue of the Buddha and the two demon guards, and it is always very dark in there. Before you enter, you first have to light a lamp or candle in order to see your way.’
‘Which is what you did, after hearing that voice call out?’
‘Yes; and hurriedly, too. We walked in, and saw him…’
My master nodded, and then said, ‘But I repeat – his voice. How did you know that it was indeed Ganjin’s voice that called out?’
‘We’d spoken with him any number of times,’ declared Fujioka. ‘There was no mistaking it. The Chinese priest’s voice was rather… shall we say, high-pitched…’
‘I see,’ nodded my master. ‘And he’d visited your temple previously?’
‘Yes, on several different occasions, just as we’d visited his. For special services, and such. This is common, for the sake of maintaining harmonious relations between the different branches of Buddhism.’
‘Yes, I am quite aware of this,’ said my master, a little shortly. He had, after all, once trained as a monk himself, travelling to China in order to do so. (Something about which I first described in the adventure entitled The Cursed Temple.)
‘The Chinese priest, Ganjin – he spoke Japanese fluently?’
‘More-or-less,’ returned Matsuda, a slight sneer I did not care for playing upon his fat lips. ‘There were sometimes errors concerning rather basic grammatical construction, and so on.’
My master ignored this statement, asking instead –
‘And how long had he been in Japan for?’
‘Some five years, I think; about two years as priest of the Chinese temple here in this town, with the three years before that being spent travelling around the country, visiting various temples and shrines while learning the language.’
‘He came here to replace the previous priest, who was getting old and who desired to return to his homeland before he died,’ continued Fujioka. ‘He was able to get passage aboard one of the Chinese trading vessels that periodically put into harbor here.’
‘Yes,’ murmured my master, the pupils of his eyes suddenly like pinpricks. This informed me, as clearly as words, that his formidable brain had suddenly realized something…
Then, in a rather brisker tone, my master continued – ‘There is one such vessel here now, I believe. But anyway… Ganjin was already dead, by the time you reached his body?’
‘Yes, dead,’ nodded Matsuda, his eyes never leaving my master’s. ‘That I swear. And then we saw the sword – ’
‘Stained with blood, even as it was grasped in the demon’s hand!’ cried Fujioka; the first time I’d seen either monk exhibit any significant display of emotion.
‘Ennin-sensei,’ continued the monk passionately – ‘they say we must admit what really happened that morning, if we are to have any chance of saving our lives – of the death-sentence being overturned…
‘But what else can we say? We heard Ganjin shout out that he’d been struck by the demon-statue with its sword, and we saw that sword – its blade covered with Ganjin’s blood – grasped in the statue’s hand!’
‘We cannot alter our story, even in order to save our lives,’ stated Matsuda, his voice more controlled, more even. ‘For what we are saying is the truth, however it appears to anyone who was not there…’
‘I understand,’ said my master, nodding slightly. ‘One final question – have you any idea concerning exactly what the priest named Ganjin was doing inside the mausoleum?’
‘Absolutely none at all,’ replied Matsuda firmly.
‘Nor how he even came to be in there,’ declared Fujioka. ‘The mausoleum is, after all, carved out of a cliff rock face, with just one thick wooden door which has – ’
‘Yes, this I know already,’ interrupted my master. ‘Except – was it not possible that Ganjin had a copy of the key needed to open this door?’
‘Three keys,’ emphasized Matsuda. ‘Three keys for three different locks, so important – so precious – is the mausoleum considered. After all, it holds the remains of priests and monks stretching back generations…
‘But no,’ continued the imprisoned monk, who like the other captive appeared to be somewhere in his mid-thirties – about my own age. ‘There is no chance at all he would have been able to get hold of these keys; and in any case, for what possible reason would he have wanted them?’
My master chose not to answer this, saying instead –
‘I will leave you, now, and visit this mausoleum for myself. I promise you that I will do my utmost to secure your release – for I believe that you are telling the truth.’
Not for a moment did the monks appear in the slightest bit happy, or in any way relieved at what my master was saying. Their shared expression was instead forlorn, again almost resigned to their fate – beheading by two samurai, this Saturday at noon. The sentence would be carried out in a public square situated not far from the harbor – a deterrent to anyone watching from committing a similar crime.
‘Come, Kukai,’ said my master.
2
With both monks at the rather small temple under arrest, it fell upon the priest himself to escort us around the place.
I took an instant dislike to the man. He was obviously somewhat weak in character, with a watery smile and an apparent inability to maintain eye contact for anything longer than a couple of seconds. It was not hard to see that in spite of his title, he liked an easy life as free from responsibility as was possible. As such, the two comparatively young monks would have been free to act in their greedy, arrogant manner, free from any worry of discipline or chastisement.
‘A bad business,’ sighed the priest who’d given his name as Ohira, although my master respectfully addressed him by his official title Jushoku.
‘Who can say what took place that morning, there in the mausoleum?’ continued the priest rhetorically. ‘And this story of a statue coming to life…’
The priest shook his head.
‘So you believe Fujioka and Matsuda killed the Chinese priest?’ asked my master.
Again shaking his head (and once more avoiding eye-contact), the priest emitted another sigh and repeated: ‘Who can say…? A bad business…’
We’d left the temple, which chiefly consisted of a main hall with a few corridors and a number of rooms behind it, and were walking towards the mausoleum carved into the cliff-face against which the main temple had been built. That is to say, the mausoleum was located to one side of the temple, close to where the stretch of cliff-face out of which it had been carved came to an end, running into a large bamboo grove.
A short wooden walkway had been constructed, with a sloped roof of grey tiles, running from just outside the temple hall to the outside of the mausoleum. It was obviously to be used when the weather was not so clement. Either side of this walkway were a number of well-kept trees and bushes, and a couple of exquisite little lawns.
A solitary gardener was working, pruning one short tree. My master greeted him as we passed, asking jocularly –
‘Did the tree do that?’
The gardener shrank back slightly, before giving an embarrassed smile and raising one hand in a gesture that was almost defensive. From this – along with his somewhat low brow and curiously dull eyes – I judged that he was hardly the most intelligent of creatures. And yet, from the evidence on offer, one could hardly fault his gardening ability.
My master’s question obviously referred to the angry red mark that was on one side of the gardener’s weather-beaten face.
With an embarrassed cough, the priest said –
‘I believe… I believe one of my two monks did that. Just out of high spirits – not from any real malic
e, you understand. But he is such a slow-witted man, who often just gets in the way…’
My master gave no reply, as we continued along the covered wooden walkway towards the mausoleum. But I knew that his thoughts were the same as mine…
A weak fool as a priest, with two younger monks who overcharged the dying and struck out at people who got in their way? Really, what a fine advertisement for a temple this was!
We reached the stout wooden door of the mausoleum, directly set into the rock-face. The priest produced three keys – hanging on one chain – and undid each of the locks in turn before the door opened inwards.
‘There is only one set of keys?’ asked my master.
‘Yes,’ returned the priest. ‘Before they were kept in a certain place located behind the temple main hall, but since the incident concerning Fujioka and Matsuda, I always keep them on my person.’
As I’d already heard, it was pitch-dark inside. And yet evidently there was some sort of shelf or ledge just out of sight, for feeling with his hand the priest then produced an oil lamp, which he lit. He held this lamp in front of him, as we followed him inside.
The mausoleum was basically a cave. The rock roof still showed the innumerable strikes of the workers’ chisels, from when it had been carved out of the cliff-face however many hundreds of years before. The marble tombs, containing the remains of the previous priests and monks, were set against the walls on either side. The slabs of marble at the front of the tombs had in their centre one metal handle. They would have been opened just once, to place inside the ashes and bones of the deceased, before they were again closed forever.
There were perhaps twenty such tombs in a line on either side of this rather claustrophobic mausoleum, with space for several more to be built before the end was reached – and that gold statue of the Buddha with an armed demon guard situated on either side.
‘Yes,’ breathed my master, looking up at the ceiling and then all around him. ‘Certainly no other way in except through the door, it seems…’