Heaven's Net Is Wide

by Hearn, Lian

  “Lord Shigeru,” the guard began, his voice trembling. He could not speak the terrible fear and, in his emotion, pressed more strongly on the child’s shoulders.

  Takeshi’s eyes flickered and he coughed violently. Water streamed from his mouth, and he choked, cried out, and retched. Shigeru raised him, wiped his face and held him as the boy retched again. He felt his eyes grow hot and thought Takeshi might weep from relief or shock, but the boy struggled to his feet, pushing Shigeru away.

  “Where’s Yuta? Did I beat him? That’ll teach him to come on our bridge!”

  Takeshi’s loincloth and sleeves were full of stones. The guard tipped them out, laughing.

  “Your weapons nearly killed you! Not so clever, was it!”

  “Yuta pushed me in!” Takeshi cried.

  Despite Takeshi’s protests, the man carried him back to the house. News of the accident had traveled fast; the maids from the household had come running into the street and were crowded on the bank.

  Shigeru gathered up his clothes from the mud and put them on. He wondered if he should bathe and change before he saw his mother. He looked back at the river. The girl had climbed back into her boat and dressed herself again. She did not look toward him but began to row downstream against the tide. Men were still diving repeatedly for Yuta. Shigeru remembered the clinging, stifling embrace of the river and shivered again, despite the warmth of the sun. He bent and picked up one of the smallest stones—a round black pebble, water-smoothed.

  “Lord Shigeru!” Chiyo was calling to him. “Come,” she said, “I’ll find you fresh clothes.”

  “You must apologize to my mother for me,” he said as he vaulted up onto the bank. “I am sorry to keep her waiting.”

  “I don’t believe she will be angry,” Chiyo said, smiling. She took a quick look at Shigeru’s face. “She will be proud of you, and your father too. Don’t be sad, don’t fret over it. You saved your brother’s life.”

  He was weakened by relief. The enormity of what might have happened was still too close. If he had not been in the garden; if Akira had not found him; if he had called the guards first; if the girl had not dived down after him. . . . He had been brought up to have no fear of death, nor to grieve excessively over the deaths of others, but he had not yet lost anyone close to him, and he had not realized how fierce was his love for his brother. Grief came close to him with its gray numbing breath and its array of insidious weapons to flay the heart and torment the mind. He saw how grief was an enemy to be feared far more than any warrior; he realized he would have no armor against its assault. And he knew that the rest of his life would be a struggle to hold grief at bay by keeping Takeshi alive.

  3

  The following day, Mori Yuta’s body was washed up on the opposite bank, a little downstream from his family home. Whatever their own grief might have been, his parents hid it in their shame and remorse for nearly drowning the son of the lord of the clan. Yuta was twelve, almost a man. He should not have been indulging in childish games, causing danger to an eight-year-old. After the funeral, his father sought and was granted an audience with Lord Otori.

  Shigemori and his younger brothers were seated in the main hall of the Otori residence, which lay within the castle grounds, surrounded by gardens leading down to the great stone walls that rose directly from the sea. The senior retainers were also in the room: Endo Chikara, Miyoshi Satoru, and Irie Masahide. The sound of the waves and the smell of salt washed through the open doors. As summer progressed, every day became warmer and more humid, but here the air was cooled by the sea, as well as by the dense forest that covered the small hill behind the castle. At the top of the hill was a shrine to the sea god where a huge bronze-cast bell hung, said to have been made by a giant; it was struck if foreign ships were sighted or a whale stranded on the beach.

  The three Otori lords were dressed in formal robes and wore small black hats, and each held a fan in his hand. Shigeru knelt to one side. He also wore formal robes—not the ones that had been mud- and water-stained; they had been carefully washed and then presented to the small shrine near his mother’s house where the river god was worshipped, along with many other gifts of rice wine and silver, in the hope that the spirit would be placated. Many in the town murmured that the god was offended by the building of the new bridge and had seized the boys in anger. It was a warning: the construction should be stopped at once. The stonemason was spat upon, and threats were made to his family. But Lord Shigemori had set his heart on the bridge and would not be dissuaded from it. The footings for the arches were in place and the first arch was already rising from them.

  All these thoughts flashed through Shigeru’s mind as Mori Yusuke prostrated himself before the three Otori brothers. He was a horseman and taught Shigeru and the other warriors’ sons. He bred and broke the Otori horses, who were said to be fathered by the river spirit; now the river had taken his son in return. His family were middle-rank but wealthy. Their own ability and their water meadows had brought them prosperity. Shigemori favored Yusuke to the extent of entrusting his son’s education to him.

  Yusuke was pale but composed. He raised his head on Shigemori’s command and spoke in a low, clear voice.

  “Lord Otori, I deeply regret the pain I have caused you. I have come to offer you my life. I ask only that you will permit me to kill myself after the fashion of a warrior.”

  Shigemori said nothing for a few moments. Yusuke lowered his head again. Shigeru saw his father’s indecisiveness: he knew its causes. The clan could not afford to lose a man of Yusuke’s competence, but the affront had to be addressed or his father would lose face and be perceived as weak. He thought he saw impatience in his uncles’ expression, and Endo was frowning deeply too.

  Shoichi cleared his throat. “May I speak, brother?”

  “I would like to hear your opinion,” Lord Otori said.

  “The insult and grievance to the family are unpardonable in my view. It is almost too much of an honor to allow this person to take his own life. The lives of his whole family should also be required, and the confiscation of his lands and property.”

  Shigemori blinked rapidly. “This seems somewhat excessive,” he said. “Masahiro, what are your thoughts?”

  “I must agree with my brother.” Masahiro ran his tongue over his lips. “Your beloved son Lord Takeshi nearly died. Lord Shigeru was also endangered. Our shock and grief were extreme. The Mori family must pay for this.”

  Shigeru did not know his uncles well. He had barely seen them when he lived at his mother’s house. They were both considerably younger than his father, born of a second wife who still lived with her oldest son, Shoichi; he knew they had young children of their own, still toddlers or infants, but he had never set eyes on them. Now he saw his uncles’ faces and heard their words as he would a stranger’s. The expressions were those of loyalty to their older brother and devotion to the family, but he thought he discerned something deeper and more self-serving behind the soft-spoken phrases. And his father was right: the punishment demanded was far too harsh; there was no reason to ask for the lives of the family—he recalled the boy sobbing on the weir and the other brother; the woman who had screamed like a curlew on the bank—unless his uncles coveted what they had: Yusuke’s fertile land and crops, and above all his horses.

  His father broke into his thoughts. “Lord Shigeru, you were the most immediately affected by these unfortunate events. What would be, in your opinion, a punishment both just and sufficient?”

  It was the first time he had ever been asked to speak during an audience, though he had been present at many.

  “I am sure my uncles are prompted only by devotion to my father,” he said, and bowed deeply. Sitting up, he went on. “But I think Lord Otori’s judgment is correct. Lord Mori must not take his own life—rather, he must continue to serve the clan, which benefits highly from his loyal service and his skills. He has lost his oldest son and has therefore already been punished by Heaven. Let him make recompense
by dedicating one of his other sons to the river god, to serve at the shrine, and by donating horses to the shrine also.”

  Shoichi said, “Lord Shigeru displays wisdom beyond his years. Yet I do not believe this deals with the insult to the family.”

  “The insult was not so great,” Shigeru said. “It was an accident that happened during a boys’ game. Other families’ sons were involved. Are their fathers to be held responsible too?”

  All the fathers involved were present in the room—Endo, Miyoshi, Mori, and his own. Something sparked anger in him, and he burst out, “We should not kill our own. Our enemies are eager enough to do that.”

  His argument sounded hopelessly childish in his own ears and he fell silent. He thought he saw scorn in Masahiro’s expression.

  Lord Otori said, “I agree with my son’s judgment. It will be as he suggests. With one addition: Mori, you have two surviving sons, I believe. Let the younger go to the shrine and send the older one here. He will enter Shigeru’s service and be educated with him.”

  “The honor is too great,” Mori began to protest, but Shigemori held up a hand. “This is my decision.”

  Shigeru was aware of his uncles’ hidden annoyance at his father’s judgment, and it puzzled him. They had all the advantages of rank and sufficient wealth, yet they were not satisfied. They had desired Mori’s death not for the sake of honor but for darker reasons of their own—greed, cruelty, envy. He did not feel able to voice this to his father or to the senior retainers—it seemed too disloyal to the family—but from that day on, he watched them carefully without seeming to, and he lost all trust in them.

  4

  Mori Kiyoshige became Shigeru’s closest companion. While his younger brother had been sobbing on the weir, Kiyoshige had run to his home to fetch help. He had not cried then or later: it was said of him that he never shed tears. His mother had been prepared for her husband’s death and the family’s ruin; when Yusuke returned home alive and with the news that Kiyoshige was to go to the castle, she wept in relief and joy.

  Kiyoshige was small in stature but already immensely strong for his age. Like his father, he had a great love of horses and great skill with them. He was self-confident almost to the point of brashness and, once he had got over his shyness, treated Shigeru in the same way as he’d treated Yuta, arguing with him, teasing him, even occasionally scrapping with him. His teachers found him irrepressible—Ichiro in particular found his patience stretched to the limit—but Kiyoshige’s good humor, cheerfulness, physical courage, and skills at horsemanship endeared him to his elders as much as he irritated them, and his loyalty to Shigeru was complete.

  Despite their relative prosperity, the family had been brought up with great frugality and a disciplined way of life. Kiyoshige was used to rising before sunrise and helping his father with the horses, then working in the fields before the morning’s lessons. At night, while his mother and sisters did sewing work, he and his brothers were expected to study, if they were not engaged in more practical tasks, like making sandals from straw while their father read to them from the classics or discussed theories of horse breeding.

  The Otori valued two sorts of horses above all others—blacks and pale grays with black manes and tails. Mori bred both sorts and ran them in the water meadows. Occasionally a gray would be so pale as to be almost white, with white mane and tail. When the horses galloped together, they were like a storm cloud of black and white. The year Kiyoshige went to the castle, his father gave a young black colt to Shigeru and a black-maned gray the same age to his son. He presented a pure white horse to the shrine along with his youngest son, Hiroki. The white horse became a sort of god itself. Every day it was led to a stall in the shrine grounds, where people brought it carrots, grain, and other offerings. It became very fat and rather greedy. The shrine was not far from Shigeru’s mother’s house, and occasionally he and his brother were taken to festivals there. Shigeru felt sorry for the horse that could not run free with the others, but it seemed perfectly content with its new divine status.

  “Father chose this one because of its placid nature,” Kiyoshige confided in Shigeru one day that summer as they hung over the poles at the front of the horse’s stall. “It would never make a warhorse, he said.”

  “The god should have the best horse,” Takeshi said.

  “It is the best-looking.” Kiyoshige patted the snowy white neck. The horse nuzzled him, looking for treats, and when it found none drew back its pink lips and nipped the boy on the arm.

  Kiyoshige smacked it; one of the priests who had been sweeping the entrance to the shrine came hurrying over, scolding the boys. “Leave that holy horse alone!”

  “It’s still just a horse,” Kiyoshige said quietly. “It shouldn’t be allowed to get away with bad manners!”

  Hiroki, his younger brother, trailed after the priest, carrying two straw brooms that were taller than he was.

  “Poor Hiroki! Does he mind having to be the priest’s servant?” Takeshi said. “I’d hate it!”

  “He doesn’t mind,” Kiyoshige whispered confidentially. “Father said that too—Hiroki is not a warrior by nature. Did you know that, Shigeru? When you gave your opinion?”

  “I saw him dance the heron dance last year,” Shigeru said. “It seemed to move him deeply. And he cried when your older brother drowned, while you did not.”

  Kiyoshige’s face hardened and he said nothing for a few moments. Finally he laughed and gave Takeshi a punch on the shoulder. “You have already killed—and you are only eight. You’ve outstripped both of us!”

  No one else had dared say this aloud, but it had occurred to Shigeru, too, and he knew others thought it.

  “It was an accident,” he said. “Takeshi did not mean to kill Yuta.”

  “Maybe I did,”Takeshi muttered, his face fierce. “But he was trying to kill me!”

  They dawdled under the shade of the curved eaves of the shrine building. “Father can’t help putting the horse first,” Kiyoshige said. “Even if it’s a question of an offering to the gods. The horse has to have the right nature to be an offering—most of the horses would be miserable standing in a stall all day, never having the chance to gallop.”

  “Or to go to war,” Takeshi said longingly.

  To go to war. The boys’ heads were full of it. They trained for hours with the sword and the bow, studied the history and the art of war, and at night listened to the older men tell stories of the ancient heroes and their campaigns; they heard of Otori Takeyoshi, who had first received the legendary sword Jato—the Snake—from the Emperor himself hundreds of years earlier and who had slain a tribe of giants single-handed with the same sword. And all the other Otori heroes right down to Matsuda Shingen, the greatest swordsman of the present era, who had taught their fathers the use of the sword, who had rescued Shigemori when he had been ambushed by the Tohan clan, five men against forty on the border with the East, and who had been called by the Enlightened One and now served him at the temple at Terayama.

  Now Jato had been passed down to Shigeru’s father, and one day it would be his.

  Above their heads hung carvings of the long-nosed goblins that lived in the mountain. Glancing up at them, Kiyoshige said, “Matsuda Shingen was taught the use of the sword by goblins. That’s why no one else came near him.”

  “I wish I could be taught by goblins!” Takeshi said.

  “Lord Irie is a goblin,” Kiyoshige replied, laughing—their sword instructor did have an abnormally long nose.

  “But the goblins could teach you all sorts of things Irie doesn’t know,” Takeshi said, “like making yourself invisible.”

  There were many stories about men with strange powers—a tribe of sorcerers. The boys discussed them endlessly with a certain amount of envy, for their own skills emerged slowly and painfully out of rigorous training. They would have loved to be able to escape their teachers through invisibility or other magic skills.

  “Can people really do that?” Shigeru questioned.
“Or is it just that they can move so fast it’s as if they were invisible. Like Lord Irie’s pole when it hits you!”

  “If it’s in the stories, someone at some time must have been able to,” Takeshi said.