Like everyone she could see he was of her folk. She had rarely seen a man so beautiful, in a wholly masculine way, and never one so utterly alive even in stillness; there was a charm and a force crackling in those features, keen intelligence, and a tensile grace in the smooth ease of his stance and movements.
I would trust this man with any task, she thought. But I would never take him lightly. And any enemy who did him an injury should also kill him instantly, for he would never forget it, any more than he would a favor done him. This is a man to be loved, or slain.
The one beside him in a posture of protection was an ogre by comparison. For a moment she thought—this was a dream—that he was an oni in truth, an oni with an iron club. Six and a half shaku tall and broader in proportion, with shoulders like a plow-ox and bare legs beneath his armor knotted with muscle. His face was ugly in a way that might be pleasant when he wasn’t in a battle and primed to kill, knotted and scarred with injuries and with a bristle of sparse beard that matched his cropped hair. The white wimple-like headdress of a sohei fighting monk was pushed back on his shoulders, to reveal a black cap. A naginata which must have been heavy even for those monstrous hands rested on his shoulder, and altogether he looked like an amiable but very dangerous bear in human . . . or part-human . . . form.
The two women alighted on the roof of the cabin. Reiko flung her arms up, and the banner spiraled into the air and caught on a rope at the stern of the ship. The wind strengthened and it streamed behind the ship, the kamon of the Minamoto showing clear. A sudden roaring cheer went up from everyone on the ship, and from many others nearby.
A banner has been granted by Heaven itself, and it flies from their flagship. What clearer sign or greater omen could the kami grant?
For an instant Reiko’s gaze met that of the bareheaded commander’s, and he saw her. His eyes widened. Then he started violently; it was obvious that she had vanished from his sight like mist in a dream, and now he doubted if she had been there at all. The bearlike warrior leaned close and growled at him and he blinked and shook his head. Then the handsome features returned to their set of hard determination.
He shouted to the crew and the samurai who crowded the vessel, pointing to the flag and they roared again, an endless surf of noise; she could see the exultation there, the sudden conviction that the kami favored and fought for them. And how it built their battle-fury, like a wind of fire rippling from man to man and ship to ship.
Then the war-fan chopped around to point at one of the red-flagged ships, and the oarsmen fell into a chanting rhythm as archers put arrows to their strings and raised their bows to draw.
The woman beside her spoke for the first time, but seemingly to herself:
“You are more fortunate than my own lord, Yoshitsune-sama; you eclipsed him as bright daylight does a pale lantern that gutters and dies. More fortunate . . . for a little while, a very little while.”
“I cannot watch this,” Reiko said, her eyes bright with tears.
Because I know what follows the terrible victory. The treachery, the betrayal by closest kin and lord, the years of flight and despair, the lonely death in the cold north, the last retainer dying upright.
“You can, Heavenly Sovereign Majesty. Because you must. Too much flows from this day to all our days to come. Subdue your soul. It is your giri, and your karma, daughter of the Empire, daughter of the Sun.”
The battle continued, but now there was a driving force to it.
Like a heavy weight shifting, shifting, until it topples down a mountainside.
The man she had seen snapped orders, conferred with his captains by signal and by coming alongside, drove his men forward, himself led boarding charges that swept enemy craft like tsunamis of steel and blood. When he fought with his own hands his tachi moved with deadly skill as he slid through the complex obstacles of battle like wind through bamboo, and his monk-companion hewed men down like saplings before a forester’s axe.
At last his ship approached another, a larger vessel with slatted sails, and led more to it. He gestured to his massed archers with the fan. The yumi spat and arrows hissed until the ship with its red banners and reddened decks seemed to float in a red sea.
Oars drooped unmoving from its sides, the hands on their wooden shafts limp in death. The general’s ship ghosted towards it, while men stood in tense silence with arrows half-drawn.
“Take the ladies alive and unharmed!” the commander snapped. “The young Majesty as well, and secure the sacred things! Quickly, men, quickly!”
Figures moved amid the bodies still or groaning and thrashing, coming from below the decks that bristled with embedded arrows. They must have awaited the outcome of the battle there, in darkness. Not samurai, but women in elaborate and colorful Court robes, their long hair fluttering a little in the breeze and their faces set with a proud sadness and only here and there a silent tear. The commander’s expression changed as he saw the three bundled objects they carried, and the child one led by the hand, and heard the low murmur of:
“Namu Amida Butsu!”
That prayer meant: I venerate merciful Amida, Buddha of Infinite Light and Life, and it was often uttered just before a life’s expected end, to ensure entry to the Western Paradise.
“Quickly, you fools!” he shouted.
The giant monk bellowed and leapt to the ship of death. Others followed him, or missed their jump and drowned in their armor.
“Namu Amida Butsu!”
As his callused feet thundered on the deck the women turned as one, stepped up to and over the rail of their own ship on the opposite side and into the ocean.
All but one, who fell to the deck with a cry of despair as the monk’s naginata slammed through the edge of her robe to pin it to the wood and tripped her helplessly. The bundle she carried skittered off across the red-running planks, and without breaking stride a samurai flung himself through the air and landed on it, gripping at the deck with fingers and toes as if he would burrow into the wood to hold it safe. Two more bushi collided in mid-air as they tried to do the same and fell stunned.
Another warrior rushed to the side of the ship and stabbed with his long spear. The second of the bundles bobbed on the surface as a gashed hand released it, and half a dozen of the near-naked oarsmen dove after it, swimming with the ease of fishermen born.
But of the Court women there was no trace; they had sunk without the slightest effort to swim or struggle, their robes and the water they had deliberately inhaled dragging them down. The general bowed his head and the fan hung limp by his side.
Reiko stood, stunned and awed by the self-discipline of the women’s gesture and the iron pride behind it.
They made nothing of defeat and less of death.
A motion from her guide, and she took her hand again. They stepped off the rail, in eerie counterpart to the six ladies an instant before. She expected to feel the cold shock of seawater, and in a sense she did as it moved against her skin. But there was no smothering, no darkness; vision became a thing of ripples and shimmering blurred shapes, as if she were seeing with something else besides her eyes.
So clear! As if I saw with sound!
Perhaps that was less than fortunate, for all around her were a gradually descending army of the dead. The fallen warriors and those who had leapt to their deaths rather than concede defeat drifted downward in a host of corpses fading to the edge of her not-sight.
She and her guide flew through the water as they had the air, turning in an arching spiral. A woman sank away from them, the richly robed child in her arms, their faces calm but their eyes staring as if at an impossible horizon. For an instant Reiko saw something else herself; a city of broad avenues beneath the sea, castle and temple and mansions, a chime of slow unearthly music beneath a sky of purple cloud.
Then all her attention went to the long cord-wrapped bundle falling away from the two bodies, turni
ng with dreamlike slowness. The wrappings hid it, but she could feel the supernal power locked within, majesty like thunderheads piling on a horizon shot with lightning, like the winds of typhoons uprooting sea and land. A blaze of brilliance that called to her very soul.
“No!” she said, and stretched out her hand towards it.
It was beyond her reach, falling and trailing thin strings of bubbles, falling toward the abyss. But something shot past, as if her reaching hand had thrown it as a thunderbolt. A dolphin, slipping through the waters with an arrow’s grace. The animal’s short beak closed on it and it curved into a pirouette, a gesture at once playful and somehow reverent, the black upper body and white making a curve through the blue sea. She met its eye and felt a joy that was all the more painful by contrast with the bodies sinking about them. It hovered before her, and seemed to nod.
Death came towards them both—a great death pale gray and white-bellied, swimming with an almost mechanical stiffness. The dolphin’s eye was full of life and mind, alien as it was to her. The shark’s was fixed and glaucuous, simply a machine to guide another machine to the food it desired in a sort of passionless hunger for everything that was. With nothing within save a drive to replicate itself until all the world was shark.
Kotegiri flashed into her hands. Darkness flowed towards her with the great hojirozame shark, she struck with ferocious concentration into the midst of it. The edge that had cut the steel wrist-guard as men fought through the streets of burning Kyoto slashed home. Vision returned, and the torpedo shape flopped limp and half-severed, drifting towards the depths trailing a dark banner of blood that roiled out through the waters like clouds.
The water about her flexed; her hand clamped on her guide’s as something came up between them. It was another dolphin, a big one ten shaku long. Her hand and the guide’s closed on the long curved dorsal fin, and they were surging upward. Their heads broke the water, and she gasped in air she hadn’t realized she needed until that very moment.
What she saw was not the strait and the gruesome wreckage of battle. Instead there were mountains ahead, black against the setting sun. A river, pouring down to the sea, and a long wooden bridge, and both dolphins moving towards it.
I know this place, she thought again. This is Ise. The bridge to the Inner Shrine.
She had seen it before, several years ago, not long after she was declared the heir when hope for her brother was abandoned. The bridge had been burnt ruined stubs, and more ruins had stretched all about. Then it had been an armed Imperial Navy ship, with her grim-faced father showing her what little was left of the holiest fane in all Nihon. She had blurted out an oath to restore it someday, and his unsmiling face had nevertheless held a hard approval.
Now the bridge arched across the flood, obviously recently renewed. Otherwise all she could see was a figure kneeling on a simple platform on piles at the water’s edge. The structure gave the watcher and a few standing attendants a place near the bank backed by trees and looking out over the river, though there was a hint of larger structures higher and inland. Birds swooped through the trees along the river, and reeds bent in the mild breeze of a summer evening.
She and her guide glided upright as the dolphin stopped, and the one before it made a spectacular leap. The wrapped bundle landed with a clatter on the boards; the figure there started up in surprise and shock. It was a woman of middle years in an elaborate, archaic kimono of crimson and green and white, with an enclosing headdress of gold and white cord and green aoi leaves. Her gentle unworldly face reminded Reiko strongly of one of her mother’s elder sisters who’d spent most of her life in dreams.
She is Saio, Reiko knew.
It had once been custom that a daughter of the Imperial House spend some time as High Priestess here, at the nation’s most ancient and sacred shrine.
She is of my line. She will know what it is that she sees, even in its ceremonial wrappings. Perhaps especially so.
The priestess stared incredulously at what lay before her, then raised her wide eyes to the departing fins of the dolphins. Then she fell to her knees and extended a trembling hand towards the bundle, drew it back, sat with tears running down her face.
Reiko walked towards her, knelt and sat back across from her, an unseen presence. Once more she reflected that this must be how a ghost lived . . . though she was the living soul among the presence of the long dead.
Or do life and death have any fixed meaning here? Perhaps for me now all time and all lives exist at once? she thought. I walk through the ages of our being, the happenings that forged our legends and our souls, and at each I touch, and am touched.
This shrine had been dedicated to her Ancestress in a time long past even if this was the year she believed it to be. Wordlessly she appealed, and held out her hands, her palms framing the High Priestess’ face.
She knows what this is, Reiko thought. Now she must know what is to be done. She may not see me, but she will feel.
Shock went through her, as she was filled in an entirely non-physical sense, filled with purpose. Then heat, and light. She was light. But not mere flame; within that fire was inconceivable structure, complexities beyond even the beginnings of comprehension.
The Saio reached forward again with a sigh of exhaled breath and took up the bundled treasure. Her head bent over it, and tears rolled down her face; tears of joy, of wonder, of fear and humility. Her attendants rushed forward in a rustle of silks as she rose and led her away, one on either side.
Silence fell like an exhaled sigh as they vanished up the path towards the Shrine. Her guide sank down opposite her and they sat for a while in silence amid the deepening shadows, where the loudest sounds were birdsong and the plop of a fish leaping. Dragonflies glittered in the last rays of the sun, making their dance of victory.
At last she spoke: “Why am I here? What purpose is achieved by it?”
“What did you do, Majesty?” the guide replied.
“I bestowed a banner; I rescued a treasure,” she said. “The Grass-Cutting Sword. But why was it necessary that I be the one who did these things?”
“Even the Great Kami accomplish their ends through others. Even fate proceeds through the deeds of mortals.”
The weathered face of the warrior-woman smiled very slightly at her dissatisfaction and spoke slowly in her archaic Nihongo.
“What era-name did you choose, Majesty?”
“Shohei,” she said. “Victorious Peace.”
“Then that is the object of your pilgrimage,” she said.
“Does this voyaging in dreams across space and time bring me closer to that?” Reiko said sharply. “To victory and peace for our people?”
“Majesty, it brings you closer to that which you must find, but equally that which you must become. All life is a pilgrimage. It is not the destination, but the journey itself that shapes the pilgrim’s soul, step by single step.”
“And is that why you were appointed as my guide in this, Lady Tomoe?”
The other almost smiled. “You recognized me, Majesty?”
“At once. As you know. I heard your tale long ago, as a small girl, and it struck deeply into my heart.”
“As They who sent me know. When you heard the tale, it was preparation for the journey you have made this night, and the greater journey of which it is a part. In my life I walked the Way of the Warrior, and then the Way of the Buddha, to find and to lose myself, that I might be fit to guide you. This is a step on your path. Rightly seen, all voyages arrive at the same harbor.”
Darkness fell; not simply the dying of the light, but a deeper night, warm and welcoming. As it fell, she heard the other’s voice speak once more, soft with yearning:
“And by offering guidance, the guide guides herself.”
• • •
“Ohayou, Reiko-chan!”
Reiko woke with a start, for a moment unaware of
herself. Was this her room at home in the Palace, with the attendant breathing softly in her sleep at the door? Was she on the ship, and her father sitting on the quarterdeck contemplating the shapes of the waves?
No. I am in Eryn Muir, across the eastern sea. My journeying begins again.
“You’re getting up late, sleepy-head,” Órlaith said to her with a smile; she was in her traveling clothes, with the sheathed Sword wrapped by its belt in one hand. “We thought you must need it.”
Light leaked around the shutters of the windows; light, and fresh crisp damp air full of the wild spicy scent of the redwood forest, and an intoxicating aroma of things grilling and baking. Reiko slipped out of the coverlet and reached for her robe; it was time to wash, to dress and eat and be upon their way, though her muscles were still stiff and sore from the brutal exertion of battle.
Work is the best medicine for that, she thought, putting the tumbled images of savagery out of her mind.
“Where’s that banner you made?” Órlaith said casually as she sat to pull on her boots. “Sure and it was an interesting thing, and I wanted to see it again. There wasn’t much time after I woke up yesterday with the day half gone already.”
Reiko froze as she reached for her comb. Slowly she turned and looked up, face unmoving. The wall above her bunk was bare save for the carving down the lines where the broad redwood planks joined.
After a long moment she picked up the comb and began to run it through her hair.
“I made a gift of it,” she said softly. “To one who needed it more than I.”
Órlaith looked at her for a moment, nodded, and finished pulling on her boots. One of the things Reiko liked about her friend was that she never pushed when it was obvious that Reiko didn’t wish to speak. Everyone had been polite to her, but the Nihonjin woman thought that was probably a rather unusual attribute here.
“Would you please send Egawa in? I need to speak with him for a moment before we leave,” she said.
The Desert and the Blade Page 39