Guardian of the Spirit

by Nahoko Uehashi

  Oddly enough, he rather liked this new self, this boy who was collecting firewood. In fact, when he thought about the old Chagum, the prince who had never dressed or even washed himself because someone else always did it for him, he wondered what on earth he could have been thinking. At first, he had not even been able to tie a knot around the kindling he gathered every day. Now his hands deftly wound the string around the bundle and secured it tightly.

  Not bad, he thought. Then he smiled. I like being able to do things for myself. It’s boring to do only what others tell you to. I don’t want to be trapped as a prince anymore. He swung the bundle of firewood onto his back and glanced up at the sky, with its clouds dyed red. A shadow crossed his face. But now, he thought, I’m trapped as the Moribito, the Guardian of the Spirit.

  He had chosen neither role. He had never asked to be born a prince and certainly not to be the Moribito. Filled with a futile, choking anger, he came full circle back to his original question: Why me?

  On the tenth day after Tanda and Torogai left, with a sound like a sigh, it began to snow. It fell thick and fast, burying the earth and the trees. Chagum helped wash up after dinner. That night, he put his hands out to warm them at the fire, only to draw them back hastily. For the first time in his life, they had become chapped, and the heat made them sting.

  Balsa took his hands in hers. “Let me see. My! Just look at that chapped skin!” Chuckling, she rose and began rummaging among the things on the shelf. Finally, she returned with an ointment that she rubbed into his cracked fingers. Chagum looked at her hands as they worked. They were so different from his mother’s — thick and rough and covered in calluses from wielding the spear. But when he felt their warm, dry touch, tears welled unbidden and spilled down his cheeks.

  Balsa said nothing, but simply kept rubbing his hands. The blizzard raged outside, but the cave under the snow was warm and silent, as if they were in the bowels of the earth.

  “I hate snow,” Chagum whispered. “It swallows up sound, and I feel like I can’t breathe.”

  Balsa patted his hands lightly and let them fall. “Then how about I tell you a story to help you?” she said.

  Chagum’s face brightened instantly. “What kind of story?”

  “The story of a country far to the north, and of a little girl who was the daughter of the king’s physician.” Staring into the crackling flames, she began. “If you travel across the Misty Blue Mountains and keep going north, farther and farther, you will come to a country called Kanbal. Unlike your country, Kanbal doesn’t have good fields — only mountains covered year-round in snow, and some steep, rocky slopes. The people survive by planting tough grains and potatoes and raising goats on the mountainsides. The huge eagles that live on the cliffs feed on mice and goats, or other animals that fall to their deaths…. They especially love the marrow inside the bones, and they’ll drop them from great heights to crack the bones open and get the marrow. I can still hear the sound of the bones hitting the rocks, echoing in the valley — crack, crack. That’s what Kanbal, my homeland, is like.

  “Although it was a poor country, the old king had several wives and many children — four princes and five princesses. When the princes grew up, they began to fight over who would be the next king, as princes often do. Rogsam, the king’s second son, was a particularly evil man. When his father died, Rogsam made sure that his older brother Naguru was set on the throne. Then he poisoned Naguru before he could have any children.

  “No one guessed that the new king had been murdered. He had always been sickly, and everyone in the palace knew he had caught a bad cold that winter. They thought he just died of it.

  “But there was one man who knew Rogsam’s secret — Naguru’s physician, Karuna Yonsa. Rogsam had ordered him to poison the king and threatened to kill his daughter if he didn’t obey. Karuna’s wife had died the year before, so this daughter was all he had left in the world. He knew that Rogsam was a cruel man, not above murdering a little girl. So in order to save her, Karuna did as he was told and poisoned the king.

  “But then he knew too much. He was sure that once the king was dead, Rogsam would never let him or his daughter live. So he secretly asked his good friend Jiguro Musa to take his daughter and run away with her as soon as the king died. Jiguro was Rogsam’s martial arts instructor, and saving Karuna’s daughter would mean the end of the life he knew. You can see that, can’t you? To escape with the girl, he would have to give up everything — his position in the palace, his whole life. Rogsam would never let him get away once he realized that he knew the secret of the king’s death.

  “And yet Jiguro accepted his friend’s request.” Balsa’s eyes were tinged with sorrow. “He and the little girl ran away into hiding. Rogsam sent warriors to kill them, and Jiguro fought them one by one. And again and again, he took the girl and fled.

  “Soon they heard that Karuna had been killed by thieves. The girl felt as though her heart had been cut in two. She hated Rogsam. She vowed that one day, she would rip him to pieces with her own two hands. She begged Jiguro to teach her how to fight.

  “At first, he refused. Martial arts were for men, he insisted. Girls didn’t have the strength for it. But the real reason he refused to teach her was because he didn’t want her to live a life of bloodshed. It’s strange, but once you learn to fight, you seem to attract enemies…. Sooner or later, those who master the art of combat must end up fighting.

  “In the end, however, Jiguro gave in, for two reasons. One was so that she could escape and survive on her own if he was killed by their pursuers. The other was because he recognized that she was born with natural talent.”

  “What kind of talent do you need for martial arts?” Chagum asked.

  “Many different kinds. This girl could mimic a move perfectly after seeing it only once. She could also —” She broke off and held up her index finger. “Chagum, can you hit the same spot over and over again with your finger?”

  He gave it a try, tapping his fingertip against a charred spot on the edge of the hearth. It was surprisingly difficult; the faster he tried to hit it, the more his finger wavered and missed the spot. Balsa suddenly began tapping a much smaller spot right beside his. Her finger moved so fast it looked blurred, and though she was hitting the point from a greater distance, she always touched the same place, as though drawn to it by a magnet.

  She stopped and said, “The little girl had always been good at that. And she had other abilities — she was light on her feet and more aggressive than most boys. Jiguro decided that she was born to be a warrior, that it was her destiny to master the martial arts.

  “Their journey continued, with Jiguro teaching her as they went. One or two years passed. Sometimes they had to do dirty work just to make enough to eat. Jiguro was hired as a bouncer for a gambling den. The girl ran errands and even begged. That’s how they survived. They could never stay in one place for long because their enemies might find them. And no matter how careful they were, in the end, the enemies always did find them.” The sadness in her eyes deepened. “Jiguro was so strong, Chagum. None of his attackers could beat him. But the little girl knew that every time he killed one of them, it broke his heart. For you see, they were all his old friends — the people he had trained with long ago. I don’t think they wanted to fight him either, but if they disobeyed the king, they would be killed and so would their families. So they came to kill Jiguro, their hearts in agony.

  “Eight men he killed, eight friends, to protect himself and the girl, and this lasted fifteen years. Then Rogsam died of a sudden illness, his son became king, and there was no longer any need to hide. Those fifteen years were hell, Chagum. By then, the six-year-old girl had become a young woman of twenty-one. She was warrior enough to beat Jiguro one out of every two tries.”

  The logs in the fire had died down to embers. A silence filled the dimly lit cave.

  “That girl was you, wasn’t it?” Chagum asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And that’
s why you vowed to save the lives of eight people. The same number that Jiguro had to kill to save you,” he said hesitantly.

  Balsa looked at him in surprise. “Tanda must have told you that. So you knew that story already?”

  Chagum shook his head. “No. When I asked him why he didn’t marry you, he said you had made a vow to save the lives of eight people, and until you’d done that, he didn’t think you would marry anyone. That’s all.”

  Balsa sighed. Then she laughed wryly but said nothing. Her face was etched with a startling loneliness.

  To his surprise, Chagum found himself pitying her, from the very bottom of his heart. Balsa seemed invincible, endowed with powers no other warrior could match, but in her profile he could glimpse the shadow of a young girl, hurt and buffeted by a cruel and hopeless fate. If he had never experienced what it was like to be at the mercy of fate himself, he would not have noticed, but now he could see it with unbearable, heartrending clarity. A warm tenderness welled up inside him. He wanted to say something but could not think of anything. All he could whisper was, “Balsa, what number am I?”

  She laughed but did not answer. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly. “When Jiguro was dying,” she said, “I told him to rest easy because I would atone for the wrongs my father committed. ‘I’ll save the lives of eight men,’ I told him. But, you know, he just smiled. ‘It’s much harder to help people than to kill them,’ he told me. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself, Balsa.’

  “He was right. If you want to save someone in the middle of a fight, you can only do it by hurting someone else. While saving one person, you earn yourself two or three enemies. After a while, it becomes impossible to figure out how many people you’ve really saved. Now, Chagum, I’m just living.”

  The blizzard blew for two days, finally ceasing at dawn on the third day. The sky was clear and the snow shone so brightly it hurt the eyes. A little past noon, Tanda returned, tramping through the freshly fallen snow.

  “Where’s Torogai?” Balsa asked.

  Tanda grinned. “She said she didn’t want to spend the winter holed up in the mountains. But there are too many eyes in the city, so she’ll stay at the hot spring in Tangaru. She’ll be back when the snow melts.”

  “Well, of all the — !” Balsa said crossly. “But I suppose it’ll be better for us than spending the whole winter cooped up with her. And what about the Juchi Ro Gai? Did you meet any of them?”

  “Not one. It was a waste of time. Nobody responded to us at all. I don’t know if it was because they were already asleep for the winter, or if they just didn’t want to tell us about Rarunga. After all, it lives in the earth of Nayugu, just like them. We’ll have to try again in the spring.”

  Sitting at the hearth sipping his tea, Tanda smiled suddenly.

  “What are you grinning about?” Balsa demanded.

  He just shook his head. He was afraid she might run away again if he told her how glad he was to be spending the winter with her in the cave.

  It was an unforgettable winter for Shuga as well. The Master Star Reader gave him the key to the secret archives and relieved him of all other duties and training, and he immersed himself in deciphering Kainan Nanai’s memoirs, which had lain undisturbed for almost two centuries.

  A few air vents provided the only openings in the underground archives, and no light entered from outside. Shuga brought ten fat candles and used mirrors to reflect their light. Although he would have liked to bring down a charcoal brazier for warmth, he had been warned that burning charcoal in that small space could poison him. The room was freezing, but he wore padded clothing and relied on the faint warmth of the candles for heat.

  He only left the archives twice a day, for breakfast and supper, and whenever he entered the dining hall, he had to endure the cold stares of his fellow Star Readers, who pointedly ignored him. The hatch that opened into the archives was located in the Master’s stone-tiled room, and as a result, everyone else believed that Shuga was working for the Master Star Reader on some special task. People are so petty, he thought frequently. How could these men, who had supposedly chosen the study of Tendo as their life’s work, waste their time envying his success? Would he do the same, he wondered, if he were in their position? He thought not, but he supposed it was possible he might feel very jealous. Whichever the case, he did not let such a little thing discourage him. The more he read, the more engrossed in the memoirs he became. The content was so fascinating that he often forgot to eat supper.

  Nanai’s memoirs were carved onto stone tablets, each crammed with fine script. He had probably originally written them in ink on cloth or hide, but his successors had spent much time and effort copying them onto stone so they would not disintegrate over the years. It must have been a daunting task, for his memoirs amounted to several hundred stone tablets. They began with Nanai’s memories of his youth, when he spent his days studying Tendo, being trained to read the future in the stars. He recorded everything in scrupulous detail, and as Shuga read, it gradually dawned on him why Nanai had been so meticulous about recording events: He knew that time will always twist the truth and facts will always be changed to embellish a story or create a myth. Nanai realized that he would be the main character in the story of New Yogo’s founding. Therefore, in addition to the distorted facts that eventually became legend, he secretly recorded what he had really experienced for future generations.

  Reading further, Shuga also began to see why this record had to be kept secret. The first Mikado, Torugaru, had been a weak and cowardly man without a mind of his own. It was not because he had tired of the pointless conflict in his home country that he renounced his right to the throne, but because he was afraid of being killed. Nanai had chosen him for this very weakness, for his docility: He was easy to manipulate, a puppet in king’s clothing.

  It was the tales he heard from a Star Reader and explorer that drew Nanai to the Nayoro Peninsula. According to the explorer, it was a very rich land, easy to protect from enemy attack. He had also been impressed by the Yakoo belief that the visible and invisible worlds of Sagu and Nayugu intertwined to create a vibrant universe. Nanai was terribly disappointed that the Yakoo fled into the mountains when the Yogoese reached the peninsula, as he wanted to question them and learn more. But he had no time to seek them out; he had to make the incompetent Mikado establish a new country. Comments such as I wish he’d use his own brains once in a while! peppered his memoirs, and Shuga found himself liking the man, who indulged in a little grumbling as he poured his heart and soul into his tremendous task.

  The memoirs were written in ancient Yogoese, which was very difficult to read. By the time Shuga reached the point where Nanai had founded the nation, winter was coming to an end and the new year had already begun. Although he was unaware of it, there had been much less snow than usual, and the Star Readers confirmed the coming of a terrible drought.

  While Shuga remained secluded in the archives, a great change had taken place within the palace. The Mikado’s first-born son, fourteen-year-old Sagum, had caught a cold early that winter, and he was now deathly ill. The Master Star Reader stayed closeted with the prince’s physician in Ichinomiya Palace for days on end, trying desperately to save the boy’s life.

  Sagum and Chagum were the Mikado’s only sons; the Third Queen had as yet only given him daughters. The Mikado privately consulted the Master Star Reader about his gravest fear. “Sagum may die,” he said in an anguished voice. “Should that happen, what am I to do about Chagum?” Chagum was, after all, his son. They might not live under the same roof the way commoners did, but he still loved him. He had tried so hard to live up to his role as ruler that, when he had learned that his second son harbored the water demon, he had steeled himself to sever any attachment to him — ordering his death, because that is what a Mikado must do. But once the heat of the moment had passed, Chagum’s face had begun to haunt him.

  “Mikado,” the Master Star Reader said. “Haste is dangerous. Do
not worry. There are many possible ways to handle this, depending on how things develop. Our first priority must be to heal Prince Sagum. In the meantime, I will order the Hunters to find Prince Chagum as quickly as possible and bring him safely back to you.” With these words, he calmed the Mikado’s fears.

  He left the Mikado’s presence, and as he walked toward the Star Palace, he happened to glance up at the sky. Stars were scattered like sand across the firmament in a breathtaking display. He felt something akin to pain stir in the depths of his heart. It has been so long since I read the stars. To think that a Star Reader should have no time for that! He was no longer a Star Reader, he thought, not in the true sense of the job.

  He resumed walking, following his servant, who carried a lantern to light their way. Instead of a Star Reader, I’ve become a lantern bearer, lighting the path this country will take. He was suddenly acutely aware of the heavy burden of responsibility he bore, and with it, a great fatigue, something he had been too busy to notice for a long time.

  When he reached his chamber, Gakai was already there waiting for him. “Have you prepared the statement to the people about the impending drought?” the Master Star Reader asked him.

  Gakai nodded. “Here is the message that will be given to every village chief,” he said.

  The Master Star Reader took the paper from him, but the expression on his face grew stern as he read it. He raised his head abruptly, his keen eyes fixed on Gakai. “This is not what I told you. My orders were to reduce the percentage of rice planted to one-fifth, and to plant tougher crops like shiga and yassha instead. But you’ve written that they should plant one-third of their fields with rice. Why did you change it without asking me?”

  A thin film of sweat shone on Gakai’s forehead, but he returned the Master Star Reader’s gaze steadily. “I apologize for acting on my own. But the Chief Treasurer strongly objected to cutting rice production to one-fifth. He insisted that it would ruin the country.”