by Lian Hearn
At dawn the stag had cooled. He moved it into the clearing and set about skinning it, carefully cutting out the brainpan and the antlers, regretful for the way life had vanished so quickly from the eyes and face, wishing it could be restored, all the time filled with gratitude.
He found flintlike stones and spent the morning scraping the skin clean. The sun came around the valley and for a few hours it was hot. In the early afternoon he carved several strips of meat from the haunches, thin so they could dry quickly, and threaded them on a shaft cut from an oak tree, placing leaves between them. He left the rest of the carcass for the foxes and wolves and began to walk toward the north.
Mostly he walked all night; the moon was waxing toward full, bringing the first frosts. He slept for brief periods in the middle of the day, after softening the deer hide with water or his own urine and spreading it out to dry. He saw no one, but on the third day he became aware an animal was tracking him. He heard the pad and rustle of its tread and saw the green gleam of its eyes. Several times he set an arrow to the bowstring, but then the eyes vanished and he did not shoot. He did not want to lose an arrow in the dark.
It seemed to be guiding him or, he reflected uneasily, herding him. From time to time he thought it had gone, but at nightfall it always returned. Once he caught a glimpse of it and knew from its size and color that it was a wolf, drawn by the scent of the deerskin and the meat. He and his uncle had pursued the stag to the point of exhaustion and now the wolf was doing the same to him. It was driving him farther and farther into the forest, and when he was exhausted and weakened by hunger it would spring at his throat. He tried to outwit it, pretending to sleep then rising soundlessly, changing direction, but it seemed aware of his intentions even before he was. He saw its green eyes shining in his path.
One morning at dawn he stopped beside a stream that flowed through an upland clearing from a spring farther up the mountain. He had eaten the last of the dried meat a day ago. A path had been worn through the grass and there were tracks at the water’s edge. He saw that animals came to drink there: deer, foxes, wolves. He slaked his own thirst warily, gulping quickly from cupped hands. Then he hid upwind with arrow drawn.
He must have dozed off, for a sudden movement woke him. He thought he was dreaming. Two animals appeared walking awkwardly side by side, their heads turned toward each other. They were carrying something between them, in their mouths. They walked strangely, as though they were not quite alive. Their heads were lacquered skulls, their teeth sharp and glistening, their eyes bright shards of lapis lazuli. Their skins did not cover flesh but seemed to be packed with straw and twigs. He caught their smell of smoke and putrefaction; his stomach heaved and his guts twisted.
As they came closer he saw the object they carried in their mouths was a two-handled water jar. They stood in the pool and lowered the jug into the stream. When it had filled they turned and walked back along the path, staggering a little and spilling water as they went.
Kazumaru followed them as though in a dream, without questioning but not without fear. He could hear the thump of his blood in his skull and chest. He knew he was approaching the lair of a mountain sorcerer, just as his uncle’s men had described. He wanted to flee, yet he was driven forward not only by his own curiosity and hunger but also by the wolf, which now padded openly behind him.
He passed a rock that looked a little like a bear and then a tree stump with two jagged branches like a hare’s ears. Closer to a small hut, which stood in the shelter of a paulownia tree, the forms became more lifelike and precise: statues carved from wood and stone, some with the same lacquered skulls, some draped in skins or decorated with antlers; owls, eagles, and cranes with feathers; bats with leathery wings.
The hut’s roof was thatched with bones, its walls covered with skins. A strong smell of urine came from a large bucket by the door. One detached part of his mind thought, He must use it for tanning hides, just as his own urine had softened the stag’s skin. Two fox cubs, real, were snarling at each other over a dead rabbit. The wolf sat on its haunches, panting slightly. The two beasts Kazumaru had been following stopped in front of the hut and whined. After a few seconds the sorcerer emerged. He took the jug from their mouths and made a gesture for them to sit as if they were dogs. His skin was tanned like leather, his hair long, his beard wispy, both deepest black with no sign of gray. He seemed both old and young. His movements were as deft and free of thought as an animal’s, but his voice when he addressed Kazumaru was human.
“Welcome home. So, you have come back to Shisoku?”
“Have I been here before?” Kazumaru said. Behind him the wolf howled.
“In this life or another.”
And maybe he had. Who knew where the soul voyaged while the body slept? Perhaps it had the strange familiarity of dreams.
“Did you bring the shoulder blades?” the man called Shisoku asked abruptly.
“No, I—” Kazumaru began, but the sorcerer cut him off.
“Never mind. No doubt they’ll turn up one day. Give me the antlers. We still have time.”
“Time for what?”
“To make you the deer’s child. That’s why you came.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your life is not your own. You will die to one life and rise to another, to become what you are meant to be.”
He turned at that moment and tried to run, but the sorcerer spoke words in a language he did not know and then said, “You will stay!” and the words were like bars closing around him. He felt bony hands grasp his forearms, though the sorcerer stood some distance from him. Shisoku stepped slowly backward and Kazumaru was drawn into the hut.
* * *
He was not sure if he was in a dwelling, a workshop, or a shrine. There were scents of lacquer, camphor, and incense, not quite masking the stench of dead things. In the hearth a fire blazed under an iron pot in which bubbled an unrecognizable brew. Carving tools and paintbrushes lay on a smoke-blackened bench. The floor was of packed earth, but at one end, in front of a sort of altar, rugs and cushions had been spread, surrounded by glittering lamps and candles. Carved figures of deities, all with lacquered and painted faces, stood on and around the altar, and on the wall hung many masks and animal heads, together with their skins. He could see at least two human skulls. He realized he had arrived at one of those places where the worlds mingle, like the place that had haunted his childhood dreams, where his father met the tengu. He began to tremble, but there was no escape. Outside, the hut was surrounded by animals, both real and counterfeit. Inside was the sorcerer.
Without knowing how it happened he was lying before the altar, naked, covered only by the deer skin. He looked up at Shisoku with the same eyes as the stag, widened and resigned in the face of death. Shisoku gave him a drink of mushrooms and pine needles, mixed with lacquer and cinnabar, which would ordinarily kill a man but put Kazumaru into a deep trance. Time stopped.
Kazumaru watched him take the antlers and the half-moon-shaped brainpan and begin to create a mask, chanting as he worked, some mysterious sutra that Kazumaru had never heard before. Slowly day turned to night. Outside, the animals stirred and cried out. It seemed to Kazumaru that a woman lay next to him. He was filled with fear, for he had never been with a woman, had avoided the knowing glances of the maids at Kumayama, suspicious of all they seemed to offer, wary of the ways humans hurt each other. But she led him on to embrace her, many times that night and the following ones, his cries mingling with the animals’. He knew his body, his strength, his maleness, were being used for purposes he did not understand, against his will. Nevertheless his own lust rose to meet hers.
In the day he lay unable to move and watched Shisoku as he painted the mask with layer upon layer of lacquer and the red and white fluids produced by the lovers. He dried each layer by passing it through smoke from the incense, chanting a different spell each time. He made lips and a tongue from cured leather painted with cinnabar, carved out hollows for the eyes and frin
ged them with black lashes cut from the woman’s hair. He polished the antlers until they shone like obsidian. The moon waxed to full and waned into nothingness. When it was next half-grown the mask was finished.
Shisoku fitted it to Kazumaru’s face. It clung to his features like a glove to a hand. He felt rush through him the strength of the stag and all the ancient wisdom of the forest. The woman came to him one last time. His cries echoed like the stag in autumn. She held him tenderly and whispered, “Now your name is Shikanoko, the deer’s child.” A distant memory came to him—a fawn, his father’s voice—and he knew he would never take another name. Then he fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke he was clothed again, the woman had gone, and the stag’s mask lay in a seven-layered brocade bag on the altar. It did not seem possible that it should fit in a bag that size, but it was one more aspect of the spells that Shisoku had cast on it.
* * *
Shisoku practiced a kind of haphazard, offhand magic. He made a vague gesture toward the fire, which sprang into life seven times out of ten and the other three sulked in disobedience. The live foxes and wolves occasionally appeared when he summoned them but more often went on with their wild lives as if the sorcerer were not living among them. Sometimes the artificial animals did what was expected of them, fetched water in the jug, gathered firewood, but shards of pottery at the water’s edge indicated how many times they had failed. Shikanoko collected firewood himself and as winter wore on went out hunting to feed them both. He made new arrows and fletched them with eagle’s feathers, but though he spotted and followed many deer he never killed one again.
Shisoku ate very little, but spent his days skinning and plucking, preserving skins and plumage with camphor and rue, boiling up skulls and bones to get rid of every last trace of flesh. Then painstakingly he re-created the dead animals as though he were some kind of creator spirit, stuffing the skins with clay and straw, building frames of bamboo and cord to hold the skeleton together. His creations stood in rows under the eaves, the snow drifting across them. For many weeks the frost preserved them, but when spring came insects returned, too. Eggs hatched into grubs and most of the crawling mass had to be burned. One or two survived, by luck, skill, or magic, and came to life and joined Shisoku’s collection.
The snows melted high in the mountains and the stream flooded almost up to the door of the hut. After it receded, grass and wildflowers covered the clearing. Every night Shisoku placed the mask on Shikanoko’s face and taught him the movements of the deer dance.
“This dance unlocks the secrets of the forest and releases its blessings. It is a powerful link between the three worlds of animals, humans, and spirits. When you have mastered the dance you will gain knowledge through the mask. You will know all the events of the world, you will see the future in dreams, and all your wishes will be granted.”
The movements awakened something in him that he both craved and feared, but he thought it was probably unreliable like all Shisoku’s magic and he only partly believed it.
* * *
Just after the full moon of the equinox a band of ten horsemen came into the clearing.
“It is the King of the Mountain, Akuzenji,” Shisoku said. He did not seem alarmed.
Shikanoko took up his bow anyway. He was sure the woman who rode with them was the one who had accompanied him through his initiation and the creation of the mask, but she gave no sign of recognizing him. He was filled with intense curiosity about her and sudden shyness in her presence. He wanted to ask her a hundred questions but could not find the words for one.
Akuzenji dismounted and added a stream of urine to Shisoku’s bucket, saying, “My contribution to your work. I’m sure it has magic properties.” He was a broad, squat man with tangled hair and beard. He wore a shabby corselet of leather plates laced with faded green cords and carried a huge sword—both looked as if they had been stolen from some ambushed warrior. He said to Shisoku, “I’ve just come to check you are keeping safe the treasure I entrusted to you.”
“I placed it under a binding spell,” Shisoku replied. “Shall I release it to you?”
“Not yet. Business is good, I’ve no need of it. But I’d like to take a look at it.”
Shisoku bowed in his offhand way and waved him toward the hut. He followed Akuzenji inside while the other men dismounted, urinated into the bucket in turn, and squatted down by the fire. After a while Akuzenji came out, a smile of satisfaction on his face, and sauntered toward Shikanoko.
“And who might you be?”
“I was Kumayama no Kazumaru, but now I am Shikanoko.”
“The boy who fell off the mountain last year? You were believed to be dead.”
“I came here and the sorcerer looked after me.”
“Did he?” Akuzenji’s shrewd black eyes took in the bow and the fletched arrows. “I don’t suppose your uncle will pay a ransom for you, will he?”
“He would be more likely to pay for confirmation of my death,” Shikanoko said, wondering if he had just invited the King of the Mountain to kill him.
“What about Lord Kiyoyori? He’d be your liege lord, wouldn’t he? Would he pay anything for you?”
“I don’t suppose so,” Shikanoko replied. “What use would I be to him?”
“A pawn has many uses, but only if it is alive,” the woman said.
It was her—he recognized her voice. It roused both anger and fear in him, at the way she and Shisoku had used him, but he also felt a pang of longing for that deep intimacy when their bodies had been joined as one and an object of beauty and magic had been created.
Akuzenji frowned and scratched his head, studying Shikanoko with a probing look. “How old are you?” he said.
“I turned sixteen in the new year.”
“Can you use that bow?”
“I can, but I will not kill deer.”
“But will you kill men?”
“I have no objection to killing men,” he replied.
“Then I will tie up your hair; you can swear allegiance to me, and come with us.”
Shikanoko sought Shisoku’s eyes. Was he to go or stay? The sorcerer did not return his gaze.
It was not the coming-of-age ceremony he had expected: he had thought he would kneel before the Kuromori lord, Kiyoyori, in the presence of his uncle and all their warriors. Instead there was the spring clearing, the wood smoke in his eyes, the rough lord who took him into his service, the animals half living and half dead. When it was done he placed some of the arrows in his quiver, tied the rest in a bundle, and took up his bow. Shisoku went into the hut, came out with the seven-layered bag containing the mask, and gave it to Shikanoko.
The woman unloaded sacks of grain, rice, millet, and bean paste from one of the horses and took them into the hut. The men were gathering up any usable skins and feathers. Akuzenji eyed the seven-layered bag.
“What’s that?”
Shisoku gave him no answer.
“Show me,” Akuzenji demanded, and, after a moment’s pause, Shikanoko drew the mask from the bag and held it up.
Akuzenji took a step back, silenced, angry. When he could speak, he said, “This is the sort of thing I’ve always wanted from you. When am I going to get it? For years I’ve been begging you. I want a skull of divination to be my oracle, to tell me all things. You know the secret techniques and rituals; why do you keep denying me?”
“It is not me who denies you,” the sorcerer muttered, but Akuzenji was in full flow.
“I have brought you many skulls. Surely no one has brought you as many. What did the boy bring you? Why did you favor him?”
“He came at the right time,” Shisoku said. “I’m sorry.”
“So when is the right time?”
“It is when the time is right. The skulls you bring are worthless—dull peasants or desperate criminals or warriors steeped in blood. Bring me a wise man or a shrewd minister, an ascetic or a great king.”
“Is that what the boy brought you?” Akuzenji was incredulous. “Ho
w?”
“He is Shikanoko, the deer’s child. What he brought was for him alone.”
Akuzenji stuck out his lower lip and narrowed his eyes. “What about Kiyoyori’s skull? What if I brought that?”
“Kiyoyori is undoubtedly a great man,” Shisoku replied. “But he is not going to let you take his head.”
The woman spoke again, “Kiyoyori’s skull is not for you, Akuzenji. If you try for it you will lose your own.”
She and Shisoku exchanged a slight glance, a fleeting smile, making Shikanoko shiver as he caught a glimpse of the secret worlds they moved in, worlds that he was now part of.
He knelt in thanks before the sorcerer, who smiled slightly and brushed him away.
He looked back as they rode off. One of the wolves had approached the hut and the sorcerer stood with his hand on its head.
The rider next to him laughed. “Old Four Legs! Did you learn any useful tricks from him?”
He waggled four fingers in Shikanoko’s face. “Did he turn you into a four legs, too?”
There was a flash of lightning, a sudden crack of thunder. A pine tree in their path split in half, smoking. The horses reared and plunged to the side, nearly unseating them.
“Make sure you are far away before you speak ill of the sorcerer,” the woman said quietly.
The man looked chastened and Shikanoko was glad the magic had for once been effective. He rode behind the woman, knowing that he had indeed embraced her many times, that together they had made the mask, but at the same time not understanding how that was possible. How would she make such a journey night after night? Did she have magic powers or had he lain with a spirit woman, summoned by Shisoku? Had he lain with a demon?
3
KIYOYORI
Lord Kiyoyori was twenty-eight years of age, the time when men approach the height of their physical and mental powers. He was descended from the Kakizuki family, who took their name from the persimmon-colored moon of autumn. Their founder was the son of an emperor who renounced his imperial rank and took an ordinary surname and whose sons and grandsons prospered, becoming skillful statesmen, gifted poets, and fine warriors, while his granddaughters became wives and mothers of emperors.