by Неизвестный
I did not mind—there was no one I would rather have been bound to. When a man’s giri and the will of his heart are in accord, his way is clear and he is happy indeed.
But when they diverge, his options are to ignore his heart, or to find an honorable way to die. Anything else will lead only to shame and disaster.
Oda Nobunaga’s army had cut across Ōmi Province like a hot knife. Lord Rokkaku sent his soldiers out from Kannonji Castle to drive them back, yet we barely even slowed them down. They had deployed peasants with matchlocks and sent waves of light infantry with long spears into our formations. We were born-and-bred bushi who had trained for battle all our lives, but we could not withstand that onslaught.
Sugitani, the hero of our company, had fought his way free, and only I had managed to keep close to him. Behind us, our brothers faced the invaders, and fell. The Oda men had not even bothered to pursue us, which multiplied our disgrace. Now we were wandering alone, in a rickety cart appropriated from a peasant village.
“Let’s find out what your farmer was running from,” Sugitani said.
If he was deserting his unit, we’d have our fight; if it was a battle, we’d join our troops. We chose a path that led over the ridge, and then we saw what had terrified him so.
In a broad open space under the full moon, there was an entire regiment of Lord Rokkaku’s men.
Every last one of them was dead.
They were spilled out across the grass, thousands of them, singly or in groups. The turf was churned to cratered mud. Pieces of armor and weapons and banners were scattered across the ground as if they had been tossed into the air. Small scavenging demons and ravens had found them days before, and every corpse was despoiled. Most were terribly mutilated, bones stripped bare and body cavities yawning and empty.
Sugitani and I walked among the fallen, trying to grasp the scope of the disaster. I had been on other battlefields after the action had passed, but they had never seemed so still, so final, or so completely given up to the dead as this. In the silver moonlight and the gathering mist, the only sound was our own breathing, and it seemed perilously loud.
“Where are the Oda?” Sugitani whispered.
I was thinking the same thing. On this field of corpses that stretched beyond sight, the only crest showing on surcoats and flags was the four diamonds of the Rokkaku clan. There was not a single Oda soldier among them.
“Maybe they took their casualties with them when they moved on?”
“Or maybe they didn’t have any,” he hissed.
“Are they that strong?”
“They could be, if their main force came through here. That means Nobunaga has probably taken Kannonji-jō already,” Sugitani said.
If so, Nobunaga likely would not bother to hold the castle long. He was in a hurry to march west, on his way to deliver the pretender Ashikaga Yoshiaki to Kyōto. When they arrived, Nobunaga would force the Emperor to install Yoshiaki as shōgun. In public, he would declare his fealty, but both shōgun and Emperor would be his puppets, and then Nobunaga would rule the greater part of Nippon.
“Now what do you think?” Sugitani said.
“Against an army like that . . . You’re right. There’s nothing for it,” I admitted at last. We could never redeem ourselves. Our war was futile.
Sugitani made a long exhalation and said, “Well then, let’s choose a good spot.”
I looked beyond the battlefield, and noticed the shape of a big old house outlined on a hilltop under the night sky. It must have been a fine residence at one time, because it had a high gate in a strong wall, over which peeked the tops of ornamental trees. It would be peaceful within the ruins of its courtyard.
I pointed. “There.”
Sugitani grunted.
We took the wagon up the hillside and stood in front of the house. To our surprise, the heavy wooden gate was still standing, and it was locked. I pounded on it, and called out.
After some time, the bolt was drawn back, and the gate opened a hand’s breadth. Lamplight flooded through, and we could see nothing else.
“We are Sugitani Zenjubō and Takeda Shinji, soldiers in good standing in the service of Lord Rokkaku,” I announced. “We have come to humbly beg your permission to commit suicide in your garden.”
The lantern was lowered a bit, and over it we could see the face of a young woman. In the flickering light, her eyes glittered.
“You have come all this way, to my home, to find your deaths?” she said. Her speech was refined; she sounded high-born, maybe from one of the old families in Kyōto. Her hair hung straight and her eyebrows were painted high up on her white forehead. She was lovely.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It will be quiet and clean, and very little inconvenience to you.”
“Oh, I am sure it will be no inconvenience at all,” she said with delicate courtesy. “We have not had visitors for so long, and it will be a pleasure to have such brave guests—even if only for a little while.” The gate opened wider, and she beckoned us into the courtyard. She didn’t offer her name.
The lady led us through to the garden. The many layers of her kimono sighed against each other as she walked. A household this size would have required a staff as big as a company, but the grounds were dark and quiet. She noted our surprise.
“You must excuse this state we are in,” she told us. “With the war so close and all, the servants . . . ”
“Of course,” I said quickly. The war had taken her husband too, or she wouldn’t have been the one to come to the gate.
The round moon hung over twisted red pines and a fine-leafed maple in her garden. The smooth water of a gurgling koi pond mirrored it. Lush moss filled the gaps between stepping stones. There was a broad, clear patch of raked white gravel to one side.
“I know this is barely adequate . . . ” the lady started to say.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” I told her. “This is absolutely perfect for our seppuku.”
She dipped her head in a tiny bow.
“My lady, if it is not too much of an imposition, might we beg you for a brush and a few sheets of paper?” I said.
“Not at all.” She turned back to the house.
Sugitani and I stared at the garden. You want everything to be just right for a good death, but this really was as excellent a spot as one could hope for. A single red maple leaf dropped and touched the surface of the pool, then was gone: a sad little symbol that all things pass. There was no harm in acknowledging it was a pity that it was all ending so soon, as long as the thought stayed docile and quiet.
“I’ll be your second,” Sugitani told me.
Which meant he would stand over me while I cut through my own abdomen, and end my suffering with a single blow when I was on the point of crying out. I would have expected no less from a brother-in-arms—but the offer meant far more in this place, where there would be no one to do the same when his turn came. It would be a long and messy trial for him.
“More giri,” I said. “Right up to the end.”
“Someone’s got to look out for you.”
“I was hoping I’d have the chance to repay it all some day.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
The lady reappeared, walking gracefully, and bearing a brush and a carved inkstone, along with a bundle of writing paper as white as snow and a heavy white cotton tarp.
“Will these do?” she asked.
“Ah, my lady, your hospitality goes far beyond.” She answered our deep formal bows with a smaller one, then stepped back to allow us to attend to our business.
Sugitani and I spread the white tarp on the white gravel. I removed my armor and laid it with my sword to one side. I would use my tantō dagger for this business, but Sugitani wore his swords in the new fashion, one long and one short without a knife, so he would have to make due with his wakizashi.
I knelt in the center of the tarp. The brush and the inkstone and the paper were before me. I contemplated the moon wavering in the pond for a few quiet bre
aths, and then considered my dagger; the subject of my death poem was clear to me. I suppose I had always had some version of it ready for a moment like this since I was a youth. I picked up the brush and wrote:
Welcome to thee
O blade of eternity!
I embrace thee tonight,
So that we may serve together again
In the life to come.
I handed the poem and writing utensils to Sugitani, holding back one sheet of the paper. He frowned at the lines I had written and said, “Ah, I see—you address it to your tantō. ‘Embrace’—Very clever.”
It was hardly original, but Sugitani wasn’t likely to know that.
“Thank you. And it is my deep hope,” I said, “that in the life to come, I may have the opportunity to serve together again with you as well.”
Sugitani almost said something, then looked at me and replied with a single, stiff bow. For as long as I had known him, he had never done that.
“What are you going to write for yours?” I asked.
“I haven’t decided yet.” He had always been awkward when it came brush and paper.
I opened my tunic to expose my torso. I picked up the tantō and wrapped the paper around the blade for a better grip. Sugitani took his position behind me and drew his sword.
“Now, don’t be impatient with the kill-stroke,” I told him. “Give me the time to try to do this right.”
“I will.”
The lady stepped out of the shadows and stood motionless at the edge of the garden. I would have thought her sensibilities were more delicate than that. But if she wanted to watch, it was her house after all. And a witness was always welcome.
“And be sure to check your swing before it goes all the way through,” I said softly. “We can’t have my head bouncing around this nice lady’s yard.”
“I’ll cut you clean,” said Sugitani. “That’s a promise, brother. Whenever you’re ready.”
I had spent my life readying myself for death; now I would prove how prepared I was. The Rokkaku family would learn of this moment one day. I had the luxury of a perfect garden under a perfect moon and the support of my best friend and a high-born lady. This would be easy—how many poor bastards died in chaos, unable to hear their own thoughts?
I focused on the blade of my dagger, on the right and welcome agony that would test me to the very end. Since Sugitani had offered to accept the unaided death, it would be small of me to go too easily. I would use the cross-cut style, which only a very few men are able to complete with grace.
With each breath my consciousness grew narrower and tighter, until the world consisted only of the certainty of the steel slicing into my flesh. I would pierce my belly with a flick of the cutting edge near the tip, not the point, and bring the blade across, cutting no deeper than the muscles of the abdominal wall. My second cut would be vertical, and if my spirit and strength did not fail me, that would be the stroke to release my innards. It would be splendid, and an inspiration to Sugitani.
At the edge of my vision I saw, but did not note, the lady step closer, and her eyes glitter with pale light. I noted only my steel and the coming challenge.
I took my dagger in both hands. The sweat from my right palm immediately dampened the paper around the steel. Just as I can know that an arrow will find its target before I even release it, I knew the cutting edge of my blade would be embraced by my entire being. All things are sorrowful because they are transient, even our bodies, even our lives, but not our actions. This act would be eternal.
With my next exhalation, I drove the knife two finger-widths deep into the left side of my abdomen. The muscles in my belly greeted the steel, and parted fluidly as I slid it past my navel. My blade was sharp. The paper around it was soaked dark red.
I saw, but did not note, that the lady’s jaw unhinged and dropped open to her breast, and that her blue tongue unfurled and lolled down as far as her waist.
“No!” Sugitani cried. He leapt past me across the tarp, his sword raised to strike. “Give him his moment! Do not interfere!”
The lady tilted her head and her glance met my own eyes.
Not now, I thought, and with that, my focus was shattered, and the pain in my belly was unbearable. I dropped the tantō and fell forward onto my hands. I knew that I had failed utterly.
With little steps, the lady came up the path towards us. Towards me.
Sugitani stood with the point of his sword extended towards her face. She continued to approach.
“Who are you to disrupt this rite?” Sugitani demanded. “Step away, ghoul.”
“I am so truly sorry.” The lady kept her genteel Kyōto accent though her jaw swung loose and wide. “It was my intention to honor your bravery, and to wait until all was complete. I thought the hunger was sated for a time. But death sits heavy around him, and it calls to me. I find that I cannot summon the patience.”
The garden was now a place of mists. The bright steel of Sugitani’s blade was the only thing that seemed pure and real under the moonlight, and its unwavering point was nearly in her eye.
“Step away!” Sugitani said again. But she stepped forward into the point, and from where I crouched, for a moment the blade seemed to run right through her face and emerge from the back of her head, clean. Sugitani dropped his sword as if it had burned him, and it rang against the stepping-stones. No blow could hurt her—she was long dead, a spirit tied to this world only by her limitless need.
Panic spread from her like a chill air. I forgot my honor and scrabbled backwards until I struck the garden wall. Sugitani fell back blindly before her.
“I am so terribly sorry,” said the lady. “This will all be so much easier if you would just accept your fate.”
Sugitani backed up against a stand of thick bamboo stalks. He could go no further.
“Is that what you told the regiment down there?” I gasped.
The lady’s head snapped to face me, and she stepped my way.
“They never even saw Nobunaga’s troops, did they?” I said. “That was all you. They were good men, and they deserved the chance to prove themselves.”
“I was so very hungry.” The lady’s sweet voice reached us as if the words were uttered by a girl in a darkened room. “And they came right to my gate . . . ”
“A whole regiment—they were our brothers, and you tore them to shreds, Eater-of-Men,” I answered. There were legends of creatures like her. I saw the realization light Sugitani’s face, joined by a type of eagerness I did not understand.
“There is no weapon that can match your strength, lady,” Sugitani said quickly. “Our clan has suffered a grievous wrong, and the army that perpetrated it is still not far ahead of us. Let us lead you to them, and we will have our revenge, and you will feast!” Even now, nothing eclipsed his awareness of his ultimate duty.
The lady raised her palm before her mouth and laughed, a sweet, trilling giggle. The cultured gesture was made a grotesque mockery by the expanse of gaping maw that her delicate hand could not begin to cover.
“Oh, I lost patience with little games of steel and fire a century before your clan claimed these hills,” she answered him. “My hunger has no interest in wars. I feed when the need takes me.”
The hem of her outer kimono was right before my face now. It was crimson, embroidered with a late-summer pattern of slim pampas grasses touched by a breeze. She grabbed my tunic in one fist and lifted me from the bushes, inspecting me at eye level. Beyond her black-lacquered teeth, her throat was a bottomless pit. Her tongue raised itself like a snake and probed my neck and shoulders. I was trained from childhood to risk my body as if it were already dead, but I was very afraid to die this way.
“I am so very, truly sorry,” she told me. “I am monstrous, even in my own eyes.”
“Then why not resist the impulse, my lady?” said Sugitani from behind her.
She did not take her gaze from me. “There is no resisting it,” she said with regret. “The curse has only strengt
hened within me through the long ages. I scoffed at the enemies I made during my ascent within the Emperor’s court, and I believed I had slipped beyond their reach when I died—but the Fujiwara clan had long memories and powerful priests, and they hauled my spirit back to this world with a chain forged of emptiness. I am its slave now. And you are victims of their vengeance as much as I.”
She brought me close enough to kiss. Her mouth was ice-cold and bitter as poison, and so wide that when her teeth snapped shut, my head would drop into it with room to spare.
“But . . . but what if another agreed to take up your hunger for you?” Sugitani cried.
The lady froze. Her eyes glittered, and she turned to him, forgetting that I dangled in her grasp.
“Endless pardons, but would you be so kind as to say that again?” she said.
“What if another—a good man, with a true heart—offered to relieve you of your burden, and make it his own?”
Her voice was strained to breaking when she said, “Do not toy with me, bushi.”
“The question is sincere.”
“Then I would be free to join the dead.”
“And the other?”
“Would be a jikininki, beyond life, driven by hunger for eternity.”
“Such as you are now?”
She hesitated. “Not quite as I am,” she said at last. “I am of the spirit world; my body was already burned when I was brought back. If the hunger entered a mortal form, it would overflow it, driving the flesh with its endless need.”
He blanched. “But that flesh could still kill.”
“Oh, yes. Neither sword nor spear could compare.”
“In that case, my lady,” said Sugitani, “I offer to accept that hunger from you.”
She dropped me into the bushes and stepped very close to Sugitani.
“Take it from me,” she demanded, with a different sort of hunger. “You will take it from me now.”