by David Kirk
“No, Lord,” said Kazuteru.
“ ‘Sayonara.’ Just ‘sayonara’ in a child’s handwriting. It was perfect,” said Munisai. There was no hardness in his voice. It was the same tone that he had used when he had spoken to Kanno at the seppuku earlier: sadness and longing. “We should cherish such perfection, because it is fleeting. This is a marred world we live in. Soon you will come to be defined by imperfections. Soon you will come to be defined by your shames. Do not think that the gods or fate has marked you any differently. I did once, and …”
There was nothing more. Kazuteru looked on uncomfortably. Munisai seemed vulnerable, and to have seen that was an intimacy he did not know how to deal with. Perhaps the commander realized that too, for he slowly leaned forward and put his good hand on the back of his neck. His knuckles whitened and the man rocked ever so slightly. He took a breath, and then raised his head once more. Gone was any hint of softness; his face was set in determination, his lips tight and his eyes stone.
“I believe that the time has come for me to go and see my son,” he said, and then he was up, the kimono rolled back over his body, his cuirass in his hand. He did not look once at Kazuteru as he left into the night.
“Should I inform Lord Shinmen, Lord?” the young samurai called after him, rising to his feet but not daring to follow. “What should I tell him? Should I …”
The call died on his lips. He was alone. Not knowing what else to do, Kazuteru settled himself by the brazier, taking guard duty unbidden. Behind him, the sound of celebrations went on. Before him, down in the valley where the fighting had been, there came only the mewling moans of those left behind and lingering still on the cusp of death. They were bleak and strange company, but duty was duty.
CHAPTER TWO
“Amaterasu,” said the monk Dorinbo, and he gestured to the morning sun behind him. “She who illuminates the heavens. The source of all goodness in this world. Receive her blessing.”
The pilgrims looked to the sun as best they could, squinting, letting light squeeze through the narrow gaps between their fingers. They had waited since long before dawn in one huddled congregation on top of this high ridge looking east across the ocean, men and women standing and the children sitting cross-legged between their feet.
The monk had appeared just before sunrise, and had ignored them. He had stood and watched the sun as it rose until its roundness was perfect, his hands held upward in praise and the hanging sleeves of his robes shaping his silhouette as though he were a manta ray leaping from the waves in chase of it.
Suddenly he had turned to them and spoken, telling the long story of the coming of the world, of the timeless seas of chaos, and then the isles of Japan falling from the blade of a celestial spear. An untrained man’s voice would have grown hoarse, but Dorinbo’s did not falter as he told of the first gods and their agonies, of the thundering turmoil that threatened all life and spirits until Amaterasu, golden Amaterasu, had come to be as a tear that fell from her father’s eye, a daughter so pure that she made order and peace and love in the hearts of all things.
All the while the sun had risen ever higher behind him, Amaterasu in her celestial form bathing them in light. When the tale at last wound its way to the ascension of the goddess to the higher planes of the heavens to reign as she did now, Dorinbo clasped a balled fist into the other hand and raised them high in salutation to her. The pilgrims mimicked the gesture of prayer, some falling to their knees and pressing their heads to the earth in their earnestness.
“But that is not the end of the story of Amaterasu, not why some of you have traveled the length of the country to come to this small village,” Dorinbo said as they lifted their eyes to him once more. “For when she left this world, the time of men came. She watched us from the heavens as we grew, and slowly she came to love us most of all the things she had bequeathed upon this plane.
“She saw that we were weak and scared sometimes, and so she decided to give us one last gift: her own grandson, Ninigi of heaven. It was he who planted the first rice fields that we might eat, and he who taught us how to fight and made us strong that we might fear no evil. Ninigi was too magnanimous ever to claim a throne for himself, but in time his bloodline was rightly praised. His great-grandson became the first emperor, and unbroken for centuries his line has continued to rule as emperor from then until today.
“All that, though,” said Dorinbo, raising a cautionary finger to stem another outbreak of rapture before it began, “all that stems from here. It was here, right here in this village called Miyamoto, that Amaterasu carried Ninigi to earth. This was where the god child took his first steps, and where the last footfalls of she who illuminates the heavens ever graced mortal soil.”
The monk gestured to the land around them. “This is the bridge between the end of the time of the gods and the beginning of the time of man. No other place on earth can claim such a thing. This little temple is special, and we too are special for we stand in the light that bounces off it. Though her blood does not flow in us, we are all of us the children of Amaterasu, and we stand here in her grace. Let us worship.”
They did, offering silent prayers to the sun, imagining a face within whose beauty they could not possibly comprehend.
From down in the darkened alcove of Dorinbo’s hovel, the boy Bennosuke watched the cluster of their silhouettes on the high ridge. Gradually the sky above them turned from the peach of dawn to the blue of day. The pilgrims had not noticed his arrival, and nor had he wanted them to; his ugly, scabbed rash brought disgusted reactions, especially from those who thought they basked in the holy and pure.
The boy had cleaned his father’s armor before he had come, and that confrontation with his shame was more than enough for one day.
He hovered hidden, waiting patiently. At some wordless sense of completion, the congregation broke. The pilgrims began to scatter, some to pray further at the small shrine of the temple proper, some to see the great waves of the ocean break white against the distant cliffs, and some to start the long journey home.
Dorinbo walked among them as they went, smiling and speaking with them as an equal now in the even light of day. Asceticism had made the monk slight of build, and the ball of his shaven head seemed too large for his thin shoulders, but he was still young and his eyes were warm and trustworthy. He knew where Bennosuke would wait, and slowly he made his way through the crowd to him.
“Nephew.” He nodded to the boy.
“Uncle,” said Bennosuke, but though he smiled the boy did not emerge from where he lingered. The monk said nothing of it, and together they stood looking out across the pilgrims as they dispersed.
“Busy today,” said the boy, “busier than a fortnight ago.”
“The high summer is coming. Fair roads to travel and the solstice approaches,” said Dorinbo.
“Sermon is the same, though.”
“You could hear it from here?”
“I don’t need to hear it, Uncle. I can tell from the gestures you use alone,” said Bennosuke, and he lowered his voice to a somber parody with his hands out before him. “ ‘We too are special for we stand in the light that bounces off it!’ I remember you said that the first time I heard it. I was sitting right before you at your feet, and you said those exact words. Don’t you ever change it?”
“That, I fear,” said the monk, “could be taken as something of a sacrilege.”
“Not the story, Uncle. You know what I mean: the words.”
“Have I need to change them?” said Dorinbo. “It must have been some eight or nine years ago now when you first heard it, correct?”
“It had to have been—my mother was there, I remember,” said Bennosuke.
“And yet, through all these years still you remember it. The children here today will do the same.”
“Don’t you just get bored, though, of saying the same thing over and over?”
“Consider that some men believe this to be a way in which things become holy, Bennosuke,” said
the monk. “I say these words in this place as dozens of men have done before me, and dozens of men will continue to say after I am dead. In this we share an experience exactly, and thus our souls are as one, split only by the shadow of time. I am a vessel for both history and future; my body may change, but my essence is constant. This is one way to the infinite.”
He gave a solemn pause and let the boy ponder that before he continued. “That, and a little theatrics and poetry twice a month, never harmed anyone. So—indulge me.”
MONKS WERE KEEPERS of words—not just holy scrolls, but old stories and poems, tracts on philosophy, science, and medicine—and Dorinbo adhered to this, tending a library as devoutly as he did to the temple. But where most temples had a body of work of the great minds, at Miyamoto they kept the words of every pilgrim who visited it.
As they prayed, whether peasant or merchant or samurai or lord, the devout were encouraged to write down their wishes and prayers upon a sliver of paper or silk. It was no issue if they could not write, for as long as they whispered it in their soul Amaterasu would understand it, and so the markings of the illiterate were as welcomed as the neatest calligraphy. All fell into a slot before the carved image of the goddess, and then without being read they were taken to be placed in heavy caskets in a dark room carved in rock beneath the earth.
There they would linger for twenty years away from the eyes of the world, kept dry as bones, for every twenty years they became fuel for a pyre. The caskets were emptied and the prayers woven into boughs of twigs that on a dark and holy night would be placed around the temple and ignited. The fire would burn hard, the temple and the prayers would become naught but ash carried upward into the realm of Amaterasu, and then her dawn would come brilliant and bright. The people would know that the goddess had heard their worries, and that she loved them still.
This was the way it was, and this was the way it had been since before history was written down. All things were impermanent in the end, the tangible flesh and trivial concerns of the mortal world most of all; to deny this was futile, to acknowledge it a step toward serenity.
Twenty winters and twenty springs had passed since they had last taken this step, and so now in the depths of the nineteenth summer Dorinbo and Bennosuke prepared for a night of holy arson.
When from among the pilgrims only a few zealots remained, Bennosuke emerged furtively, and then he and the monk set about working as they had been since the drizzle of spring had ended. Twenty years of prayers was no small amount, and to weave even a single bough correctly took time. There was a precise and holy way of entwining twig with silk and paper, incense that had to be burned while holy phrases were uttered and small bronze chimes struck.
The monk and his nephew gathered the prayers in their endless caskets, wood from where it was left in daily piles by the pious local woodsmen, and then they set to work in front of the temple weaving until Amaterasu was at her zenith high above and the sweat was dripping off them.
The temple itself was a small pavilion perhaps ten paces square. Though it was set at the highest point of the village, the carvings and reliefs set upon it, which in other shrines would be delicately worked dioramas painted in gold leaf and expensive purples, were here simple effigies in faded base colors. An image of Amaterasu in her earthly form was highest, of course. She sat above the tarnished brass gong and the worn old knotted rope that was used to strike it, her face a plain oval in peeled white, the beams of light emerging from behind her devoid of any paint entirely.
She watched over them, steady and serene, as the strain built in every joint of Dorinbo’s and Bennosuke’s bodies, working hunched over like beggars. The goddess offered no sympathy or divine respite when the boy rose, and he thought he heard the bones of his spine unlock one by one.
“This can’t be good for my back.” He grunted, stretching and swiveling his hips with his fists.
“I’ve seen peasants who labored under heavy bushels for decades still stand upright,” said Dorinbo. “Come on, just grit your teeth and bear it—two more and we’re done for the day.”
“You ought to get an apprentice,” said the boy.
“A young man who helps me with the running of the temple, you mean?” said Dorinbo, and he gave a small laugh. “I think I may already have one.”
“Me?” said the boy, surprised.
“Have you considered it?” said Dorinbo, rising to his feet himself. “Well, no,” said Bennosuke. He struggled for something to say. “It’s just …”
“What?” said Dorinbo, and the monk waited for an answer that he knew would not come. He was earnest; surprisingly so. The boy realized that his uncle must have wanted to say this for some time, and so he suddenly found himself shy of Dorinbo’s gaze.
“You’re young,” continued the monk when he realized the boy would speak no further. “I know life at a temple must seem boring to you, and I suppose that’s true. There’s little excitement or glory in the divine or in healing, but that does not mean that there is not pride and worthiness.”
“It’s not that, Uncle. You do good things for people,” said Bennosuke, the words faltering. “I know that.”
“But?” the monk probed. The boy stood pinned with his eyes looking around the sandaled feet of his uncle.
“It’s just my father …” he managed. Dorinbo let out a sympathetic sigh, and his voice softened.
“It’s been eight years since he left, Bennosuke. You’ve worked with me every morning since,” he said. “My brother is where he is, and that is not here. He cannot teach you, nor hold any expectations of you. Your mind is too sharp to waste on swords in any case.”
“Yes, but …” the boy said lamely. He looked at Dorinbo’s toenails as though he were counting rings on a felled tree, and felt the empty blackness of that helmet looking into him once more.
“Well, I’ll not force you,” said Dorinbo eventually. “But you’re getting older, Bennosuke. You’ll have to choose the path of your life soon. Warriors are not all in the world. You’d make a fine healer, or a priest, or a scholar. At least promise me you’ll think about it.”
The boy murmured a sound, neither yes nor no. He dropped into a squat and got back to work, and for a few long moments he could still feel his uncle’s gaze upon his back, until he too returned to weaving.
Leagues away from Miyamoto, the young lord Hayato Nakata could not stop the curl forming on his lip. What was left of Kanno’s castle stood around and above him, a skeletal carcass of charcoal beams interlocking in scorched remnants, framed bleakly against the sky. He stalked about glaring critically upward, hands growing black with soot as he touched what remained.
“Years, my lord,” said the master builder, hovering to the side with his eyes only on the ground.
A week had passed since the battle. Hayato had stayed, waiting to see if the castle was salvageable, while his father and Lord Shinmen had already departed. It had been a stubborn hope, he knew, and it had withered day by day as the master builder and his team had swarmed over the remaining structure like beetles picking a corpse clean. Wall by wall and floor by floor they had found irrevocable damage, nibbling away until only what was splayed before them now was left.
“What does that mean?” Hayato sighed, the final glimmer dying within him.
“If you will us to proceed, my lord,” the master builder said, sucking air through his teeth as he made predictions he was unsure he could keep, “by the first frost of next winter we could have a roof patched on it. It’s too late to do anything this year. Wood needs to be shaped and dried. But even by then, it’d be no thing of beauty. Habitable, at best. To be what it was …”
“I meant, what does that mean for me?” said Hayato.
The master builder hesitated. The question was oblique and Hayato’s displeasure evident. Nervously he began to wring the handle of his hammer where it hung at his side, but he was spared answering when Hayato’s bodyguard stepped forward.
“If you would permit me to speak, my l
ord?” the samurai said as he bowed, and the young lord nodded. “Our most noble Lord Nakata instructed me that were you to judge the situation irredeemable we were to accompany you back to his side. Do you judge it to be so?”
“Weren’t you listening? How could I possibly stay here?” snapped Hayato.
“Then we shall return to your father’s castle, my lord,” said the man. He bowed once more, and then gave a gesture at the other samurai to prepare for travel.
As they busied themselves readying his palanquin, Hayato stalked away. He did not want them to see his anger; they were all sworn to his father above him, and if they saw it then the old lord would see it too. He kicked a stone, listening to it skitter and drop into the cavern of a cellar that had been exposed to the day. It echoed and died, like everything else here had.
This was supposed to be his escape, his way out from under the watchful yoke of his father, a castle and a frontier entrusted to his management. What did he have now but a monument of ashes and the condescending dotage of a dribbling old fool?
It felt as though he had been gelded. The young lord spat and sidled back to the palanquin, glowering, giving no more than a perfunctory nod at the men waiting on their knees to bear him aloft. The head samurai held the burgundy drapes open for him, smiling as he passed.
“That’s it, my lord,” he said, and his voice was cooing. “Let’s go back to dwell in a nice, comfortable city.”
Hayato stopped in the doorway and looked at the man. The smile was held honestly on his face. Beyond him the palanquin bearers were entirely still. They were not permitted eye contact, their faces looking toward the dirt, and the lord got the sense that they were suddenly grateful for this.
They were tense, but it was not with fear.
The young lord looked at them all for a long moment, not sure what he was searching for. Eventually he went inside without saying anything further. There came a sound that might have just been the swishing of the curtains and bamboo blinds behind him, but as he was borne back toward his father, Hayato became more and more convinced that it had been a snigger.