Yamada Monogatori_Demon Hunter

by Richard Parks

  “I think I’ll forego the hot spring for the rest of my stay,” I said.

  Soon after our arrival we had paid our respects to the hojo of the temple, and that was the first and last time I’d expected to see the old man. No such luck. The next morning Kenji and I were summoned to an audience.

  Master Kagyo looked even sourer than what I had assumed to be his usual demeanor. When Kenji and I bowed our respects, he in turn bowed to us. “I’ve learned of your difficulties the previous evening, and must express my regret.”

  “I gather this is not the first time this has occurred?”

  He sighed. “I have spoken to Hoshi, who I gather did express some concern? Well, it’s true, though never before has there been an incident this serious. Prince Kanemore is a patron of this temple; if either of you had died, I could never have apologized adequately.”

  Meaning he might have lost a not inconsiderable income. While his concern wasn’t exactly touching, I did see his dilemma. “The hot springs of this temple are a source of both pride and offerings,” I said. “You cannot afford to lose either.”

  “Just so,” he said. “Lord Yamada, I must ask—what did you see before the water fell?”

  I told him. I had a strong feeling that he already knew. “I cannot be certain of any of this; it happened rather quickly.”

  He waved a hand. “Lord Yamada, you’re not the first to see the creature. At first I thought it mere coincidence, that some peasant girl had found her way across the mountain, lured by the spring. Now I am certain we are dealing with something more sinister.”

  “A demon?” Kenji asked.

  The old man grunted. “More than likely. Gentlemen, both your reputations precede you, and I must request your assistance. It is imperative that we rid ourselves of this creature. Otherwise this holy temple may not survive.”

  “I know a sutra that will confine it and render it powerless, but I can’t perform the ritual alone,” Kenji said. “I’ll need seven volunteers, and the training will take no fewer than four days.”

  “We will provide whatever you need,” Master Kagyo said.

  “Including a sword?” I asked. “A demon cannot be exorcised like a spirit. It can only be bound and slain.”

  “Swords are often given to the temple as offerings,” Master Kagyo said. “We have several, and all are blessed objects. With your aid, the creature’s destruction is assured.”

  I grunted, but otherwise kept silent. Nothing was assured. Not in this life.

  For the next three days Kenji was kept busy with a group of young and earnest monks who literally gathered at his feet as he instructed them in memorizing the holy sutra they would be using for the rite. To my considerable surprise, Kenji was quite a good teacher. He remained both firm and focused, refraining from telling even one bawdy joke though, in my opinion, the gang of them could have used a good joke. I left them to it.

  As for myself, I had long since finished inspecting the sword that Master Kagyo had supplied. It was a straight-bladed tachi of the old Chinese pattern, a type often used for just such offerings. Though the sword had never been intended for actual combat, it had been made by a master who took no shortcuts nor made any concessions to the blade’s intended purpose. All I needed to do was polish the blade a bit to bring back its razor edge, and that was the work of an afternoon. Afterward, I was at loose ends. A combination of boredom and curiosity drew me back to the hot spring.

  The gate to the spring was unbarred and unwatched. I wasn’t terribly surprised, since after the last incident it seemed unlikely that anyone would be foolish enough to use the baths. I pulled the gate open and went inside.

  Everything was more or less as I remembered. The steaming waterfall fell with the same muted rushing sound that it had no doubt made for the last several centuries. The stone pool made ripples back and forth from the ebb and flow of the water before it flowed over the sluice and down the mountainside as it cooled and turned into a gurgling mountain stream. It was easy to forget what had happened before, but I still remembered the face looking down at me from the head of the waterfall. Perhaps it was simple foolishness, but I wanted a closer look.

  I found the path up the mountain on the right side of the waterfall. It was steep and faintly marked but clear enough; I knew I was not the first to use it. I wondered who else had taken this way recently. It seemed a rather risky avenue to explore, if Master Kagyo was correct about the demon. As for myself, I had no excuse save curiosity.

  That, and the strong suspicion that whatever we were dealing with here was not a demon at all.

  That conviction was put to the test almost immediately. I was barely halfway to the head of the waterfall when the girl appeared again, looking down at me. I eyed the rushing hot water no more than the length of a body away and had no doubt that it could expand to engulf me in an instant, as it had nearly overwhelmed me and Kenji three days before. I considered again how foolish this enterprise was and how easily it could be the end of me.

  I looked at the girl. I couldn’t help thinking of her as such: the hair, the size of her. Her eyes, like two black stone pebbles. There was nothing about her save an aura of . . . well, strangeness, to make one think she was other than what she appeared—a pretty but slightly unkempt young girl.

  I had seen more than a few demons in my time, and some of them even looked as angry as this creature did now, but there was something in their faces that was missing here—malevolence. She was angry; that was unmistakable, but evil? I just did not see it in her. While I did not consider the fact that I had not so far been knocked off the mountain by a cascade of boiling water to smash on the rocks below as proof of anything, I did take it as a good sign. I kept climbing.

  After a moment the girl stepped away from the edge of the waterfall and disappeared. When I finally reached the stone ledge where the waterfall originated, she was nowhere to be seen. As for the waterfall’s origin, it was a flow of scalding water emerging from a fissure in the mountainside; only its normal flow into the air and down in the waterfall cooled it enough for the baths. The mountain itself continued for a considerable height beyond it. The path continued as well, but its direction was no longer up; it pointed down on a slant across the slope to the other side of the mountain. I saw a footprint there and paused to examine it.

  Curious.

  I followed the path. The way was steep, but not nearly so much as the first section that went nearly straight up the mountain slope. To my right I could see the valley beyond the mountain. When I looked back behind, I could just make out the road that Kenji and Kanemore’s bushi must have used to bring me to the temple in the first place. Before long the descending path entered a growth of maples and green pine, and everything was lost to sight except the path itself and the mountain above me. For a while I merely listened to the call of birds in the mountain forest and smelled the fragrance of the trees and earth.

  The path ended in a grove of very large old pines near the mountain’s base. It occurred to me that doubtless here was an exit to my gentle confinement, as it was unlikely anyone thought to guard this path; neither Kenji nor Kanemore’s men could have known about it. When I saw what was waiting in the grove, all thoughts of the outside road went by the wayside.

  The shrine had once been a large, proud thing but had become timeworn and neglected. Roof tiles had fallen off and not been replaced; one of the beams supporting the entranceway was canted at an odd angle, and the overhang sagged slightly. Likely in a dozen or so more years the entire structure would fall to ruin. In truth, there was only one new thing anywhere near the shrine. It was a folded piece of paper tied to an old maple that I recognized as a prayer-tree. The remnants of older prayers remained in the bits of rotting cord that had once tied them to the tree.

  It wasn’t exactly proper, but I unfolded the prayer and read it. Then I sighed and turned toward the shrine. “You can come out now, Hoshi-kun. The only way back is up the same path, and I know you didn’t pass me.”

&n
bsp; After a moment or two Hoshi appeared at the door to the shrine on his hands and knees, looking chagrined. “How did you know?”

  “I knew someone had made a fresh footprint on the path. I didn’t know who until I was so impertinent as to read the prayer you left at this shrine. A prayer to the kami of this mountain. A rather improper sort of prayer for a novice monk.”

  Hoshi threw himself on his face. “You’re not going to tell Master Kagyo, are you?”

  “Tell him what? That your loyalties are divided between the Way of the Gods and the Way of the Buddha?”

  He looked up at me. “They are not divided! I just . . . I was trying to help. I thought I might be able to calm her.”

  “Why should you care if the demon is killed?”

  “She’s not—” he stopped himself, but I was already smiling.

  “Indeed. It’s not a demon who turned the spring into a torrent—it’s the spirit of this mountain. A kami. Once I discovered the shrine I assumed as much myself, but you already knew all about it, didn’t you?”

  He nodded, looking unhappy.

  “Why is she angry?”

  “Because I abandoned her,” Hoshi said.

  I sighed. “You do realize that you’re going to have to explain that, don’t you? Either you tell the story to me or Master Kagyo. Despite the fact that I haven’t had any saké in nearly five days, I can assure you that I am in a far better mood than he is.”

  Hoshi kneeled on the portico to the shrine and glanced around him. “Lord Yamada, what you see here is the sad remnant of my family’s history. For generations, we were the caretakers of this shrine to the goddess of the mountain.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Emperor’s taxes,” Hoshi said bitterly. “Most of the smaller farmers in the area sold their land to the local daimyo rather than pay and then worked their old farms for him as tenants. When that happened, the offerings that were going to our shrine instead went to the temple across the mountain. That was the daimyo’s will.”

  Hoshi was not telling me anything I had not heard before; an ill-considered land reform edict in an earlier century had many consequences that had not been intended. The consolidation of land and thus power in the regional lords’ hands had been merely one of them. That this regional lord was primarily a follower of the Buddha and not the older Way of the Gods was simple misfortune for the shrine. “That must have been difficult.”

  Hoshi sighed. “Enough people remained loyal that my family managed to carry on for a time, but there came the day when only I and my grandmother remained to serve the kami. Then only I remained.”

  “I gather you could not carry on alone.”

  Hoshi let out a long, slow breath. “I intended to do so,” he said. “Somehow. But, even in my family, funerals are the business of a temple, not a shrine. When my grandmother died, I visited the temple across the mountain to make the necessary arrangements. I admit it—I was curious about these men who had no care for ritual impurity, who saw that my poor grandmother’s remains were treated properly. I found myself talking to them and listening. This spring, I abandoned the shrine forever to make my life here. That is why the kami is so angry. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s also why you made a point of warning us, that day at the bath, when no one else had seen fit to do so. You knew what might happen.”

  “I feared, Lord Yamada. I did not want to be right.”

  “So. What are you going to do?”

  He blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  “You do realize that matters cannot continue as they are? There’s no balance in this spiritual war, Hoshi. As things are, someone is going to lose.”

  “But . . . what can I do? I can’t go back to the shrine, not now. I’ve been offering prayers, but they are hollow and she knows this, so they have not helped. A god may be powerful and revered, but it is just a god, unenlightened as I or any other mortal, just as trapped on the wheel of death and rebirth. I have found the true path.”

  “You sound like someone I know,” I said, thinking of Kenji. “Yet even assuming that is true, and I am no priest or scholar to make such a judgment, it does not change the situation. Tomorrow my friend Kenji and his associates are going to use a demon-binding ritual to trap the spirit of the mountain.”

  “She’s not a demon! She’s a goddess!”

  “So far as Kenji is concerned, there’s precious little difference. If Kenji prevails, the spirit of the mountain will be bound long enough for me to strike with the blessed sword I have been provided.”

  “You wouldn’t . . . ”

  “I assure you that I would. Reluctantly, but with no hesitation. Yet if the goddess prevails, she may very well pull the mountain itself down on the temple, and there’s an end to both.” He looked at me in absolute horror, but I did not relent. “Whatever happens tomorrow, Hoshi-kun, you are responsible. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “But I . . . what else can I do? Even ‘nothing’ is not even an option,” Hoshi said. “I volunteered to participate in the rite of binding itself.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Since so many of my brother monks are on pilgrimage, Master Kenji had trouble getting enough men for the ritual. Master Kagyo knows my background; he is still suspicious of me,” Hoshi said bitterly. “I thought if I could go through with the rite, it would prove my commitment to this temple.”

  I thought of the simple prayer, tied to an old tree. “To whom? Master Kagyo or yourself?”

  “Both,” he said simply.

  “So now you’ve made your betrayal of the goddess a double one,” I said.

  Hoshi flushed in anger. “What else could I do?”

  “I state the facts, Hoshi-kun. I don’t presume to judge you. You are in a difficult position,” I said. “If I had an answer, I’d give it.”

  “There is no answer. I cannot both serve a goddess and follow the Eightfold Path!”

  “Maybe you should consider telling her that. Or do you think the spirit that your family revered for generations is unworthy of an explanation?”

  There was an open path down the mountain from the shrine, but at this point I didn’t even consider it. I followed the path back across the mountain and left Hoshi kneeling in the ruins of his family’s legacy.

  On the following morning, Kenji and his assistant monks faced the mountain like an army besieging a fortress. The first tremors began before the echo of the first droning chant had faded. From then on they only got worse.

  Master Kagyo and I stood a little to the side of the battle line. He sat in silence, his large wooden prayer beads held in one hand, palm open and hand upright in blessing. I kept my own hand on the hilt of the sacred sword. After a little while I glanced at Kenji.

  There was a fierceness about the priest that I had seen only seldom, when the fervor for his spiritual path was either being challenged or affirmed. He was in his element now, perhaps even more so than when engaged in one of his more common pursuits like securing a bottle of wine or the attentions of a pretty woman.

  Hoshi, on the other hand, was a mess. Oh, he bore his weight, so to speak, in the repetition of the chant. He and his seven brother monks and novices, with Kenji making the eighth member of the line, were in perfect unison; you could almost see their words battering away at the mountain like flung stones. Yet Hoshi trembled as he spoke, and when the first answer came from the mountain, a glowing hot rock that hissed as it struck the water of the bath, there were tears in his eyes.

  The goddess of the mountain was losing. That was clear much sooner than I expected; there was rumbling, yes, but now the earlier violent tremors were beginning to fade even as the drone of Kenji’s binding sutra rose and strengthened. If there had ever been a time for the goddess to pull the mountain down, it had long passed. I did not believe her capable now; the long years of neglect, perhaps even the presence of the temple, all had taken their toll. I had seen her as a girl that day on the mountain. I wondered if she had
always appeared thus. I no longer wondered about the outcome; that was no longer in doubt.

  I considered what was to come. Perhaps I would be cursed. It was no minor thing to slay a goddess. Even, perhaps, if there was no alternative. I drew the sword and prepared myself. It was only because I was examining the blade again that I did not see what happened in the next instant.

  “Hoshi!”

  I do not know who shouted. Perhaps it was Master Kagyo, or Kenji, or even both at once. But the harmony of the chant was broken. I looked up to find Hoshi racing desperately up the path to the head of the waterfall. I headed for the base of the path as Kenji shouted approval. “Stop him, Lord Yamada! He’ll be killed!”

  “Perhaps,” I said and blocked the path up the mountain, sword in hand.

  The chant ceased utterly, and the goddess finally showed herself. She stood at the head of the waterfall where I had seen her that first day, but she was not the same. She stood in glory, surrounded by a golden glow. She was taller than I remembered, a woman now and not a girl. I wondered if I was seeing what Hoshi’s family had seen, what they had revered for centuries, and not the diminished creature she had become. Was it because of Hoshi?

  Master Kagyo stormed up, with Kenji barely a step behind. “Lord Yamada, what is the meaning of this? Why did you not go after him?”

  “Because the situation was his to resolve. If he thinks he’s found a way to do that it’s not my place to interfere.”

  “He’ll be boiled alive!” Kenji said. “The demon must be furious!”

  “She’s not a demon, and yes, I’m sure she is furious. He may yet be killed. Choices have consequences, whether we choose well or poorly. That does not mean we are free from choosing.”

  Both Master Kagyo and Kenji were glaring at me, Kagyo in anger and Kenji in disbelief, but it was far too late to stop Hoshi from reaching the waterfall, so we all watched as Hoshi approached slowly and then kneeled down at the feet of his former goddess.