The hair reached for his sword arm, but he slashed at her. She flung herself back as if light as feather and hung there above the swirling mist. A great mane of black hair rose around her head like ten thousand tentacles, each with a life of its own. Her eyes looked like solid droplets of congealed gore, devoid of pupil and iris. Her fingers were black-taloned claws.
He slashed wildly at the hair, and it parted like so much gauze at the sword’s razor edge. Then he was free, gasping.
Green flames burst into life at the base of every wall, shooting upward with prodigious hunger, engulfing the walls, licking at the thatch.
As if waking from a dream, Ken’ishi began to remember.
The rice bowl on the floor writhed to the brim with maggots, crawling over not a pickled plum, but a plucked eyeball.
She unleashed a hideous, keening wail that stabbed needles into his ears, into his spine. The nimbus of hair flew around her face as if in a typhoon wind. He raised his sword and charged her.
An explosion of green flame blinded him. He slashed blindly, stumbling over a wooden beam, but kept his footing. His eyes watered, and he blinked and blinked.
Finally, when he was able to see again, he was standing in the cold, charred ruins of his house. Thick fog, gray with the light of morning, surrounded him.
He scrambled free of the debris, gasping, with the sensation of hair still sliding across his flesh.
“Captain!” came voices.
“I am here!” he called.
Moments later, shapes appeared out of the fog, converging on him.
“Is that you, Captain?” called a man’s voice.
“It is,” Ken’ishi said, turning to survey the blackened timbers and charcoal.
The thick fog muffled all sound, but it bore the light of dawn, not the moon.
Several men ran up, gaping with surprise, carrying shovels and hammers and clubs as improvised weapons. “It is...you, Captain,” said one.
“I still walk with both feet in this realm,” Ken’ishi said.
Another said, “Gods and buddhas, Captain! You look—”
“Like Taka!” said another, referring to yesterday’s dead man.
“What happened?” asked another, eyeing Ken’ishi’s naked blade.
Ken’ishi sheathed it and noted the paleness of his arms, the blueness of his veins, the chill that suffused even his bones. “We require an exorcism.”
September lightning...
White calligraphy on high
Silhouettes the hill
—Joso
Kazuko sat down on a wooden bench in the heart of the sakura grove at the base of the castle wall. She had ordered this bench constructed because of her frequent walks. She liked to sit and contemplate here under the dark leaves, often at night, now that Tsunetomo had taken to sleeping in another room. The castle guards did not approve of the lady of the castle wandering outside the walls at night, especially when she demanded to go alone, but they could hardly refuse her.
If her husband knew of these frequent sojourns, he did not challenge her about them. He professed to care about her welfare, but in truth she seldom saw him except at meals, ceremonies, and festivals. He had his business, and she had hers.
Lately, hers had become providing comfort and companionship to Lady Yukino, whose ocean of melancholy over Ishitaka’s death remained as deep as the moment the news had come. She still wept daily, even though the mourning period for Ishitaka was several weeks over.
Tonight, clouds blanketed the moon, and a chill autumn wind made Kazuko tug her robes closer. She clutched her loneliness around her like a blanket. Her new handmaiden was a simpering little girl, incapable of interesting conversation. She thought about sending the girl away, but she lacked the energy to seek out another one. Hatsumi, even in her crawling, hidden evil, had at least been a familiar face. Lady Yukino was a chore now, not a comfort. Tsunetomo had all but abandoned her. Ken’ishi was gone.
Kazuko was alone.
This melancholy of hers felt so familiar. She had wallowed in the blackest depths of it in the first months after her marriage. Eventually, she had learned to smile again. But now, any smile reminded her of the unnatural tug on her scarred cheek, the spots of numbness that would never go away, a crack in what had once been perfect, porcelain beauty. She had never thought herself vain until the beauty she had so heedlessly enjoyed was marred. Whenever she appeared in public now, she wore a veil in the fashion of the dark-skinned women from the land of the Buddha.
Some days she could cast herself into martial pursuits, and some days it all felt too much. She did not want to be strong today. She wanted to let herself weep, and that became a battle in her heart. She was a samurai woman. She was steadfast and brave. She was Kazuko the Oni-Slayer, a natural companion to Ken’ishi the Oni-Slayer if ever there was one.
Tonight, the samurai woman lost the battle. She let the tears come, burying her face in her sleeves, at the same time despising her weakness.
Her sleeves were damp when she heard an exasperated sigh beside her.
She started and looked around.
A small voice said, “One might think you were the saddest human in the world.”
An old tanuki sat beside her on his haunches, preening his white whiskers.
“Mr. Tanuki, you frightened me,” she said.
“You may call me Hage, lady. That is the name I’ve worn for a century or two.”
“Are you truly so old?” she said. “Are you a god?”
“Young lady, I’m just getting started. And I’m hardly a god, although I daresay a lover or two has proclaimed it of me.” He chuckled. “So how do you expect me to enjoy my evening with so much sadness polluting the air?”
“I am sorry to have disturbed you, Lord Hage.”
The tanuki leaned back with a high-pitched roar of laughter, slapping his knees. “Oh, lady! ‘Lord,’ you said!”
When his laughter finally subsided, she said, “I wish only to be respectful.”
“How about a rice ball instead? Some saké, perhaps?” He smacked his lips. “Putting such a title on me is like trying to put a diaper on an ox. You’d find it mighty difficult, and the ox would just soil it.”
“I apologize, Hage. If I had known you were coming to my party of despair, I would have brought a picnic.”
He slapped his knee again and chuckled. “That’s a more suitable spirit, Lady. So tell me about the damp sleeves. I helped an acquaintance of yours once or twice when he was having difficulty.”
“Ken’ishi?”
“You two took care of that awful, howling woman, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” She touched her scarred cheek.
“He didn’t bed you, did he? I told him not to.”
She gasped at the tanuki’s brazen audacity. No human would ever think to ask a powerful lady such a question. But somehow, the fact that he was not human made it easier for her answer. “No.”
“But you’re both in heat for each other.”
“It is a curse for both of us.”
“A curse? Bah. For creatures who are open to copulating so frequently, you humans get so twisted up about such things.”
“I am cursed, Hage. I am the wife of a lord. My husband needs an heir. I fear the gods have made me barren for dishonoring my family...because of Ken’ishi.”
He leaned closer and sniffed her. “Hmm...barren you say?”
“Hage, you have magical powers, do you not?”
“When the mood strikes.”
She knelt before him and bowed. “Please do me this favor. Quicken my womb.”
He raised a bushy brow and scratched his chin. “As I doubt you’re asking me to scamper through your rice patch, so to speak, I must tell you I have no control over your womanhood. The best I could do would be to make you the randiest doe in the forest until morning. I could make you forget your ‘curse,’ however, if that would please you.”
Forget Ken’ishi? Would she if she could? Her yearning for him, and t
he way she had channeled it, had turned her into a formidable warrior. He had taken her to greater ecstasy than she had ever known, in her heart, in her body. She was a richer woman for having known him. Remove him from her life, and she would be just an ignorant girl.
“No, I do not wish to forget anything.”
Hage rocked back and forth on his haunches, pursing his lips, chewing on his whiskers. “You’re wiser than I suspected. Wiser than he is sometimes. Tell me, what do you wish?”
“I wish to make my husband happy, to do my duty, to bear him a son.”
He sighed. “Alas, sometimes all there is to do is enjoy the breeze.”
She sat on the bench again and tried to follow his advice.
“If one sets up a mirror, the form of whatever happens to be in front of it will be reflected and will be seen. As the mirror does this mindlessly, the various forms are reflected clearly, without any intent to discriminate this from that. Setting up his whole mind like a mirror, the man who employs the martial arts will have no intention of discriminating right from wrong, but according to the brightness of the mirror of his mind, the judgment of right and wrong will be perceived without giving it any thought.”
—Takuan Soho, “Annals of the Sword Taia”
Ushihara returned to Aoka at mid-morning, cursing the fog for his delay. “I’m very sorry, Captain.”
Ken’ishi had tried to eat breakfast, but his stomach would not accept food. Every time he looked at a bowl of rice, his memory jumped to the bowl of squirming maggots. So he shepherded the uneasy workers back to their labors, assuring them that he was as hale as ever, that they were safe during the day. Nevertheless, he would not allow anyone to sleep another night in Aoka with Kiosé’s yurei clinging to the area like the miasma of death around an improperly covered grave. “Where is the priest?”
“He is coming on foot. He wouldn’t ride. Said he should keep his feet on the earth.” Ushihara shrugged. “Found him at one of the shrines. You want to know how many I had to ask? Most of those snobbish bastards weren’t willing to come this far.”
Ken’ishi snorted. Such disdain for the dead spoke poorly of these priests’ adherence to ways of the kami. And they had the audacity to claim that their prayers had something to do with the typhoon that had destroyed the barbarian fleet.
By midmorning the fog had burned away, and the priest arrived in the village. He was a well-fed, jovial-looking man with beady eyes and new, stiffly-pressed robes. When Ken’ishi told him about the worker’s death, the priest earnestly set about the proper funeral rites over the fresh grave. Ken’ishi left him to his work, but requested to speak to him again when his work was finished.
Ill fortune continued throughout the day, with broken tools, a barrel of cured fish that turned rancid overnight, and growing malaise among the workers. The kami gnawed all day at Ken’ishi’s awareness, set into vexation by some evil presence that seemed to have seeped into the ground itself. He found himself growing more and more irritable with the workers. The painful wound around his ankle from Hatsumi’s awful tentacle—healed with a spattering of jagged puncture scars—throbbed with a burning ache.
That afternoon, the priest informed Ken’ishi the funeral rites had been completed. The dead man had been laid to rest.
Ken’ishi thanked him and then said, “What do you know of yurei?”
The priest said, “They are the remnants of those who die in states of the most powerful emotions. Rage, jealousy, terror. This emotion prevents them from shedding their bonds to the mortal world. They become trapped.”
“A yurei haunts this place. It is responsible for the death of the man you just laid to rest, and another a few days ago.” Ken’ishi then told him what had happened the night before, and of Kiosé and how she and Little Frog been killed during the invasion. The priest’s face grew paler with each word. By the end of Ken’ishi’s tale, a sheen of sweat had appeared on the man’s forehead. “She must be put to rest,” Ken’ishi said.
The priest’s hands trembled as he wiped the sweat away. “I fear such skills are beyond my knowledge.”
“Where do I find someone who has such knowledge?”
“You need an onmyouji. Fortunately for you, I know of one. The Emperor has sent his best yin-yang masters to lend their arts to the construction of this wall. With their help, the gods and the kami will smile upon this effort.” He gestured at the construction.
“Where do I find this onmyouji?”
“I would be happy to send him to you.” The priest lightly jangled his coin purse.
Ken’ishi swallowed his annoyance and produced a suitable donation. Color returned to the priest’s face, along with a broad grin. “Please tell him that the lives of my men and the future of this construction are at stake.”
“I certainly will,” the priest said. Then he hurried away.
* * *
In late afternoon, the onmyouji arrived in great splendor. His entourage of servants stretched ahead and behind. They bore him in a magnificent gilded palanquin, lacquered and heavy, bells jingling on it in such profusion that the entire work crew had heard it coming for some time.
When the yin-yang master stepped out, he looked around at the remnants of the village, he looked at the workers, he looked at Ken’ishi, and he sniffed with effete snobbery.
When Ken’ishi approached him, naked to the waist and sweating from labor, his nostril curled, but he looked Ken’ishi up and down with a raised, powdered eyebrow. The man’s skin was as pale and soft as a woman’s. He wore voluminous robes—they must have been sweltering—decorated with a profusion of incomprehensible symbols that were not Chinese characters, and the high, black cap that was the fashion among lords and nobles. His bony hand clutched a folded fan. His eyes glittered with shrewd intelligence from a spare, angular face.
Ken’ishi had never met a yin-yang master before, but aside from the strangeness of his clothing, the man reminded him of the court nobility he had glimpsed in his brief time in the capital.
He and the workers knelt before the onmyouji, pressing their foreheads to the earth. Straightening, he said, “Thank you for coming, Sensei. I am Captain Otomo no Ken’ishi, vassal of Lord Otomo no Tsunetomo.”
The man bowed slightly. “I am Abe no Genmei, augurer of the second rank to the court of the Emperor. Let us begin as soon as possible.” He snapped his fingers at his chief attendant, who immediately snapped orders at the porters and servants to unload and erect an entire campsite in the center of the village.
The chief attendant was younger than Ken’ishi, dressed similarly to Lord Abe, but less ostentatiously, with fewer arcane sigils on his attire and a cap a bit shorter. He had the look of an apprentice.
“Lord Abe,” Ken’ishi said, “would you care to accompany me? There is much to tell.”
Snapping open his fan, Lord Abe squinted up at the sun and fanned himself. His eyes flicked about the village. “The very air here drips with disquiet.” He gestured for Ken’ishi to lead on. “Tell me everything.”
Ken’ishi escorted him around the village, telling him the story of Kiosé and Little Frog and of his relationship with them. Leaving something out might disrupt whatever the onmyouji was formulating.
“So many intricacies in the flow of the universe, so many twists and turns to fortune and fate. Any detail could be significant,” Lord Abe said once between scenes in Ken’ishi’s tale. They stood before the ruins of Ken’ishi’s house while he told of his brush with the hungry spirit the night before.
Lord Abe’s face softened bit by bit as he listened. “Such a pitiable fate. Not even the unclean deserve such a terrible demise.”
“What can be done, Lord?”
“I will attempt to exorcise this dim spirit. Do you know the characters of her name?”
“I’m sorry, Lord, I do not. I doubt even she did. She was sold to a brothel when she was very young, then to the innkeeper here. She never spoke of her parents or who gave her that name.”
“The sounds
alone are sometimes enough. They can echo into other realms. What you must remember is that becoming trapped here has destroyed what was good about her. All that remains are incidental echoes buried in fear and rage.”
“How can I assist you?”
“Send all the workers away. Once my servants have made the necessary preparations, they will also be sent away, except for Koumei, my apprentice. You must stay, as you will be my weapon. Her essence is still very much tied to you. Your return here has fueled her anger, like encountering an old love affair fills the belly with either butterflies or serpents. Unless she is stopped, she would follow you wherever you go, feeding upon your spirit until there is nothing left but a shriveled husk, like the two men she killed.”
The hairs at the nape of Ken’ishi’s neck stood on end.
“We must have all preparations in place to contain her before nightfall.”
The man was insufferably haughty and disdainful, which rankled Ken’ishi, but what choice did he have? There was no one else who could help. The assurance in the voice of the onmyouji gave Ken’ishi a bit of comfort, but at the same time the earnestness warned him how dangerous the situation had become.
* * *
The ritual began with a five-pointed star drawn twenty paces across. From jars of black sand, the apprentice Koumei drew the star upon the ground near the ruins of Ken’ishi’s house, taking meticulous care that every line was arrow-straight.
Meanwhile, Lord Abe told Ken’ishi, “The yurei will never depart of its own accord. It must be subdued and forced to leave the mortal realm.”
“Will nothing appease her? Is there some way I can convince her to leave, to move on?”
“Can you remove a bloodstain from the earth? The yurei is but a shadow of the woman you knew. You cannot appease her. During the ritual, you must obey my commands to the letter. If you disobey me once the ritual has begun, your life, your very soul itself, will be in mortal danger.”
Spirit of the Ronin Page 27