“You should have killed him then,” Ibara said. “Swords return for a purpose.”
He did not respond to this but said, “Tell me what happened at Nishimi.”
She could see him more clearly now. How young he was! She had formed a picture of an older man, for that was what the word lord suggested to her. But he was not much more than a boy. How had he destroyed the Prince Abbot, in an act of such power the temple at Ryusonji had burned to the ground?
He loved the Princess. She died. His mouth had the same shape as little Take’s, and his long fingers, too. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Akihime came to Nishimi, with Risu and Nyorin. Yukikuni no Takaakira employed me to look after Lady Hina. Hina knew the horses, she knew their names.”
“Hina?” the lord said wonderingly. “Lord Kiyoyori’s daughter?” And the foal came closer, nodding its head.
“I had no idea who Lady Hina was, other than that she was his ward and that he was secretive about her and didn’t want anyone to know she was living with him. I guessed he’d saved her life. I would have done the same thing—anyone would. She was enchantingly pretty and so brave. She hid the Princess, and we pretended she had been rescued from the lake. After the baby was born Akihime worked in the kitchen. We thought no one would suspect her of being anything but a servant girl.”
“She had a child?” His lips were ashen.
“A son. She wanted him to be called Takeyoshi. Lady Hina often played with him and she was carrying him when Masachika came over the mountains from the west.” She halted abruptly. “This is the bit I don’t understand. For he came with Saburo.”
Tan gave a low whinny.
“Yes, Tan, Saburo, the man who saved your life at birth. He must have told Masachika that the Princess was at Nishimi, but I cannot believe he would betray her. And then Masachika killed him, stabbing him in the back.”
“Masachika often works as a spy,” the lord said. “Your Saburo would not be the first to be deceived into trusting him.”
He laid one hand against the foal’s neck. “What happened to Hina?”
Ibara replied, “She jumped into the water with the baby in her arms.”
Tears splashed on her arm and hand. The foal was weeping.
“What is this animal?” she cried, half-rising. “How does it understand every word and why is it shedding tears like a human?”
The lord said quietly, “The foal is a vessel for the spirit of Lord Kiyoyori, Hina’s father.”
“The one who died at the side of the Crown Prince? How can that be possible?”
He looked at her. The bone mask allowed no expression apart from the eyes, but they seemed to open onto a world she did not know existed. She could not hold his gaze.
“Is it like rebirth?” she said after a long silence.
“Not quite. Lord Kiyoyori’s spirit refused to cross the river of death. A man who owed him an unthinkable debt took his place. I summoned the lord back. The mare was pregnant. His spirit took over the unborn foal.”
It might have been the wild claim of a man driven mad by grief, yet, if she accepted it, so many things made sense—the foal’s devotion to Hina, its ability to understand human speech, its tears.
“I don’t believe Lady Hina is dead,” she said, addressing the foal. “There was a boat. I think they saved her and the baby. Don’t grieve for her yet…” And then, deeply uncomfortable, she added, “Lord.”
Accepting it was true gave her new hope. “Why can’t you summon the Princess back? Or Saburo? Summon him back into whatever shape you like. He died before we even held each other. I cannot stand it.” She was twisting her hands together frantically.
“I know,” he said, and, for a moment, Ibara felt their deep grief unite them. Then he said bitterly, “Don’t think I haven’t tried. Night after night, I attempt to walk again between the worlds and summon up the dead. But she is gone. Maybe she is in Paradise, maybe she is reborn, either way she is forever lost to me. Your Saburo must have died even earlier. He also will have crossed the last of the rivers that flow between this world and the next. I was given much power and taught many things, but I lay with her when I should not have done, and though together we destroyed the Prince Abbot, we did not escape punishment. She forfeited her life and I cannot remove the mask. I am condemned to live half animal, half human, belonging to neither world. I will go without food or sleep until I follow her into the realm of the dead. Maybe there I can find forgiveness.”
“It is not forgiveness I seek,” Ibara said in a low voice. “It is revenge.”
The foal gave a sharp neigh of encouragement.
How strange, she thought, I am just a girl from Akashi, a servant, but my desire for revenge is stronger than this boy’s, who was born a lord, brought up as a warrior.
“No one is to blame for the Princess’s death but myself,” he said. “It is on myself that I am taking revenge.”
“The baby looks like you. He is your son, isn’t he? Don’t you want to find him?”
“Better he died in the water,” Shikanoko said, “than grow up in this world of sorrow.”
3
MU
Three of the five boys who had been born from cocoons, Mu, Ima, and Ku, had been left at the mountain hut all winter. Once a messenger had come from Shikanoko at Kumayama to check that they were still alive, but after that they heard nothing of him or their other brothers, Kiku and Kuro. At first they did not worry, living day to day without much thought, like animals, but when spring came Mu began to be plagued by restlessness and a sort of anxiety. He took to roaming through the Darkwood and it was there that he saw a foxes’ wedding, though at the time he did not know what it was. It was the third month, when showers chased sunshine. For several days he had been away from the hut, sleeping under the stars or in caves when it was too wet, feeling almost like a fox himself. One morning he was plucking young fern shoots, cramming the tender stems into his mouth, in one of the hidden clearings on the lower slopes of Kuroyama, when he heard curious noises, the soft padding of many feet and flute music, so high he could not tell if it was really music or the wind in the pine trees, and drums that might have been rain falling. He quickly climbed an oak tree and hid in the foliage as a procession came into the clearing.
At first, he thought they were people, dressed in colorful clothes, walking upright, playing flutes and drums, but then he saw their pointed ears, their black-tipped snouts, their precise, delicate paws. A male and a female were carried on the shoulders of the largest foxes, who were the size of wolves. Like the music, they hovered between reality and imagination, filling him with an intense longing. He did not think they were aware of him, but, as they passed beneath the oak tree, one young female looked up and smiled in his direction, a smile that seemed to be an invitation into worlds he had not known existed.
The sun shone brilliantly on the short winter grass, only recently liberated from snow, starred with flowers, yellow aconites and celandines, white anemones. The bride and groom were lowered to the ground and stood facing each other. They joined hands—paws, Mu thought—as the flutes played even more sweetly and the drums more loudly. Then the sky darkened, sudden rain joined in the drumming, and, when Mu could see again, they had all disappeared, as if the shower had dissolved them.
When he came home his brothers Kiku and Kuro had returned and were crouched by the fire, silent and miserable. He felt a moment of relief, as if his anxiety had been for them, but why had they come alone and why did they look like that? The youngest brother, Ku, was sitting near them, watching them with a troubled expression on his face, a bunch of puppies, as usual, crawling over him and tumbling around him. The fourth boy, Ima, was tending a pot in which a stew of spring shoots was simmering along with some sort of meat.
Ima scooped broth into wooden bowls and offered them to Kiku and Kuro. Kuro took one and drank without a word, but Kiku refused with a gesture that made Mu’s heart sink.
“What’s happened?” he said.
> “Shikanoko…” Kuro began.
“Don’t you dare speak!” Kiku shouted. “It was all your fault!” He hit Kuro over the shoulders so violently the soup flew from the bowl, scalding Kuro’s face and hands. Kuro swore, grabbed a smoldering stick from the fire, and thrust it toward Kiku’s face.
“Stop it, stop it!” Mu cried. “What happened to Shikanoko? He’s not dead?”
“He might as well be,” Kiku said angrily. “He has sent us away. He never wants to see us again. It was all Kuro’s stupid fault. I told him to leave all his creatures behind. But he had to bring the deadliest one.”
“The snake? The snake bit someone?” Mu said.
“Only a woman.” Kuro tried to defend himself.
“Only a woman?” Kiku repeated. “The woman we were meant to rescue, the Autumn Princess, the woman Shika loved.”
“I don’t understand that,” Kuro muttered. “I don’t know what love means.”
“I’m not sure I do either,” Kiku admitted.
Mu thought of the fox girl and how her look had transfixed him. Do I love her? he wondered.
“Shika felt something for her,” Kiku tried to explain. “An emotion so strong her death destroyed him. He has turned us away, our older brother, our father, the only one who cared for us, who brought us up.” He said all this in a bewildered voice as though, for the first time in his life, he himself was feeling some strong emotion. He brushed his hand against his eyes. “What is this? Is it the smoke making my eyes water?”
Tears were staining his cheeks. Mu could not remember ever seeing him cry, not even when the rest of them had wept after Shisoku died. “Where has Shika gone?” he said.
Kiku sniffed. “He rode away into the Darkwood, with Gen, three horses, and two men with burnt faces. He performed an act of great magic and defeated the priest. He raised a dragon child from the lake. You should have seen it, Mu, it was magnificent. Balls of lightning everywhere, a roaring like you’ve never heard. The priest dissolved in fire.”
“Tell Mu about the price Shika paid,” Kuro said. “Tell him about the mask.”
“The stag mask he uses,” Kiku said. “It stuck to his face. It cannot be taken off. Now he is half man and half deer.”
“Is that so bad?” Mu asked, wishing he could be half fox.
“It would not matter if he had stayed with us.” Kiku gestured toward the fake animals that the old mountain sorcerer Shisoku had created from skins and skeletons. “He would have fitted in perfectly here. Or he could still have been a warlord like he intended. He would have been all the more terrifying. He did not need to send us away. He could have achieved anything he wanted with our help. Look what we have done for him so far! He would never have got the better of that monk, Gessho, or taken his old home back from his uncle.”
“It was my bee that killed the uncle,” Kuro added proudly.
“And then getting into Ryusonji,” Kiku continued. “It’s a shame about the Princess—my eyes are doing that strange thing again. Why is your fire so smoky, Ima?—but the Prince Abbot was destroyed. Shika could have done none of those things without us.”
At that moment one of the fake wolves gave a long, muffled howl and fell over with a thump. Ku pushed away the pile of dogs that surrounded him and ran to it. The puppies yelped and snarled at it in playful attacks, but it did not move. The other boys stared at it.
“It’s dead,” Ku said.
“It was never really alive.” Kuro moved toward it and knelt beside it, pushing the puppies away. He looked up at Kiku. “Whatever power was holding it together has left it.”
Kiku looked wildly around at the other fake animals, making no effort now to control his tears. Mu followed his gaze. He realized what he had not noticed before: Shisoku’s creations were winding down, fading in some way. Regret stabbed him. He also felt his eyes water. Why hadn’t he looked after them better?
A crow plummeted from the branch it had been perched on and lay broken and silent on the ground, its borrowed feathers scattered by the breeze.
“No!” Kiku sobbed.
“You never liked them much, anyway,” Mu said, surprised at his apparent sorrow.
“I hate them,” Kiku replied, controlling himself with an effort. “But they are breaking down before I’ve had a chance to learn how they work, how to make them. How did Shisoku get them to move, to live to the extent they did? How did he and Shika make the mask? What would he have done with the monk’s skull that we buried? And the horse’s? I need to learn all these things, and now there is no one to teach me.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” Ima said, suddenly anxious.
Kuro said, “The old man Sesshin…”
Mu started at the name. “He is one of our fathers. The only one still alive, apart from Shika.”
“Well, he told Shika to kill us. He called us imps. My snake was meant to bite him!”
“He must know some sorcery,” Kiku said.
“He gave all his power away to Shika,” Kuro said. “I heard the torturers tell the Abbot Prince.”
“Prince Abbot,” Kiku corrected him.
“Whatever, he is gone.” Kuro stood up. “But wasn’t the dragon superb? If only I could learn to summon one up like that.”
“Well, you won’t now,” Kiku retorted. “Because Shika is never going to want to see you again.”
They looked wildly at one another. They were all crying now, even Kuro.
What will become of us? Mu thought. There is no one in the world who cares about us.
* * *
Over the next few weeks the boys sulked and squabbled as more of Shisoku’s animals ran out of living force and fell to the ground. Mu wanted to burn them; they did not exactly decay like real animals, but they gave out a strange smell; insects began to dwell in the hides and maggots hatched. The corpses heaved with a new movement that nauseated him. But Kiku would not allow it. He studied each one’s unique makeup, committing to memory how they were put together, out of which materials.
He went through the hut, looking at, smelling, tasting the contents of all the flasks of potions and jars of incense and ointments that Shisoku had concocted or collected. The sorcerer had kept records in an arcane script, which none of them could read, but Kiku searched out every object of power, every amulet and statue and figurine. He knew their weight and what they were made from, but he did not know how to use them for his own ends. That did not stop him trying everything out, experimenting fearlessly.
Sometimes he raved uncontrollably about visions and deep insights, sometimes he seemed to work magic by accident. Once he threw up so violently and for so long the others thought he was dying.
He gathered the remains of the werehawk, from where they still lay on the roof, and made a necklace from the beak and talons. He dug up the horse’s skull. Worms and insects had done their work and the flesh was stripped from the bone. The last remnants fell away when Kiku boiled the skull in an iron pot on the fire.
“You can’t make a horse,” Mu said. “Even Shisoku never made anything so large.”
“I want to make a mask like Shika’s,” Kiku replied.
Mu had never seen the mask, only knew the seven-layered brocade bag in which it used to be kept, but Kiku had watched Shika wear it and had held it in his hands.
“I carried it,” he said, with a note of pride in his voice. “He said he wanted to leave it behind, but I knew he didn’t really, so I took it to him.”
He described it to Mu: the stag’s skull, the antlers, one broken, the half-human, half-animal face with its carved features, smoothly lacquered, and its cinnabar-reddened lips. But he did not know the ritual in which it had been created, months before the boys were born, the blending of the red and white essences of male and female.
When the horse head was reduced to gleaming bone, Kiku tried to shape it, but his chisel often slipped and the resulting skull pan was lopsided and jagged. He made a face mask from wood, carving out eye sockets and a mouth hole, and he and K
uro lacquered it without really knowing the method. The lacquer bubbled and cracked, as if it were diseased, and the result was monstrous, both laughable and sinister. When Kiku put it on, the dogs howled and ran to Ku, and two more fake animals lay down and did not get up again.
“It’s useless,” Kiku said, taking the mask off and throwing it to the ground. “It’s ugly and it has no power.”
“It’s only your first attempt,” Mu said. “Imagine how many times Shisoku had to experiment and practice before he got it right. And he was still making mistakes up to the time he died.”
“But he mostly knew what he was doing. He must have had so much knowledge,” Kiku said. “Why do I have no one to teach me? Don’t you ever feel it? That there is a huge part of our lives missing? Why is there no one like us? Where did they all go?” He sighed, and glanced around the clearing, his eyes falling on the dogs, cowering around his youngest brother. “Maybe the skull has to come from something I kill myself.”
“No!” Ku said defiantly.
“A dog is too easy,” Mu added. “It is not enough of a challenge for you.” He picked up the horse mask and set it on a pole near the hut. “It’ll make a good guard.”
The mask was not what Kiku had intended, yet it was not a complete failure, and some strange force had attached itself to it. At night they heard hoofbeats and whinnying, and several times, the post seemed to have moved by morning. Ima was fascinated by it. He patted the post and clicked his tongue at it when he went past, and brought offerings of fresh grass and water.
Weeks went by. Shikanoko did not return. Kiku continued his experiments. Kuro set about replacing his collection of poisonous creatures, and managed to capture another sparrow bee.
One morning Mu had gone with Ima to the stream to gather grass and check the fish traps. The boys were always hungry, and although they preferred meat to fish, fish were easier to get and more plentiful. The stream did not flood that spring and, in the deep pools, sweetfish hid in the shadows, while crabs could be found under every rock. Sometimes the traps would catch an eel, which was as rich and tasty as meat. They were both knee-deep in the water when they heard someone approaching. Neither of them had Kiku’s acute hearing, but the sounds were unmistakable: a snapped twig, a dislodged stone, and then a quickly muffled gasp as a foot slipped. The two boys were out of the water and into the undergrowth in one movement, as quick as lizards.