Autumn Princess, Dragon Child Read online

  “He is lying down,” he said, “but he needs to sleep to get better.”

  Kiku was boiling something in an iron pot; it smelled of aniseed and rhubarb root.

  He took the pot from the embers and poured the contents into a small cup. He handed it to Ku. “Give him this. It will settle his stomach and send him to sleep.”

  “You aren’t planning to poison our guest, I hope,” Shika said.

  “Of course not,” Kiku replied, adding, “I will if you want me to.”

  “Thank you,” Shika said. “I’m pleased to see you all being so considerate.”

  “If he is soundly asleep, you can discuss your plans freely with us,” Kiku replied. “We are not being considerate, we are being practical.”

  “We are learning a lot from him, too,” Mu remarked. “What did he mean when he said avenge?”

  “It is when you want to harm or punish someone who has injured you. Payback. It is a sort of justice.”

  Mu considered this reply for a few moments. Then he said, “Who was Lord Kiyoyori?”

  “He was a great warrior; they called him the Kuromori lord. Kuromori is the fortress where our guest, Kongyo, has been hiding out.” After a pause Shika said quietly, “He was one of your fathers.”

  “As well as Shisoku?” Kiku had been listening carefully to every word. The boys knew nothing of normal human relations, so they accepted this more or less unquestioningly.

  “You had five fathers: Shisoku; Kiyoyori; a bandit chief, Akuzenji; a great sage and magician, Sesshin; and me.”

  Kiku and Mu both laughed.

  “You are very young to be our father,” Mu said. “Aren’t you?”

  “You are our older brother,” Kiku added.

  “I am old enough to make children,” Shika said. “And, I suppose, the way you are growing, you soon will be, too.”

  The boys were silent while they thought about this. They were both smiling. Kiku gave Mu a shove; Mu punched him back.

  Something else I will have to teach them about, Shika thought. But who will they marry? Will they take human wives? And what will become of their children?

  “Do you want to avenge Lord Kiyoyori, too?” Mu asked.

  “I do, and I will. But first I need to kill my uncle,” Shika replied, and thought, And then I have to destroy the Prince Abbot, and—he hardly dared to put his longing into words, even silent ones—find Akihime and marry her, and restore Yoshimori to the throne. Kumayama was the first step toward all these goals.

  “This is Kumayama, where my uncle lives now.” He picked up a charred stick and began to draw a rough map on one of the firestones. “This is where I grew up.”

  He was suddenly besieged by memories, the daily humiliations and cruelties, the helpless rages he had fallen into, when everything went red and he wanted only to lash out, to kill and destroy, the sense of outrage and injustice that the man who was supposed to care for him, who held his inheritance in trust, wanted him dead and was driving him either to suicide or to an act so uncontrolled, it would justify his execution.

  He was deeply grateful he had fallen over the cliff, grateful to the stag that had cushioned his fall and to the men who had spared his life and in their own strange way nurtured and educated him: Shisoku, Akuzenji, Kiyoyori, Sesshin. They had all been like fathers to him, so, in a sense, he was the boys’ older brother.

  He became aware they were watching him, the stick still in his hand, waiting for him to go on. He said, “I was there briefly a year ago. I was a prisoner, so I could not see how my uncle had changed and fortified my old home since I had been away—it is nearly two years ago now.”

  Kiku said, “Explain uncle.”

  “My father’s brother. If Mu had a child, you would be the uncle.”

  This made them laugh again. Kiku dug Mu in the ribs with his elbow. “Who is your child’s mother going to be? One of those bitches you sleep with? Your children will be puppies!”

  Mu hit him and they tumbled over on top of Gen, waking him from sleep. He leaped to his feet, snarling and snapping. Shika silenced all three with a look, and went on. “This is how it was when I lived there—we called it a castle, but really it was just a fortified house, with a high wooden fence around it, a ditch in front of the fence, strong gates at front and rear, and a watchtower. Just inside the rear gate are cells with wooden bars, and between them and the house is an open space where horses are exercised, and where anyone who annoys my uncle is put to death.”

  He moved on to the adjacent stone. “The stable is also at the rear. It’s an open shed with ropes for the horses to be tied to. Fodder and water buckets are stored here. The roofs are all thatch, reeds, not bones.”

  “It looks interesting,” Mu said. “It’s so big!”

  “Yet it is small compared with many other fortresses,” Shika said. “Small but very important. Difficult to take, easy to defend.”

  “I’d like to see it for myself,” Kiku said.

  “I hope you will soon. Now leave me in peace for a while.”

  Shika went to the hut, saw that Kongyo was deeply asleep, and took the shoulder blades of the stag from where they lay on the altar. He had found them among Gessho’s possessions after the monk’s death. He said a few words of prayer over them and placed them in the embers of the fire. Then he sat cross-legged, meditating, until the sun set. At nightfall he took the cooled blades from the ashes and studied the fine hairlike cracks that had appeared on them. He felt he heard their message in his own bones.

  Kongyo did not wake, but that night his horse became colicky from the sudden large amounts of food it had eaten so hungrily, and, despite Shika’s efforts to save it, died in the early hours of the morning. As soon as Ima woke and saw the dead horse, he set about skinning it. The head and hooves were buried, like Gessho’s skull, to rot away the flesh. The mane and tail were cut off and given to Ku, who washed them carefully and combed them out, so they regained in death the rippled silkiness they had lost in life. The dogs and wolves sat around, mouths dripping strings of saliva. When the belly was slit open Ima threw the still-steaming entrails to them and they snapped and fought over them.

  Shika reread the message in the shoulder blades.

  “I am going to Kumayama,” he informed Kongyo. “If you’re well enough to ride, you can take my horse. Return to Kuromori and tell your men to expect me. I suppose I will be there in about ten days. If I’m not, you can assume either we are snowed in or I have failed. Your future will be in your own hands then.”

  “You will not fail,” Kongyo said, his eyes gleaming. “We have my dream to trust in.”

  “You’re taking us with you, aren’t you?” Mu said.

  “Are we going to kill the uncle?” Kiku asked.

  “Do you want to?” said Shika.

  Kiku looked around at the bone-thatched hut, the animals assembled from various parts of corpses, the carcass of the dead horse, and said, “I don’t mind.”

  The middle boy, Kuro, emerged from the forest carrying a pole across his shoulders from which hung several small bamboo cages. He set them carefully on the ground and crouched down, his eyes fixed on his oldest brother.

  “What have you got there?” Shika asked.

  “A giant centipede, two golden orb spiders, a viper, and a very angry sparrow bee,” Kuro replied.

  Kongyo shuddered. “I would rather face a hundred Miboshi warriors than any one of those—apart from the snake. Snakes are easy to kill, you just lop off their head.”

  “This one is half-asleep,” Kuro interrupted him. “It will not wake up properly till spring.”

  Kongyo ignored him. “But insects! You don’t see them until it’s too late. They lie in wait in dark corners and shadowy places, and they sting and bite without discrimination or mercy.”

  “Are all warriors cowards when it comes to insects?” Kiku said. The question sounded innocent, but Shika knew Kiku intended to insult Kongyo and unsettle him.

  “It is not a question of cowardice,”
Kongyo began.

  Shika held up a hand to calm him. “We will find out.” A plan was beginning to form in his mind. “Kiku and Kuro will come with me. Mu, you will stay with Ima and Ku.”

  “I’d rather go with you,” Mu pleaded.

  Shika did not want the two older boys squabbling and competing, leading each other into danger. Kuro was the most solitary, usually, but he had more respect for Kiku than Mu did, and his poisonous insects could be useful. “I’m trusting you to look after your brothers and the animals. You must be what Shisoku was, the guardian of this place, of the forest.”

  This seemed to placate Mu a little, and he was smiling as he went away from them and joined Ima, who was now slicing strips of flesh from the dead horse and threading them on sharpened sticks. Mu began to place these on forked poles above a bed of embers. Shika hoped the weather stayed fine. If the meat dried quickly, it would feed the boys for half the winter.

  The sparrow bee had found it could not escape and was buzzing furiously against the narrow bamboo bars. Kongyo looked at it, fascinated and horrified.

  “Lord Kiyoyori’s brother, Masachika, was half-dead from what he said were bee stings when we found him after the attack. He told us they had stung him on the orders of the guardian spirits at Matsutani. I thought he was hallucinating, but maybe they were giant bees like this one.”

  “He would not be half-dead but all dead,” Kuro replied. “But there are many kinds of bees, wasps, and hornets, and many different levels of poison.”

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll sting you? Then you’d be all dead!” Kongyo laughed, but no one else did.

  “I let them sting me,” Kuro said. “I am immune now.” He flashed a look at Kongyo from his expressionless eyes. Sometimes, Shika thought, the boys looked like insects themselves, and he recalled how they had been born from eggs in cocoons, like spiders.

  * * *

  Kongyo left at dawn the next day, and shortly afterward Shika, Kiku, and Kuro set out for Kumayama. Shika took his bow and Jinan, and the mask, in the seven-layered brocade bag, together with the shoulder blades of divination. The boys took knives, ropes, bows and venom-tipped arrows, and other poisons, carefully sealed with stoppers of beeswax in bamboo tubes, and the sparrow bee in its cage. It had gone silent and Shika thought it was dead, but Kuro assured him it was sleeping; he had blown a drowse smoke over it and could waken it when it was needed. Gen, the fake wolf, came with them, inseparable as always from Shika.

  They moved silently and swiftly through the winter forest. In low, shady places the ground was white with frost. Most of the trees were leafless, only pines and cedars still deep green. Kuro said after a while, “Will that man let our horse die of hunger, too?”

  “It may happen, though I hope not,” Shika replied.

  “If the horse was hungry, why didn’t it run away and find food?”

  “I expect it was tied up, somewhere inside the fortress. Horses suffer along with men in war. They are killed in battle, they starve in sieges.” Shika found himself thinking of Risu and Nyorin, and the foal. The time of its birth must be getting close. He wondered what would happen when it was born, if he would ever see it, ever know if Kiyoyori’s spirit truly dwelled within it.

  “And then they get eaten,” Kiku added.

  Kuro said, “Do men get eaten, too?”

  “Sometimes, I believe, starving, desperate people will eat the flesh of a dead human being, but generally not.”

  “Why do horses submit to men? Why do they let themselves be tamed? I would never do that!” Kuro declared.

  “I suppose it is in their nature,” Shika replied. “Something in them longs to be mastered. When they submit, they feel safe. Most horses don’t get to choose their owners. They are passed from hand to hand. If a new owner treats them properly, and feeds them, they obey and are content. There are many people like that in the world, you will find. They are happy to obey. But, like horses, while most will follow, a few others always want to be in front.”

  “It is not in our nature to follow,” Kiku said.

  Shika laughed. “I don’t believe it is. Yet you and Mu are leaders over your brothers, and you all obey me, and must, until you are fully grown and understand how the world works.”

  “Who do you follow?” Kuro asked.

  “No one,” Shika said, after a pause. “I am the horse that wants to go first.”

  “What happens when several horses all want to be in front?” Kiku said.

  “They jostle and nip one another. Eventually they fight.”

  “So, you are going to do a little jostling and nipping against your uncle?” said Kiku. “And then you will fight?”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  On the evening of the fourth day they came to a place Shika remembered, at the foot of a steep cliff. He found the stag’s skeleton, and marveled that wolves had not scattered the bones. He helped the boys build a rough shelter a short distance away, and shared out the last of the food they had brought with them.

  It was hardly enough to satisfy their hunger. Kuro set traps for rabbits and then declared he was going to forage for nuts and mushrooms. Shika told Kiku to keep watch and went back to the place where he had come tumbling down the cliff, expecting to die. The stag had broken his fall, and in saving his life changed it beyond imagination. Now he wanted to thank it, he needed to tell the mountain, Kumayama, he was back, and he wanted to test the power of the mask.

  Kneeling beside the skeleton, he placed the mask over his face, prepared to face the Prince Abbot, should he be taken into his presence, and to remove the mask swiftly if he had to. It was more than a month since Gessho had died, and, even though the werehawk messenger had been killed, too, surely the priest would have divined what had happened by now?

  Shika breathed in and out slowly, bringing his thoughts under control. Little by little, his mind quieted, and he felt his spiritual power awaken. He was aware of everything around him. He could feel the forest in its deep winter sleep, he knew its dreams. He spoke to it and to the mountain, thanking them both for sustaining him, seeking their protection. Then he spoke to the stag. He saw it tread proudly through the forest, its antlers held erect, its nose twitching, its eyes bright. He heard its autumn cry of yearning and loneliness. He expressed his sorrow at its death, his gratitude for all it had done for him. He called it Father and told it his name, Shikanoko, the deer’s child.

  He felt no sign of the power of the Prince Abbot, nor was he taken into the realm of Ryusonji. The mask had been broken, he had been broken, but, in the mending, they had both become stronger.

  He rose to his feet and began the movements of the deer dance. For a while he was transported by it. He thought he saw inside Kumayama, his uncle made cruel by his fear of attack from without and rebellion from within. He saw the fortress weighed down by hatred and repression; one push and it would fall. He saw the two great lords, the leaders of the Miboshi and the Kakizuki; he realized he could become greater than either of them. Kongyo’s dream came into his mind as though he had dreamed it himself. He straddled the Eight Islands. He would put the rightful emperor on the throne and rule through him.

  But then his feet faltered. He did not know the rest of the movements, he had never learned all the steps. And now Shisoku was gone, there was no one to teach him. In that moment of doubt, he felt the pull of Ryusonji, as though the Prince Abbot had woken and turned his attention to the east. He felt a surge of longing and regret. He saw all the wisdom and knowledge that dwelled at Ryusonji and longed to be part of it again. He missed the admiration and affection he had so often heard in the Prince Abbot’s voice. He wanted to hear that voice again at the same time as he cringed from it.

  He felt the bound beginning, as it had before, the stag’s leap that would take him there in minutes. He would not go inside, he would just stand on the veranda …

  He tore the mask from his face, his heart pounding.

  That night he hardly dared sleep, lest he should
meet his former master in his dreams. Instead his thoughts circled and returned over and again to all he needed to learn.

  In the morning there were two rabbits in Kuro’s traps. They skinned and cooked them, fed the entrails to Gen, ate one, and took the other with them. The boys scaled the cliff easily, thanks to their skills in balance and leaping. They let down a rope for Shika to climb. Then the three followed the route along which he and his uncle had tracked the stag, two years before. He was in familiar territory now—he had roamed over this mountain as a boy, and, though there were no paths and it looked as if no one had been here in the past two years, they made swift progress. Did his uncle no longer hunt in this part of the mountain? Was he afraid he might meet Kazumaru’s angry ghost?

  The boys went ahead, for they could move more silently than Shika, and Kiku’s sharp hearing would warn them of anyone in their path. They slept briefly for two nights, not making fires, sharing the rabbit, cracking and sucking the bones, then huddling together against the cold. Shika noticed that Gen’s body, once as chill as the elements he was made of, now gave out a natural warmth.

  Around midday on the third day Gen sniffed the air and said indistinctly, “Dead people.”

  At the same time Kiku appeared.

  “There’s a strange noise ahead,” he reported. “Flapping and rustling.”

  “Can you hear that noise, Gen?” Shika whispered.

  The fake wolf turned his head and pricked the right ear, which had always worked better than the left.

  “Birds,” he said.

  As they cautiously approached the source of the noise, Shika saw Gen was right. A flock of crows swarmed over some thing, or things, mounted on poles. The birds did not caw, or even squabble. They simply pecked, relentlessly and silently, every now and then fluttering up into the air and then returning.

  At the sight of Shika and the boys, they flew off into nearby trees, where they made the boughs hang down heavily, and watched with greedy, inquisitive eyes.

  The things heaved and swayed, as if they still lived, but it was not life within them but life feeding on them. Countless maggots teemed over them.