Lord of the Darkwood Read online

  A boy and a girl came warily down to the stream. The boy looked familiar, and Mu realized it was the messenger who had been sent by Shikanoko in the winter, the boy called Chika. He was still not very clear about human ages—his own growth, like all his brothers’, had been so rapid he had nothing to go by—but he knew Chika was a boy, definitely not yet a man. The girl seemed younger, but maybe not by much. They were both thin, legs scratched and bleeding in several places, barefoot, burned brown by the sun. Yet the boy carried a sword, and the girl a knife, and, Mu thought, they both looked as if they knew how to use them.

  The boy knew his way, leading the girl across the stream, helping her jump from boulder to boulder. When they reached the bank, they walked downstream toward the hut. Mu picked up the fish they had already caught, still flapping on the grass stem threaded through their gills, and gestured to Ima to bring the bucket of crabs. They followed the pair, silent and unseen.

  The boy halted near the horse skull, hand on sword, and called, “Is anyone there? I am Chikamaru, son of Kongyo, from Kuromori. I am looking for the man known as Shikanoko.”

  Kiku emerged from the hut, blinking in the sunlight. “We know who you are, Chika. Shikanoko is not here.”

  Slowly the other boys appeared and surrounded the pair. The girl held her knife out threateningly, but Kiku brushed it aside and stepped close to her, touching her face and her hair, in a gentle way that both astonished and alarmed Mu.

  “Kongyo?” Kiku said finally. “He was the man who came with the horse.” His eyes flickered to the horse mask on the pole.

  Chika said, “That’s Ban? My father said he died. He was our last horse. But what have you done to his skull?”

  Kiku made a dismissive gesture. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The girl began to cry silently, as if the sight of the horse, once no doubt magnificent and prized, now a hideous replica, had unleashed all her grief.

  “I’ve done that,” Kiku told her. “Water has come from my eyes. It will dry up, don’t worry.”

  His face had taken on an intense fixed expression, like a male animal about to mate or kill.

  “Cook the fish,” Mu said to Ima, to break the uncomfortable silence, and then addressed the boy, Chika. “Sit down, we’ll eat something. Are you hungry?”

  They both nodded. The girl slumped down, still weeping. Chika said, “Our mother told us to flee. After our father died she was afraid his murderers might seek to kill us, too. I don’t know what will happen to her. My sister is still in shock, I think. She hardly speaks and the slightest thing sets off her tears.”

  “Our mother is dead,” Kiku said, sitting down next to the girl. “She died just after we were born.”

  “Lady Tora?” Chika said.

  The boys stared at him. “You knew our mother?” Mu said.

  “She came to Matsutani with Akuzenji, the King of the Mountain. Shikanoko was with them, too.”

  Mu remembered the name, Akuzenji. Shika had told them he was one of their five fathers.

  “What does that mean, King of the Mountain?” said Kiku.

  “That’s what he called himself. He wasn’t really a king, he was a bandit. Merchants paid him so they could travel safely along the northern highway. If they didn’t pay, he robbed them and usually killed them. He set an ambush for Lord Kiyoyori, whom my father served, but he was captured and the lord beheaded him and all his men, except Shikanoko. Then Lord Kiyoyori fell madly in love with Lady Tora and made her his mistress, even though she was said to be a sorceress.”

  “One of our fathers took the head of another of them,” Kiku murmured. “That would be a skull worth having.”

  “The bodies were burned and the heads displayed at the borders of the estate,” Chika said. “You should have seen it—thirty men separated from their heads in as many minutes. It was brutal. I’ve been in sieges and battles, but nothing was as horrifying as that day.”

  “You say you have been in battles,” Mu said, “but you are not yet a grown man.”

  “I still know how to fight with this.” Chika tapped the sword that lay beside him on the grass. “I have just escaped from the battle in which my father died.”

  “Why have you come here?” Ima said from the fire. The sweet smell of grilling fish rose in the air.

  “I could think of nowhere else to go. Our father is dead, along with all Lord Kiyoyori’s men and their families. We held out for months in the fortress at Kuromori, but after Shikanoko left for the capital, and never came back, Lord Masachika attacked for the second time, took the fortress, and put all the defenders to death. Then he did the same at Kumayama. He holds a huge domain now for the Miboshi. No one is left to oppose him in all the east.”

  “It sounds very complicated,” Kiku said. “You’ll have to explain it to us. We need to understand all these things, if we are to live in the world.”

  “No one understood why Shikanoko disappeared,” Chika said. “They felt betrayed and abandoned. At first we thought he must have died, but then we heard that he destroyed the Prince Abbot at Ryusonji. He could have dominated the capital himself, but he rode away, no one knows where.”

  “Someone died,” Kiku said, glancing at Kuro, who sat a little way off, letting a snake slither up his arms and around his neck. “A girl Shika liked.”

  “Loved,” Mu said.

  Kiku frowned. “Loved,” he repeated, and bent forward to look in the girl’s face. She squirmed away and said to her brother, “I don’t want to stay here.”

  “You spoke,” he said in delight. “You see, we will be safe here. We can stay, can’t we?”

  “Of course,” Kiku said. “You are welcome, you and your sister. What did you call her?”

  “Kaze.”

  “And your name, Chika—that’s like the other lord you mentioned.”

  “Masachika. I wish it were not. I hate him more than any man alive. It’s one of the clan names—Chika, Masa, Kiyo, Yori. Many of us are called some variation of it. Masachika is Lord Kiyoyori’s younger brother.”

  So he is some relation to us, Mu thought. If Kiyoyori is one of our fathers, this Masachika is our uncle. Kaze is Chika’s sister. He will be uncle to her children. And if I have children my brothers will be their uncles. He thought of the foxes and the girl he had seen, thought of having children with her. The blood rushed to his face and he trembled. In the following weeks he often went back to the clearing, looking for her, but he did not find her.

  * * *

  During that time Kiku and Chika had many conversations about the realm and governance of the Eight Islands: the emperor, the nobility, the great families who held roles of state, the warlords and their warriors, the rich merchants who had their own sort of power. Kiku’s frustration increased daily, until finally he announced his intention to go out into the strange and enticing world Chika described. “You can’t be a sorcerer without someone to teach you,” he said. “We can’t live in this stinking place forever. We must find some way of having power in the world.”

  “Maybe we should be bandits,” Kuro said. “I would like to be called King of the Mountain.”

  “King of the Insects, that’s what you are,” Ku jeered.

  “And you are King of the Dogs,” Kuro countered.

  “Bandits are like crows,” Kiku said. “They swoop down and steal, they scavenge. But if you are rich you don’t have to scavenge.”

  “Others steal from you, then,” Mu said.

  “Then you could be a bandit, in secret, as well as a merchant,” Kiku suggested. “Yes, that’s what I would like to be.”

  “Being a warrior sounds very fine,” said Ima, who had been entranced by Chika’s tales of heroism and sacrifice.

  “You can’t be a warrior,” Chika told him. “You have to be born into a clan.”

  “Lord Kiyoyori was our father,” Ima reminded him. “And so was Shika.”

  “Well, if Shikanoko had stayed around he might have brought you up as warriors. But he’s disappeared and Lord
Kiyoyori is dead, and no one’s going to believe you’re sons of either of them.”

  “Why not?” Ku asked.

  “You don’t look like it,” Chika replied.

  “What do we look like?” said Kiku.

  “Not like anyone else, really,” the warrior’s son said.

  The brothers exchanged glances, seeing one another’s coppery skin, their sharp bony faces, their unkempt black hair.

  “I have no intention of being a warrior,” Kiku declared. “They all end up being killed or killing themselves. I am going to be a merchant by day, and a bandit by night. And maybe a spy or an assassin, but only for the highest reward.”

  Chika laughed. “To be a merchant you have to have something to sell, and ways of either making it or buying it.”

  Kiku laughed, too, but more loudly. “I have something that I think will get me started. Come into the hut.”

  They crowded into the hut after him and watched as he pulled a pile of old rags away from the wall. Beneath it lay a large flat stone.

  “I’d never been able to move it,” Kiku said. “Then, one day, it shifted. Something I did must have unlocked it. Help me lift it—Kuro, you’re the strongest.”

  Together, they raised the stone and slid it aside. A wooden chest had been buried under it. Kiku removed the lid and plunged both hands in, pulling out pearls, golden statues, silver prayer beads, copper coins, jade carvings—all small, light things that could be easily carried. “They must be valuable,” he said.

  “Where did it come from?” Kuro asked.

  “Maybe Akuzenji got the sorcerer to hide it for him?” Mu suggested.

  “That’s what I think,” Kiku said. “Our fathers provided for us, before they knew of our existence. It’s touching, isn’t it, Chika?”

  Chika said nothing, just stared at the treasure.

  “What should I deal in, Chika? You know what men buy and sell. What are the things people cannot do without?”

  “Wine, I suppose, and the things you make from soybeans: paste, curds, sauce.”

  “I imagine I’ll find out what all that stuff is,” Kiku said. “Chika and I will go to … what’s the best place?”

  “Maybe Kitakami,” Chika said. “I’ve never been there, but it has the reputation of being a city where anyone can make a fortune. It trades with countries on the mainland. It is said to be rough and wild.”

  “Then we will go to Kitakami.”

  “I don’t mind coming with you,” Chika said. “But what about Kaze?”

  “Kaze can stay here. I’ll come back for her once I’ve started making my fortune.”

  “I’m coming with you, too,” Kuro announced.

  Kiku stared at him for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes, I’m sure I’ll need you.”

  Kuro grinned. “Me and my creatures.”

  * * *

  After the three left, Mu, Ima, and Ku went back to the peaceful life they had been leading before their brothers returned. Yet it was not quite the same, for now they had a girl living with them. She followed Ku and the dogs around and joined Ima in bringing offerings to the skull of her father’s horse. She ate what they ate and slept alongside them, outside on fine nights, inside the hut when it rained. It did not rain often—even though the plum rains should have set in—and the days and nights were very hot.

  Shikanoko had taught all the boys to use the bow. One day, Kaze took up Mu’s bow, went off into the forest, and returned with a hare and two squirrels. They could all move silently, and could take on invisibility, but she was a better shot than any of them. She still did not speak much, but now and then, at the end of the day when they sat around the fire watching the flames grow brighter as night fell, she would sing—lullabies that made the dogs sigh in their sleep, ballads of love and courage that filled the boys with yearning.

  They were fascinated and intimidated by her. She ordered them around, as if it were her right to be served. Ku and Ima adored her. Her presence, Mu thought, made them all more gentle, more complex—perhaps more like real people. He remembered Shika’s wolf companion, Gen, who had been as artificial as the ones whose remains now littered the clearing, but who had grown more and more real because of its attachment to its master.

  He began to pay more attention to the fake animals, tried to revive their strange spark of life.

  Even objects need attention, he thought. Even the lifeless need love.

  Some nights, he saw green eyes shine in the darkness under the trees and he imagined the foxes had come to listen to the singing. He heard vixens scream at midnight. One day, when he went to the stream to get water, a fox was drinking from one of the pools. It ran into the undergrowth at his approach. He called, without knowing why, “Come back! I won’t hurt you!” and a few moments later the leaves rustled and the fox girl stepped out.

  They stood and gazed at each other, the stream flowing sluggishly between them. She seemed less like a fox than before and more like a human. Her ears were only slightly pointed and her feet were small and delicate, but they were definitely feet, not paws. Beneath her robe, which was dyed red and tied with a yellow sash, was a hint of a tail, but, at second glance, it was not a tail at all but just the way the robe fell.

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “I know. You were in the oak tree.”

  “What was it?”

  “A wedding,” she said gravely. “I’ll show you if you like.”

  He held out his hand. “Come across.”

  “No, you come to me,” she commanded.

  He leaped the stream in a bound and found himself so close to her he could smell her faint animal scent. She smiled at him and, reaching up—she was much smaller than he was—kissed him on the mouth.

  The effect on him was so surprising he broke away from her, crying out, which made her laugh. Taking his hand, she led him into the bushes and pulled him down, so they were lying side by side. The sunlight dappled the moss with tiny circles. In the distance a warbler was calling. She loosened her robe and guided his hands to her body, then reached under his clothes to caress him.

  * * *

  She lived in the hut with him as his wife. She combed and braided Kaze’s hair—the girl responded as if the fox woman were her mother, climbing on her knee when they sat by the fire, though Kaze was really too big to be cuddled. The dogs growled at her at first, but she rubbed their ears, picked off their fleas, and won them over. She was always merry; everything made her laugh. She liked to dance in the twilight, while Kaze sang. And every night she lay down with Mu and made him happy in a way he had never dreamed of.

  Once he said to her, “Why did you choose me?”

  “Your mother was one of the Old People.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

  “They were here before the horsemen came. They are more like us, both animal and human. Shisoku was one, too. The Old People know many things about other realms that the horse people have never learned.”

  Mu thought about the mask and the skulls. “Can you teach me those things?”

  “I am teaching you already,” she said, laughing. “Didn’t you notice?”

  4

  SHIKANOKO

  Throughout the summer the Burnt Twins and Shikanoko kept traveling north, following the tracks of deer and foxes through the tangled forest. Not knowing where else to go, Ibara went with them. They saw no one nor was there any sign that they were being followed.

  That first autumn the rain ceased and though the following winter there were heavy snowfalls, the seasonal summer rains failed. They had found shelter in an abandoned building where a solitary hermit had once lived. It stood near a spring from which water flowed constantly, and the former occupant had made a garden, which still existed wild and overgrown. Yams and taro had self-seeded, as well as pumpkins, and there were fruit trees, an apricot and a loquat. They found his bones in the garden, in a tangle of grass and kudzu vine, scattered by scavenging birds and animals. Eisei gathered them up and buried
them.

  Animals came to drink at the spring, foxes, wolves, and deer. The deer lingered to graze on the sweet grass in the clearing, which, thanks to the spring, flourished all through the hot summers while the rest of the land dried up. Nagatomo trapped hares and rabbits and shot birds—pigeons mostly and the occasional pheasant—but the lord would not allow them to hunt deer. Consequently the deer became more and more tame, allowing him to mingle with them and feeding from his hand.

  “That is why he is called Shikanoko,” Nagatomo said. “The deer’s child.”

  Ibara had not known his name, though she had heard it once, a long time ago, it seemed, from the mouth of the man with the Matsutani crest whom Nagatomo had killed. In the long months when there was little to do, Nagatomo taught her with that dead man’s weapons and now she carried his sword at her hip; she wore his clothes and tied her hair back. She had fallen a little in love with Nagatomo, almost overcome with desire when he held her hips or shoulders to correct her stance, but he never responded. She knew he and the monk were lovers, twinned in some way by their shared suffering. In time she recovered her equilibrium, but she did not lose her desire for revenge. Every day she thought of Masachika and how she was going to kill him.

  Shikanoko spent hours in meditation, but he began to eat. Ibara could feel how, little by little, grief gave up its grip on her heart, and she thought she could sense the same in him. When the deer came in the evening he moved among them as if he were following the steps of an ancient dance. When she had first seen him she had recalled the heron dancers. Now he danced with the deer—they all did—and in the dance created the ties that bind Heaven and Earth, humans and animals, the living and the dead.

  The foal grew to its full size and its dark coat turned to silver. It looked like its father but had a black mane and tail. Nagatomo introduced it to the saddle and bridle, but it did not need breaking in. It accepted the saddle but did not like to be bridled. However, no one felt comfortable riding it. There were enough horses for the three men, and Ibara took Risu. Tan followed close by her side and she talked to him about Hina, feeling sorry for the man trapped in a horse’s body, wondering what good it had done him to be summoned back.