Autumn Bridge (13 page)

He had not been a very dedicated student in his youth, and that sutra was particularly long and complicated. But one image had always stayed with him because it was at once so elegant and so impossible to comprehend.

“The sutra says the Net of Indra is composed of an infinite number of mirrors, each reflecting every other mirror, and each reflecting the complete nature of reality, which is itself infinite in extent, infinite in time, and infinitely variable.”

Shizuka clapped her hands approvingly. “Very good, Lord Kiyori. So you were not always sleeping with your eyes open when the Reverend Monk Koiké gave forth with his teachings.”

“No, not always.” Koiké, that boring old pedant. He had not thought of him for years.

“Tell me of Confucius and you will have correctly answered three scholarly questions in a row for the very first time in your life. What an accomplishment that would be.”

Indeed it would. As skillful as he had been in combat with sword, staff, and his bare hands, he had never truly mastered calligraphy, memorization, and poetic composition. Mastered? In truth, he had never moved beyond woefully deficient. Think hard. What was Confucius’s one great lesson? He realized the folly of his exertions. Here he was, pushing himself to the utmost to impress someone who wasn’t even there. No, consider it instead a matter of self-discipline. He was a samurai. He should be able to hone his thinking to a swordlike edge and cut through all confusion.

Confucius’s great lesson. What could she mean?

Respect your elders?

Preserve the way of the ancestors?

Be an obedient son to one’s father, and an exemplary father to one’s son?

Emulate men of merit, eschew the company of the frivolous?

Criticize oneself, not others?

He stopped himself. Such random rambling wouldn’t do. Think sharply. Like a sword. Cut through confusion.

Shizuka had mentioned Confucius as one of three. What commonality existed between his teachings, Chuang-Tze’s butterfly dream, and Indra’s infinity of mirrors? Between the utterly pragmatic on the one side, and the wildly speculative and fanciful on the other?

“Confucius was not concerned with dreams,” Kiyori said, “nor with cosmic riddles, only with the actual behavior of men, and so created guidelines for harmonious and beneficial behavior.”

“Therefore?”

Therefore — what? He was about to admit defeat when the matter suddenly clarified itself. Possibilities were infinite (Indra’s mirrors), fancies could turn every answer to any question into yet another question (Chuang-Tze’s butterfly), and so it was up to human beings not to continually multiply matters but to reduce them to manageable proportions (Confucius’s parent-child scheme of reality). How best to put this thought into the right words? Shizuka seemed about to speak, no doubt to answer her own question.

He must beat her to it!

Quickly he said, “Therefore, what is most real is what we choose to consider real.”

Her smile immediately soured his triumph.

“You tricked me into saying what you wanted me to say.”

“You have only drawn the obvious conclusion,” she said. “There is no trickery in that.”

“I said it,” Kiyori conceded, “but I don’t believe it. If a sword arcs in my direction, and I neither avoid it nor block it, I will be cut, whether I choose to think it is real or not.”

“Cut me with your sword, Lord Kiyori.”

How did she manage to always say what most irritated him? “I cannot.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Because you are not really here. The sword will move through you as if you are air.”

“Because I am not here?”

“Yes.”

“Again, only one possibility, my lord?”

“Of course, there is a second. That I am not here.” As soon as he said it, he realized that she had tricked him again.

Shizuka bowed in assent. “And following the pathways of butterflies and mirrors, we cannot say with any certainty which is more likely or, indeed, whether one possibility excludes the other. Perhaps I am your ghost, and you are mine.”

“The possibility that I am not here,” Lord Kiyori said, “is just that. A possibility only. We can say anything — words being the untrustworthy devices that they are — but I know that I am here, and you are not. All talk of butterflies and mirrors cannot negate that.”

Shizuka watched him reach for something in front of him. From the way he raised what must be in his hands, she knew it was a teacup. Nothing real for Kiyori was visible to her, except Kiyori himself, and he only as a smoky image through which the walls of the room could be seen. The structure of the room was the same for them both, but not its contents. Kiyori regularly walked through screens, flower placements, and people that did not exist in his time. Shizuka knew she must be guilty of similar behavior in his eyes.

She was glad he had not yet tasted the soup. It was poisoned with blowfish bile, the toxin placed there by his son, Shigeru. Shigeru was insane and murderous, but not cruel. The dosage of the poison was such that Kiyori would slowly grow numb before paralysis set in and death followed. There would be little pain.

Kiyori lowered the teacup and said, “Besides, even if I were a ghost without knowing I was one, how could I be your ghost? You died five hundred years before I was born.”

“I expressed possibilities,” Shizuka said. “I never claimed to have explanations for each of them.”

“Simple logic dictates that if any ghost is here, it is you.”

Kiyori rose and walked to the western window. There was strong contrast between the light within the room and the darkness of the night outside. This, combined with the position of the moon on the other side of him, made the upper half of Kiyori’s body difficult to see. His face she could not see at all.

She said, “It is simpler for you to think so.”

“The logical aspect deserves emphasis,” Kiyori said, “rather than its simplicity. Time passes and does not return. The past precedes the future. Like a waterfall, the flow is in one direction only.”

“True,” Shizuka said, “for almost everyone.”

“There is no use arguing the point. We will never agree.” He stepped away from the window. With a solid wall behind him, she could once again see his face. He looked worried rather than angry. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Hallucination or spirit, you have been the means by which I have learned of things to come. I have never had a single one of the visions with which I am credited. I have known only because you have told me. If you do not return, I will provide no further prophecies.”

“Does that trouble you, my lord?”

“No. I have predicted many things, more than any other Okumichi before me. I already have far in excess of my fair share of sayings in
Suzume-no-kumo
.”

“Then… ?”

“So far, my grandson has had no visions,” he said. “I have told him — as you told me — that he will have only three in his lifetime. Will they come to him in dreams?”

Kiyori’s true query was obvious to Shizuka. He wanted to know whether she would ever appear to Genji. Because his own life had been made so strange by her frequent and unpredictable manifestations, his great hope was that Genji would not suffer the same fate. She looked carefully at his face. Shadowy and transparent, insubstantial and tenuous though he was, his concern was very apparent and deeply touched her sympathies. There was no reason to burden his final hours of existence with matters about which neither he nor she could do anything.

For Kiyori, time flowed as he had said, like the waters of a stream falling from the edge of a cliff, in one direction only. It was not so for Shizuka. She had died five hundred years before Kiyori had been born — and she would die before the next sunrise. And she was here now, alive, to attend him at the end of his life.

“You are the only Okumichi to whom I have ever appeared,” she said, lying to him for the first time in their years together, “and the only one to whom I will ever appear,” which was her second lie. But she had truly answered his unspoken question. She would not appear to Genji.

Kiyori breathed deeply, and bowed to her. “Thank you for telling me, Lady Shizuka. I feel a great weight lifted from me. I have managed to maintain the behavior of a normal person, but only because I am a samurai of the old and outmoded kind, able to pretend that what is so is not, and that what should be is, despite all evidence to the contrary. Genji has neither the inclination nor the training to behave in that way. He examines, questions, thinks for himself — vices which are no doubt the result of excessive study of outsider ways — no matter what tradition may say. If you appeared to him, he would lose himself in that endless spiral of doubts inevitably inspired by your presence.”

Shizuka returned his bow. “I tell you now, Lord Kiyori, that you have nothing to fear. Genji will live a life of unusual fullness, with clarity of thought and unshakable purpose. He will be a true samurai, and sword in hand will lead the clan in battle as in ancient times, and attain victories that will be spoken of by generations yet unborn. He will be loved by women of incomparable beauty and great courage. His descendants, too, will be heroes. Have peace in your heart, my lord, for your line will continue into time beyond even my most distant vision.”

Kiyori fell to his knees. His shoulders shook, his breath came in uncontrollable gasps, he sobbed, and his tears splattered the mat before him like a sudden squall. More important than his own honor was the honor of his heirs. More important than the lives of his immediate descendants was the knowledge of the continuity of his clan. Shizuka had told him what he had most wanted to hear.

“My lady?”

Ayamé’s voice came from the other side of the hallway door. Quietly, Shizuka slipped away from the weeping Kiyori and left the room.

“Yes?”

Ayamé managed to glance into the room before the door was closed. She had heard her lady speaking to someone. No one was there.

Ayamé said, “The enemy has begun to move toward the castle in battle array. A night attack. It must be Go’s doing. He has always had an impatient streak. They will assault the gates and the outer wall within minutes. We are too few to keep them out. Kenji and the samurai will set traps and ambushes in the courtyards and passageways. I and your other ladies-in-waiting will greet them at the base of this tower. We will make them bleed for every upward step they take. But we are few. Eventually, they will reach this room.” Her gaze went from Shizuka’s face to her belly, then stared up into her eyes with a look of pleading. “You said your child will survive the attack.”

“Yes, she will.”

“My lady, what must we do to make it so?”

“Be brave, Ayamé, as you have always been, and do as you have said, and make the traitors bleed. Trust that what I have told you will come to pass. That is all.”

“Is a ‘visitor’ with you, my lady?”

Shizuka smiled. “I thought you didn’t believe in the visitors.”

Tears sparkled in Ayamé’s eyes, and sparkled on her childish cheeks as they spilled out.

“I promise to believe in anyone who will save you, my lady.”

“You have been a true and loving friend, Ayamé. When I am gone, remember me, and when my daughter is old enough to know, tell her everything. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” Ayamé said, emotion choking her. She bowed her head and could say no more.

Shizuka went back into the room where Lord Kiyori waited. He had regained his composure and now held something up to his lips. The distance between his hands told her it was a bowl. The soup poisoned with blowfish bile.

From the window, thousands of voices raised in war cries flooded in from the night.

The past and the future were about to meet in death.

“A very curious thing happened at the meeting this morning,” Lord Saemon said to his chamberlain. “Lord Genji proposed the adoption of a new law.”

“Another one?” the chamberlain said. “He has clearly contracted the outsiders’ disease of lawmaking. They want many laws because they have no guiding principles. Wishing so much to be like them, he has abandoned the ways of our revered ancestors.”

“No doubt you are right. Quite apart from that, the law he proposed was very interesting.”

“Oh?”

“He wants to abolish regulations holding down the outcast class. Moreover, he also wants to outlaw the use of the term
eta
.”

“What?” The chamberlain’s face grew dark, as if the pressure behind the skin had suddenly shot up.

“Yes, and replace it with the term
burakumin
. ‘People of the village.’ It has a quaint charm, doesn’t it?”

“My lord, did he actually speak of this matter before the gathered lords?”

“He did,” Lord Saemon said, recalling with satisfaction the shocked expression on every face but his own, and that only because it was his unshakable habit to always keep the look of a kind of provisional acceptance there.

“Were there no protests?”

“Lords Gaiho, Matsudaira, Fukui, and several others walked out. Lord Genji has made a few new enemies as well as insured that he will keep his old ones.”

“What could have driven him to such folly? Has he gone mad at last?”

“He said, and quite convincingly, too, that the Western nations, and particularly the most powerful, England, would never accept Japan as an equal as long as it has laws against outcasts. It violates something they call ‘rights.’ He said the Indians are held in low esteem by the English, despite their rich and ancient culture, for just the same reason.”

The chamberlain looked worried. “I hope you did not support him.”

“No, of course not. As moderator, I can’t take sides. I simply noted the need to properly ascertain the motives of the outsiders, including the English.”

“That was very wise of you, lord.”

“Did you look into the matter I asked you about?”

“Yes, lord. It is evident that, some five years ago, Lord Genji did lead a contingent of samurai into Hino Domain. There are no witnesses to an actual attack. However, after Lord Genji left, an isolated village was discovered to have been burned to the ground, and all its inhabitants slaughtered. The appropriate conclusion can be drawn. And a curious coincidence, my lord, which you may find amusing. It was an eta village.”