Dai-San - 03 (24 page)

Rikkagin Aerent put his strong arm about his brother’s sinewy shoulders. Both men were tall and muscular. Tuolin, with his close-cropped blond hair was obviously the younger, for Rikkagin Aerent was already graying; his strong face with its curving nose and full beard bore the seams and scars of many campaigns. He turned Tuolin away from the darkness of the buildings, away from the sombre streets of Kamado with their pin points of yellow and orange light.

‘Tuolin, it is time we forgot the intervention of gods and sorcery. All of that belongs to another age, when other men, far different from ourselves, walked the world—’

‘I do not think that they were so different from us except that they wielded more power.’

‘Oh no, they were as different from us as we are from the deathshead warriors out there. They were bound to serve, Tuolin. Our lot is not to throw ourselves upon the hard earth and grovel before a carved figure nor to mumble incantations from some rotting scroll. The world has changed. Our Laws will no longer tolerate sorcery’s proliferation.’

‘Then what of The Dolman?’

‘The end of a life long past its time. The Dolman was created in a forgotten age. He could not be birthed now. We shall destroy him and his legions.’ But Rikkagin Aerent’s voice seemed brittle and hollow on this sorcerous night, even to himself.

After a time, he followed Tuolin down the wide stairway to the high ramparts, into the dark streets.

‘Tell me,’ he said gently, ‘why she troubles you.’

Tuolin sighed.

‘Her soul has died. Or at least something important inside her.’

‘What happened?’

‘Someone was killed. A woman, very close to her.’ He turned his head away, the small ivory bar run through the lobe of his ear flashing in the torchlight for a moment. ‘I knew them both’—he laughed bitterly—‘I was about to say “well”, but it is not the truth. I knew them a long time, that was all. I never bothered to understand their relationship clearly—’

‘What of the other one?’

‘Matsu?’ Tuolin shrugged awkwardly. ‘I should have suspected that night when I first took Ronin to Tenchō. Matsu gave him a strangely patterned robe and then he asked for Kiri. What a fool, I thought. But she took him—’

‘Why?’

‘I do not know but I think that Matsu signaled her. They are linked, the three of them, in some curious way—’

‘But Matsu was slain, you said.’

‘And now she will not talk about it.’ He meant Kiri. ‘Perhaps they were sisters.’

‘Why does it matter?’

A dog barked angrily. A smithy’s hammer sounded, an echoing wail in the dense night.

‘I feel like I am choking. This weather is unnatural.’

‘About Kiri,’ Rikkagin Aerent prompted.

‘Why are you so interested in her?’ said Tuolin, turning toward him. Rikkagin Aerent noted the gaunt cheeks, the hollowness around the eyes. His gaze took in the slight rise of the right shoulder and he wondered if his brother’s wounds were healing satisfactorily.

‘I care about you, that is all. I wish to know the cause of your melancholy. If you desire Kiri now, you need but ask. Once she was untouchable. She gives you—’

‘Her body. There is nothing left but the shell—’

‘She gives you what she can,’ Rikkagin Aerent said relentlessly.

‘Not enough,’ Tuolin breathed. ‘It is the ghost of a half-remembered past only.’

Rikkagin Aerent heard the bitter tone of his brother’s voice and silently he mourned for him.

‘I have nothing,’ Tuolin whispered. ‘Nothing.’

‘Yet she lives.’ Rikkagin Aerent gripped his brother’s arms. ‘She breathes, her heart pumps, she thinks. Find the way—’

But Tuolin was already shaking his head.

‘It has died within her.’

‘Fool not to see what is directly before you!’

The clang of a bell came between them. The solid tramp of booted feet, somewhat muffled. The watch changed.

Rikkagin Aerent ran a hand through his hair and in a softer tone said, ‘Tuolin, I wish you would speak to her—’

‘About what?’

‘Ronin. She was closest to him, you said so yourself. Nothing has been heard of him since he was seen leaving the eastern edge of the forest. That was many moons ago. Perhaps he went for reinforcements after he slew the Hart. Perhaps she knows—’

Tuolin shoved his brother aside.

‘Why do you not ask her yourself?’ His angry voice drifted off dully into the fogbound night.

She kissed him tenderly and he closed his lids to his reflection in her eyes. Her lips were incredibly soft. His long arms went about her body.

His mouth broke away for something more important. To say it.

‘How can I leave you?’

She took his arm and they went out onto the long balcony, staring out at the calmness, the last frosted shreds of the long night. They felt, rather than saw, the vast bulk of Fujiwara looming over them on their left.

Space.

They floated, a pair of powerful eagles, in the thin, charged air.

Her slender hands roamed his body, exploring still. She was a delighted child. And he, transported by the knowledge of her.

‘Did he do this to you?’ he said. ‘Dor-Sefrith?’

Did her head nod imperceptively?

‘But how? And why?’

‘You already know the why.’ She held him close to her. ‘As for the how—’ She shrugged. ‘There is no telling, really.’

‘But I—he saw you—’

She turned to him. ‘And I see you now.’ Her fingers stroked his arms. ‘Would you have me ask who you are?’ She shook her head. ‘You are no longer Ronin. You are—more complete. But Ronin is still there, his essence did not perish with his body. He is but a part now. So too with me.’

‘But what are you a part of?’

She climbed his body, kissed him again.

He felt a wetness on his cheeks.

His strong, strange fingers twined in her long hair. He searched her eyes.

‘How can I leave you?’ he said again. ‘Soon,’ she whispered. ‘Soon.’ It was but half a cry.

He had made but a third of the circuit around the vast citadel’s ramparts when he saw her. She was leaning against the chill stone, her back to the cold conflagration of the pine forest. Her deep purple cloak was wrapped tightly about her body.

‘Tuolin said I might find you here.’

Her head turned but her eyes did not move. They observed him impassively.

‘I am always here at night,’ she said softly.

Below them, Kamado was still quiet, despite the first pre-dawn stirrings of the cooks and grooms. Farther away, the snortings and stampings of the horses caused him to think momentarily of her extraordinary mount: a saffron luma. He had long wished to own such a steed. He had never even ridden one.

‘He has changed so much in so little time.’ He sat beside her, so close that her hair, caught by the damp wind, brushed his face. ‘I hardly recognize him.’

Kiri laughed humorlessly and he shivered at the sound.

‘I can hardly recognize myself. We have all changed. The Kai-feng—’

‘My brother has lived with war all his life, Kiri. The Kai-feng is but the last. It is not battle which makes him sad.’ And then after a moment: ‘He loves you.’

‘Yes. I know.’ Her voice so low, he barely heard her.

‘You will destroy him.’

‘I am not an evil person,’ she said, almost to herself.

‘It is not you,’ said Rikkagin Aerent. ‘The circumstances—’ But he broke off, for he did not believe those words himself.

‘But it
is
me! You must understand.
He
must understand. You must tell him. I am useless now, worse than useless for I no longer care—about anything, not the Kai-feng, not my people, not Tuolin …’

He watched the silent tears running down her cheeks. Even then she appeared beautiful.

‘I fear for him.’ His voice clogged with emotion. ‘He thinks of you only. In the morning, when we go out to battle, he must be clear of mind. Only that and his skill as a warrior will keep him alive. He is my whole family—’ Too late, he remembered and stopped awkwardly.

She did not wipe at the tears. Nor did she look at him.

‘Leave him be,’ he said, not unkindly.

Her eyes closed, the long lashes jeweled in the damp night.

‘What power I once had has been stripped from me,’ she whispered. ‘He will do what he must.’

‘Will you bring him down with you?’

She lurched to her feet, spun away from the wall where he still sat. Her head whipped at him and he felt the splattering of hot tears on his face.

‘What do you want of me?’

Abruptly, he was fed up with her self-pity. He stood up, his tall frame seeming to explode with energy. She paused, a frightened doe mesmerized by bright torchlight.

‘Be a woman, not a terrified child! If you wish to die, take a knife and plunge it into your own belly. At least, if you wish to live, have the decency not to destroy those around you—!’

‘I wish only for time to reverse itself, for Matsu to be here with me, for Ronin to—’ She turned away from him. Her hands gripped the icy stone of the parapet like claws.

He came up behind her and she winced at the force of his words, as if he were beating her physically.

‘You disgust me! How many more miracles would you like? He fights here for the future of all man and you pray to your private gods to return your dead sister—!’

‘She was not my sister!’ And she turned on him, her fists beating against his chest. She was strong and her violence startled him. He stumbled backward against the assault, for she was a warrior also, and now she was unleashed, a ferocious, deadly animal, pounding him as he fell, straddling him, beating him, her violet eyes ablaze with anger and frustration and despair.

But the mauling was a small price to pay, he felt, for what he was learning.

‘Bastard!’ she cried. ‘Bastard! She was me! She was me!’

His nose cracked from a sharp blow and the skin along one cheek ripped as her knuckles skidded along it. Still he put up only token defense. She split his lower lip, screaming at him, and, at last, she collapsed on his chest, gasping and sobbing, her hair wet with perspiration.

He said nothing, lay there feeling the blood seeping down his neck, onto his robe, under his breastplate. He breathed through his mouth, his puffed and swollen lips open wide.

She sat up.

‘Do you understand now?’ he said softly.

She sat very straight, her eyes closed.

‘What is false and what is true?’

‘I no longer know who I am.’

He got up from under her.

She opened her eyes, gasped at her handiwork.

‘Oh!’

‘Where did Ronin go, Kiri?’

She reached down for a handful of snow, applied it to his nose. It turned pink.

‘Far, far away, I think. I do not know where. But I am certain of one thing.’ She applied ice to his split lip. ‘He will return.’

It was only then that she wiped the drying tears from her cheeks.

At first snow swirled about him, pearled and soft in the pink glow of dawn. But as he descended, he found himself immersed in clouds where all was diffuse and misty.

Soon,
she had said.
Soon.
What was behind those eyes as dark as olives?

Lost in the clouds, he thought of the Aegir, who had aided him for so long when he was Ronin. He had recognized, even as he had slain it—the first blood, anointing his long blue-green blade, which she had engraved with the name
Aka-i-tsuchi,
the ancient Bujun words meaning: Red Tidings—the being billowing darkly in the water far below his battered felucca, as he had made his unknowing way to Sha’angh’sei. He knew also that it had been the Aegir who had saved Ronin from the sorcerous sailors of The Dolman sent by Setsoru to destroy him before he found Ama-no-mori. The creature had heaved its great coils, causing the unnatural tidal waves which had swept his ship from the enemy vessels over the sea to the distant reefs of Xich Chih.

And he had slain the Aegir.

Why?

Inwardly, he shrugged, letting it go, relaxing, circling inward to the glowing core of his being.

Out of the steamy clouds, their vast undersides lit with green lightning, and onto the lower reaches of the mountain, where the shivering turquoise pines spoke to him in restless sibilants. Down the treelined slopes of Fujiwara he went until the path became abruptly less steep and his speed increased.

In full armor, he went easily down the lower reaches of the mountain, threading his way through the thickening pines, inhaling their pungent musk, hearing the distant cries of the flying geese, the diurnal insects chirruping, all the minute quotidian sounds of the waking world.

And they were there, waiting for him, as he stepped from Fujiwara’s last majestic pines: Moeru, Okami, and Azuki-iro.

They stared upward at him as he approached and he saw Okami and Azuki-iro lower their eyes, not in awe but in respect for the last myth of their people, alive and standing before them.

‘It is he who stops the darkness,’ whispered Okami. ‘It is the Sunset Warrior.’

‘Nikumu succeeded,’ said Azuki-iro, ‘as I knew he must. He was Bujun, our traditions were too deeply embedded within him. Karma. Now history shall honor him.’

‘Haneda is gone,’ said the Sunset Warrior. ‘Some vast, terrible struggle took place there while I was being born.’

‘Both Ronin and Nikumu have been buried beneath the warm ashes at Haneda,’ said Moeru quietly. ‘There a shrine will be built in the time to come.’

‘To dor-Sefrith,’ said the Sunset Warrior.

‘To all the Bujun,’ said the Kunshin.

Silently, Moeru took a step forward, her gaze never leaving the strange countenance of the Sunset Warrior.

Azuki-iro turned to Okami.

‘Come, my friend, it is time you and I rode for Eido. The daimyos are standing by and I must see to them.’ He took a small ivory oblong from the folds of his robe, handed it to Okami. ‘Take my chop and use it at the harbor master’s. Instruct him in my name to prepare the ships. The Bujun join the Kai-feng now that the Sunset Warrior is come.’ He looked briefly upward to the amethyst slopes of Fujiwara high above them. ‘Truly the mountain has proved worthy of its name: “Friend of Man”.’

They went without another word across the small field to where their horses stood tethered, cropping the sweet grass. They mounted, swinging their steeds around, slapping their heels against the animals’ flanks.