Segaki (7 page)

Who sees ghost foxes is not apt ever to see anything else. Dead souls ravenous for life, though always
fastidious
, they gathered in old temples and wayside shrines, demons attached to the maize goddess. Trouble is the only thing that thaws their icy courtesy. The ricks were shaking violently. At any moment, when all had gathered, the foxes would take off in a pack.

Muchaku blinked rapidly, but they were still there, and there was no question of their validity. More and more of them appeared, out of nowhere, until the depression was a sea of cold, rational flame.

He turned and ran down the road, stumbling badly. He had had enough. The dog was after him. The road was shadowy and empty, but the lights of the inn streamed out across the rough dirt, and though his heart pounded, he knew he had to reach them. He could hear the patter of weightless feet behind him. He panted hard.

But this at least was not a ghost. This was an inn. If he
could reach it, he would be safe. As he ran along, the ricks seemed to pause and stare at him with disbelief.

He did not reach it. He was within ten yards of it, and could see how, though every window and doorway was lit, it seemed abandoned. Perhaps it was a phantom after all, yet he could smell the odours of cooking. It was long since he had had food. He lurched forward.

From somewhere behind in the wood, that ghost music started up again, whining through the air like an arrow. Wood clunked against wood. There was a gong.

At the sound of the gong, the ricks stopped and then reversed direction. He did not notice. He had almost reached the grounds of the inn. A scrawny arm appeared from nowhere and laid hold of him. He flinched, but it would not let go. His sleeve ripped.

He found himself staring at a mottled old woman with two teeth. Her sunken eyes were almost invisible, and her eyebrows were grey and spidery.

“Not there,” she shrieked at him, seeing he was a priest. “Not if you value your life, not there.” She shook him, cackling to herself, and then shoved him out of her way. He lost his footing, stumbled forward, and fell into a ditch. The dog leaped after him. Of the old woman there was no further sign.

The sounds were now louder around him. He heard the clanking of arms and the scream of arrows. He half raised his head, and as he did so, that so warm and inviting inn burst spontaneously into flame. It lit up the whole landscape, and he saw the ricks moving luridly in every direction.

He cowered in the wet dirt of the ditch, face up. The air now reeked of blood and was flame red. He heard the
crackling of the flames, and the earth shook with the sound of pounding. A horse’s hoof appeared wriggling beside his face, then lifted, he had a glimpse of the belly, and heard the business-like porcupine rattle of armour. The music had swirled away, but the animal grunts and screams were terrible. Something wet and squishy fell beside him, and he smelled bonemeal. It was the last thing just then he did smell. He lost consciousness.

He was still unconscious when the man beside him died. When he came to the body had
become
a corpse. The first thing he saw was that it was day, though because of the smoke, the sky was the colour of celadon. Moreover, from the moist pungency of the smells around him, it must be early in the day. There was first the earthworm smell, faintly foetal, of the mud in the ditch itself. Then there was the leech smell of dried blood. It is odd how the senses sometimes attack our equanimity one by one, now smell, now hearing, and now sight. Of these smell, because the most seldom, is the worst. He sat up, and found himself staring into the face of the corpse, a young man of good family, with a startled, disappointed face. Bushido was a discipline
useful
only from the front. It made no provision for an arrow from behind. The arrow had gone almost entirely through the body. The point of it soared straight up. Muchaku followed the line of the point, and saw peering soundlessly down at him through the grass fringe of the ditch the frantic face of the dog, with one ear inside out over the side of its cocked head. It looked as though it had been there for a long time. It was sitting down, and its front paws dangled over the edge of the ditch like empty stockings. Muchaku got up painfully and scrambled
out of the ditch. A corner of his robe was covered with dried blood from the young man, and for a reason he did not understand he ripped it out and threw it down behind him, as though it did not belong to him any more.

There was no longer any sign of the army, except for a few suits of armour lying about dead here and there in the fields, but the ricks were now explained. They were peasants with their bundles, who had fled for safety to the very woods in which the danger had lain in ambush all along. They had left behind them only the seeds of the summer planting, in land they did not even own.

Apart from that, the valley, what he could see of it, was desolate. It was inhabited only by fire in the boles of trees and by the scorched crops. He was thirsty and went in search of a well. The inn seemed the natural place to look. Smoke from the fires lay in attenuated layers here and there in the air and choked him. He entered the grounds of the inn, and saw the ragged old woman who had warned him, lying face down on the ground, her fingers gripping the earth. He felt too much pity to turn her over, but it moved him that she had warned him. No one else had. But perhaps she had only been a crazy old woman with murdered sons, who had had to warn someone before she died. If so perhaps he had made her happy.

He found the well easily enough, drank, and set down the bucket for the dog. The inn he saw had been a
sing
-
song
house, but any valuable geisha there must long ago have been moved to some point of safety. The ruins were still too hot to enter.

There was no one of whom he might ask directions, but it had not occurred to him to ask the way, since he was so certain of where he was going that he never doubted
that he would arrive there. He did see fitful shapes in the smoke, but thought it better to avoid them. He did not see that the woman he had taken for dead rose up and shook her fist at him for being still among the living, when she must surely die.

This new sundered landscape impressed him deeply, as it also seemed to quiet the dog. He knew his brother would have appreciated it, for his brother had a passion for sbumi, that principle whereby one adds a discordant detail to some careful perfection, in order to heighten one’s pleasure by a reminder of how artificial and
contrived
a thing is any felicity. Usually, in a carefully swept garden, a precise flower arrangement, or a painting, the discordant element was one dead leaf or a misdrawn stroke. But now, he saw, it could also be something living, for in this charred landscape the only living thing he saw was a tiny sapper with three pale green leaves, quavering at the foot of a smouldering oak, as a reminder that all is not death, either. For some reason this made him feel less feverish and more rational. After all, above the smoke the sun was warm. He hurried on.

By noon he had reached the other end of the valley. Here a series of folded geological faults provided a group of isolated hills, extremely picturesque, with carefully plotted woods, and some flowing water. He began to climb. Above them there was another meadow, and on knolls scattered about it lay the older and nobler houses of the district. Here, too, was the great waterfall, which for the moment he could neither see nor hear, though as he walked along, a distant incessant pouring reached his ears.

The houses, when visible, were shut up and empty,
their caretakers invisible, their owners having prudently removed themselves from so near the fighting. But his brother, he knew, would not have removed, for he loved this place. He had once sent Muchaku a scroll of his house and grounds. They must be somewhere ahead, up, well concealed, to the right of the fall.

The air at this height had an enhanced sanity that to others would have produced a madness. But to Muchaku it was almost to reinhabit the serene heights of Noto again. He and his brother, they had always been a family for heights, if only because they had had to hide among them as children, in order to avoid the general massacre of the family heirs, when their fathers had lost the strength to control the favours of the world.

Of course we may perceive truth anywhere, but it is perhaps only on alpine levels that we gain the ability to move freely through it. The sages are always in the mountains. Otherwise they are no more than wise men, and of course a sage does not have to be wise. He has seen through all that. He would rather peel potatoes.

The perfection here was not so cautious as at Noto, nor so walled in. It was carelessly scattered about, wherever it happened to concrete. Muchaku went forward almost eagerly, and climbing an eventual spur, saw well hidden in a small bowl of rock, amid carefully untrained trees, his brother’s house.

He recognized it at once. It had the sparse, unfurnished, austere lines of that kind of luxurious and elegant
bleakness
that leaves us with only one place to sit in any room. To move anything in these rooms would have been a moral impossibility, as a rare thin jade cup is always safe, because everyone finds it morally impossible to drop it.
Even the stream that gurgled through the garden would wisely leave the stones where they were, for they could not be arranged any better, since perfection in art or nature is an arrangement to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away, without changing its nature. If a rock should shift in that bed, then everything in the house would be rearranged too. It was not the pattern that was fixed, but only the existence of one, for his brother was a very great painter indeed. It took him five years of concentration to do a lightning sketch, but those five years might take only a moment, since concentration has no time. He had always been like that.

Muchaku felt suddenly timid, for he had not seen his brother for twenty years, and he was coming to ask for something, though he did not know for what. It was just as well. His brother even as a child had given freely only when he was unobserved and unasked.

The dog however seemed right at home. It trotted in through the garden gate, and there was nothing for Muchaku to do but follow.

The garden was touching. Obviously it looked the same in peace or war, and could be destroyed by the latter, but not in the least altered by it. It was imperturbable, a sage grey portrait of its owner, with something leaping and young too, here and there among the late irises. And the stream was thoughtfully shallow, and slipped lingeringly along its shelving stones.

Naturally, with the famous waterfall so close, it would have been an impertinence to have falling water here. The garden was extensive, with a small copse of trees. Beyond it, around the turn of a wall, was a doorway, and
he stepped into the shed roofed promenade of a sand garden.

To judge by the precisely aligned furrows of its
granular
waves, the sand must have been raked that morning. But there was no sign of anyone about. Above his head a single orange leaf detached from a tree and see-sawed through the air. It hit the dog on the snout, who sneezed and pattered indoors. Muchaku again followed.

He was almost relieved, though alarmed, to find the rooms empty. Yet they were immaculate. They had not been left long. He could not believe that his brother no longer existed. In a little room open to a private garden and veranda, the innermost room of the house, he found a panel slid back, and quilts hung on the balustrade of the veranda, to air. That cheered him immensely. In a reception room he found five irises in an irregular shallow bowl, and their water was fresh. It had not yet gone sappy and stale. In the cook shed, most cheering sight of all, a pot was simmering over hot coals. He lifted the lid. The smell was marvellous. It was too good to think it would not be eaten. Outside the bright green leaves of some shrub began to rustle. Nobody came, but he was aware of his disheveled appearance, so he retired to the iris room.

The only other thing in the room was an antique kakemono of the famous waterfall. Of course. His brother, no doubt, had gone out to study the original.

He had only to follow the sound through the woods, and that, not quite sure of himself, he did at once.

The wind was active. But gradually the soughing of the trees gave way to the distant, compulsive sound that water makes when falling. The pool at the foot must be
almost empty, for the sound was not confused by that other water gurgle, the rebound into spray after the fall hits the surface of a pool. This spray sounded to be
echoing
only off exposed rock, feeding the moss on the protected underledges.

The dog was happier now. It took time out to
investigate
fascinating smells, deer droppings perhaps. It had been thirsty for so long, and was so tired of dust baths, that it was content to amble contentedly towards the water.

Muchaku was happier, too. This roar was cousin to the capricious falls of Noto. It made him secure in the midst of all this change.

The rocky wood through which they now passed seemed unscathed. Before Muchaku’s nose an early
bagworm
had woven itself around a leaf, swaying gently at the end of a long sticky thread. Spider webs stretched from tree to tree, as they do from statue to statue in those treasury rooms where the massed temple Buddhas are kept. And indeed this little wood was also a host, equally liberated and benign.

And then, at once, it was not.

The dog ran ahead and then came back. It had
catapulted
out into another devastated strip, and by now it knew what that meant. The sound of water was now very loud, but so was the sound of smouldering fire.

There had been more fighting and less looting here than down in the valley, for there were more dead. They had surely been mercenaries, for only men paid to do so would have killed in such haste and with such lack of art. Most of them had been decapitated, for several of the
local warlords still paid by the head, in order to make war more serious, and naturally wanted to see what they had paid for.

The devastated strip was actually an open glade, the fire having licked only the outer trees of the wood, in a ring around the burnt over grass. In the centre was an
overturned
closed lacquer cart, or the remains of one.
Someone
of importance had been making an escape and was either dead or not dead. It was from there that the fire seemed to have started.

Over it all, quite visible now, the waterfall poured serenely down to freshen the air.

That was ironic. For though Micho waterfall is only a waterfall, at the same time it is one of the great Buddhist texts of Japan, a Koan in itself, and also a commentary on that passage of the Tao Te Ching which claims that the highest excellence is like that of water, which benefits all things, and which, without deliberate effort or destructive force, also shapes all things. It is not only the source of life; it is also patience, for he who has true wisdom shapes things merely by seeking his own level. The Japanese, however, never having forgotten that they are primitive, are more subtle than that. They realize that the absence of effort is a characteristic only of great vigour.

To remain untouched, and to touch nothing, one must at the same time keep constantly in motion. But then the subtleties of nature are infinite precisely because its manifestations are generic. There is only one Micho waterfall. Yet who is to say how it differs from any other waterfall? The surroundings make it seem unique, but are not unique in themselves. In nature nothing is unique and everything is particular. Thus one sees the world
from two sides at once merely by looking at it in one way.

And what we value a man, or a waterfall, or a dog for, is not what we call himself or it, which we can never know, but for that insight into the nature of all things which only the particular thing can ever give us, and it only when it is most idiosyncratically itself.

Unfortunately Muchaku was in no such mood, though he found the virginal existence of the waterfall soothing, so seasonably permanent, above this wood and these men, who had been cut off in the middle of a summer.

The sight revolted him. He would go no farther. One of the wheels on the wagon was still spinning. The scene was too immediate.

It was the dog, then, that found the living man.

Muchaku hesitated. He did not want to step out on to that burnt earth. Smoke from the scorched trees drifted in a blue mist, noiseless, but yet like an imitation of the mist of the waterfall, whose base was hidden by conical green trees standing up like incense mounds.

The dog lifted its nose into the wind. Something had caught its attention. The look of worried boredom in its eyes gave way to surprise, it bounded into the air, set off across the field at a purposeful trot, giving the headless bodies a wide berth, its fringed tail held politely straight out, and disappeared. Then it began to yip.