Thousand Shrine Warrior (14 page)

Even though many facets of the conspiracy evaded her understanding, the bikuni's racing thoughts were eager to vindicate Heinosuke. Priest Kuro, not Heinosuke, sought the deaths of Lord Sato's vassals and sent them on deadly errands. The man of Omi had uncovered at least part of the reason; thus Heinosuke's moment of “completion” had gained high priority. The bikuni nearly had become the unwitting tool of Kuro's plot.

She was about to call out to the man of Omi by his childhood name of Yabushi, so that he would know her for a friend; but at that moment, a shutter was torn away from the window. Wind raged into the room with a hateful shout, drowning her cry to Heinosuke. Her attention was diverted to the window, for she thought it was the man of Omi seeking egress, not the wind tearing loose the shutter. But he was elsewhere, noting her every move, realizing the moment when her readiness focused in a direction contrary to his position. He leapt out of deepest shadow with a bat's swiftness, his longsword scraping through the bikuni's alms-bag. Raw rice scattered through the air, sprinkling the floor. The length of paper was snatched from her grasp, leaving her but one small fragment.

The man of Omi was through the door.

She pursued him to the muddy courtyard, where she was struck by cold blasts of wind. The man of Omi was already across the court, too far to hear her shouting that she was his friend. She saw him enter the maw of the main temple. Though she was at the same door in an instant, already he had vanished, knowing the buildings and the grounds too well.

Something intangible stroked her neck as she entered; and the wind outside, raging the moment before, became a silent zephyr, as though to inform her that some portion of the performance was over. Now she stood in a vast hall where sound was absorbed and rendered mute. She knew she had stumbled into the vortex of whatever malignance ruled the forest and the falls; yet she could give no great thought to the matter, not in the wake of more personal revelations, and on the heels of a friend nearly treated as a foe.

She spied his footmarks, left by muddy, unshod feet. The track ended less than halfway through the building, having gotten cleaner and dryer with each step of his flight. If he hadn't changed direction, she calculated his arrival at the lap of the blasted Buddha seated at the far end of the hall.

The Buddha looked to be the survivor of conflagration, his once-holy visage reduced by the ravages of decay. Now he frowned malevolently upon she who approached.

Nearing the altar, she saw that there was a separate room behind the large wooden Buddha. Ready for a new attack—for Heinosuke might well regard her as an emissary of his worst enemy, as indeed she had almost been, through clever and depraved machinations—she stepped into the small back room. It was relatively well-lit, for a side door had been left open onto a graveyard.

She stood in the doorway and looked at gulleys, rivulets, and paths leading in several directions, none betraying Heinosuke's quick route. Far to the left was a wide, rushing river which, beyond her view, leapt into the void of the gorge at the temple's rear. Before her was a heavily overgrown cemetery. Many cedars had been left throughout the grounds to provide shelter of sorts from the mountain winds, so that graveyard and forest were poorly delineated.

Because of seepage from higher ground, many of the cedars' roots were weirdly exposed by runoff. Purulent, mildewed soil gave rise to disagreeable odors, despite the present drizzle's efforts to cleanse the air. Nearly every Buddhist temple was associated with a graveyard, which were by their nature on the darkled edge; but the sight before her now was much more evocatively evil, though less so, she thought, than the main temple hall overseen by the blasted Buddha.

A distant voice weakly intoned a sutra addressed not to Priest Kuro's favored Wonderful Law, but to the wargod Hachiman. It was a prayer of vengeance, though the voice was thin and reedy. It was the voice of an old woman.

The bikuni descended a steep, wide, slate stairway, the sides of which were impinged upon by worn figures of buddhas and bodhisattvas, their eyes shut, their visages complacent. Water cascaded over the steps, splashing beneath her geta. Springs, which ages anon had woven their way through the graveyard in a managed, controlled manner, after decades of neglect had made their own wild courses. Numerous graves were washed away, ashes carried into the muted gorge. The bikuni passed a stone bodhisattva that had had the soil washed from underneath. It had tipped sideways, revealing bones.

Both wind and drizzle subsided, though the sky rumbled distantly, still promising ferocious weather. The sound of prayer was somewhat louder. The bikuni took a side path over slippery clay. She wove between additional monuments, many of them leaning. At last she came to an area devoid of monuments, but recently cultivated with graves, few of them marked, proof that the old cemetery was still used.

She pushed through brittle, dead weeds higher than her shoulder, finding grave after unmarked grave, and hoofmarks which she took to be the tracks of Ittosai Kumasaku's cherished horses. This would be the very place into which Kuro the Darkness instructed Ittosai, his only true retainer, to place the uncremated victims of monstrous and curious schemes.

She found a certain grave, one of the few with any kind of marker, albeit a marker of little merit, its inscription apparently made by an unsteady hand with a worn-out brush; the bikuni could not read the sloppy characters. Before this grave knelt a woman whose bent posture and ragged brown clothing conveyed old age. Her face was mostly swaddled, the slits of her closed eyes the only portion revealed. She seemed a very mountain spirit, a ghostly hag, hunkered in front of the recent grave, calling out to the wargod in her weak voice, muffled by wrappings; pleading for revenge. Omnipotent revenge. Purifying revenge. Glorified and holy to gods, devils, and humankind:
revenge!

“Grandmother,” said the bikuni, shattering some spell. The old woman grew still and opened her eyes. “It's too cold to stay out here. Can you pray before your houseshrine for a while?”

The old woman's wrappings hid her hair and ears and nose and jowls and chin … everything but those pinched, narrow eyes. A knife was sheathed at the front of her obi. Her muffled voice replied,

“Here lies the last of my kin. I've made this marker with his name upon it, in my own broken calligraphy. I couldn't find a priest to do it properly. I couldn't have his corpse taken for interment at our traditional grave sites near a temple distant from here.” She pointed vaguely south with a bent finger, then continued. “I am cast from my home, in which I could live only while my nephew had the rights of a castle retainer. What is there for me to do but die in this place, begging Hachiman for revenge against Lord Sato's hellish cleric?”

“What good is dying here alone?” the bikuni asked, pitying the old woman. “If you have no home, why not live secretly in one of the abandoned temples? You can pray for your nephew's spirit anywhere.”

The oldster turned her swaddled face away and said vehemently, “I will die right here! Don't try to make me fail! You shouldn't bother me like this. Even that villain Ittosai, who buried nine more men this morning, does not interrupt me, does not try to sway me, does not show me such disrespect. You know it's impolite to meddle! Go away quickly!” Now she glowered at the bikuni and insisted that she “Go! Go! I pray for only one to come to me before I die!” She gripped the handle of her sheathed knife and added, “The one I wish to see is the slayer of my poor Chojiro!”

Only when the woman said her nephew's name was the bikuni able to decipher the barely intelligible calligraphy on the wooden slat marking the grave.

“Grandmother,” she said, head hung low. “Hachiman has answered your prayer just now.”

The old woman's vein-mapped hands clutched at the knife's handle, ready to unsheath it. She stared up at the bikuni, demanding, “You are Kuro's handmaiden of death? You killed my poor Chojiro?”

“I have never seen this Priest Kuro. I fancy myself his foe; although I wonder how deeply his intrigues are rooted. I begin to wonder if anyone can die within this fief who does not do so by the design of Kuro the Darkness. Whoever slays anyone may serve Kuro, though not knowing how or why.”

The old woman tried to stand quickly, but was too feeble, and found her unsteady legs by awkward stages. Her hunched spine kept her from standing tall. Her fingers were knotted and deformed; she could not draw the knife very well. Her eyes conveyed a fierceness all the same. The knife was raised to the side of her head and she appeared willing to dash forward at any cost.

But she did not move. Momentarily, her expressive eyes broke from ferocity into shame and sorrow. She confessed, “I knew Chojiro was too much influenced by Priest Kuro. I knew it would undo him in the end. He was a good boy all the same, if you can believe that. He did what others told him, but never thought up anything evil on his own. I can bear the truth, if it comes from a nun with so guileless a face. Tell me: Did my Chojiro die bravely?”

The bikuni had to turn her face away in order to reply. “He was not such a brave man, if I must tell the truth.”

A cry caught in the old woman's throat. She took one step forward and managed to ask, “Did he commit some misdeed in Kuro's name that required your cutting off his head?”

The bikuni was bitterly ashamed, and barely able to respond. “I don't know that he did,” she said. “I gave in to the irony of the moment. He begged mercy, but I had none.”

The old woman's knife raised again, aiming shakily at the bikuni. She demanded, “Then how can I let you off for killing him?”

The bikuni squared her shoulders, looked the woman in the eyes, and replied, “I don't believe you can.”

The old woman hobbled forth, striving for swiftness, knife stabbing the space the bikuni had already vacated.

“Grandmother, your vengeance is a just one. If I give my blood to any, I promise it will be yours. Yet I am not ready to give it to you now.”

The old woman struck again, but the bikuni stepped aside, evading her easily.

“Take care of your health,” said the bikuni, “in case it takes a while for you to have your wish.”

Then the bikuni wheeled about and hurried back toward the Temple of the Gorge, quickly outpacing, and losing, her elderly foe.

As she backtracked, intending to reclaim her hat, she found, in the muddy courtyard between buildings, the same scrap of paper that had torn in her hand when Heinosuke snatched his scroll, and which she had dropped in pursuit of him. It was wet and dirty, but after she straightened it out a bit, it was easy to read. It contained part of another list of names, a peasant clan, and one of them was Shinji's. As was the case with Otane's name, Shinji's had already been given the mark that implied completion of revenge.

The bikuni stood in the courtyard, pondering the variety of families on Heinosuke's scroll: a lord and his relatives; vassals of various posts, with their kin; local holy men; and here, she found, even a farm family. All their fates were intertwined for some reason that the bikuni could not penetrate. A strange mystery! She wished she had been able to speak with Heinosuke, for it was possible his research had already resolved Priest Kuro's purpose and the connection between such divergent and unsuspecting families.

As her mind struggled with the fragments of information she had acquired, the dark sky became extremely pale and unleashed not a deluge, but snow. The day's long promise of tempest would not be met after all. Snow clung to her shoulders and hair; but that which touched the ground melted at once. It was a light snow and had the beneficence of making the temple less overtly grim.

That which she had felt in the main temple hall—a hand placed lightly at her nape—she felt a second time in that courtyard. It was eerily unnatural; she might have dismissed it as a snowflake or breeze had she not felt it once before. Yet the touch was not entirely threatening. She looked about, seeing no one. She crumpled the paper, then opened her palm; and a slight gust stole the scrap, losing it among flakes of snow.
How odd I feel
, she thought, gazing at her palm, on which snowflakes danced as within a miniscule tornado.

The peaked, tiled roofs around the court were swiftly becoming white-on-rust. Menace was certainly not erased, but snow's deathliness was more comprehensible, muffling the temple's native strangeness. The bikuni felt once more a fascination with or attraction for the macabre, a thing usually contrary to her disposition, or so she felt. Sometimes she was moody or withdrawn, but rarely grim or haunted. All the same, the monastery made her think about the tragic beauty of things grotesque, not about their frightfulness.

Perhaps this was in her nature, she reflected, only she refused to embrace it with full honesty. Her past was rife with gory deeds, dark battlefields, calm strokes of steel. She had been less reflective in those days. Even now, despite a discrete sense of criticism regarding herself and others, her dreams remained peaceful ones, more than not, never filled with severed limbs groping for the life her own sword had denied them. Because she had fallen from high station and become humble, some might think she suffered, battling a corrupting ego or a pitiful sense of inconsequentiality. Really she reveled in such feelings in a self-indulgent manner, and was quite happy to evade peace of mind. This being so, both her occasional sense of inadequacy and her questioning of the necessity of violence in no way caused her sensations of guilt for things past, or things that yet might happen.