Thousand Shrine Warrior (16 page)

Two middle-aged men in peasant blues came down the middle of the street. They were squat fellows conversing with one another rapidly, making vague comments about pitiful this and pitiful that. Their conversing halted when they saw the nun in her incognito-hat and two swords at her side. She appeared to them out of the swirling snow, causing them to draw aside and stand motionless, mouths open, eyes round. When she had gone by them without taking much notice, they renewed their jabber. She overheard a reference to the Battle of Awazu. Then she caught another snatch of their discussion, predicting warm blood on fresh snow. They knew much, these peasants! Priest Bundori's tongue had wagged through the town, and the nun's present nonchalance fooled no one.

She saw eyes peeping from windows that were opened the barest slit. The whole village expected carnage. What else was in their minds? Did they think her the gravest part of their misfortune, or their salvation?

Fires burned in the homes, but the snow cleansed the air of smoke or scent of cooking. There was a deadening of all the senses, due in part to the muffling snow; and there was a quietude about the village that smacked of held breaths. Somewhere nearby, the silence was momentarily interrupted by a door slamming adamantly—against the cold, and against expectation.

As she neared the further edge of the village, the bikuni took a narrow alley off the center street, circling about in such a way that she could investigate the punishment-enclosure without the guards noticing her presence. The enclosure was made with thick, sharp strips of bamboo, loosely laced from one vertical pole to another. There was a gate that could be removed altogether or left completely sealed, as now, made of the same laced strips. It would be easy to fit one's arm through any portion of the fence, but it would be difficult to pull it down or push on it without cutting oneself on the hard strips of razor-edged bamboo.

Her view was veiled by the swirling whiteness. The track she made in passing was already filling up with windblown and new-fallen flakes. The guards' chances of noticing her, a mere shadow between two buildings across the way, were slight.

There were more guards than one would expect. Someone certainly did not wish the couple saved from their slow execution. Inside the criss-cross fence, a small fire had been built, around which squatted samurai with long spears leaning against their shoulders, hands cast forth in search of warmth. At the enclosure's entry, four men, also with spears and swords, stood conversing. Additional sentries strode about the inside and outside of the enclosure, only nominally on guard, seeming quite certain the weather had driven off the usual village spectators or anyone with a mind toward intervention.

The men did not themselves seem especially concerned about the redundancy of their post. They had learned in the past months that duties and assignments were occasionally pointless or askew, directed less by Lord Sato than by his minister Kuro the Darkness, whose reasoning evaded understanding. Most of Lord Sato's men no longer cared one way or another how things were run.

It was curious and darkly whimsical that the villagers, thanks to Priest Bundori's gossip, suspected things might be coming to an alarming point, but Lord Sato's vassals remained unready for a raid of the very sort suggested by Ittosai, Kuro's one true vassal. These samurai were almost pitiful, going aimlessly about their appointed task, knowing nothing of potential doom lurking beyond their fortress of bamboo, a doom clad in the costume of a mendicant nun.

Shinji and Otane were at the enclosure's very center and, for the moment, totally undefined, due to increasing snowfall. Then a sudden, higher wind brushed aside the veil long enough for the nun to see the couple, a sight that brought a grimace to her covered face. They were clad in peasant cottons—
mopei
knee-britches and
hapari
field jackets—clothing that the youth Shinji would have provided so that Otane might not be detected as a samurai's daughter; a failed plan.

They were mounted head-down and back to back, spread-eagle on the X of the wooden cross, bound arms and ankles by means of hemp rope. Both had long hair unbound and brushing the ground. The nun could not see Shinji clearly, for he was on the backside of the cross; but they had turned their faces sideways that their cheeks might touch.

They were stoic and silent. Their heroic love and tragedy made them seem heavenly spirits tortured by callous hands of mortals lacking understanding of such beauty and rich sentiment.

As for the numerous vassals posted in and around the punishment-enclosure, they seemed hardly to notice their woeful wards. Whether such heartlessness was from a true lack of feeling or an emotional deadening that protected their own hearts was impossible to judge. The crucifixion itself was not an untoward event, and a samurai was rightly immune to much opinion. By contrast, an esoteric nun was free to exert all manner of fervid sympathy or response.

As the wind passed, the snowy curtains hid the sad vision once more. The bikuni rubbed sore hands vigorously to warm them. She was eager for the reaping, for surely it was a nun's duty to save such perfect beings as these who had been captured. Never mind that the young vassal samurai were only slightly less innocent, and perhaps the sadder for having never known an attachment like the one that the couple knew. Never mind that a nun performed the bidding of a dark priest. Shinji and Otane could by no means be left to excruciation and death!

Two humps of snow in front of the sealed gate moved. The bikuni realized one of those inconsequent humps was in reality the widow Todawa, who had been bowing long before the gate in abject obeisance. The other hump was her grandson, feebleminded Iyo. Snow fell from their shoulders as they sat up on their knees, and Iyo looked to his grandmother for direction, having no idea how to behave in such a fix, having less idea why his sister and Shinji were thus maltreated. He looked confused rather than horrified and might not have a real sense of the agony suffered by the silent lovers. The father, Kahei Todawa, doubtless remained under house arrest, and so could not join the rest of his family in their prayers and hopeless pleas for mercy.

The bikuni could not see the widowed matriarch's face, but could not doubt the expression was anything but discompassionate, a mask disguising emotional turmoil. From this old woman, Otane had inherited stoicism; and it was from Otane that Shinji, usually sharp-tongued and unable to hide his feelings, had acquired a like amount of endurance, the epitome of dignity and intrepidness.

The nun had seen enough. Piqued, she stepped forward, leaving her geta a step behind, for she would like better footing since she would do battle on slippery snow. She drew steel as she took that step; but before she was out of the alley, she was momentarily blinded by an unexpected flurry of snow that had coalesced into a tiny, furious cloud before her hat. Seeing it through the loose-woven window-portion of her amigasa, the nun could not be absolutely certain she had seen, within that come-and-gone cloud, a pair of redly burning embers.

She dismissed the brief vision as a dollop of snow fallen from the eves. But as she started again from the alley, there came once more that tiny monstrosity of whiteness and red eyes fluttering before her, batting against her incognito-hat, plaguing her line of sight.

A guard circling the bamboo enclosure noticed the cream-and-charcoal shadow beneath the eaves. He started forth to investigate. The nun withdrew into the alley, for the snow-colored beast was most vexing. Her sword cut upward at an angle, then down. She heard a chirping sound as the face-flutterer struck the ground. She looked where the thing had fallen and realized it was one of Priest Bundori's albino birds. Her sword had only clipped its wing. It hopped away through the snow, complaining like a bothered hen.

The bird would freeze to death in the snow, unable to fly back to White Beast Shrine. The nun felt responsibility for its small life. She sheathed her sword, stepped backward onto her wooden geta, then turned to backtrack a ways, intending to catch the clipped bird.

The inquisitive samurai, sad to say, continued his approach, though not with much wariness. He hurried through the alley, then pursued the nun across a clearing beyond the buildings. He called for her to stop, but she increased her pace, not looking back.

He came in earnest now. He was nearly upon her. She heard his sword slide from its scabbard. In that instant, she turned to face him, her weapon having appeared in her hand with the swiftest ease. The samurai looked startled. Then he looked horrified to realize he had been gutted. Blood melted red holes in the snow.

The bikuni stood poised, her back to an ancient fir at the clearing's edge. Her sword was held at a high angle where its sweeping arc had ended, sharp edge toward the fir. For a moment the samurai looked as though he wanted to collapse. When he did not do so, the bikuni's blade twisted forward, ready to retrace its previous path and take the man a second time.

He wavered in his stance, looking at her piteously. His surprise, which had become horror, now became resignation and resolve. His sword swept forward, striving to cut her mortally, but the nun's steel was quicker, cutting at an angle across his forehead, even while she stepped aside from his assault.

Blinded by his own gushing blood, he turned toward the sound of the bikuni's footsteps. He staggered in her direction, then fell to his knees. His sword went back and forth madly, trying for a lucky contact. The bikuni lowered her sword, watching him. He fell to his left shoulder, still swinging his sword in his right hand, swinging it at nothing, at snowflakes. Then he rolled to his back, grasping the sword in a proper two-handed manner. He thrashed foolishly, grunted, hoping against all probability to slay his slayer.

His pain was evident. It would be cruel and immoral to abandon him without his coup de grace. It was this very necessity on which he placed his hopes—to cut her when she tried to get close enough to end his anguish.

She leapt forward, parrying his ridiculous cut, and buried the point of her sword in his throat.

Now, poised above him, seeing him awash in his own blood, the bikuni forgot the vision of Shinji and Otane and saw, instead, how Priest Kuro meant to use her. The excessive guard was not there to insure her failing to pull the crucified lovers from their shared cross. Rather, Kuro the Darkness had faith in her ability. He counted on her to kill all those pathetic vassals.

The horror of her dilemma was only beginning to settle in when a tall, slender woman in shimmering white kimono stepped out of wreathes of snow. The bikuni stepped away from the slain vassal, raising her sword, then lowering it, seeing the woman pale as death, eyes red as blood, one sleeve of her kimono shorn halfway through, as though by a sword's stroke.

“Has someone attacked you?” the bikuni asked.

“Someone has,” the white woman said, her tone ironic. She was young and eerily gorgeous, a snowy apparition with a courtesan's coiffure and sensuously aristocratic bearing. “My name is Akuni,” she said, “a friend of Reverend Bundori. He asked me to see if you were all right, so I came just now to search for you.”

The white woman drew nearer the nun and the corpse, cocking her head to one side to look at the samurai and his blood. She said,

“Bundori-sama thinks highly of you, despite that you wear Buddhist garb. A little prejudice might serve him better. Why have you killed this blameless man? You will be stuck here in Kanno province forever, making stone lanterns, if you are so careless!”

The lantern was a private matter and the bikuni was annoyed to have it mentioned. “It was not Bundori's business to tell you about the lantern.”

Akuni raised her pale brow, supremely arrogant as she said, “He didn't tell me! I watched you myself! In any case, if you truly wish to end the sorrows of Lord Sato's fief, you need not kill a lot of guiltless men to succeed. You need only kill the demonic Priest Kuro up there in Sato's fortress.”

“You appear demonic yourself,” said the nun, sword still bared and stained with blood. The white woman laughed almost sweetly and did not act the least bit threatened.

“Perhaps I am a demon after all!” she allowed, thrilled by the notion. “But there are demons, and there are demons. Don't you think so? Reverend Bundori would not like that I suggest you kill Kuro out of hand. Nonetheless, it's what I think you should do. It would be better than killing two dozen or so vassals trying to save those pitiable lovers,
neh?
Should so many die for the sake of your meddling chivalry? If you want to save your friends, why not petition Lord Sato directly? Better still, petition his daughter Echiko, who is sentimental about lovers and would be upset to find out what is going on.”

The white woman laughed a final time, then looked askance at the bikuni and added, “You always hide under that hat! Don't you know everybody knows who you are? Tell them at the castle you are Tomoe Gozen, a widow-warrior and defender of the Imperial House! How can they refuse you entry? An insult to the Emperor if they fail to greet you! Use your head for once, not your steel!”

Saying this much, the white woman withdrew into thickening snowfall, holding the cut part of her sleeve to herself. The bikuni pursued a few paces, finding that the trail vanished almost at once. She could see only the hop-marks of a passing bird; and even these were quickly erased by wind and new snow.

PART TWO

The Suffering Dark

“Princess Echiko,” the nearest maid-in-waiting whispered. “It snows upon the castle.”

Echiko sat huddled in a corner of the room, having crawled from her bedding some while before, trying to hide from haunted dreams and memories. Her once-beautiful face was thin and sallow. There were shadows around her eyes. At first she did not respond to the maidservant's solicitous information. In a few moments, her head began to turn, slowly, painfully. She opened her mouth to reply, but said nothing.