Nobody tells you how long it takes to walk away from the only place you have ever lived.
Eleven days, in my case.
Eleven days of frozen mud and thin white grass, of straw sandals wearing through at the heel and then at the toe, until I bound my feet in strips torn from Hanae’s shawl and walked on the bloody cloth.
Daigo gave me six millet cakes and a flint.
The cakes lasted four days.
After that I ate roots dug from beneath the ice, and once, on the seventh night, a crow that had frozen to death on a fence post.
I did not cook it.
I did not want to wait.
The sword rides on my back the whole way.
It weighs more each morning.
Not in the arm, in the spine, in the place behind the ribs where a man keeps whatever he means to do.
At night I sleep in hollow trees and the lee sides of boulders, and at night the voice comes.
It does not shout.
It never shouts.
It talks the way an old friend talks across a fire, easy and warm, in a tone that has all the time in the world.
You are cold, it says.
I could warm you.
You are hungry.
I know what hunger is.
I could take it from you.
You are tired of losing.
I have never lost.
I lie curled around the scabbard with my teeth clenched and I say the names.
Hanae.
Tsugu.
The grandfather they tied to the saddle, whose name I never learned, and so I say only the grandfather.
Ryo’s crooked tooth.
Daigo’s dead eye.
I say them over and over until the voice grows bored, or pretends to, and goes quiet.
I have learned it is never really gone.
It only waits, the way a cat waits at a mouse hole.
Some mornings I wake with blood dried in my nostrils.
Some mornings the black lines have crept a finger’s width past my wrist before fading.
I stop looking at my arms.
On the sixth day I come to a village called Kuwabara, and it is not a village anymore.
I smell it from a long way off.
Not smoke, though there is smoke, a thin gray thread still rising from what used to be the roof of the granary.
The other smell.
Sweet and thick, the kind that gets into the back of the throat and stays.
I stop on the ridge above the valley with my hand over my mouth and I look down at what the crane left behind.
Forty huts, maybe fifty.
Most of them burned to black skeletons.
The paddies are trampled flat.
And in the middle of the lane, where the well must have been, there is a pile.
I go down anyway.
I do not know why.
Something in me insists on it.
There are no survivors.
I check every hut I can enter, and I find what I expected, and I will not write down all of it.
An old man with his hands still bound.
A woman on a doorstep, her back to the wall, who might have been sleeping if not for the angle of her neck.
A child’s sandal, very small, lying by itself in the mud.
On the lintel of the largest hut, someone has driven an arrow through a scrap of white silk, and the silk has a crane painted on it, wings spread, pinned in the same way they pin every crane.
A message.
They leave it in every place they do this.
I stand in front of it for a very long time.
They did this, says the voice, and it is not warm now.
It is quiet and almost gentle.
You see it now.
You see what they are.
All of them.
Not just the captain.
Every man who wears that bird.
“I know,” I say aloud.
My voice is very small in the wreckage.
Then let me.
“No.”
You are one boy with one sword.
They are a thousand.
You will die on the road and none of this will be answered.
“Then I’ll die on the road.”
I turn my back on the arrow and walk out of Kuwabara.
I do not bury anyone.
There are too many, and I have no tools, and if I stay long enough to try, I know what I will find waiting inside the digging.
So I go.
I keep walking until the smell fades and the light fails, and I do not stop until I cannot feel my feet, and then I keep walking a little further, because stopping is the only thing I am afraid of.
The river is called the Sanuki.
I learn this from a sign nailed to a post, one of the King’s, painted in the flat square hand of a court clerk.
It says the bridge is under royal toll.
It says that all travelers must pay one measure of rice or one strip of cloth or, failing these, “a fair price in service.”
At the near end of the bridge stand two guards.
I see them from a long way off, across the flat white ground.
Black lacquer.
White cord.
The crane on each breastplate.
One is tall and heavy, with a beard cropped close, and the other is young, barely older than me, with a face still soft at the jaw.
Between them, on his knees in the snow, is an old ferryman with a pole across his lap.
The tall one is kicking him.
Not hard.
Casually.
The way you kick a dog that has wandered into the wrong room.
The ferryman doesn’t cry out.
He only draws his shoulders in and takes it, and the young guard stands watching with his arms crossed and an expression I cannot quite read.
Bored, I think.
Embarrassed, maybe.
I should turn around.
There is a ford three miles downstream, and Daigo told me to avoid the road if I could, that any traveler alone could be taken for a spy or a runaway or worse.
I know this.
I stand at the edge of the tree line and I know it.
Look at that old man, says the voice, very softly.
Think of Tsugu.
I step out onto the road.
I want to say I had a plan.
I did not.
I had the sword, and I had a week’s worth of rage with nowhere to go, and I had nineteen years of practice at losing.
That is all I had.
“Toll,” the tall guard says as I come up.
He does not look at me.
He is still watching the ferryman.
“One measure of rice, or—”
“Let him up.”
Now he looks.
The young one looks too.
They take in the ragged clothes and the bloody feet and the sword strapped to my back with a strip of old shawl, and something crosses the tall one’s face, not fear, only a sort of tired amusement.
“Another one,” he says, to the younger man.
“They keep coming with swords now.
You’d think there was a prize.”
“Let him up,” I say again.
“He’s an old man.”
“He’s a tax evader.” He nudges the ferryman with his boot.
“Six years he’s been ferrying goods over the river and paying the court nothing.
That’s a lot of rice, boy.
The King is not a forgiving man about rice.”
“He’s ferrying people.
Farmers.
The ones you’re starving.”
The tall one smiles.
“Yes, I know.”
I draw.
It’s the first time I have drawn my father’s sword in the open air.
In the hut it felt like cold water.
Now it feels like a hand closing around my wrist, welcoming and hungry, and I feel the voice stir at the back of my skull like a dog getting up from sleep.
I clamp down on it.
I hold the sword the way Daigo has shown me, both hands, elbows in, and I try to remember what it feels like when the wooden one is not a dead fish.
The young guard’s eyes go wide.
“Sir.” His voice cracks.
“Sir, look at the pommel.”
“What?”
“The mark.
That circle with the—”
“I said what.”
“That’s the Shogen mark, sir.
That’s his.
I’ve seen it in the archive.
It’s—”
“Shogen is dead.” The tall one has already drawn his own sword.
He is not smiling now.
The amusement has vanished, and what has replaced it is worse: interest.
“He’s been dead nineteen years, boy.
Don’t be a coward.
And you.” He looks at me and his mouth curls.
“You’ll go a long way in the capital, boy.
They’ll pay a fortune for that blade.”
He comes at me.
I have never fought a real guard before.
I had imagined it, in the quiet hours.
I had imagined my father’s speed, the flow he must have had, the way the sword would sing.
I had not imagined how fast a man could be who does this every day of his life.
His first cut takes my left sleeve and a strip of skin beneath.
His second knocks my blade aside so hard my whole arm goes numb to the shoulder.
His third comes in low, a sweep to the knee, and I only avoid it because I trip over my own frozen foot and fall.
I hit the snow on my back.
The tall guard’s shadow covers me.
He raises his sword for the finish, and I do the only thing I can think of: I roll, and I cut blind.
It catches him across the thigh.
A deep cut, right through the lacquered skirt, and blood comes out of it dark and fast.
He screams.
He actually screams, surprised, and stumbles back with one hand clamped to the wound, and for one bright, ridiculous moment I think: I hurt him.
I really did.
Then the young one runs me through.
I do not see it coming.
I feel it.
A sudden pressure low in my left side, a wet heat, and then a pain so vast it has no edges.
I look down and there is a blade sticking out of me, just under the ribs, and behind it there is a boy’s face, white as paper, staring at his own hands.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”
The tall one, one leg bleeding, has recovered enough to laugh.
“Finish it, you idiot.”
The young guard pulls the sword out.
The cold rushes in behind it.
I am on my knees in the snow.
I do not remember getting there.
My hands are pressed to my side, and everything below the ribs is warm and getting warmer, and the snow in front of me is turning a color I have never seen snow turn.
Somewhere behind me the ferryman is sobbing.
Somewhere above me a crow is calling.
Now, says the voice.
It is not soft anymore.
It is right there, filling my skull like water fills a jar.
The red is coming into the edges of my sight, and the two hot points on my brow are flaring, burning, pressing outward through the bone.
Now, now, now.
You will die here.
Say the word.
My arms are black to the elbow.
To the shoulder.
The lines are climbing my neck.
My fingers are curling into something that is not quite fingers, hardening, lengthening, and beneath the pain in my side there is a new kind of hunger, a huge one, a hunger for the taste of the guard’s throat, for the crunch of bone under my grip, for the whole white world turned red.
I can do it.
I know I can.
I can feel exactly how it would be.
I would stand, and the wound would seal, and I would tear these two men apart with my bare hands, and I would feel nothing but joy.
And then I would keep going.
Nineteen years of Hanae’s fear finally makes sense.
That is the trap.
It does not want to kill them.
It wants me to like it.
I bite my tongue.
Hard.
I bite down until my teeth meet through the flesh, and the blood floods my mouth, and the pain is small and sharp and entirely mine.
“No,” I say.
It comes out thick.
“No.
No.”
You fool, says the voice, and for the first time it is angry.
You stubborn little fool.
You will die and nothing will—
Something whistles past my ear.
There is a wet sound, a thock, like an axe going into green wood, and the tall guard stops laughing.
He stands there for a moment with an arrow through his left eye.
The shaft is still quivering.
Then his knees fold, and he pitches face-first into the snow, and does not get up.
The young guard turns.
His mouth is open.
He has time to say one word, and it is “Please,” and then a shape comes out of the tree line at a dead run, low and fast, and something silver flashes.
I do not see all of it.
I am watching through a fog, through the red haze crawling over my vision, but I see enough.
I see the shape drop under the guard’s guard.
I see two quick cuts behind the knees, and the boy goes down screaming.
I see the shape stand over him, and put a foot on his chest.
“Where is the other patrol?” says a voice.
It is a woman’s voice, raspy and low, like a rope being drawn over stone.
“I don’t—please, I don’t know—”
“Where.”
“The east road!
Two hours!
Please—”
The blade goes into his throat.
It does not take long.
She wipes it on his cloak, sheathes it, and walks over to me.
I see her boots first.
Old, patched, laced to the shin.
Then a gray cloak.
Then a hood, and beneath the hood a face like a carved walnut, seamed and brown, with pale eyes that have seen everything and thought less of it each time.
A scar circles her throat like a thin white necklace.
She must be sixty.
She moves like someone half that.
She looks down at me.
At my blackened arms.
At the sword lying in the snow, with the struck-out eye on its pommel.
“Ah,” she says.
That is all.
Just ah.
As though I have confirmed something she had long suspected.
She kneels and lays two fingers against the wound.
I gasp.
She takes the fingers away and considers them, red to the second knuckle, and then she looks at my face, and something in her expression shifts, some careful, hard thing that has been closed for a long time.
“You have his jaw,” she says.
“Don’t die yet.
I haven’t decided about you.”
The world goes black.
I wake up in the dark to the smell of pine smoke.
For a long time I lie there and do not move.
There is a roof over me, low and crooked, and a fire in the corner, and I am wrapped in a heavy wool blanket that smells of sheep.
My side aches.
It is a deep, dull, familiar ache, and when I lift the blanket and look, the wound is only a pink seam, stitched with black thread, already half healed.
I count the stitches.
Eleven.
I do not know how many days I have been unconscious.
Three, I learn later.
A man with a hole like that should have been dead in one.
“That’s not your body healing.”
The voice comes from the dark beside the fire.
She is sitting cross-legged with her back to me, honing a long knife against a stone.
The hood is down.
Her hair is close-cropped and iron gray.
“That’s the other one,” she says.
“Working.
Keeping you alive because it needs you alive.
A cheap trick, and you should hate it.
Every day it does you a favor, it adds to the bill.”
I try to speak.
My throat is a dry hinge.
She reaches back without looking and passes me a wooden cup, and I drink, and it is water, the coldest water I have ever tasted.
“Who are you?”
“Iwa.”
“Iwa,” I say, slowly.
“Rock.”
“Well done.
Your father would not have made the connection.” She turns then, and looks at me properly, and in the firelight the scar around her throat is very white.
“I was a captain of the guard.
Thirty years I served.
I trained the men who train the men who kill in the King’s name.
Then, nineteen years ago, they told me to burn a school of children on the eastern border, because the children had been born to farmers who owned a little too much land, and I said no.”
She touches the scar.
“They were not gentle about it.”
“You survived.”
“I was careless with my dying.” Her mouth twitches, almost a smile.
“It’s a habit of mine.
Your father had it too.”
“You knew him.”
“I fought him, once.
On the eastern plain, at the height of the war.
I was a young captain and he was the thing the guards feared in the night.” She lays the knife across her knees.
“He cut through my whole company.
He did not cut through me.
I still do not know why.
I was the last one standing when the demon went out of him and he sat down in the mud and wept.”
She lets that settle.
“He wept, boy.
The greatest killer of his age, after the slaughter, sitting in the blood with his head in his hands, because he could not stop, and had not wanted to start.”
The fire pops.
Somewhere outside, a wind moves through the pines.
“Teach me,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You’ll—”
“I said yes.
Do not make me repeat it.
I am not a patient woman.” She rises, stiff, and crosses to the fire, and stirs the pot with her knife.
“But listen closely, because I will say this once.
I am not going to teach you to fight.”
“Then what—”
“I am going to teach you to hold.” She looks at me across the flames.
“Your body is a door.
The thing behind your eyes has been leaning on it since the day you were born.
A door that cannot stay shut is no good to anyone, no matter how many fine swords you hang on it.”
I look at my hands.
The black has faded.
They look like any other hands.
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“The King won’t wait.”
“The King has waited nineteen years, and he has all the time in the world.” She ladles something into a bowl and holds it out to me.
“Eat.”
I stare at the bowl.
I feel something tighten behind my breastbone.
Eat, Hanae said.
I take it.
My hands are shaking.
I eat, and it is thin, salty, tasteless, and it is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.
The first morning she wakes me an hour before dawn with a bamboo pole across the ribs.
“Up.”
I have not been able to lift my arms above my shoulders in three days.
I get up.
She leads me out of the hut and into a cold so absolute that breathing hurts.
The hut sits on a shelf of stone halfway up a mountain, and from the door there is nothing but white sky, black pine, and a long staircase carved into the rock, four hundred steps down, to a frozen spring at the bottom of the gorge.
She hands me two wooden buckets on a yoke.
“Fill them.
Carry them up.
Do not spill.”
“That’s—”
“Do you want to argue with me?” She does not raise her voice.
“Or do you want to learn?”
I go down.
I chip the ice with my knuckles, and I fill the buckets, and I climb.
I spill nearly half of it in the first hundred steps.
She is waiting at the top with the pole.
When I reach the shelf, she looks into the buckets, then at me, and she hits me across the back of the legs, hard enough to drop me to my knees.
“Again.”
That is the whole lesson.
Water, stairs, spillage, pole.
Again.
Again.
Again.
By noon my hands are raw.
By evening they are bleeding.
By nightfall I cannot feel the bottom half of my body, and when she finally lets me drop onto my mat, I am asleep before I hit it.
In the morning she wakes me with the pole.
It goes on for weeks.
I lose count of them.
I carry water.
I carry stone, flat gray slabs from a quarry higher up, which I must stack in a wall she says she will never use.
I stand in the frozen spring up to my chest for the length of two hundred breaths, and I count each one aloud.
When my voice breaks she hits me.
When I fall she hits me.
When I begin to shake so hard I cannot speak, she hits me and tells me that shaking is only the body’s first argument, and I am not obliged to hear it.
She teaches me a breath.
Four counts in through the nose.
Four held.
Four out through the mouth.
Four held again.
It sounds like nothing.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done.
“Do it while you climb,” she says.
“Do it while you carry.
Do it when you are hungry, and when you are cold, and when you have not slept.
If you lose the count, you begin again.”
“Why?”
“Because the thing in you does not attack your strength.” She taps the side of my head with one dry finger.
“It attacks your tired.
It waits until you are hollow, and then it moves in like a fox into a burrow.
When your breath is steady, there is nothing for it to wear.”
I learn how right she is on the eleventh night.
I have been on the stairs for eighteen hours.
It is snowing.
The buckets are sloshing, the yoke has bitten through my collar, and somewhere on the two hundred and ninetieth step, the count slips.
I don’t notice at first.
I just have a moment where my head feels light and warm and pleasant, and I think, how nice, to stop.
Yes, says the voice, delighted.
Yes.
Just there.
Put them down.
My arms go black.
I don’t see it.
I feel the pole hit my collarbone from behind, hard enough to crack something, and I scream, and the pain drives the red out of my eyes like a slap.
I stagger.
I do not spill a drop.
Iwa stands on the stair above me, pole in hand, snow gathering on her shoulders.
“Count,” she says.
“I—”
“Count.”
I count.
Four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
The black lines go back under my skin like water draining from a tub, and the two hot points on my brow cool and fade, and the voice, furious, retreats into the dark of me and does not speak for three days.
She says nothing about it.
She only turns and goes up the stairs, and after a moment I follow.
That night, when I lie down on my mat, she sits beside the fire with her back to me and says, without turning:
“That was the first time you held it.”
It does not feel like a victory.
It feels like a small cold coin dropped into an empty hand.
On the fortieth day it stops snowing.
I climb the stairs at dawn with both buckets full and I set them down at the top and I have not spilled a drop, and Iwa is standing by the door with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth.
It is my father’s sword.
I have not held it in weeks.
She has kept it in the hut, high on a rafter, where I could not reach it and could not be tempted.
“Draw it,” she says.
I do.
Cold moves up my arm.
The voice stirs, and I breathe.
Four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
It does not come.
It leans, but it does not come.
I stand there in the frozen light with my father’s sword in my hand and my whole body humming like a plucked string, and for the first time in my life the blade feels like nothing more or less than what it is: a sharp piece of steel, and a choice.
“Good,” Iwa says.
It is the first time she has said it.
I look at her, and I find I am grinning, a raw cracked ridiculous grin, and I do not care.
She does not grin back.
She is looking past me, over my shoulder, out at the valley below the shelf.
I turn.
Far below, where the frozen spring feeds into the Sanuki, a thin gray thread of smoke is rising.
Not one.
Four.
Five.
Set at intervals along the river, spaced the way a hunter spaces his snares.
Iwa’s face has gone very still.
“The boy at the bridge told me there was another patrol on the east road,” she says.
“He lied.
Or he did not know.” She lets out a breath.
“Either way, they found the bodies.
And the captain you told me about, the one with the half-smile, he sent word up the chain.
Nineteen years the King has waited to hear whether Shogen’s blood had survived, and now he knows.”
The wind comes up.
Somewhere below, faint and sweet and clear across the gorge, a horn sounds.
Long and flat.
The same note I heard on the ridge road above Ashigawa.
“How many?” I ask.
“Enough.” Her hand goes to the knife at her belt.
“Four of them will be shinobi.
They will come at night, and they will come up the stairs, because it is the only way.
I have known for nineteen years this day would come.
I did not think it would be so soon.”
She turns to look at me.
Her pale eyes are calm.
“Forty days,” she says.
“It is not enough.
It was never going to be enough.
But it is what we have.”
I tighten my grip on the hilt.
They are coming for you, the voice whispers, thin and eager, from the very back of my mind.
Let me.
Just this once.
You cannot hold four of them and hold me.
I breathe in.
Four counts.
“Then I’ll hold both,” I say.
Behind me, the sun goes down over the mountains, and the long shadows of the pines fall like bars across the snow.
End of Chapter Two