For the first two days I do not speak to her, and she does not speak to me.
I carry her on my back, lashed to me with strips of the wool blanket, her thin arms crossed over my chest and her chin resting against my shoulder.
She is lighter than the buckets.
I keep telling myself that.
I keep counting my steps, one to four and back again, four in, four held, four out, four held, because when I stop counting I start seeing the clearing, and I do not want to see the clearing.
I do not want to see my hands, either.
They were not my hands.
They were long and black and they lifted a man like a wet cloth, and the worst of it is that I have not stopped feeling them.
Some nights I wake with my fingers curled against the blanket, curved and tight, and I have to open them one by one with the other hand.
The voice has been silent since the mountain.
I do not trust the silence.
Silence is what a cat gives a mouse hole.
Iwa is feverish by the second night.
Her skin burns.
She mutters in her sleep, names I do not know, and once a command, sharp and clear: “Hold the line.” When she wakes she is embarrassed by it.
She looks at me with those pale eyes as if I have caught her undressed.
“You have questions,” she says.
“Only one.”
“Then ask it.”
“Did it hurt him?
My father.
Being what he was.”
She is quiet for a long time.
Her breath rasps against the back of my neck.
“I think,” she says finally, “that it hurt him more not to.”
We do not follow the road.
She insists on it.
She has me leave the packed earth behind on the first morning and cut across the folds of the hills, along game trails and dry streambeds, wherever the trees grow thick enough to hide a man’s shape.
It doubles the distance.
She says it does not matter.
“The King’s men take the road,” she says.
“The King’s men always take the road.
They think the land belongs to them, so they walk upon it as if it did.”
“And you?”
“I walk where the land lets me.”
On the fourth day I learn how to set a snare.
It is not the sword lesson I had wanted.
She has me kneel by a rabbit run at dusk while she lies propped against a tree, and she talks me through it, a bent sapling, a slip of cord, a trigger of split twig.
My fingers are clumsy with the cord.
She corrects me with a look.
When I catch a hare on the second morning, a small brown thing with a broken neck, she has me skin it with her knife, and the smell of it, the hot, sweet smell of the inside of something alive, turns my stomach.
“You did not flinch on the stairs,” she says.
“That was different.”
“Why?”
I think about it.
The hare lies in my hands, limp, its dark eyes clouding.
“On the stairs,” I say slowly, “I was too frightened to think.”
She nods.
“Yes.
That is the only mercy in the killing of men.
There is not enough time to understand it.
But you will not always be frightened.
One day you will be calm, and you will do it anyway, and you will have all the time in the world to know what you are.” She closes her eyes.
“That is the day I worry about.”
I skin the hare.
I cook it over a fire no bigger than my two hands.
It is the best meal I have had since Hanae’s gruel, and I do not tell her so, and she does not ask.
On the sixth day the road throws up a village.
It is the first we have seen since Kuwabara.
It is called Sakaki, according to a wooden marker half-buried in a ditch, and it clings to the side of a steep valley like a tick on a hound.
Thirty huts, maybe less.
Smoke rising.
A few thin figures moving in the terraced fields.
Iwa is worse.
The fever has broken and returned twice, and her side, beneath the bandage, has gone the color of a bruised plum.
She tries to stand up on her own, and her legs fold.
I catch her before she hits the ground.
“I need a healer,” I say.
“You need to keep moving.”
“You need a healer.”
She looks at me, and there is something in her eyes I have not seen before.
Not anger.
Only a sort of tired tenderness.
“There is no healer in the world who can help me,” she says.
“But you may stop at Sakaki, if you like.
I would not say no to a roof.”
We go down.
They do not welcome us.
They watch from the doors of their huts, faces closed as fists, and when I come up the path with a dying woman on my back and a black sword over my shoulder, a man steps out of the shadows with a pitchfork.
He is short and wide, with a scar over one eye.
He does not point the pitchfork at me.
He only holds it, the way a man holds a thing he hopes he will not have to use.
“State your business.”
“She’s ill.
She needs a bed.
I’ll pay in labor.”
“Where from?”
I hesitate.
I do not know how to answer.
I see his eyes go to the sword, to the pommel, and a long second passes, and then he lowers the pitchfork.
“You’re the one from the mountain,” he says.
“The Sanuki.
The demon.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes you do.” He gestures over his shoulder.
A woman has come out behind him, and a child, and another man, and another.
They do not come closer.
“Word travels, boy.
Two days now.
A whole company of the King’s guard, wiped out on the north peak by a thing with horns.
They say you tore a shinobi in half with your bare hands.”
I have not slept in three days, and my ears are ringing, and I say the only true thing I can think of.
“It wasn’t a whole company.”
Nobody laughs.
“Is she yours?” the man asks, jerking his chin at Iwa.
“She’s my teacher.”
He is quiet for a moment.
Then he steps aside.
“We have a barn,” he says.
“The roof is sound.
You may have it three nights.
In return—” He stops, and his face changes, something hardening in it.
“In return you will do something for us.”
The barn is warm.
It smells of hay and old manure, and Iwa sleeps in the corner on a bed of straw, breathing shallow.
A woman named Fumi, who is broad and slow-moving and has hands like ham, sits by her and changes the bandage.
She does not ask questions.
She only clicks her tongue at the wound and murmurs, “It’s the black kind.
There’s nothing to be done.”
“I know,” I say.
“Best keep her comfortable.”
“I know.”
She glances up at me.
She is not young.
There are lines around her mouth as if she has spent forty years biting words back.
“The men want to see you,” she says.
“The elder’s house.
Tonight.”
“What for?”
Fumi does not answer.
She only turns back to the bandage, and I feel a small cold shiver run down my spine.
The elder’s house is the largest in Sakaki, which is to say it has two rooms.
They have gathered in the front one, twelve men and three women, their faces lit from below by a single oil lamp.
In the middle, on the packed earth floor, is a man tied to a post.
He is a guard.
I know it at once by the black lacquer, though the plates have been stripped from his chest and lie in a heap by the door.
He is perhaps forty, gray at the temples, with a broken nose and a swollen eye.
Somebody has been at him for some time.
His hands are bound behind the post with rope, and there is a dark stain spreading down the front of his tunic.
His head hangs.
His breath makes a small bubbling sound.
“We found him three days ago,” the elder says.
He is the short wide man with the scar.
His name, I have learned, is Torao.
“Wandering on the ridge road.
Separated from his patrol.
He’d been thrown from his horse.”
“And?”
“And he says nothing.” Torao’s voice is flat.
“He says he’s a soldier and he follows orders.
He says he never harmed anyone himself.”
The guard lifts his head at that.
It costs him.
His good eye finds me and he tries to speak, a wet cough, then manages: “I never did.
I swear.
I carry the ledgers.
I count the rice.
I never—”
“He was at Kuwabara,” Torao says.
The room is very still.
“There is a woman here,” he goes on.
“Sana, who lost her daughter in the fire.
She was at market in the next valley when it happened, and when she came home she found—” He does not finish.
“She is the one who identified him.
She saw him on the ridge road from the field.
She knew the ledger-book.
She said he was the one who read the King’s order at the well.”
The guard says nothing.
His eyes have gone to the floor.
“We could kill him,” Torao says.
“But we are farmers.
We do not know how to do it cleanly.
We would make it long.
It would be, ah.” He rubs his mouth.
“The women would want it long.
I do not say I would stop them.”
I understand then what he is asking.
“You want me to do it.”
“You are the demon of the Sanuki.” He does not smile.
“You do it well, I hear.”
I look at the guard, and the guard looks at me, and for one strange moment I think I recognize him.
Not his face.
His fear.
The exact quality of it.
The look on the young guard’s face at the bridge.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The look, I think, that Tsugu’s confused smile was trying to be.
“I won’t,” I say.
“Then they will.”
He gestures at the corner.
Three women are standing there, very still, and one of them, the tallest, has a length of chain in her hands.
Her face is like a shut door.
“He was there,” Torao says quietly.
“He read the order.
He counted.”
I do not know how long I stand there.
Do it, the voice whispers.
It is faint.
It has been quiet for days, and I am so startled to hear it that I nearly flinch.
Do it.
It is nothing.
It is a tired man tied to a post.
You are not even angry.
Look at yourself.
You feel nothing.
And that is the horror of it.
It is true.
I feel nothing.
There is no rage, no grief, no righteous heat.
There is only a flat, gray calm, as though somebody had drained me of everything but the ability to stand upright, and in that calm I see the whole thing very clearly: the guard, the rope, the rice, the chain in the woman’s hands.
I see that there is no version of this room in which the man walks out alive.
I see that I can choose only how.
I breathe.
Four in.
Four held.
“Everyone out,” I say.
“Boy—”
“Out.
All of you.
Sana stays.”
They go.
It is not a question.
Whatever they saw in my face, it moves them.
The tall woman with the chain does not leave.
She stands where she is, fingers tight on the links.
Her eyes are dry.
“Sana,” I say.
“You saw him at the well?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I would know him in my sleep.” Her voice is very steady.
“He was reading from a paper.
He didn’t look up.
He didn’t look up once.”
I nod.
I turn to the guard.
“What is your name?”
He blinks.
“Ren,” he whispers.
“Ren of the Fourth Company.”
“Ren.” I draw my father’s sword.
He flinches, then goes still.
“Did you read the King’s order at Kuwabara?”
His mouth works.
A long moment passes.
Then, in a voice so soft I almost do not hear: “Yes.”
“Did you count them?”
A pause.
“Forty-one,” Ren says.
Sana makes a sound.
It is not a sob.
It is something drier, and worse.
“I’m sorry,” Ren whispers.
“I’m so sorry.
I didn’t want to—”
I step behind him and set the edge of the blade against the side of his neck.
“Sana,” I say.
“Look away.”
“No.”
I do not argue.
There is not time.
I have heard it said that a clean death is a kindness.
It is not.
It is only a shorter cruelty.
When I draw the blade across his throat the way Iwa showed me, quick and deep, he makes one small surprised sound, and his head drops, and the rope holds him up like a hanged scarecrow.
Blood pours down the front of him, dark and thick, and runs across the floor to pool around my boots.
Sana does not move.
She stands with the chain hanging from her fist and she watches him die.
When it is finished, she lets out a long breath.
“Thank you,” she says.
I do not answer.
There is nothing to say.
I wipe my father’s sword on the hem of my tunic and I sheathe it and I walk out into the cold night air, and I lean against the wall of the elder’s house, and I am sick in the dirt.
Iwa is awake when I come back.
She is lying with her eyes open, looking at the beams of the barn roof, and she does not turn her head when I sit beside her in the straw.
The lamp has burned low.
Her breathing is shallow but even.
“You did it quickly,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“I heard the elder leave.
He had the look of a man who has watched something done properly.” A pause.
“And I know how you walk when you are sick.”
I say nothing.
“Were you calm?”
“Yes.”
“That is the part that frightens you.”
“Yes.”
She is silent a while.
When she speaks again her voice is very quiet.
“There is no good way to kill a man tied to a post,” she says.
“Do not let anyone tell you there is.
Not the elders, not the priests, not the songs.
There is only the bad way and the worse way, and if you choose the bad one, you may sleep a little.
Not much.
Some.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Not for nineteen years.”
She turns her head, finally, and looks at me.
In the dying light, the scar around her throat is very white.
“But I would rather not sleep,” she says, “than sleep the way your father did.”
We leave Sakaki on the ninth day.
Fumi packs a bundle of dried fish and hard bread and presses it into my hands without a word.
Torao stands at the edge of the fields, and as I pass he lifts his hand, once, awkwardly, and I lift mine.
I do not look back.
The mountains close around us.
The trail narrows, climbs, becomes a ledge along a cliff.
Iwa rides on my back and no longer speaks unless she must.
She has grown light as paper.
When I set her down at night to make a fire, her hands shake so badly she cannot hold the cup.
On the tenth day we see the patrol.
It is a long way off, far below, a snake of black moving along the ridge road in the gray light.
Twenty riders.
Perhaps thirty.
The banners are too far away to read, but I know the color.
White cord, black lacquer.
And at the head, on a big bay horse, a rider whose lower face is wrapped in white cloth from the jaw to the bridge of the nose.
Kagemasa.
I feel it in my teeth.
The whole world narrows to that single small figure, riding along the road below, tiny as a crawling ant, and something hot and black uncoils in my chest and begins to rise.
There, the voice says, very softly.
There he is.
It is twelve hundred paces.
I could be on him before he draws.
“No.”
Look at him.
Look at what he did.
“No.”
“Shigen.”
Iwa’s voice is a thread.
Her fingers have closed over my collar.
“Not now,” she says.
“Not with me on your back and thirty riders at his side.
If you go down there, you will die, and I will die, and the King will laugh.” A dry cough.
“Let him ride.
He has a long way to go before he is done.”
I stand there with my hands shaking.
Then I count.
Four in.
Four held.
Four out.
Four held.
The black fades from the edges of my sight.
The patrol moves on, and vanishes into the pines, and the ridge is empty again.
“He is hunting us,” I say.
“Yes.”
“He’ll follow us to the temple.”
“Perhaps.” She shifts against my shoulder.
“The temple has been there for six hundred years, and the King has never once been able to enter.
There are reasons.
You will learn them.”
“What reasons?”
But she has closed her eyes, and her head sags, and I do not press her.
That night, camped in a fold of the hills with no fire, she tells me about the King.
She does it without preamble.
We are lying side by side in the dark, wrapped in the same blanket for warmth, and the stars are hard and bright and close.
“You will want to know why he does it,” she says.
“The killing.
The culls.
I have wondered myself.
Nineteen years, and I have not found the answer.”
“He hates us.”
“That is what the songs say.” She shifts.
“But a man does not need to hate a thing to burn it.
He may only fear it.”
“Fear us?
We’re farmers.”
“Yes.” A long pause.
“Ask yourself, boy.
What does a king who owns everything need with the death of everyone else?
What could a village of rice-growers possibly take from him?”
I stare up at the sky.
I have never considered it.
It has always seemed simpler: the royals have the power, and the rest of us do not, and that is the way of the world.
“I do not know,” I say.
“Nor do I.” Her voice is very quiet.
“But I saw the King’s demon once.
At a distance, on a night I would rather forget.
It was not like your father’s.
It had no horns.
It wore a face like the head of a crane, and it moved—” She stops.
“It moved as though it had been taught.
Your father’s demon was a beast.
The King’s is a servant.
Do you see the difference?”
“No.”
“Nor did I, at first.” She lets out a breath.
“A beast is born.
A servant is made.
When you find out how the King came by his, you will know what he is afraid of.”
The wind sighs over the ridge.
Somewhere far off, an owl calls, and another answers.
“Sleep,” Iwa says.
“We will reach the temple in two days, if the mountain is kind.
You will need to be rested.”
“Why?”
“Because the six of them will not welcome you.” She turns on her side, and her voice is muffled in the blanket.
“They do not train the sons of demons.”
The temple sits on a mountain the color of old bone.
We come upon it on the twelfth afternoon, after a long climb through pines and scree and a last, killing switchback.
I do not see it at first.
It is only when we round the final shoulder of rock, with my legs trembling and Iwa a dead weight on my back, that the trees fall away and there it is.
It is not large.
A gate, a hall, a scatter of low buildings, gray with weather, roofs bent under moss.
A wall of piled stone circles the whole, waist high, too low to stop anyone.
There are no guards.
There are no banners.
But over the gate, on a crossbeam of black wood, hang bells.
Dozens of them.
Bronze, iron, clay.
Every one has been broken.
Cracked across the lip, split down the side, one shattered nearly in two.
They stir in the wind, and they make no sound at all.
That is the strangest part.
They ought to ring.
The wind is strong enough.
But each broken bell only sways on its cord, mute, and the silence they leave hangs over the gate like a held breath.
“Kane-no-Tera,” Iwa murmurs against my shoulder.
“The Temple of Broken Bells.
Put me down.”
“You can’t stand—”
“I can stand for this.” Her voice has a hard edge.
“Put me down.”
I do.
She wavers, then finds her feet, and takes one step, then another, one hand pressed to her side.
I stay close.
She walks to the gate as though it is a road she has walked a thousand times, and stops in front of the empty arch, and lifts her chin.
“The rock has fallen,” she says.
Her voice cracks on the last word.
It carries anyway.
For a long moment, nothing happens.
Then a figure steps out of the shadow of the nearest hall, a man so old and so thin that at first I mistake him for a scarecrow.
He wears a plain gray robe belted with rope.
His head is shaved.
He carries a long wooden staff, and his eyes, when he lifts them, are the color of pale honey, and as sharp as a hawk’s.
Behind him come five more, one by one.
Two women and three men, the youngest perhaps sixty.
They come out of the halls and stand along the wall in a loose half circle, and not one of them speaks.
I have never in my life felt so thoroughly inspected.
It is like being looked at by a row of mountains.
The old man with the staff looks at Iwa.
His face does not change.
But something in the set of his shoulders, some tension held for nineteen years, lets go.
“Iwa,” he says.
“You are late.”
“I was delayed.”
“So I see.”
His gaze moves to me.
It settles on my face, then drops to the hilt at my shoulder, and I see him find the mark on the pommel, the small circle struck through.
It takes a very long time.
When he looks up again, there is nothing in his eyes at all.
“You have brought a demon to our door,” he says.
“I have brought a student.”
“They are not the same.”
“No,” Iwa says.
She sways, and I catch her, and she does not push me away.
“But this one held it.
I watched him.
Twelve nights ago, with the King’s shinobi at his throat and my blood in the grass, he took it back.
Do you understand what I am telling you, Master Tenkai?
He took it back.”
The old man’s expression does not change.
But behind him, the other five have gone very still.
“Impossible,” says one of the women.
“I said the same.” Iwa’s voice is failing.
“Then I saw it.”
The old man looks at me for a long time.
“Draw your sword,” he says.
I do not move.
“Draw it,” he says again, very gently.
“And show me what my old friend has seen.”
I look at Iwa.
She gives me the smallest of nods.
I set my hand on the hilt.
The cold rises.
The voice, so long silent, turns over in the back of my skull like a sleeper waking, and murmurs, with a sound that is almost glad: Ah.
Now they’ll see.
I breathe in.
Four counts.
Behind the old man, the broken bells stir in the wind, and do not ring.
End of Chapter Four