I draw my father’s sword in front of six strangers, with a dying woman leaning on my arm, and I do not know whether I am about to pass a test or begin a slaughter.
That is the honest truth.
The count is steady in my chest, four in, four held, four out, four held, but the voice has woken, and it is warm and eager and very close.
Ah, it said.
Now they’ll see.
I have never wanted so badly to prove it wrong.
The blade comes free with its whisper of cold.
The temple yard is silent.
The bells hang over the gate, cracked and mute, and the six masters stand along the wall in their gray robes with their hands empty and their faces closed.
Not one of them has moved to draw a weapon.
That should reassure me.
It does not.
Master Tenkai, the old man with the staff, lifts one hand.
“Sheathe it,” he says.
I stare at him.
“You told me to draw.”
“And you did.
That was the first question.
Would you draw when told, or would you draw when the thing in you wished it?” A faint dry edge comes into his voice.
“You drew when told.
Now sheathe it.
We have much to do before dark.”
I sheathe the sword.
My hand is shaking.
The masters exchange looks along the wall, small ones, brief as sparrows.
“Bring her inside,” Tenkai says.
“Haru.
Botan.
Take her.”
Two of them step forward, a tall woman with one ear missing and a broad heavy man with forearms like tree roots.
They lift Iwa from my arms so gently that she does not protest, and she looks back at me as they carry her toward the low hall, and her pale eyes are half closed.
“Do what he says,” she whispers.
“Whatever it is.
Do not argue.”
“Iwa—”
“Do not argue.”
Then the door closes behind her, and I am alone in the yard with an old man and his silent bells.
The sounding takes place at noon, on a flat gray stone in the center of the courtyard.
Tenkai has me kneel on it, sword across my knees, back straight, hands flat.
The other five stand in a circle around me at a distance of about ten paces.
They have not spoken since Iwa was carried away.
I can feel them looking, like a weight against the skin.
“Do you know why the bells are broken?” Tenkai asks.
“No.”
“Every student who has ever held the thing you carry has broken one.” He walks a slow circle around me, staff tapping the ground.
“Not with a hammer.
Not with a blade.
They break them the day they no longer need the count.
The day the beast sits quiet inside them, and they are the master of their own skin.
It is the only ceremony this temple has.” He stops.
“There are two hundred and eleven bells on that gate.
That is how many have completed the training in six centuries.”
“Two hundred and eleven.”
“Yes.”
“And how many have failed?”
He is quiet for a moment.
“We do not count those,” he says.
“They are buried behind the north hall, and there are a great many more than two hundred and eleven.”
The wind moves across the courtyard.
I feel the hair rise along my arms.
“You are here because of a woman I once loved like a sister,” he says, “and because of a thing she saw.
I will not pretend it is enough.
I will ask you a question, and you will answer it truthfully, and then we shall see.”
“Ask.”
“When you let it in on the mountain, what did it feel like?”
I do not want to answer.
I open my mouth, and nothing comes.
It is the hardest question anyone has ever put to me, and it is also the simplest, and behind me in the dark of my skull the voice waits with perfect patience for what I will say.
“It felt good,” I say.
Nobody moves.
“It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me.
It felt like I had been cold my whole life, and someone had finally put me by a fire.” My throat is tight.
“I have never wanted anything so much as I wanted to keep it.”
“And yet you stopped.”
“Iwa said my father wept.
That he didn’t want to start.
I thought—” I swallow.
“I thought if that was what it did to him, I’d rather be the kind of man who weeps after.”
Tenkai nods slowly.
He does not smile, but something in his face eases, the way a fist loosens.
“Good,” he says.
“That is the right answer.
Not because it is noble.
Because it is honest.” He lifts his staff.
“Now we shall see whether you can keep it.”
He raises the staff to the height of his shoulder, and I see for the first time that there is something hanging from a cord at its tip: a small bronze bell, no bigger than a plum.
The lip is cracked.
It is the smallest, ugliest bell I have ever seen.
He strikes it against the stone.
It makes no sound.
But I feel it.
I cannot describe the sensation to you, and I have tried.
It is not a note.
There is no vibration in the air.
It is something deeper, a pressure in the bones, a tap on the inner wall of the skull, and it goes through me like a nail through cloth.
And in answer, at the exact moment the bell strikes the stone, something inside me rises.
Not slowly.
Not like on the mountain, where it crept up from the belly.
This is a lunge.
A leap.
The heat floods me in a single instant, the red edges of the world snap in, and I hear the voice roar, joyful, triumphant, from somewhere behind my teeth.
There!
Yes!
Do you feel it?
They are calling me!
They are calling me—
My hands are already black.
I did not see them change.
The nails curve, and the veins race up my forearms like ink poured into water.
My face is on fire.
I feel the pressure begin above my brows, the two hot points, the wet cracking of bone.
“Hold,” Tenkai says.
He strikes the bell again.
I scream.
I cannot help it.
The second strike is worse than the first, a hammer to the spine, and the beast bucks against my ribs so hard I taste blood.
My skin is splitting along the shoulders.
My back is arching.
I am on my hands and knees on the stone, and there is a sound coming from my throat that no human being should make.
“Count!” someone shouts.
It is Haru, I think.
“Count, boy!”
Four in.
I cannot get the air.
My lungs are locked.
“Four in!”
I drag it through my nose.
It burns like swallowed gravel.
Four held.
The bell again.
Another blow, this one to the very center of me, and I feel one horn break through the skin of my forehead with a wet tearing sound, a hard curved weight, and the blood runs hot into my left eye.
The red is closing over my vision.
The masters are shapes, blurred and distant.
Behind me, in the huge glad dark, the voice says: Enough.
You cannot hold this.
Let go.
Let go, let go, let—
Four out.
The horn stops growing.
It hangs there, half through, a burning crown of pain.
Four held.
Tenkai strikes the bell a fourth time.
I do not know how long it goes on.
Time comes apart.
I know only that the bell sounds again and again, silent and terrible, and that with each stroke I lose a little ground, and that somewhere in the wreckage of it I stop thinking of the count as a thing I do and begin thinking of it as a thing I am.
A tide.
A heartbeat.
A rope thrown down a well.
The sun moves across the sky.
The shadows of the masters lengthen on the stone.
When the last stroke falls, I am flat on my belly with my cheek against the cool rock, and I am breathing.
Just breathing.
Slow and shallow and steady.
In.
Held.
Out.
Held.
The horn is gone.
My hands are pale.
My tunic is soaked, my mouth is full of blood, and I have bitten through my lower lip.
I have held it.
Not well.
Not gracefully.
But I have held it.
“Enough,” Tenkai says.
Nobody speaks.
I lie there with my eyes closed, listening to my own heartbeat, and for the first time in my life I do not hear the voice at all.
A hand touches my shoulder.
It is Botan, the heavy man, and his eyes are very wide.
“He got a horn,” he says.
“A full horn through the skin, and he took it back.
Master.
Master, in eleven years I have never—”
“I know.”
“The Seventh Head of the temple, Master Ryōkan, could not do that on his hundredth try.”
“I know,” Tenkai says.
His voice has gone strange.
“Give him water.”
They put me in a bare room off the east hall, with a pallet and a lamp and a bowl of thin barley broth.
I drink it all.
I do not taste it.
My hands are steady, which surprises me, but my legs will not hold my weight, so I lie there and stare at the beams.
Haru comes to me at dusk.
She is the one with the missing ear, tall as a tree, with a face like a hawk’s.
She does not sit.
She stands in the doorway with her arms folded.
“Iwa is asking for you.”
I sit up too fast.
The room tilts.
“Is she—”
“She is dying, boy.
She has been dying for twelve days.
Come.”
Iwa lies in the long hall on a pallet of clean straw.
They have washed her and dressed her in a plain white robe.
Somebody has combed her cropped gray hair.
The lamps have been set around her in a ring, and their light lies over her face in warm gold, so that for a moment I hardly recognize her.
She looks small.
Smaller than I have ever seen her.
The blood has gone from her skin, and the scar around her throat stands out white as a thread, and her breath comes in little dry catches.
But her eyes, when I kneel beside her, are open and clear.
“You held it,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“I heard the bell.” A ghost of a smile.
“Six times.
They only ring it that many for the ones who might live.”
“I thought it was silent.”
“To the ears.
Not to the ones who have it.” She lifts one hand.
It shakes.
I take it, and it is cold as river stone.
“Listen to me, boy.
I have very little breath left, and I intend to spend it well.”
“Iwa—”
“Listen.”
I close my mouth.
“Tenkai will take you,” she says.
“He will not say so tonight.
He will make you wait.
He will be difficult, he is always difficult, and you must not lose your temper.
You must stay.
Six months.
Seven.
As long as they will keep you.” Her breath catches.
“Learn what they know.
Not the sword, though there is that too.
Learn the silence.
The thing the bells do.
It is the only weapon that ever mattered against the King’s demon.”
“How?”
“I do not know.
I never had it.” A faint, rueful twitch of her mouth.
“That is why I am dying in a bed instead of on a hill.
But I saw your father try to find it, and he did not, and it broke him.”
“You said he wept.”
“He wept because he could not stop.
You will weep because you can.” She squeezes my hand, or tries to.
“Do you understand the difference?
There will come a day when you are calm, and you will have the strength to do all the terrible things you have promised.
And you will choose.
Every time.
Not because the beast forces you.
Because you are the one who decides.” Her eyes are very bright.
“It is the whole of the art.”
I cannot speak.
My throat has closed.
“I have one more thing to ask.”
“Anything.”
“Do not avenge me.”
I stare at her.
“Not me,” she says.
“Not Hanae, not Tsugu, not the grandfather.
Not even your father.” The words come slowly now, each one an effort.
“You will want to.
You will say the names in the dark, and you will call it duty.
But it will only be the beast wearing a kind face.
If you go east, go because the world has need of it.
Not because the dead are owed.”
“Then why—”
“Because the dead are not owed anything.” Her voice cracks, and for a moment, terribly, I see the young captain she was, lying in the mud with her company dead around her.
“They are only dead, boy.
They are only gone.
And the living have to carry on.”
The lamps gutter.
Somewhere outside, very far off, a wind moves through the pines.
“I want to see it,” she says softly.
“The east.
The sun over the white walls.
I would have liked to.” A pause.
“But I have seen the mountains.
That is not nothing.”
I lean down.
I press my forehead to her hand.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Iwa.
Thank you.
I don’t—I never—”
“Eat,” she says.
I stop.
I lift my head.
She is looking at me with an odd, fond, almost mischievous expression, the first I have ever seen on her face.
“You said it in your sleep,” she says.
“On the mountain, with the fever on you.
Three nights you muttered it.
Eat.
Eat.
I did not know who you were speaking to.” Her lips curve.
“I think I do now.
I am glad I could say it back.”
I do not remember what happens next.
I know only that I am weeping, and that I have not wept since I was fourteen, and that it comes from somewhere so deep it seems to tear on the way out.
She strokes my hair with one shaking hand.
She does not tell me to stop.
“Good,” she whispers.
“Good boy.
Let it out.
That is the other half of the art.”
She dies just before dawn.
There is no last word.
No final breath, no rattle, none of the things the songs promised.
She simply stops.
One moment the small warm weight of her hand is in mine, and the next it is only a hand.
I sit very still.
The grief comes in a wave.
It is not like the grief for Hanae, which was thick and slow and stunned.
This is sharp, and it is cold, and beneath it, from somewhere in the dark, I feel a great vast hunger open its jaws.
Now, says the voice.
It is not triumphant.
It is not cruel.
It is gentle.
It is the gentlest I have ever heard it.
She is gone.
They are all gone.
Everyone who ever cared for you, and the world did not even pause.
Do you feel how cold it is?
I could take that from you.
I could take all of it.
You would never feel this again.
I close my eyes.
You know I am right.
I do know.
That is the worst of it.
It is not lying.
It has never lied.
It will make the grief go away, and it will do it kindly, and I will thank it, the way my father thanked it on the last night of his life.
“No,” I say aloud.
Please.
“I want it.”
What?
“I want to feel this.” My voice is a rasp.
“She would have wanted me to.”
I breathe.
Four in.
It does not come easily.
Four held.
My chest is a hollow drum.
Four out.
Four held.
The voice says nothing for a very long time.
Then, slowly, like a tide going out, the hunger recedes.
I open my eyes.
The lamps have burned down to stubs.
The gray light of morning is coming through the paper screens, and somebody is standing in the door.
It is Tenkai.
He has been there some time.
I can tell from the way he holds himself, from the stillness, that he has watched the whole thing.
“That was the true sounding,” he says quietly.
“Not the bell.
The bell is only a noise.
What you did just now.”
I do not answer.
“Two hundred and eleven,” he says.
“I will not tell you what it cost the others.”
He crosses the hall in three slow steps and lowers himself to the floor beside me.
Together we look at Iwa’s face.
Her eyes have been closed, her hands folded.
She looks like a woman asleep who has finally, after nineteen years, been permitted to rest.
“She was my student,” Tenkai says.
“Fifty years ago.
The best I ever taught.” His voice is very even.
“When she left to serve the King, I told her she was making a mistake.
She told me I was an old fool who had never once done anything but sit on a mountain.” A pause.
“She was right.”
“She said you’d make me wait.”
“I will.”
“How long?”
“Seven months, if you are lucky.
A year, if you are not.” He turns and looks at me, and his honey-colored eyes are steady.
“You will carry water.
You will chop wood.
You will learn the silence, and the sword, and the ten thousand small things no one told you that you did not know.
You will hate me.
It is customary.”
“The King won’t wait.”
“Then you will lose.” He says it flatly, without malice.
“You will go east too soon and the King will kill you.
Or you will stay, and learn, and when you go you will have a chance.
That is all I can give you.
A chance.”
I look at Iwa’s face.
Do not argue, she said.
“A year,” I say.
“Seven months.”
“A year, if I’m not ready.”
For the first time, something like a smile flickers at the corner of Tenkai’s mouth.
It looks unfamiliar there, like a bird that has forgotten how to land.
“She chose well,” he says.
We bury her at sunrise, behind the north hall, in the small grove where the ground is soft and the pines are old.
There are no stones.
There are only the graves, dozens and dozens of them, in long uneven rows, each marked with a single broken bell buried mouth-up in the earth.
I count them.
I stop at two hundred.
Tenkai hands me a bell of my own to bury with her, not a graduate’s, but a plain little thing of clay, cracked at the lip.
I set it beside her head.
The six masters chant something, low and slow, a dry murmur like wind in leaves.
I do not know the words.
I do not need to.
When it is done, I stand for a long time with the spade in my hands.
Then I hear it.
It is very faint, a ring of bronze on the wind, from the direction of the gate.
I lift my head.
The others have heard it too.
Haru has gone rigid.
Botan is staring at the roofs.
Every bell over that gate has been silent for six hundred years.
One of them has rung.
We do not go to look.
We only listen as the last vibration fades from the air, thin and sweet, a single clear note like a voice saying goodbye.
And I think, though I will never know it for certain, that I understand what it is.
Not a summons.
Not a warning.
A rock, falling into deep water.
That night, on the wall, Tenkai finds me watching the road.
It is a clear, cold night, the stars sharp as splinters.
Far below, where the mountain folds into the lowlands, a scatter of tiny orange lights has appeared along the ridge.
Torches.
Dozens of them.
They are spread in a wide ring around the foot of the slope, patient and still.
“How long have they been there?” I ask.
“Since dusk.” Tenkai leans on his staff.
“Kagemasa’s patrol, and a good deal more.
Two hundred men, I would say.
Perhaps three.”
“They’ll come up.”
“They will try.” His voice is unconcerned.
“They have tried before.
Many times.
Six centuries of kings.”
“What stops them?”
He is silent a long moment.
“The ground remembers,” he says at last.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you will have to stay to find out.” He turns and looks at me, and there is a gleam in his honey eyes, small and sharp and very, very old.
“There is a great deal in this temple that Iwa did not tell you, boy.
There is a great deal that I have not told you.
The King’s demon.
The bells.
The reason the crane hates us so.” A pause.
“Some of it will make you wish you had gone east that first night, and died on the road.
But you asked for the truth.”
“I did.”
“Then you shall have it.
In time.” He lifts the staff and taps it once against the stone.
“Sleep.
Tomorrow you carry water.”
He walks away along the wall, a thin gray figure against the stars.
I watch him go.
Then I turn back to the road, and the torches, and the long dark country beyond them.
Somewhere in that darkness, beyond the ridge and the river and the endless winter fields, are the white walls, and the King, and the thing that wears a crane’s face.
You are going to lose, says the voice.
It is not spiteful.
It says it almost sadly.
You know that.
Whatever they teach you.
In the end, you will need me.
I put my hand on the cold stone of the wall.
“Maybe,” I say.
I breathe in.
Four counts.
Down below, the torches wait.
Behind me, in the grove, two hundred and eleven bells lie mouth-up in the earth, and one more beside a woman who taught me to hold.
I have been losing for nineteen years, I think.
I am getting good at it.
It is not a boast.
It is not even a hope.
It is only where I begin.
End of Chapter Five