I leave the temple on the fourth morning after the burial, in a cold thin light that smells of snowmelt.
They come to the gate to see me off, all of them, which is more than I expected.
Haru stands with her arms folded and her one ear pink with cold.
Sen has tucked a pair of throwing knives into my belt without a word, and when I look at her she only shrugs and says, “You’ll lose the first one.
It’s easier if there are two.” Jiro presses a coil of bowstring into my hand and steps away before I can thank him.
Mitsu sits on the step with his face turned toward the road, listening.
Tenkai does not say much.
He hands me a small bronze bell on a length of cord, no bigger than a plum, its lip cracked in a long clean line.
It is the bell he used on me in the courtyard.
It makes no sound.
“When you need to remember the room,” he says, “hold it.”
“And if I need to ring?”
“You will not need the bell for that.” A dry twist of his mouth.
“It is only a hand to hold.
Everyone wants one, at the end.”
I hang it around my neck.
It lies against my breastbone, cold, and after a moment it seems to warm.
Ryo has not left Daigo’s side since the rescue.
He stands a little behind the old man now, his swollen face healing into a wide purple map, the wooden sword still tight in his fist.
The gap in his teeth whistles when he breathes.
“I’m going to stay,” he says.
“I know.”
“Master Tenkai said I could.
He said—” He swallows.
“He said there’s no such thing as a child too small to learn to fall.”
“He’s right.”
“I’m going to be better than you.”
“You already are.”
He stares at me.
Then, to my horror, he begins to cry, furiously, with his chin thrust out, and I do not know what to do, so I put my hand on the top of his head and leave it there.
“Idiot,” says Daigo, gruffly.
He has not cried.
He has only sat down on the temple step and put his one dead eye toward the sun, as if it might see something.
“Come here.”
I come.
“I never told you about your mother.”
I go very still.
“I was there, you know.
At the end.
Not in the house.
I was too late, and I do not forgive myself for it.” His voice is rough.
“But I knew her.
Kinsie.
She could not swing a sword to save her life.
She held one like a soup ladle.
Your father used to laugh himself sick.” A faint, cracked smile.
“But she sang.
That was her gift.
She had a voice like water over stones.
When the men fought in the tavern, she would stand in the door and sing one line, and they would put down their cups.”
“What did she sing?”
“I don’t remember.” He closes his eye.
“That is the shame of it.
I have forgotten every word.”
I sit beside him for a moment on the cold stone.
Neither of us speaks.
Then he says, without turning: “Go and finish it.
And when you have, come home.
I will keep your bed.”
It is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.
I nod, because I cannot speak, and I get up, and I walk down the road.
I do not look back.
I have learned that lesson.
But I hear it all the way down the mountain, faint and far and unmistakable, from somewhere above the gate:
A bell, ringing once, softly, for someone who is still alive.
Nobody warns you how large the country is.
I have lived my whole life in a valley the width of a morning’s walk.
I did not understand that the world goes on and on.
For eleven days I follow the great eastern road, down out of the mountains and across the flat gray plain, and every day the land grows richer and stranger.
The paddies widen.
The villages thicken.
The roads are wide and well drained and lined with pollarded willows.
There are inns.
There are ferries.
There is a stone marker at every league with a number on it and, below the number, the painted crane.
And everywhere, on every hedge and gatepost and shrine wall, the King’s notices.
They are all the same.
White silk, black ink, the flat square hand of a court clerk.
By order of the King and the blood of the royal house.
Rice quotas.
Levies on wells.
Curfews.
Registers of names.
I stop reading them after the second day.
I know what they are.
They are the paper skin of the great machine, and each one is a small hungry mouth.
I walk in a straw hat with my sword wrapped in my father’s old cloth, and nobody looks at me twice.
That is the strangest part.
In Ashigawa I was a joke, and at the temple I was a weapon, and on this road, among the carts and the peddlers and the tired plodding farmers, I am nothing at all.
A young man with sore feet.
I like it more than I want to admit.
You are enjoying yourself, says the voice.
“A little.”
I approve.
There is a smile in it.
It is a very pleasant road.
We have found a manner of speaking, the two of us, since the cavern.
It is not friendship.
I do not think it will ever be that.
But it is no longer war.
It talks when it has something to say, and it falls silent when I ask, and sometimes, in the long empty stretches between villages, it asks questions.
What is that?
“A rice cake.”
Why is it wrapped in a leaf?
“To keep it from drying out.”
How do they make the leaf so flat?
“I don’t know.”
I would like to know.
I shake my head, and I smile, and I buy another rice cake from a peddler and unwrap the leaf slowly so that it can look.
I have not felt this light in a very long time.
I should have known it would not last.
On the eleventh evening, I come to a village called Nagare, and I smell it before I see it.
Not smoke.
Not blood.
Something else, thin and bright and wrong, like the air after lightning.
It comes up the road on the wind and lodges in the back of my throat, and it makes the hair stand along my arms, and it makes the bell against my chest go suddenly, achingly cold.
Shigen, says the voice.
It is not shy now.
It is a different thing entirely.
Shigen.
Do you hear that?
I stop.
At first I do not.
Then, in the still dusk, I hear it: very faint, very sweet, drifting across the fields from the direction of the village.
A chime.
A single clear bright note, like a struck cup of water.
Then another.
Then another.
It is the first ringing bell I have heard in a month.
I leave the road.
I go down into the ditch and up the far side, through a stand of dead reeds, and I lie on my belly on the ridge of a paddy dike with my chin on my hands.
Below me, in a hollow, lit by torches, is a village.
Thirty huts.
A well.
A small shrine.
And in the yard in front of the shrine, in a wide ring of black-clad men, the King’s tithe is being taken.
I will tell it plainly, because I have promised myself I will not turn away from anything the crane has done.
They have gathered the village in the yard.
All of them.
Two hundred people, perhaps, in the torchlight, standing in ragged lines with their heads down and their children held tight against their legs.
Nobody speaks.
There are perhaps forty guards standing around the edges, spears grounded, faces blank as boards.
Among them, at intervals, I can see the marked, by their stillness.
They do not slouch.
They do not look about.
They watch the crowd with the flat patient eyes of dogs at a gate.
At the head of the yard, on the steps of the shrine, stands a man in white.
He is not a guard.
He wears a long robe of undyed silk, wound at the waist with a white cord, and on his head a high black cap.
His face is thin and clean-shaven and quite calm.
In his left hand he carries a small bronze bell on a stick.
In his right, a pale clay jar, no larger than a man’s head, with a strip of paper pasted across its mouth.
Beside him, on a low cart drawn by two oxen, are more jars.
Twenty.
Thirty.
Rows of them, each sealed with a paper charm, packed in straw.
“By order of the King,” the man in white says.
His voice is soft and cultured and carries with perfect clarity.
“The village of Nagare is in arrears.
The count has been taken.
Those who cannot labor will come forward.”
Nobody moves.
“Come,” he says, gently.
“It will not hurt.
It is an honor.
The King remembers his loyal subjects.”
An old woman steps out of the line.
She is very small, very bent, leaning on a stick.
She does not look at the man.
She walks slowly across the frozen mud toward the steps, and behind her, a younger woman cries out, “Mother—” and is caught by two men and held.
The old woman reaches the steps.
She stops.
The man in white lifts the bell.
I feel it in my molars.
I feel it in the bones of my face.
It is the exact inverse of the sound at the temple, that soundless pressure.
This is a sound made to be heard, a note so pure and welcoming that it makes my eyes sting.
The old woman closes her eyes.
And something leaves her.
I see it.
I do not know how.
It is not smoke.
It is not light.
It is a kind of ripple in the air above her, faint and pale, shaped a little like a small hunched figure, and it lifts out of her mouth in a slow thin stream and drifts toward the mouth of the clay jar.
The man in white holds the jar up to catch it.
The paper across its mouth trembles, lifts, and settles.
The old woman falls.
She falls the way a sack of grain falls, all at once, with no sound.
Her stick rolls away across the mud.
Nobody moves to touch her.
Nobody even breathes.
“Next,” says the man in white.
I do not know how many there are.
Thirty?
Forty?
The old, first.
Then the crippled.
Then a boy with a twisted leg, no more than ten, whose mother screams until the guards strike her across the mouth and she goes limp.
Each time the bell rings.
Each time the pale figure lifts out of the still body, and streams into the jar.
And each time the man in white stoppers it with a fresh strip of paper and sets it carefully in the straw of the cart with a small, tender, almost loving movement, like a farmer laying eggs in a basket.
I cannot look.
I cannot stop looking.
They are not dead, says the voice.
It is very quiet.
Not yet.
Not in the way you mean.
They are only—held.
“Held?”
Yes.
It hesitates.
Do you feel it?
The tug?
They are calling out.
Every one.
Inside the jars.
They are so frightened, Shigen.
I press my forehead against the cold clay of the dike.
Hisui said it.
I did not fully understand.
Every village culled, every dead body emptied of its spirit.
I had thought of it as a metaphor.
A way of speaking.
I had thought the souls were something the crane consumed, like meat, and that the consuming was over quickly.
But they are not consumed.
They are kept.
Corked in pale jars like pickled plums, whimpering, for a journey to the east that takes three weeks.
And at the end of it, somewhere in the white walls, there is a room, and in the room there is a mouth.
I stand up.
I do not decide to.
I only find that I am standing on the top of the dike in the last of the light, with my father’s sword in my hand and the straw hat lying in the mud behind me, and the whole hollow has turned to look.
“There,” says the man in white, mildly.
He does not seem afraid.
He tilts his head, and the bell in his hand swings once, chiming faintly.
“You are early, boy.
We had heard you were making for the capital, but we did not think it would be so soon.”
“Put down the jar.”
“I do not think that is wise.”
“Put it down.”
“You misunderstand.” The thin face crinkles into something like a smile.
“I am not the King’s soldier.
I am his Keeper.
I serve the tithe.
Every jar in that cart is the spirit of a loyal subject, given willingly, in the King’s service.
It is a sacrament, boy.
A blessing.”
“They didn’t give it.”
“They are the King’s.” He says it with the gentle finality of a man explaining arithmetic.
“Everything in his realm is the King’s.
Their bodies.
Their spirits.
It has always been so.”
Around us, the guards have begun to move.
They are slow at first, uncertain, spears coming up out of the dirt.
Forty of them.
I feel the marked among them stir like wolves, and I feel something else, beneath the noise, something huge and far away and patient, that has just turned its head.
Shigen, says the voice.
Shigen, it can feel you.
The crane.
It is close to these jars.
It is listening.
I breathe in.
I have exactly one chance at this, and I know it.
If I let the ring go too soon, the Keeper will vanish into the crowd.
If I let it go too late, the guards will be on me.
I have never used it twice in one day.
I do not know what it will cost.
But I have promised myself something.
I will not turn away.
Four in.
The first spear comes at my chest.
I go under it.
I put my sword through the man’s belly and out again, and he folds up in the dirt, and I feel the wet heat splash across my knuckles.
Then the whole line is on me, and I fall back across the dike with my father’s blade in a low sweep, and I let it out.
It is worse the second time.
That is the first thing I notice.
The first time, at the camp, it left me like a breath.
This time it tears.
It comes out of my chest in a long hard rip, and the small room inside me shudders, and I feel one wall of it crack.
The marked go down in the yard in a great soft rippling wave, twelve, fourteen, sixteen of them, and their screaming rises into the dusk like a flock of startled birds.
The Keeper does not scream.
He staggers.
The high black cap falls from his head.
The bell drops from his hand and rings, once, on the frozen ground, and the sound is enormously loud in the sudden hush.
But he stays on his feet, one hand pressed to his ear, blood running through his fingers, and his thin calm face has gone gray.
“Ah,” he says.
His voice is thin as a thread.
“So it is true.”
“Stand aside.”
“You are the ringer.” He is looking at me with real wonder.
“The temple has produced one, after all.
Six hundred years.
And to think, we were told it was a legend.”
“Stand aside.”
“No.” He smiles.
It is a ghastly thing.
“But I will tell you what I will do.
I will give you a choice.
You may kill me, and I will die, and the jars will go on to the capital without me, for there are others to carry them.
Or you may—”
He never finishes.
An ordinary guard, an unmarked man, one of the many who are still on their feet, has crept up behind him with a spear.
He does not want the Keeper to talk.
He does not want anyone to talk.
He puts the spear through the Keeper’s back with a short, grunting thrust, and the thin man in white looks down at the point poking out of his chest, and says, in a tone of mild surprise: “Oh.”
Then he falls forward, across the steps of the shrine.
The guard stares at what he has done.
Then he drops the spear and runs.
I do not stop him.
It is over quickly after that.
The marked lie in the yard, twitching.
The guards who are left throw down their spears and flee up the road in a ragged, silent rout.
I do not chase them.
I stand in the blood-slick mud of Nagare with my breath heaving and a hot throb behind my eyes, and I look at the village.
Two hundred people stare back at me.
They are afraid.
I see it in every face.
They have seen the guards fall, and the Keeper die, and the young man on the dike with the black sword, and they do not know whether to fall on their knees or run.
A child begins to cry.
A man in the front row takes one step back and pulls his wife behind him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say.
Nobody answers.
“I’m—” I do not know how to finish.
I look down at my hands, red to the wrist.
“I’m sorry.
I was too late for the ones who—”
“You’re the oni,” says a small clear voice.
A girl has stepped out of the crowd.
She is perhaps eight, thin and dark-eyed, with her hair in two crooked braids.
She is holding the hand of a smaller boy.
Her mother is somewhere behind her, and is trying to pull her back, and she does not seem to notice.
“The oni of the Sanuki,” she says.
“The one who killed the guards.
Everybody says.”
I crouch down, slowly, until I am at her height.
“Not the oni,” I say.
“His son.”
She considers this gravely.
“Is that better?”
“I don’t know.” I try to smile.
“I’m working on it.”
She looks at me for a long time with those grave dark eyes.
Then she turns and points, with one small grubby finger, at the cart.
“What about them?”
I follow her hand.
The jars are still there.
Thirty of them, pale and silent in their straw.
I open the first one at dawn.
I have spent the night on the steps of the shrine, sitting with my back to the wall and the jar in my lap, holding Tenkai’s little bell in my fist.
The village has not slept either.
They have buried the dead, twelve of them, in a long trench behind the well.
They have washed the blood from the yard.
They have brought me food, quietly, and left it on the step, and gone away without a word.
And I have listened to the jars.
It is not a sound.
It is closer to the feeling of a hand on your sleeve.
Thirty small pressures, thirty separate faint pleadings, each one quite distinct.
An old man’s, dry and bewildered.
A boy’s, frightened.
A woman’s, singing very softly to nobody, some cradle song in an old country dialect.
I do not know how to do this.
I have only the room, and the black water, and a hunger to be gentle.
Sit with it, says Hisui, from six hundred years of distance.
Every time.
I put my thumb under the paper charm.
I close my eyes.
And I go down.
The room is not quite as I left it.
One wall has a long dark crack in it, and the black water is lower than it was.
But the figure is still there on the far shore, small and horned and tired, and when I look at it, it lifts one hand and gives me a shy, awkward wave.
You want to open it, it says, in my head.
Yes.
It might be dangerous.
Yes.
I will help.
A pause.
I do not know how.
But I will sit.
I peel back the paper.
There is no sound.
There is no light.
There is only a sort of soft exhalation, like the breath of a sleeper turning over, and something rises out of the jar and hangs in the air over my knees.
It is small, and pale, and shaped a little like an old woman with a bent back.
It does not seem to know where it is.
It’s all right, I say, or think, or feel.
You’re free.
The pale shape turns.
It looks at me, or seems to.
There is no face, only a sort of tender shifting in the air, but I feel it see me.
A great slow astonishment.
And then, very faintly, so faintly I might have imagined it, something like a smile.
It rises.
It goes up, over the shrine roof, over the trees, into the gray shining morning.
It does not rush.
It drifts, like a seed on a breeze, until it is a small pale mote against the sky, and then it is gone.
I do not know where it goes.
I do not think it matters.
I open my eyes.
The whole village is standing in the yard.
They have been standing there, I think, for a long time.
Not a sound.
Nobody moves.
And every face is turned upward, toward the place where the spirit has gone, with the same wide dazed look as the girl on the road.
Behind me, on the step, the little girl lets out her breath in a long soft sigh.
“Again,” she says.
It takes the whole of the day.
Thirty jars.
I do them one at a time, sitting on the step, with the village watching, and each one is different.
A young man who does not want to go.
A grandmother who blesses me before she rises.
A very small child, whose spirit spins twice around the yard before it leaves, laughing.
I weep at that one.
I do not mind who sees.
When the last jar is empty, the sun is going down again.
My hands are shaking.
My mouth tastes of copper, and the small room in my chest is very dim.
I have used, I think, a great deal of whatever it is that Tenkai called the splinter.
“That will do,” says a voice at my shoulder.
It is a woman.
Old, gray-haired, with a scarred face and a straight back.
I have seen her at the edge of the crowd all day.
She is holding the hand of the girl with the crooked braids.
“They will come for this,” she says.
“The King will hear of it.
By the end of the month there will be a company here, and worse than a company.”
“I know.”
“We will not be here.”
I look at her.
“We have been talking, in the village.” Her voice is level.
“Nagare is not much.
It has never been much.
But it has a well, and thirty pairs of hands, and no landlord within three days’ ride.
We are not the first to be culled.
We will not be the last.” She gestures at the empty jars.
“We will go into the hills.
There are places.
There are people who have done it before.
We will hide, and we will wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For you.” She says it simply.
“For whatever you are going to do.”
Something cold and huge settles in my chest.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Then we will wait for that.” She almost smiles.
“Go on, boy.
Go east.
Wherever those carts came from, there will be more.
I would guess that is where you were going.”
“Yes.”
“Then go.”
I stand.
The girl with the braids is looking up at me.
She lets go of the old woman’s hand, and steps forward, and puts something into mine.
It is a small piece of paper.
One of the charms from the jars, torn and creased, still bearing a smear of ink.
It says, in a clerk’s flat square hand: Nagare.
Old woman.
Eleven.
“Eleven?”
“The eleventh,” says the old woman.
“That is the count.
Nagare has given the King eleven of its own this year, before you came.
It is a great many.” Her jaw tightens.
“Keep it.”
“Why?”
“So you don’t forget what the numbers are.”
I fold the charm in my palm.
I put it in my pocket, next to the flint, and the wrapped strip of shawl, and Tenkai’s silent bell.
I leave Nagare at dusk, on the eastern road, with the whole village standing at the gate to watch me go.
Nobody waves.
Nobody speaks.
But as I walk out beneath the torches, one by one, they bow, and the girl with the braids bows lowest of all.
I do not look back.
I have learned that lesson.
That night, in a hollow beside the road, I do not sleep.
I lie on my back and look at the stars, and I count.
Thirty jars.
Eleven thousand, three hundred and six.
Thirty jars is a very small number.
It is nothing.
It is a drop poured onto a parched field, and there are a thousand fields, and the crane is very, very thirsty.
Shigen, says the voice.
“Yes.”
Do you know what you have done?
“Freed thirty.”
Yes.
But also this.
It hesitates.
You have made a hole in the tithe.
It will notice.
It notices everything that is missing.
I close my eyes.
It is looking for you, the voice says gently.
Not the way it looked at the camp.
Closer.
Hungrier.
Like a cat that has smelled a bird.
A long pause.
I am afraid.
“So am I.”
What will you do?
I think about the white walls.
I think about the eleven thousand.
I think about the tiny pale shape drifting up over the shrine roof into the morning, and the girl with the braids saying again.
“I’m going to do it again,” I say.
“Every jar.
Every cart.
Every village on the road between here and the capital.
Every one of them I can reach.” I open my eyes.
“I’m going to starve it.”
The voice is quiet.
Then, softly: That is a very large task.
“Yes.”
It will cost you everything.
“I know.”
Then I will sit with you, it says, for all of it.
Far away, to the east, over the black rim of the world, something pale turns in its sleep.
And on the wind, faint and sweet and terribly clear, from the direction of the capital, I hear a single bell begin to ring.
End of Chapter Nine