Dai-San - 03 (14 page)

He withdrew his blade in time to parry the thrust from the first man.

In the periphery of his vision, Ronin had the briefest glimpse of Okami’s long curving blade, a platinum blur, disemboweling one of his foes with a blow of enormous power and speed.

Ronin’s remaining foe feinted twice and chopped at him. Their weapons shuddered with the force of the electric contact as he countered. He felt the longer blade slip from his and withdrew his extended right leg as the man sought to cripple him with a new downward sweep.

As they circled each other, Ronin felt respect for his opponent’s combat skills. The man was obviously a professional, his ability and knowledge would have exceeded those of most Bladesmen from the Freehold.

Fierce blue sparks flew from the crashing of their blades as they fought across the gorge, skirting the verge of the bubbling pool.

Ronin extended his leg again for a swift lunge. His foe angled his blade, anticipating the attack, and Ronin swept in high instead of low, a powerful vertical strike which left him exposed for a fraction of an instant. But the other had only enough time for his eyes to open wide, registering shock, before his skull was split open like a fruit. His sword arm, responding to galvanic action, continued its sweep and Ronin stepped aside. The body toppled into the pool and Ronin whirled.

Okami had just dispatched the second man with an economic reverse thrust as the man ran at his exposed back. Now he confronted the leader of the group. Okami yelled, forcing the other man back until he was stopped by the rocks at the rear of the gorge. Desperately, the man sought an avenue past Okami’s guard, to his neck, but with a fierce surge of strength, Okami broke through first. His curving blade was a white blur as it drove deep into his foe’s shoulder and chest. The man jerked, his head thrown back. Only the whites of his eyes showed as the body danced in death.

Okami turned, bowed to Ronin.

‘Well, it seems as if this small respite from the toils of our journey has been most beneficial.’

He wiped his long blade on the dead man’s robe and, slowly, sheathed his weapon.

‘I do not like it.’

‘Why not?’

‘It is clumsy compared to yours.’

The Kisokaido had become a steeper road, the rocks crowding out for a time the lushness of the jade foliage. Yet even these grays and blues seemed austere rather than bleak. Already Okami’s paintings had taught him that.

‘Please, Ronin, do not attempt to compare those things which have separate lives.’

‘But I do not—’

‘It is advice only. Compare, by all means. But I tell you this now: you will never be happy with it.’

‘I am not satisfied.’

‘Good!’ Okami clapped his hands. ‘An artist is never satisfied—’

‘But you just said—’

‘Happiness and satisfaction are two very different feelings.’

They sat just outside the wooden overhang of a white station high up within the mountains. It was chilly and a thin covering of crisp snow shimmered white and blue across the highway. It was virgin save for their footprints and those of Okami’s mare.

‘Look here, Okami—’ He indicated a point on the sheet of mulberry paper in his lap.

‘Yes, and so—?’

‘The trees are too squat and here the copse is bunched up.’

‘Change them then.’

‘All right. Uhm. How is that? Better?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Well.’ He paused, studying it. ‘Yes. I like it better.’

‘There, you see? You have it.’

He smelled the sharp fragrance of the fire they had lit in the interior of the shelter, within the stone hearth.

The sun was sinking, a flat red oblate, magnified and distorted by the haze near the horizon, almost directly in front of their eyes. A towering, snowcapped peak shimmered pink and mauve in the lowering light. A man and two women in wide-brimmed sedge hats and wooden sandals walked beside a laden cart pulled by a lone ox. They came down the mountain path, passed the pair, and disappeared around a turning to the far left.

‘We teach ourselves, we who can paint,’ said Okami, after a time. ‘We begin to explore what we see before us, each to our own precepts. Trust no one who would claim to teach you that.’ He pulled at the lobe of one ear. ‘Oh, the mechanics can be taught. I have already showed you how to hold the brush in order to get the strokes you desire. But’—he shrugged lightly—‘who knows? You may find a better way of getting what you want from the brush.’ He stared at the darkling mountain peak jutting through the horizontal landscape. ‘Painting, as with all great endeavors, comes from the soul of man. Each individual. None other may teach that thing which makes art unique.’

Ronin’s right hand ceased its movements across the sheet of paper. He looked at the other.

‘You paint and fight.’

Okami nodded. ‘All Bujun must learn delicacy and compassion as well as fierceness and precision. Naturally, it has always been easier to acquire the latter qualities. One must work most diligently to learn the former.’ A line of black ants crossed the ground between them, carrying bits of food twice their own length. ‘I myself had a choice. We all do of course because the Bujun have long understood that, in some things, at least, authority does not engender discipline.’ The ants began to disappear, one by one, into their hill. ‘Dancing was not the way for me, neither the Noh, and I confess to being a rather poor poet—’

‘But painting—’

‘Yes, that is something in which I show some little expertise.’

‘As you do with your sword.’

‘So.’

‘Have you been down the Kisokaido before?’ said Ronin, turning a page, smoothing the new, blank sheet of mulberry paper.

‘Oh yes, many times.’

‘Then you have bathed in that pool before.’

‘Certainly. It was most refreshing, do you not agree?’ He twisted off a stem of grass, stuck it into the corner of his mouth.

‘I imagine one must be careful, these days, wherever one travels.’

A small smile spread across Okami’s face. ‘Oh, most assuredly, but the prudent traveler soon learns to avoid those places along the highway most frequented by brigands.’

‘Such as the gorge.’

‘You must admit,’ Okami said happily, ‘that each of us now knows the other much better.’

Ronin had to admire the man. Each had shown the other his worth without the embarrassment of prying questions or the wastefulness of a direct confrontation. He recalled the deviousness of his first clash aboard Tuolin’s ship on his way to Sha’angh’sei. Those men, too, has wished to gain the measure of his strengths as a warrior. How crude and unnecessary their actions seemed now.

‘And your shoulder,’ said Ronin, taking up his brush once more.

‘A flesh wound, only.’ Okami sat very still, breathing deeply. ‘And I have had many of those.’

‘I will not forget this.’

Okami nodded.

‘A man never forgets.’

Ronin gestured. Dusk was settling comfortably in.

‘I would paint that peak that we have seen all afternoon.’

‘Yes. I thought you might.’

Ronin dipped the brush into the ink and began to paint.

‘What is its name?’

‘Fujiwara.’ Okami sighed in contentment. ‘“The Friend of Man”.’ For a time, he watched the strokes of his brush in the stranger’s hand, thinking, His name does not fit him. Once, perhaps, but I have a feeling—and are we not taught to feel?—that he has outgrown it now. He sighed again, his keen eyes lifting to the beauty he saw before him. Home. He blinked. This man’s arrival will disturb the tranquility which we have observed for so many years. Change has come again to Ama-no-mori. He shrugged inwardly. Is not change what life is all about?

‘Tomorrow,’ he said quietly, so that his companion would hear yet not be disturbed from his work, ‘we begin our descent into Eido.’

On Ronin’s lap, Fujiwara was born again.

W
AITING, HE STOOD JUST
inside the vermilion and green wooden gate. Above his head, a great oiled paper lantern, lacquered in black angular characters, swung gently from its wire moorings.

He looked out across the wide stone courtyard at the two-story wooden structure, its vermilion walls and sloping roof made more startling as they jutted from the concealment of the stand of cherry trees. On the right, across the courtyard, beyond the main building, rose the layered construct of a pagoda.

The clear chime of bells came to him on the crystalline air.

Men in wide-shouldered robes and wooden sandals strolled in twos and threes toward the vermilion building. Behind them, women in long robes and quilted coats, their heads hidden by oiled paper umbrellas, followed, chatting among themselves.

Plovers clattered against the wind.

They had come down out of the cold clear mountain air at dawn, the highway declining serpentinely, with the sky pink and platinum. Birds fluttered in the early sunshine, calling to each other.

Eido was spread out before them, flat and variegated, sitting astride two rivers, the one, narrow and swift, the other wide, marshy, and sluggish, sprawling across a large plain bordered on its far side by the first gentle slopes of Fujiwara. Beyond them, the steep sides of the mountain itself rose, enormous and majestic against the lightening sky.

Thus they stood for many moments mute, transfixed, despite their exhaustion, their need to bathe, by this view at the southernmost end of the Kisokaido, which, perhaps, transcended all other views in Ama-no-mori.

They went directly to Okami’s home, a flat, elegant house of paper and wood and some stone in a section of the city between the rivers. Lanterns swung from the wooden gate.

‘The garden is behind the house,’ Okami said.

They were met at the door by two women in brown robes, who bowed as they entered, beautiful as flowers, their hair dark and shining, their skin very white. The women undressed them, taking the clothes stiff with dried sweat, whose colors had faded with the layers of dust, and led them to the bath: two square stone tubs, sunken into the slatted wooden boards of the floor. As hot water was poured over them and the women commenced to scrub their bodies, Ronin was once again reminded of the pleasures of Tenchō.

Scrubbed, he floated in the warm water, watching one of the women tend to Okami’s wound, cleaning it carefully, then cauterizing it with a deft flick of her fingers. Afterward, she applied a small bandage.

Okami began to talk rapidly to the second woman, apparently giving her instructions. Ronin stood up and, dripping, reached for a towel. The woman who had mended Okami’s shoulder rubbed him down, then wrapped a clean robe around his body. It was dark blue with the now familiar spoked wheel pattern embroidered in green.

He opened a soji and went out into the garden. The woman glanced at Okami but he made a brief sign to her and she remained inside.

He went through a high stand of whispering bamboo, heard the frogs’ distant croaking. In the heat haze, with the droning of the insects and the whispering of the exquisitely sculpted rows of sighing flowers, pink and gold, saffron and orange, Ronin conjured the extraordinary temple in the heart of Sha’angh’sei; its magnificent garden. He thought of the languid fish, calmly floating in their liquid world, the august tranquility of the old man who sat by the side of the metal urn. The breath of Eternity. Here was the complete peace that seeped through his skin, balming his nerves.

Like coming home, not to birth, but to history.

‘First the Yoshiwara,’ said Okami, pushing away his empty dish. They had dined on fresh raw fish, sweet rice, and spiced tea.

‘And what will we find there?’ Ronin drank the last of his tea.

Okami smiled enigmatically.

‘Not what. Who.’ He stood up from the low polished wood table as the women came in to clear the remnants of the meal. They were as silent as deer. ‘Azuki-iro. Kunshin of the Bujun.’

‘Does he not have a court?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’ Okami went across the room, slid open the paper soji. The late afternoon sun fell obliquely into the room. The green of the garden was tinged with orange and russet. ‘He has a most elaborate castle but, for the most part, he prefers the energy, the breadth of Eido.’ They went out into the burnished light. Billowing white clouds chased each other across the arch of the blue sky, causing myriad shadows to darken the foliage, the stone paths, as they flew across the face of the sun. ‘He enjoys people, you see, more than anything else.’

Cicadas wailed, hard-edged, like copper being beaten.

‘You must try to understand so much about us, Ronin, for we are a most complex people and we baffle those foreigners who have been exposed to us. We are traditionalists, but only in a certain sense, I think. We are not fools.’

They strolled through high groves of fragrant camellias, glowing like ribbons of fire in the sunlight.

‘In our long yesterdays, our rulers were emperors who, so our myths tell us, were descended from the sun itself. But, over time, the emperors’ power weakened, so much so that factions of Bujun warred among themselves for land and wealth and, at last, we saw the emergence of the Sho-gun. The first of these mighty warlords rose up, defeating all the daimyos, consolidating his power, thence ruling Ama-no-mori, leaving the emperor as an impotent figurehead.’ Sunlight flickered in chance patterns across Okami’s wide head, dappling his skin as if he were the subject of a series of paintings. ‘For some time, this worked well for us for we needed the iron discipline the Sho-gun enforced upon us. We grew strong and indomitable.’ They broke cover and for a time, they were without shade. Distant bamboo shivered. There was a constant rustling. ‘But the Sho-gun were, of course, first and foremost great martialists and the Bujun became militant, land hungry; they sought war, victory over their neighboring races.’

They came to the deep pool, a stone octagon stocked with a multitude of fish, large, sleek, and silvery, pink and blue. They sat on the cool stone edge. A gentle breeze brushed their cheeks. Thus the eventual defeat of the Sho-gun was assured. So were born the first of the warrior-mages, for it was a time then when sorcery was tolerated in the world and for many eons the Bujun were isolated and content.