Shadows on the Moon (15 page)

I crawled back around the hedge until I came to the stand of trees that hid the kitchen. I ran along behind them and came out at the edge of one of the ornamental pools. There, a vast and ancient weeping willow bent down to the water. It was a safe distance from everyone else and the view was good. Better, the long trailing branches of the willow provided excellent cover, so I would not have to concentrate on holding an illusion over myself as well, as long as I kept behind the trunk.

I made a weaving anyway, carefully tweaking and pulling at my normal shadow-cloak until I felt it become green and fluttering like leaves, with a long edge that was dark and rough like bark. I held it in the back of my mind, ready in case of emergency.

With a click, the sliding door on the veranda moved back.

Terayama-san stepped out.

My hands became fists. My lips peeled back over my teeth. More than anything — more than anything I had ever wanted in the world — I wanted to hurt him.

But I could not. I could not harm a single strand of his hair. I could not even draw his attention. I had promised Youta.

I leaned against the tree, panting and shaking.

After a moment, I peeked out again and found that Terayama-san was standing close to me now, at the opposite end of the path from the targets. I forced myself to examine him with some semblance of calm and noticed that he wore the traditional
ky-ujutsu
costume: a gray
keiko-gi
top with short sleeves that would not impede shooting and the
hakama,
loose trousers. I had never seen him wear anything so plain. It suited him. He looked strong, honest, and capable.

This was the Terayama-san that my mother loved.

More people began streaming through the door onto the veranda. High-ranking men dressed in the sort of rich clothes that Terayama-san normally wore. After them came the foreigners.

It
was
the men from the ship. Their behavior was so different from those around them that everyone was staring. They swung their arms as they walked, shrugged their shoulders, waggled their eyebrows when they talked. Smiles flashed across their faces like the moon striking through ragged clouds on a windy night. They seemed like giants, standing there next to Terayama-san’s friends and servants. The shortest of them was actually no taller than Terayama-san himself, but their broad shoulders and powerfully muscled limbs, accentuated by their simple attire, made them look twice as big.

The foreigners wore leather breeches and loose tunics that were bound at the waist with lengths of embroidered cloth. They also sported an astonishing amount of gold. Rings, bracelets, nose and ear piercings. Closer to them now than I had been on the ship, I was able to count eight earrings marching up the curve of one man’s ear. The bottom one was a dangling pear shape made of amber. Most had thin gold collars at their necks, the metal formed into fine strands and braided.

Not one of them carried a bow, wore a glove, or displayed any other sign of the archer. It seemed that Chika-san had been wrong. There was no contest to be held here today. Something else was going on. And the boy — my boy — was not among them.

There was a pang in my chest. I breathed out sharply.

Terayama-san bowed deeply to his foreign guests. They bowed back just as deeply, but somehow I felt that they found the ritual amusing. Despite Terayama-san’s smile, I did not think he shared their amusement. Something had nettled him.

He motioned his friends and the servants to silence, and I wondered why he had not ordered the servants away yet.

“Here we gather, friends and honored guests,” he said. “We were speaking of archery, and we have disagreed on the subject. It will give me great pleasure to demonstrate to you
ky-ujutsu
— or as some are calling it now,
ky-ud-o
— the Way of the Bow. I intend to prove to you that this is, indeed, an art.
Ky-ud-o
is based upon the three principles that all disciples must attempt to attain: truth, goodness, and beauty.”

My fingers tightened on the harsh bark of the willow until they went numb. I remembered my father and Terayama-san standing together in the
ky-udojo
in my old home, laughing because neither of them could beat the other. They had had the same teacher, had practiced together all their lives, and their skill and technique were equal.

Terayama-san had said that he was sure my father could beat him, if only he had the ambition. He had seemed frustrated that Father would only exert himself to a draw. Father had said that Terayama-san had enough ambition for the both of them. He had never realized how true that was.

Terayama-san was made of avarice and desire and covetousness. What he wanted he must have, no matter how low he sank to gain it. There was no place for truth, goodness, or beauty anywhere that he was.

That was what this so-called contest was about. That was why it was taking place out here in the open: for though the house had a perfectly good
ky-udojo
of its own, it was so small that only Terayama-san and his foreign guests would be able to watch the demonstration, and Terayama-san wanted witnesses, lots of them, even servants. He wanted to win against the foreigners, defeat them, and prove it to everyone.

Terayama-san spoke again, gravely. “For a master of
ky-ujutsu,
there is only one target. The one within our own spirit. Some have called me a master of this art, but I will leave it to you, honored guests, to judge.”

The dark-skinned men nodded respectfully, and I felt sorry for them. Terayama-san held out his hand. It was clad in a
yotsugake,
an archer’s glove that covered all but one of his fingers. A servant came forward to hand him his
yumi.
The bamboo bow was taller than Terayama-san, with a slight recurve to the bottom third of its length. The servant had already strung the bow for him. My father would have frowned at him for that. He had said that a man who cannot string his own bow is not fit to shoot it.

Terayama-san already had three arrows thrust into the back of his obi. Now he reached back with his free hand and carefully pulled one out. It was longer than the full reach of his arm.

Still holding the bow above his head, he nocked the arrow to the string. He slowly drew the string taut, bringing the bow down in the same measured movement so that the arrow lay next to his eye. He sighted and released.

The arrow hit the target dead center. Terayama-san drew the next arrow from his obi. Again the arrow thudded home at the precise center of the target. There was a low murmur of admiration and pleasure from his friends.

Terayama-san drew the last arrow from his obi and held it in his hand. “From the moment that I lay my hand upon my bow, I must know that the arrow is already in flight. When I touch my arrow, I must know that it has already hit the target.”

He closed his eyes. Keeping them closed, he went through the movements of nocking the arrow and drawing the bow. He stood still, blind, waiting. I could see most of the people around him holding their breath.

Terayama-san loosed the arrow.

It hit the target in exactly the same place as the others.

The foreign visitors began clapping their hands noisily. Terayama-san opened his eyes and smiled. Then his friends stepped forward to congratulate him.

“Do you see now, A Suda-sama? Do you understand that this is an art?”

“Oh, yes,” said one of the foreign men. He stepped forward, reaching out. Terayama-san seemed to expect this. He switched his
yumi
to his left hand and allowed the man he had called A Suda-sama to clasp his forearm.

“Then I have changed your mind?”

The foreign man released Terayama-san’s arm and made an odd gesture, lifting both hands and laughing. The painted scars on his face were in straight lines across his cheeks, like a cat’s whiskers, and his laughter made them move as whiskers do when a cat yawns or snarls.

One of the female servants made a frightened noise, and it struck me with a deeper awareness than it ever had before that what Youta had said was true. The servants here in Terayama-san’s house had swathed their own minds in so many layers of illusion that they were incapable of seeing these foreign men clearly. They did not see the friendliness, the relaxed confidence, the life and joy that glowed around them, like sunlight reflecting from polished jet. Those serving girls, and probably everyone else there, thought the foreigners were ugly.

To me, they were the most beautiful men I had ever seen.

“I am afraid my mind is not changed, Terayama-san,” A Suda-sama was saying regretfully. “I cannot deny that you have made archery into an art here in your garden. This does not change the essential nature of the thing. Archery is what we call
gan a hamat a hana.
A skill of killing, a way of death. It cannot be beautiful.”

“I do not understand you, A Suda-san. You have said to me that your young people, even your young women, are trained to use a sword and bow. How can you call archery evil if you teach it to your children?”

“I do not say it is evil. I say it is not art. It is a necessity.” A Suda-san shrugged. “We are a peaceful people and we abhor killing, but our lands are rich, and we must be able to defend ourselves. Our sons and daughters fight and hunt, and we honor them for it — but because we know what they endure to fulfill their duty, not because the hunting and killing are glorious things in themselves. To kill is to destroy, and destruction brings despair. That is why our people do not eat the flesh of domesticated animals. If we hunt wild animals, we give them a fair chance to escape, and in taking down a stag or a boar, we know we risk our own lives, too. To destroy a tame animal that does not even know it may run and that trusts the hand that spills its blood is sickening to us, as is all death.”

The man spoke so passionately in his deep, accented voice, I could see that everyone listening had been unwillingly touched by what he had said, and their instinctive resistance made them resentful of him.

“Our greatest warriors,” Terayama-san said, “believe that they are already dead. They live as if their lives are over, and so fighting holds no terror for them.”

A Suda-san looked gravely at him. “That, Terayama-san, is one of the saddest things I have ever heard.”

“I hesitate to disagree with such an honored guest, but it occurs to me that with such sentiments ruling their training, your warriors may struggle to defend your prosperous land. Should they ever need to.”

A Suda-san blinked slowly, his dark eyes glinting. When he smiled, he again reminded me of a cat, but a rather less friendly one this time.

“You have been kind enough to provide a demonstration of
ky-ujutsu
for me and my countrymen today. Perhaps you would be interested in a demonstration of the way we train our archers.”

“
You
will shoot against me?” Terayama-san asked, surprised.

“Oh, no, no. I did not bring any weapons to your house. I did not think I would need them. Luckily, there is one among us who is still in training and so needed to carry his bow with him to practice.”

“In training? Do you mean —?” Terayama-san broke off as someone new stepped out onto the veranda.

It was my boy.

The boy who had saved me.

Only it did not seem right to call him a boy anymore. He had grown. He was nearly as tall as Terayama-san now, if not as broad. He wore the same leather breeches as his fellows but had stripped to the waist, displaying long, wiry muscles that flexed and bunched smoothly as he stepped down from the veranda to the grass. His long hair in its thin ropes was gathered into a horsetail on the back of his head and was free of the golden ornaments his countrymen wore. In fact he had on no jewelry, save for a long leather thong around his neck that bore a piece of some fine white stuff, bone or ivory perhaps, carved into the shape of a crescent moon. The pendant hung just beneath his breastbone.

Then he stepped out of the shadow of the house and I — along with everyone else in the garden — gasped. The boy’s back was . . . marked. Like his face. The scars glowed against the skin, a deep, almost iridescent blue. The dots and lines curved and swirled, like storm clouds or the sea. His left arm to his elbow was also thickly covered in the marks, as was his left shoulder. The pattern ended in a single, delicate tendril that curled around the top of his right hip, as if it were beckoning. Only his right arm was bare.

I had heard somewhere that criminals wore tattoos to identify themselves to others of their kind, but I knew instinctively that these marks were different. They meant something not frightening or bad, but important.

“My son, Otieno,” A Suda-sama said. “He is just seventeen, so please excuse his technique. He still has much to learn.”

Terayama-san looked at the younger, slighter man and nodded affably. I wondered if anyone else could see the suppressed smugness there. “Of course. None of us would expect perfection from such a young person.”

And the boy — Otieno — smiled. My breath stopped at the glory of it. It was a fearless, reckless grin. Not the expression of a boy who knows his mistakes will be forgiven but of a man who has a healthy interest in winning, and every expectation of doing so.