The Harsh Cry of the Heron (3 page)

Shizuka’s next blow
had cut one of the men, and his blood was streaming over the steps and floor.
Shigeko hit the other in the side of the neck, where Gemba had showed her, and,
as he reeled, thrust the stick up between his legs, into his private parts. He
doubled up, vomiting from the pain.

‘Don’t kill them,’
she cried to Shizuka, but the wounded man had fled out into the crowd. The
guards caught up with him but could not save him from the enraged mob.

Shigeko was not so
much shocked by the attack as astonished by its clumsiness, its failure. She
had thought assassins would be more deadly, but when the guards came into the
courtyard to bind the two survivors with ropes and lead them away, she saw
their faces in the lantern light.

‘They are young! Not
much older than I am!’

The girl’s eyes met
hers. She would never forget the look of hatred. It was the first time Shigeko
had fought seriously against people who wanted her dead. She realized how close
she had come to killing, and was both relieved and grateful that she had not
taken the lives of these two young people, so near to her in age.

They are Gosaburo’s
children,’ Takeo said as soon as he set eyes on them. ‘I last saw them when
they were infants, in Matsue.’ Their names were written in the genealogies of
the Kikuta family, added to the records of the Tribe that Shigeru had gathered
before his death. The boy was the second son, Yuzu, the girl Ume. The dead man,
Kunio, was the eldest, one of the lads Takeo had trained with.

It was the first day
of the year. The prisoners had been brought into his presence in one of the
guardrooms within the lowest level of Inuyama castle. They were on their knees
before him, their faces pale with cold, but impassive. They were tied firmly,
arms behind their backs, but he could see that though they were probably hungry
and thirsty they had not been ill-treated. Now he had to decide what to do with
them.

His initial outrage
at the attack on his family had been tempered by the hope that the situation
might be turned to his advantage in some way, that this newest failure, after so
many others, might finally persuade the Kikuta family, who had sentenced him to
death years before, to give up, to make some kind of peace.

I had grown
complacent about them, he thought. I believed myself immune from their attacks:
I had not reckoned on them striking at me through my family.

A new fear seized him
as he remembered his words to Kaede the previous day. He did not think he could
survive her death, her loss; nor could the country.

‘Have they told you
anything?’ he asked Muto Taku. Taku, now in his twenty-sixth year, was the
younger son of Muto Shizuka. His father had been the great warlord, Takeo’s
ally and rival, Arai Daiichi. Taku’s older brother, Zenko, had inherited his
father’s lands in the West, and Takeo would have rewarded Taku in a similar
fashion; but the younger man declined, saying he had no desire for land and
honours. He preferred to work with his mother’s uncle, Kenji, in controlling
the network of spies and informants that Takeo had established through the
Tribe. He had accepted a political marriage with a Tohan girl, whom he was fond
of and who had already given him a son and a daughter. People tended to
underestimate him, which suited him. He took after the Muto family in build and
looks and the Arai in courage and boldness, and generally seemed to find life
an amusing and agreeable experience.

He smiled now as he
replied. ‘Nothing. They refuse to talk. I’m only surprised they’re still alive:
you know how the Kikuta kill themselves by biting off their tongues! Of course,
I have not tried all that hard to persuade them.’

‘I don’t have to
remind you that torture is forbidden in the Three Countries.’

‘Of course not. But
does that apply even to the Kikuta?’

‘It applies to
everyone,’ Takeo said mildly. ‘They are guilty of attempted murder and will be
executed for that eventually. In the meantime they must not be ill-treated. We
will see how much their father wants them back.’

‘Where did they come
from?’ Sonoda Mitsuru inquired.

He was married to
Kaede’s sister Ai, and though his family, the Akita, had been Arai retainers,
he had been persuaded to swear allegiance to the Otori in the general
reconciliation after the earthquake. In return, he and Ai had been given the
domain of Inuyama. ‘Where will you find this Gosaburo?’

‘In the mountains
beyond the Eastern border, I imagine,’ Taku told him, and Takeo saw the girl’s
eyes change shape slightly.

Sonoda said, ‘Then no
negotiations will be possible for a while, for the first snow is expected
within the week.’

‘In spring we will
write to their father,’ Takeo replied. ‘It will do Gosaburo no harm to agonize
over his children’s fate. It might make him more eager to save them. In the
meantime, keep their identity secret and do not allow contact with anyone but
yourselves.’

He addressed Taku. ‘Your
uncle is in the city, is he not?’

‘Yes; he would have
joined us at the temple for the New Year celebrations, but his health is not
good, and the cold night air brings on coughing spasms.’

‘I will call on him
tomorrow. He is at the old house?’

Taku nodded. ‘He
likes the smell of the brewery. He says the air there is easier to breathe.’

‘I imagine the wine
helps too,’ Takeo replied.

‘It is the only
pleasure left to me,’ Muto Kenji said, filling Takeo’s cup and then passing the
flask to him. ‘Ishida tells me I should drink less, that alcohol is bad for the
lung disease, but ...  it cheers me up and helps me sleep.’

Takeo poured the
clear, viscous wine into his old teacher’s cup. ‘Ishida tells me to drink less
too,’ he admitted as they both drank deeply. ‘But for me it dulls the joint
pain. And Ishida himself hardly follows his own advice, so why should we?’

‘We are two old men,’
Kenji said, laughing. ‘Who would have thought, seeing you trying to kill me
seventeen years ago in this house, that we would be sitting here comparing
ailments?’

‘Be thankful we have
both survived so far!’ Takeo replied. He looked around at the finely built
house with its high ceilings, cedar pillars and cypress-wood verandas and
shutters. It was full of memories. ‘This room is a good deal more comfortable
than those wretched closets I was confined in!’

Kenji laughed again. ‘Only
because you kept behaving like some wild animal! The Muto family have always
liked luxury. And now the years of peace, the demand for our products have made
us very wealthy, thanks to you, my dear Lord Otori.’ He raised his cup to
Takeo; they both drank again, then refilled each other’s vessels.

‘I suppose I’ll be
sorry to leave it all. I doubt I’ll see another New Year,’ Kenji admitted. ‘But
you - you know people say you are immortal!’

Takeo laughed. ‘No
one is immortal. Death waits for me as it does for everyone. It is not yet my
time.’

Kenji was one of the
few people who knew everything that Takeo had been told in prophecy, including
the part he kept secret: that he was safe from death except at the hands of his
own son. All the other predictions had come true, after a fashion: five battles
had brought peace to the Three Countries, and Takeo ruled from sea to sea. The devastating
earthquake that put an end to the last battle and wiped out Arai Daiichi’s army
could be described as delivering Heaven’s desire. And no one so far had been able
to kill Takeo, making this last one seem ever more probable.

Takeo shared many
secrets with Kenji, who had been his teacher in Hagi, instructing him in the
ways of the Tribe. It had been with Kenji’s help that Takeo had penetrated Hagi’s
castle and avenged Shigeru’s death. Kenji was a shrewd, cunning man with no
sentimentality but more sense of honour than was usual among the Tribe. He had
no illusions about human nature and saw the worst in people, discerning behind
their noble and high-minded words their self-interest, vanity, folly and greed.
This made him an able envoy and negotiator, and Takeo had come to rely on him.
Kenji had no desires of his own beyond his perennial fondness for wine and the
women of the pleasure districts. He did not seem to care for possessions,
wealth or status. He had dedicated his life to Takeo and sworn to serve him; he
had a particular affection for Lady Otori, whom he admired; great fondness for
his own niece, Shizuka; and a certain respect for her son, Taku, the spymaster;
but since his daughter’s death he had been estranged from his wife, Seiko, who
had died herself a few years earlier, and had no close bonds of either love or
hatred with anyone else.

Since the death of
Arai and the Otori lords sixteen years before, Kenji had worked with slow,
intelligent patience towards Takeo’s goal: to draw all sources and means of
violence into the hands of the government, to curb the power of individual
warriors and the lawlessness of bandit groups. It was Kenji who knew of the
existence of the old secret societies which Takeo had been unaware of - Loyalty
to the Heron, Rage of the White Tiger, Narrow Paths of the Snake - that farmers
and villagers had formed among themselves during the years of anarchy. These
they now used and built on so the people ruled their own affairs at village
level and chose their own leaders to represent them and plead their grievances
in provincial tribunals.

The tribunals were
administered by the warrior class; their less military-minded sons, and
sometimes daughters, were sent to the great schools in Hagi, Yamagata and
Inuyama to study the ethics of service, accounting and economics, history and
the classics. When they returned to their provinces to take up their posts,
they received status and a reasonable income: they were directly answerable to
the elders of each clan, for whom the head of the clan was held responsible;
these heads met frequently with Takeo and Kaede to discuss policy, set tax
rates and maintain the training and equipment of soldiers. Each had to supply a
number of their best men to the central band, half army, half police force, who
dealt with bandits and other criminals.

Kenji took to all
this administration with skill, saying it was not unlike the ancient hierarchy
of the Tribe - and indeed many of the Tribe’s networks now came under Takeo’s
rule, but there were three essential differences: the use of torture was
banned, and the crimes of assassination and taking bribes were made punishable
by death. This last proved the hardest to enforce among the Tribe, and with
their usual cunning they found ways to circumvent it, but they did not dare
deal in large sums of money or flaunt their wealth, and as Takeo’s
determination to eradicate corruption became harder and more clearly understood
even this small-scale bribery dwindled. Another practice took its place, since
men are only human: that of exchanging gifts of beauty and taste, of hidden
value, which in turn led to the encouragement of craftsmen and artists, who
flocked to the Three Countries not only from the Eight Islands but from the
countries of the mainland, Silla, Shin and Tenjiku.

After the earthquake
ended the civil war in the Three Countries, the heads of the surviving families
and clans met in Inuyama and accepted Otori Takeo as their leader and overlord.
All blood feuds against him or against each other were declared over, and there
were many moving scenes as warriors were reconciled to each other after decades
of enmity. But both Takeo and Kenji knew that warriors were born to fight: the
problem was, against whom were they now to fight? And if they were not fighting,
how were they to be kept occupied?

Some maintained the
borders on the East, but there was little action and their main enemy was
boredom; some accompanied Terada Fumio and Dr Ishida on their voyages of
exploration, protecting the merchants’ ships at sea and their shops and godowns
in distant ports; some pursued the challenges Takeo established in
swordsmanship and archery, competing in single combat with each other; and some
were chosen to follow the supreme path of combat: the mastery of self, the Way
of the Houou.

Based at the temple
at Terayama, the spiritual centre of the Three Countries, and led by the
ancient abbot, Matsuda Shingen, and Kubo Makoto, this was a mountain sect, an
esoteric religion whose discipline and teachings could only be followed by men
- and women - of great physical and mental strength. The talents of the Tribe
were innate - the powerful vision and hearing, invisibility, the use of the
second self - but most men had within them untapped abilities, and the
discovery and refinement of these were the work of the sect, who called
themselves the Way of the Houou after the sacred bird that dwelt deep in the
forests around Terayama.

The first vow these
chosen warriors had to make was to kill no living thing, neither mosquito nor
moth nor man, even to defend their own life. Kenji thought it madness,
recalling all too clearly the many times he had thrust knife into artery or
heart, had twisted the garrotte, had slipped poison into a cup or bowl or even
into an open sleeping mouth. How many? He had lost count. He did not feel
remorse for those he had dispatched into the next life - all men had to die
sooner or later - but he recognized the courage it took to face the world
unarmed, and saw that the decision not to kill might be far harder than the
decision to kill. He was not immune to the peace and spiritual strength of
Terayama. Lately his greatest pleasure was to accompany Takeo there and spend
time with Matsuda and Makoto.