The Harsh Cry of the Heron (4 page)

The end of his own
life, he knew, was approaching. He was old; his health and strength were
deteriorating: for months now he had been troubled by a weakness in the lungs
and frequently spat blood.

So Takeo had tamed
both Tribe and warriors: only the Kikuta resisted him, not only attempting to
assassinate him but also making frequent attacks from across the borders,
seeking alliances with dissatisfied warriors, committing random murders in the
hope of destabilizing the community, spreading unfounded rumours.

Takeo spoke again,
more seriously. ‘This latest attack has alarmed me more than any other, because
it was against my family, not myself. If my wife or my children were to die, it
would destroy me, and the Three Countries.’

‘I imagine that is
the Kikuta’s aim,’ Kenji said mildly.

‘Will they ever give
up?’

‘Akio never will. His
hatred of you will end only in his death - or yours. He has devoted his entire
adult life to it, after all.’ Kenji’s face became still and his lips twisted
into a bitter expression. He drank again. ‘But Gosaburo is a merchant, and
pragmatic by nature: he must resent losing the house in Matsue and his trade,
and he will dread losing his children - one son dead, the other two in your
hands. We may be able to put some pressure on him.’

‘That was what I
thought. We will keep the two survivors until spring, and then see if their
father is prepared to negotiate.’

‘We’ll probably be
able to extract some useful information from them in the meantime,’ Kenji
grunted.

Takeo looked up at
him over the rim of the cup.

‘All right, all
right, forget I said it,’ the old man grumbled. ‘But you’re a fool not to use
the same methods your enemies use.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll wager you’re still
saving moths from candles too. That softness has never been eradicated.’

Takeo smiled slightly
but did not otherwise react. It was hard to grow out of what he had once been
taught as a child. His upbringing among the Hidden had made him deeply
reluctant to take human life. But from the age of sixteen he had been led by
fate into the way of the warrior: he had become the heir to a great clan and
was now leader of the Three Countries; he had had to learn the way of the
sword. Moreover, the Tribe, Kenji himself, had taught him to kill in many
different ways and had tried to extinguish his natural compassion. In his
struggle to avenge Shigeru’s death and unite the Three Countries in peace he
had committed countless acts of violence, many of which he deeply regretted,
before he had learned to bring ruthlessness and compassion into balance, before
the wealth and stability of the countries and the rule of law gave desirable
alternatives to the blind power conflicts of the clans.

‘I’d like to see the
boy again,’ Kenji said abruptly. ‘It might be my last chance.’ He looked at
Takeo closely. ‘Have you come to any decision about him?’

Takeo shook his head.
‘Only to make no decision. What can I do? Presumably the Muto family - you
yourself - would like to have him back?’

‘Of course. But Akio
told my wife, who was in contact with him before her death, that he would kill
the boy himself rather than give him up, either to the Muto or to you.’

‘Poor lad. What kind
of an upbringing can he have had!’ Takeo exclaimed.

‘Well, the way the
Tribe raise their children is harsh at the best of times,’ Kenji replied.

‘Does he know I am
his father?’

‘That’s one of the
things I can find out.’

‘You are not well
enough for such a mission,’ Takeo said reluctantly, for he could think of no
one else to send.

Kenji grinned. ‘My
ill health is another reason why I should go. If I’m not going to see the year
out anyway, you may as well get some use out of me! And besides, I want to see
my grandson before I die. I’ll go when the thaw comes.’

Wine, regrets and
memories had filled Takeo with emotion. He reached out and embraced his old
teacher.

‘Now, now!’ Kenji
said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You know how I hate displays of sentiment.
Come and see me often through the winter. We will still have a few good
drinking bouts together.’

The boy, Hisao, now
sixteen years old, looked like his dead grandmother. He did not resemble the
man he believed to be his father, Kikuta Akio, nor his true father, whom he had
never seen. He had none of the physical traits of either the Muto family of his
mother or the Kikuta - and, it was becoming increasingly obvious, none of their
magical talents either. His hearing was no more acute than that of anyone of
his age; he could neither use invisibility nor perceive it. His training since
childhood had made him physically strong and agile, but he could not leap and
fly like his father, and the only way he put people to sleep was through sheer
boredom in his company, for he rarely talked, and when he did it was in a slow,
stumbling fashion, with no spark of wit or originality.

Akio was the Master
of the Kikuta, the greatest family of the Tribe, who had retained the skills
and talents that once all men had possessed. Now even among the Tribe those
skills seemed to be disappearing. Hisao had been aware since early childhood of
the disappointment he had caused his father: he had felt all his life the careful
scrutiny of his every action, the hopes, the anger, and always, in the end, the
punishment.

For the Tribe raised
their children in the harshest possible way, training them in complete
obedience, in endurance of extremes of hunger, thirst, heat, cold and pain,
eradicating any signs of human feeling, of sympathy and compassion. Akio was
hardest on his own son, Hisao, his only child, never in public showing him any
understanding or affection, treating him with a cruelty that surprised even his
own relatives. But Akio was the Master of the family, successor to his uncle,
Kotaro, who had been murdered in Hagi by Otori Takeo and Muto Kenji at the time
when the Muto family had broken all the ancient bonds of the Tribe, had
betrayed their own kin and become servants of the Otori. And as Master, Akio
could act as he chose; no one could criticize or disobey him.

Akio had grown into a
bitter and unpredictable man, eaten up by the grief and losses of his life, the
blame for all of which lay with Otori Takeo, now the ruler of the Three
Countries. It was Otori Takeo’s fault that the Tribe had split, that the
legendary and beloved Kotaro had died, and the great wrestler Hajime and many
others, and that the Kikuta were persecuted to the extent that most of them had
left the Three Countries and moved north, leaving behind their lucrative
businesses and moneylending activities to be taken over by the Muto, who
actually paid tax like any ordinary merchant and contributed to the wealth that
made the Three Countries a prosperous and cheerful state where there was little
work for spies, apart from those Takeo himself employed, or assassins.

Kikuta children slept
with their feet towards the West, and greeted each other with the words, ‘Is
Otori dead yet?’ replying, ‘Not yet, but it will soon be done.’

It was said that Akio
had loved his wife, Muto Yuki, desperately, and that her death, as well as
Kotaro’s, was the cause of all his bitterness. It was assumed that she had died
of fever after childbirth: fathers often unfairly blamed the child for the loss
of a beloved wife, though this was the only weaker human emotion Akio ever
displayed. It seemed to Hisao that he had always known the truth: his mother
had died because she had been given poison. He could see the scene clearly, as
though he had witnessed it with his own unfocussed baby eyes. The woman’s
despair and anger, her grief at leaving her child; the man’s implacable command
as he brought about the death of the only woman he had ever loved; her defiance
as she gulped down the pellets of aconite; the uncontrollable wave of regret,
shrieking and sobbing, for she was only twenty years old and leaving her life
long before she was ready; the shuddering pains that racked her; the man’s grim
satisfaction that revenge was partially completed; his embracing of his own
pain, and the dark pleasure it gave him, the beginning of his descent into
evil.

Hisao felt that he
had grown up knowing these things; yet he had forgotten how he had learned
them. Had he dreamed them, or had someone told him? He remembered his mother
more clearly than should have been possible - he had only been days old when
she died - and was aware of a presence at the edge of his conscious mind that
he connected with her. Often he felt she wanted something from him, but he was
afraid of listening to her demands, for that would mean opening himself up to
the world of the dead. Between the ghost’s anger and his own reluctance, his
head seemed to split apart in pain.

So he knew his mother’s
fury and his father’s pain, and it made him both hate Akio and pity him, and
the pity made it all easier to bear: not only the abuse and punishment of the
day, but the tears and caresses of the night, the dark things that happened
between them that he half-dreaded, half-welcomed, for then was the only time
anyone embraced him or seemed to need him.

Hisao told no one of
how the dead woman called to him, so no one knew of this one Tribe gift that he
had inherited, one that had lain dormant for many generations since the days of
the ancient shamans who passed between the worlds, mediating between the living
and the dead. Then, such a gift would have been nurtured and honed and its
possessor feared and respected; but Hisao was generally despised and looked
down upon; he did not know how to tune his gift; the visions from the world of
the dead were hazy and hard to understand: he did not know the esoteric imagery
used to communicate with the dead, or their secret language: there was none
living who could teach him.

He only knew the
ghost was his mother, and she had been murdered.

He liked making
things, and he was fond of animals, though he learned to keep this secret, for
once he had allowed himself to pet a cat only to see his father cut the
yowling, scratching creature’s throat before his eyes. The cat’s spirit also
seemed to enmesh him in its world from time to time, and the frenzied yowling
would grow in intensity in his ears until he could not believe no one else
could hear it. When the other worlds opened to include him, it made his head
ache terribly, and one side of his vision would darken. The only thing that
stilled the pain and noise, and distracted him from the cat, the woman, was
making things with his hands. He fashioned waterwheels and deer scarers from
bamboo in the same way as his unknown great-grandfather, as though the
knowledge had been passed down in his blood. He could carve animals from wood
so lifelike it seemed they had been captured by magic, and he was fascinated by
all aspects of forging: the making of iron and steel, swords, knives and tools.

The Kikuta family had
many skills in forging weapons, especially the secret ones of the Tribe -
throwing knives of various shapes, needles, tiny daggers and so on - but they
did not know how to make the weapon called a firearm that the Otori used and so
jealously guarded. The family were in fact divided over its desirability, some
claiming that it took all the skill and pleasure out of assassination, that it
would not last, that traditional methods were more reliable; others that without
it the Kikuta family would decline and disappear, for even invisibility was no
protection against a bullet, and that the Kikuta, like all those who desired to
overthrow the Otori, had to match them weapon for weapon.

But all their efforts
to obtain firearms had failed. The Otori confined their use to one small body
of men: every firearm in the country was accounted for. If one were lost, its
owner paid with his life. They were rarely used in battle: only once, with
devastating effect, against an attempt by barbarians to set up a trading post
with the help of former pirates on one of the small islands off the southern
coast. Since that time, all barbarians were searched on arrival, their weapons
confiscated and they themselves confined to the trading port of Hofu. But the
reports of the carnage had proved as effective as the weapons themselves: all
their enemies, including the Kikuta, treated the Otori with increased respect
and left them temporarily in peace while making secret efforts to gain firearms
themselves by theft, treachery, or their own invention.

The Otori firearms
were long and cumbersome: quite impractical for the secret assassination
methods on which the Kikuta prided themselves. They could not be con- cealed,
nor drawn and used rapidly; rain rendered them useless. Hisao listened to his
father and the older men talking about these things, and imagined a small,
light weapon, as powerful as a firearm, that could be carried within the breast
of a garment and would make no sound, a weapon that even Otori Takeo would be
powerless against.

Every year some young
man who thought himself invincible, or an older one who wanted to end his life
with honour, set out for one or other of the cities of the Three Countries, lay
in wait on the road for Otori Takeo or crept stealthily at night into the
residence or castle where he slept, hoping to be the one who would end the life
of the murderous traitor and avenge Kikuta Kotaro and all the other members of
the Tribe put to death by the Otori. They never returned: the news came months
later of their capture, so-called trial before Otori’s tribunals, and execution
- for assassination attempted or achieved was one of the few crimes, along with
other forms of murder, taking bribes and losing or selling firearms, punishable
now by death.