CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FIRE
“Stay here and watch the horses,” he told Shiro. Shiro opened his mouth to protest, got a good look at Hiroki’s face and shut his mouth again. “Tetsuo, come with me and watch my back. Do not draw your sword.”
“Understood.” Tetsuo’s face had the taut, closed-in look it got when he was preparing for battle against an unseen enemy, and Hiroki didn’t begrudge him the worry in the slightest. Everything about the situation he was propelling them into felt new, different, wrong.
Gripping his staff and using it to support himself, he began to force his way through the crowd.
“I wish I knew how you did this,” Tetsuo muttered as the townspeople melted away from the path Hiroki followed. Some of them looked at his face and their eyebrows shot up in alarm; most just seemed to be pulled away from him by the force of the others around them moving away.
“I’m not doing anything,” Hiroki said over his shoulder. “But I’m not interested in politeness either. These people will get out of my way.”
The teashop, when he was finally able to see it, was little more than a set of blackened stumps poking up from a pile of ash and debris. The shops on either side of it had burned as well, and the buildings adjacent to those were damaged, a little by fire and a lot by the efforts of their owners and neighbours to stop the fire spreading.
When Hiroki reached the teashop itself — or the place it had been — he found the townspeople in a respectful semicircle around the space. Five bodies lay in that semicircle; three were alone but for the gods. Small clusters of townspeople knelt over the other two.
One of those bodies was Katsumi’s. Seeing her, Hiroki tried to refuse the image, shutting his eyes and hoping for physical pain to distract him. For a moment the world behind his eyes was red; at the back of his mind he could hear Shiro’s description of what happened to him when he fought. Then the red went to black. He had prayed, the whole of the journey into the city, that he not be made to see what he was now seeing. Where are the gods? He did not know.
“Sensei?”
Was someone speaking?
He opened his eyes. Tetsuo stared at him, the solid heavy face twisted with worry. “Sensei?” he asked again. “What do you want me to do?” Tetsuo never calls me “teacher”, Hiroki thought. Unless we’re in a lot of trouble—oh.
Then the black lifted, and something broke with it. Hiroki smashed his staff into the ground, no longer trying to keep his anger — his fear — in check. “Who did this?”
“Farmers,” somebody shouted.
“No, idiot, it was Tendai monks from Hiei,” another voice called back.
“They were Hokke,” a third voice said, but in a hesitant, even confused tone. “They said they were….”
“We are Hokke,”said a man who rose from the bloodied body of a young man. “That was an insult.”
Hiroki knew the man: he was Saburo, the proprietor of the teashop and Katsumi’s landlord. The corpse beside him had been his son, who once had fetched dumplings for Hiroki.
“Forgive my intrusion into your grief and your anger,” Hiroki said, acknowledging the man with a brief nod, “but I have to know what happened here.”
“She, at least, still lives,” the proprietor said, looking to where Katsumi lay — and now Hiroki saw that her eyes were open, most of the time, and that she moved her legs under the ministrations of the old woman who, he understood, was tending her wounds. He took a deep breath, the better to force down the urge to scream out the emotions he didn’t dare acknowledge.
“I am glad to know this,” Hiroki said, his voice an unfamiliar stretched thing in his ears. “But who? How?”
“They claimed to be Hokke, from one of the Lotus temples in the city,” the man replied. “One of the temples that isn’t our neighbour,” he added with undisguised contempt. “But they were warriors, and their goal was to kill your woman and my family.” He paused, made a sad-looking gesture toward the body of his son — and then, to Hiroki’s surprise, laughed. “I believe they will not forget the surprise they received, lord. Because Katsumi fought back. And then we all fought back. We have killed three of theirs, you see, to the loss of — of —”
“Your son died a most honourable man,” Hiroki told him, choosing for now to pretend he had not heard the reference to your woman. “It was a death any warrior could be proud of.” The proprietor gave him a look that Hiroki did not understand, and after a moment turned away, shoulders slumped. “I have no trouble imagining their surprise,” Hiroki said, if only to fill the embarrassing silence. Perhaps the man just doesn’t understand about honour, he decided.
“We fight back much more often now than before,” the man said, turning back to face Hiroki. “Since the shōgun can no longer protect us, we must protect ourselves. The invaders certainly did not expect this.”
“I wonder — whose men were they?” Hiroki said. It was ridiculous that there should be so many possible answers to that question. He walked to the nearest invader’s body; whatever armour the man might have been wearing was now gone, as were his weapons. The face was young, thin, unknown. His head rested oddly against the soil of the street, in a pool of darkening blood that Hiroki suspected had been let out when the back of the man’s skull was crushed by something blunt and very heavy.
He had just reached the second body, and looked down on a face he had definitely seen before, when behind him the proprietor said, “I don’t know where they came from, but I have seen their leader before.
“The scar on his forehead is not something you’re like to forget.”
Next Characters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
No comments:
Post a Comment