Heart of the Ronin (17 page)

“Did your teacher know your father?”

“Only by reputation. You see, my teacher spent no time among . . . people. He’s not like us.”

“What kind of man is he?”

“He’s not a man at all.” He watched her reaction, dreading what might come. “He’s a tengu.”

“A tengu?”

He nodded, glancing at her, looking for a reaction.

“I’ve never heard of a tengu raising a human child before. Stealing them sometimes. There are many tales of tengu, but I know of no one ever seeing one. But their skill with the sword is well known.”

He breathed a sigh of relief, and his tone brightened. “Tengu don’t like us. Men have moved into territories the tengu once had all to themselves. They are too few to fight us, and their magic is going away, so when the settlements of men come too near, they move away. Sometimes they play tricks on humans because they are angry.”

“How wondrous to be raised by a tengu!” Her eyes flashed. “My own life has been so boring!”

“I knew nothing else, so it didn’t seem very . . . wondrous. He was . . . difficult. I couldn’t pronounce his true name, so he told me to call him Kaa.”
 

* * *

“Again, monkey-face!” Kaa screeched.

The twelve-year-old boy flinched at the sound and attacked with his bokken. The wooden swords clacked together, and Kaa was a gray blur of spindly arms and legs as he leaped to the side, spinning behind the boy to swat him on the backside with the flat of the sword, adding another welt to the reddened, crisscross pattern already there.

The boy’s eyes misted with tears as he spun and threw himself at his master with a flurry of wild blows. Even after a few weeks of practice, he was still clumsy with the sword.

The sword master turned each slash aside with shameful ease. “Striking an enemy is not about the sword, boy! It is about the spirit! Seek the emptiness! You won’t touch me until you do!”

The boy tried to do as Kaa taught him, to reach inside for the timeless void that existed between moments. He had been able to do it a few times, but only when given a chance to prepare. To release himself into that void in the midst of a fight was impossible. He knew that if he moved away from his master to try to settle himself for the release, his master would attack him and destroy the attempt before it began.

Sweat rolled into his eyes and slicked his palms, making the wooden sword slippery, in spite of the cool mountain wind that blew his hair around his face. He did all he could think of to do, throwing himself at Kaa with the strongest blow he could muster with his waning strength.

WHACK!

His hands went numb, and sharp tingling pains rippled up his arms. Kaa’s sharp blow to the spine of the weapon had driven it out of his grip. Before the boy could blink, Kaa landed a sharp blow to his pate. Stars exploded in his vision, then blackness.

The next thing he saw was Kaa’s face leaning over him as he stared up at the sky. Half-bird, half-man, with two forward-set black eyes, a head without ears, covered by a smooth coat of iridescent gray feathers, and a bright crimson beak that made up the lower half of the face. The round, black eyes blinked as they regarded him.

“Perhaps a bit too hard. . . . Good for once that you have a thick skull!” Kaa said.

The ground was rough under his back, the sky above him, bright, the throbbing knob forming on top of his head, painful.

“Enough lessons today!” Kaa stood up and offered Ken’ishi his hand with its long, three-jointed fingers and fine, gray feathers.

The boy took it, and the tengu’s wiry arm jerked him to his feet. Kaa’s laugh came out like a falcon’s screech. “Improvement is good! There is hope for you, monkey-face!”

The boy bowed.

Kaa led the way down the narrow mountain path toward the cave that had been their home since the boy could remember. A rippling shiver traveled up the feathers on tengu’s back. “Winter comes early this year. Tomorrow is wood-chopping day.”

The boy’s attention wandered to the evergreen forest below, undulating with the shape of the underlying mountains, the crystal-blue sky above, frothy with high clouds, and wondered about other people like himself. Kaa always said that other humans were out there, and for that reason had taught him the human tongue. The boy thought about the far-off day when he would rejoin his own people, after completing his education. It was a day he both longed for and feared.

They approached the mouth of the cave, an opening just large enough for the boy to walk upright. He paused, noticing a column of dark smoke in the distance, and pointed.

Kaa turned and followed the boy’s gesture. The boy knew his sensei’s vision was much sharper than his.

Kaa said, “A fire. Several of the houses in that village are burning.”

“There is a village? A village of my own people?”

“Yes.”

“So near. . . .”

“Do not get any ideas. The village is not that close. Perhaps two days of walking.”

The boy’s heart fluttered with excitement. “When can I see them?”

Kaa screeched a laugh again. “So eager! Do not be so quick. Men have too many strange ways. Too many rules. They either try to kill me or prostrate themselves before me. Men are dangerous. Quick to kill what they do not understand or what they dislike. Remember your own family. Their fate proves my wisdom. Before you go back to your own people, you must be able to talk to them, and you must be able to protect yourself from them.”

The boy heard his master’s words, but in his heart did not believe them. “But why? Am I not just like them?”

“Their customs are ridiculous!” Kaa snorted, making a strange whistling sound in his nostrils, shaking his scarlet beak. “I do not understand them, so I cannot teach them to you. Sometimes they screech like monkeys over the silliest of things. They stole the art of swordsmithing from us!”

Ken’ishi had heard this tale before, but he kept silent. He liked Kaa’s stories.

“Men of this land did not always have swords. I remember when the barbarians from across the sea first brought them. The tengu could fight against humans then, even with their sad weapons, because ours were so much better. Then some monkey-brained human smith stole a tengu blade and mimicked its creation. Fighting became much more difficult after that. Bah! We were masters of the blade centuries before men! Your people breed like rats. They look like monkeys and breed like rats! A bunch of monkeys with blades as fine as ours is still a dangerous thing! And bows! What a dishonorable way to fight!”

“Then why do you teach me the bow?”

“You’ll be living among them! If they fight with bows, you must fight with a bow.”

The boy thought about this for a few moments. His teacher always made his distrust and dislike for humans plain. At those times, the boy had felt guilty to be born one. Then something occurred to him for the first time. “If you so dislike humans—”

The tengu interrupted him, “Why did I raise you?” Kaa often finished the boy’s statements for him, almost as if he could read the boy’s mind.

“Well, yes.”

“Because of who your father was. A great swordsman. A great samurai. So famous among your people that even I had heard of him. Most warriors these days concentrate on using bows, but your father was part of a new school among warriors. He was a master of the sword. I am a master of the blade, and the thought of a monkey calling himself a master of the sword made me angry. So I sought him out. I wanted to test his skill. Because he was a man, I expected little from him. I expected to humiliate him, to put him in his place. So I challenged him to a duel. It was a close match, but in the end, he defeated me. I lay on the ground at his feet, at his mercy, wounded. He could have killed me. He did not. Instead, he bowed to me, and thanked me for the chance to prove his skill against a true master.

“My opinion of your race was raised that day. To think that monkeys could come so far in only a few hundred years! But it seems if one monkey rises above the others, the others must drag him down. Your people have a saying, ‘The nail that sticks up must be pounded down.’ When his enemies came for him, I could not save him or your mother. I could only save you. Your father was a man of honor, and a man of true strength. And so will you be, if you listen to what I teach you.”

“When will you give me his sword?”

“When you are ready. Not before. You will use the bokken until that day. Your father’s sword is special.” Kaa paused to smooth some feathers on his breast with his hard crimson beak.

The boy had asked this question before, but he tried again. “Please, will you tell me his name? What is the name of my family?”

“You have no family. Your family was wiped out when you were three. You were reborn into a new life.”

“What is my name?”

“Names have power. You have no name, except Boy, and no power, except what you make for your own. On the day I give you your father’s sword, you can choose your own name. And you must make of that name whatever you can.”
 

* * *

“For a long time,” Ken’ishi said, “I thought about what name I wanted. But I didn’t know any human names. I only knew the names of birds and trees and fish. I thought I would choose the name of a fearsome animal, like ‘Kuma’ or ‘Tora,’ but I never decided on one.

“When Kaa told me the day had finally come, he gave me my father’s sword and sent me to the village a couple of days’ walk from my mountain home. He warned me that the people would think me strange, that they did not like strangers. He told me to be careful, but I was too excited to listen. I was venturing into the world for the first time! I was such a fool.” He touched the small jagged scar on his forehead that traced up and merged with his hairline.

Thirteen

O moon,

Why must you inspire my neighbor to chirp

All night on a flute!

—
Koyo

The young man’s long trek through the mountains toward the village neared its end when he found a footpath winding through the pine forest. The path was too wide to be a game trail, and it pointed in the general direction he believed the village to be. Excitement surged in him, and his heart began to pound. He would see people again! It had been so long.
 

He walked faster through the thick forest. He heard and smelled the village before he saw it. So many strange scents he could not begin to identify, scents that did not exist in the wilderness. He heard voices calling out to one another, but too muffled by the forest to discern the words. He heard the river down the slope, the same river he had fished from and sought for comfort most of his life. He did not know if the river had a name, only that it passed near the mountain where he had lived until two days ago.

Silver Crane hung from his rope belt, banging against his left hip, and his bow and arrows hung from his back beside his traveling pack. With each step, feeling the weight of the steel weapon against his leg, he felt a beat of pride. He had waited for so long, dreamed of these days he was now living. He was free to see the world and to carry his father’s blade. He sometimes feared he must be inside a dream, and that he would wake up to find himself sleeping in the cold, dark cave. The sword’s weight still felt unfamiliar to him, but that would change.

He tried to think about what he would say to the people he found. How would they respond to him? His teacher had told him to be cautious, so he would be cautious, but friendly. He felt like a lost child, coming home.

The forest ended suddenly, and he emerged into the outskirts of the village. The path wended its way along the earthen embankments between rice fields toward the group of perhaps forty houses and buildings straddling the river. He saw a wooden bridge crossing the river among the houses. On the far side of the village, the mountains again heaved up out of the earth to create a deep green wall of pine forest, the trees with their long, naked trunks topped by bushes of green needles, a backdrop for the plain, wooden houses with their thatched roofs and weathered sides.

Then he noticed a man in one of the rice fields beside the path. The man squatted on his haunches, working, so that only his conical straw hat and his shoulders were visible in the sea of green. The bright green rice plants rippled in the breeze, with the kernel heads just beginning to form on the grassy stalks.

The young man walked toward him and stopped on the path perhaps ten paces from him. He said nothing, but watched the farmer. He wanted to speak but did not know what to say. His teacher had little use for even simple greetings.

Then a voice cried out from the village. The farmer’s straw hat jerked up and looked around. The farmer’s eyes fixed upon him, and then almost bulged out of his head. The young man smiled at him. The farmer’s face convulsed with fear, and he said something unintelligible. Two other men and a woman stood on the path, watching, frozen with expectation.

“What did you say?” asked the young man. “I did not understand you.” His teacher had told him that men had many different tongues and often could not understand each other. Now he wondered if he would be able to communicate with these people at all.

The farmer jumped to his feet, turned and ran toward the village as fast as his spindly legs would carry him. The young man could only watch him go. He called out to the villagers, “I’m not going to harm you.” He waved and walked toward them.

When the farmer reached the others, he stopped and turned to watch the young man’s approach. The four villagers watched him, appearing to grow more fearful with each of the young man’s steps.

He stopped. He did not know what to do. He tried smiling wider and showing them that he had no weapons in his hands. This appeared to change nothing in their demeanor.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker of movement. He turned to look, just in time to spot another young man behind an embankment near a rice field, just in time to spot the fist-sized stone as it sailed toward him. The stone struck him squarely in the forehead. A blaze of searing pain, then nothing.