Shike by Robert J. Shea (the reading list txt) 📕

As the vast crowd drifted away from the cremation site, leaving the final burial of Hidehira’s ashes to the priests of the Chusonji, Yukio and Jebu walked by themselves towards the mountains to the north.

“They want to free me from care for ever,” Yukio said wryly.

“Yerubutsu has no love for you, but he would not go against his father’s last wish,” said Jebu. His words rang hollow in his own ears.

“The past is the past and the present is the present,” Yukio said, repeating the old samurai saying. “I’m finished, Jebusan. Yerubutsu knows it as well as I do. Hideyori will have my head if he has to knock down these mountains to get to me.”

Jebu thought of his own father, relentlessly tracked down by Genghis Khan’s agent, Arghun, and he felt overwhelmed by a wave of love for the small, frail-looking man beside whom he had fought for over twenty years.

“I will never desert you, Yukio.”

“I will need you at the end, Jebusan.”

It was beginning to snow. Helmets of white formed on the dark boulders that littered the plain. Yukio pulled his thin white cloak tighter around him. They still had a long walk over the stormy ground to the castle they had been given by Lord Hidehira as a refuge. Since Yukio’s arrival in Oshu ten days ago, just before Lord Hidehira’s final illness, Yerubutsu had been promising to furnish Yukio and his party with horses, but the horses never came. Yerubutsu and his family rode away from Hidehira’s funeral, back to Hiraizumi; Jebu and Yukio had to walk. The road they followed had been cleared by an age-old succession of travellers moving rocks and gravel to one side. The path rose into bare, black hills and began to twist and turn. New-fallen snow partly obscured the way. The cold bit Jebu’s toes through his deerskin boots.

“Yerubutsu means to betray me,” said Yukio.

“Then let’s get away from here, Yukio-san.”

Yukio shook his head. “The priests say, live as if you were already dead. I’ve been doing that ever since Hideyori answered my plea for friendship by sending assassins. Where could I fly to? North to Hokkaido, to live among the hairy barbarians? Back to China, to throw myself on the mercy of Kublai Khan? No, Jebu, some ways of living are so wretched that death is clearly better. I’ve lived like a hunted animal most of my life. That was all right when I was young and had hopes of a great future for myself and for the Sunrise Land. Hideyori has closed the door to all hope. I am too old to take up the fight again.”

“You’re only thirty-eight, Yukio-san.”

“For a samurai, that is the beginning of old age. Soon my body will start to fail me. And even now I have an old man’s awareness of how foolish were the visions of my younger self. Men say my victories over the Takashi were brilliant. All I ever achieved with those brilliant victories has been to inflict a far worse tyranny than Sogamori’s upon my country, a tyranny that may well last a thousand years. I fought to restore the glory and authority of the Emperor, and now the Emperor has no more importance than a doll. Somewhere in heaven or in hell Sogamori and Kiyosi are laughing at me. I want to join them and laugh along with them, Jebusan, at the futility of human hope.”

The wind stung Jebu’s face with sharp, bitter-cold particles of ice and snow. “What of your wife and children? If you stay here and fight, they will surely die when you die.” Yukio’s father-in-law had sent Yukio’s family over in a palanquin from his estate. Yukio’s son and daughter had rarely seen their father and had no idea who he was.

“Remember what happened to the women and children of the Takashi?” Yukio said. “I will stay with my wife and babies. I will not abandon them to be buried alive.”

The narrow path climbed the side of a cliff. Half-blinded by the huge white flakes blowing into their faces, they walked single file, Jebu in the lead, one hand on the rock wall. Whenever the wind died down, they could see the yellow, flickering glow of lanterns higher up in the mountains. They came to a cleft that offered shelter and pressed themselves into it to rest.

“You are a warrior without peer, the bravest man and the noblest soul in all the Sunrise Land,” Jebu said. “You ought to be seated in glory at the feet of the Emperor. You, and not Hideyori, that sly, self-deluded coward, should hold the reins of power. The Order taught me to expect nothing from life but a violent death. Even so, I find what is happening to you impossible to understand.”

Long ago some pious traveller had carved deep in the cleft an image of a standing Buddha, his hand raised in blessing. With a smile, Yukio bowed towards the carving.

“If you Zinja believed in karma, as good Buddhists do, you would realize that in a past life I must have done something so evil that my present troubles are only just payment for it.”

“People believe in karma because they can’t find any other idea that makes sense of life,” Jebu said.

“Life does not make sense,” said Yukio, staring impassively into the storm. “The Buddha taught that life is suffering. The Eirst Noble Truth. We suffer because we can’t understand life. Injury and agony fall upon the virtuous and the wicked alike, without rhyme or reason. It is not only I who must fail and die. Hideyori will end in a grave just as surely. In the end life not only defeats us, it even defeats our efforts to understand it. We die as ignorant as when we were born.” Yukio slapped Jebu on the shoulder. “Come on. It would just add to the general senselessness if we froze to death out here.”

They trudged on, kicking up puffs of snow. Now the storm was dying down, and the lanterns above the log wall of the castle were steadily visible. Small though it was, the castle was well placed for defence. It was set on a platform of stone overlooking a deep gorge, and the cliffs behind it were absolutely vertical. The path approaching it was so narrow, it could be defended even by the handful of men Yukio had with him. In the dim past this had been the stronghold of a tribe of barbarians of a race that no longer existed. Later, before the Northern Eujiwara unified the land, a bandit hideaway had occupied this eyrie. Lord Hidehira had known what he was doing when he turned the place over to Yukio just before he fell ill.

Now Yukio and Jebu were close enough to see a figure in a grey fur cloak and hood watching them from the guard tower overlooking the gate. It was Yukio’s wife, Mirusu, who had set the lanterns in the tower to guide them home. Jebu’s feet were numb. His heart felt numb as well. A Zinja, he reminded himself, does not care whether he lives or dies. That was what troubled him. He no longer believed that he should not care. He wanted to die caring.

Three days after Lord Hidehira’s funeral, at the hour of the horse, Jebu was finishing his midday meal of rice and fish when he heard the lookout’s shout from the guard tower. As he ran to the ladder, he saw Yukio in the doorway of the hall where he lived with his family, talking to Mirusu. Yukio’s hall was slightly more decorative than the other buildings in the compound, having walls of rough plaster and a tile roof with upsweeping eaves. It contained a small chapel.

Climbing to the tower, Jebu saw at once a long single file of dark, mounted figures approaching at a leisurely pace up the path from the distant plain.

“I make it about a thousand,” said Jebu when Yukio joined him. Jebu’s heart boomed like a bronze bell in his chest. He had never felt the end of his life to be closer.

“More than enough to finish us,” said Yukio, peering at the line of horsemen that disappeared and reappeared as it wound its way through the hills below the fort. “They’re taller than most samurai and they have a different way of sitting a horse. Mongols, Jebusan.”

Jebu felt a momentary surge of hope. “Could they be coming to join us?”

“They have been riding under Hideyori’s command for the last seven years. He sent them here.”

As the riders came nearer, Jebu saw that midway down the line porters were struggling to carry a heavily curtained palanquin up the steep, snow-covered path. Some high-ranking person was coming to view Yukio’s death. Jebu unslung his small Zinja bow from his shoulder and made ready to fire as soon as the first of the Mongols came close enough, but they halted out of range. Only two kept coming, one holding up a heraldic pennon, both men without spears, bows or sabres.

“By the gracious Kwannon,” Yukio exclaimed. “The one with the flag, that’s Torluk, and the taller one behind him is Arghun.”

By the time the Mongol leaders had reached the fort, Yukio and Jebu were standing, unarmed, before the gate on a small tongue of stone where the path to the fort ended. Arghun had to ride behind Torluk until they tethered their horses to a crooked pine growing out of the cliff wall, and approached on foot. It was seven years since Jebu had seen Arghun, but the tarkhan looked little changed, except that he now wore samurai armour, a large suit with crimson lacings that must have been built specially for him. His face under the golden-horned helmet was sharp and angular as the mountains around them, his eyes as blue and inhumanly expressionless as the Eternal Heaven the Mongols worshipped. His moustache was now entirely grey. Torluk, a compact figure who still wore Mongol heavy cavalry armour, had grown a short, thick grey beard that made him look more barbaric than ever. He glowered at Yukio and Jebu with undisguised hostility.

“Well, tarkhan and tumanbashi, have your years in the_ Sunrise Land been rewarding?” Yukio asked. He spoke the Mongol tongue haltingly and with a heavy accent, not having used it in years. “I hear that two out of every three of your men have fallen in battle. You would have fared better under my command.”

“It was you who placed us under your brother’s authority,” said Torluk sullenly. “He used us ill.”

“As he uses all who serve him,” Yukio said softly.

“Even so, your samurai have learned to speak of the Mongols with dread,” said Torluk.

“You might wish to think so,” Yukio said dryly. “I doubt it.”

“Those of us who lived have gained much wealth,” said Torluk. “This is a poor country compared to China, but there is loot to be gathered.”

“Now you are going back to your homeland?” asked Yukio. “After you perform this last service for Hideyori?”

Eor the first time Arghun spoke, his voice as heavy as the black rock beside him. He answered Yukio in the language of the Sunrise Land, which he used with more fluency than Yukio did Mongol.

“You need not die, Lord Yukio. You could be restored to your former power and glory. You could see your brother lying crushed at your feet. You could be the mightiest man in these islands. The choice is yours.”

“But there is a condition, isn’t there, Arghun?” said Yukio lightly. “You insult me, Arghun. You think I am the sort of man who would betray his country.”

“That is a foolish way to put it,” said Arghun. “Your people will be harmed only if