The Initiate Brother Duology (43 page)

Stands of pine and cedar scented the breeze. And then the boat rounded a bend to find a whole hillside atremble with ginkyo, leaves turning to copper-gold in the late autumn sun.

Shuyun had never known a place that felt so pure and alive. The very air seemed light and newly created, a sharp contrast to the capital where the air tasted as though it had been too long in too many lungs. Here the air caressed him.

As the day passed, Shuyun began to sense the pattern of Seh, began to discern a deeper design. Seh was a land frozen in the midst of great motion, as though Botahara himself had stopped all movement. And this stillness was balanced by the sense that motion could begin again at any instant.

Hills rolled and folded, and ran their crests off into the far distance, their sun greens turning finally to silhouettes of blue. Field and pasture, irregular
in shape, appeared among the forests and pushed their way up hillsides and along valleys to end abruptly at walls of fall-turning trees.

Here and there, as random as only the earth could be, great fractured blocks of stone pushed through, as though the ruins of some mammoth fortress lay hidden beneath the land. The gray-white stone was layered in thick bands and broken into blocks of enormous proportion as though it were the stone work of a giant race, its mortar worn away through the ages of wind and rain. Moonstone, this was called, and it seemed ancient despite the freshness of the land.

Along the river’s course, cliffs of great scale would suddenly rise up and echo the voices of the water back and forth until men would hear words and even their own names spoken among the tumult.

Shuyun rode the prow of the boat as it plunged down into a steep gorge and he felt as though his heart had been opened and his spirit exposed to beauties so great that he ached with the power of them. Never before had he risked his life; he did not know that many a man who had fought the Hajiwara and scaled the rope ladders into the ancient fane above Denji Gorge felt much as he did now. But unlike Shuyun, most had felt the shock of powerful emotions before. The young monk was alone in his experience, with nothing to compare.

They were swept into the white foam roar of the gorge and boatmen fought their steering oars to stop the barge from making a fatal broach. The tiny, pure white tinga gulls screeched their high notes and knifed into the whirlpools and crests as though they had made a pact with a river god to allow them passage.

The rushing of the water became deafening and the speed of its flow truly frightening when, with a sudden final drop, the boat shot out onto a lake as clear as air and as tranquil as an enlightened soul.

Seh, Shuyun thought. I have been swept up and carried by the great river into the far reaches of the north, borne on waves of cloud, and tossed out onto the still surface of a great mirror. Seh, where my liege-lord has come to wage a war that he can never name, for it is not the barbarians we have come to challenge. Seh, where I become the Imperial Governor’s Advisor and bring honor to my teachers or shame to my Order.

The monk looked down into the waters and it was as if he looked into the infinite depths of the sky. Illusion he thought, it is the purpose of my life to dispel illusion.

There in the depths of the sky he saw clouds sailing east in great billowing fleets.

“I am the Gatherer of Clouds,” he heard himself whisper. Clouds that change and grow and become dragons and sprawling lands and shape themselves into birds and mice and women of great beauty. I will gather them all.

*   *   *

An hour passed during which Shuyun had pushed himself deep into meditation. Footsteps sounded on the deck behind him. General Hojo, Shuyun thought without turning, he has strong chi for one untrained. Pulling himself up out of his meditation, the monk turned and bowed.

“General.”

“I hope I do not interfere with your contemplation, Brother Shuyun.”

“I spend too much time in contemplation and not enough studying the wisdom of my lord’s advisors.”

Hojo gave a slight bow. “I am honored, Brother, but it was I who argued against scaling the walls of Denji Gorge. Fortunately I was not listened to.”

Shuyun felt embarrassed by the officer’s words. “General, you were listened to and your council was wise. No one knew if Lord Komawara and I would succeed, and if we had failed?—as you said, this would have had disastrous consequences. There was great risk, but Botahara smiled upon us.”

The general gave a slight bow again and then looked out at the shore, ready to change the subject. “I have read that you can only experience something for the first time once. Yet each time I come to Seh, it is for the first time.”

“All that I had read and been told did not prepare me….” Shuyun trailed off, at a loss for words.

The two men stood, watching the passing land for a long time without speaking. Finally Hojo broke the silence.

“It must be disconcerting for our lord to come to Seh knowing that his famous ancestor’s name is so much a part of the history.”

“This is true,” Shuyun said. “The first Shonto Motoru: is his shrine not close to here?”

Hojo nodded without looking away from the scene. “Yes,” he said quietly, “quite close, but difficult to reach from the river.” He paused. “So a Shonto lord comes again—even bearing the sword his ancestor gave to his Emperor. If I were a man of Seh, this would affect me.”

Hojo shook his head. “Of course, the situation is not at all the same. That was the time of the barbarians’ great power. And this Emperor…” he held up his open palms, “he is not the poet Emperor Jirri was.”

Shuyun smiled at the joke.

They fell silent again and Hojo’s remark caused Shuyun to remember his reading of the history of the Shonto family. Many poems had been written of the great barbarian war. Lord Shonto had been celebrated in songs and poems and plays. Many besides Emperor Jirri had set their brush to paper, many of the great poets of the Empire.

Shuyun looked up at a hillside that spread itself in crimson and yellow across the western horizon. Seh, he thought, in all her beauty….

And Shonto has come.

A
BRONZE BELL RANG in the darkness, echoing across the water and returning again from the far shore of the slowly moving river. Brother Sotura could see the light-boat itself now. “Yul-sho,” he whispered. The Floating City should appear by midday.

Releasing the rail he began a series of intricate finger exercises, the movements hidden in the long sleeve of his robe. His focus, however, was elsewhere: larger issues concerned him.

He had known the Supreme Master for twenty-two years, had been the senior monk’s closest advisor for perhaps half that time, and never had he seen the Order’s most senior Brother despondent—until now. It was the Supreme Master’s misfortune to bear the great responsibility of his position at a most difficult time in history.

The plague had devastated the Empire of Wa and though the Brotherhood had finally found a cure, uncounted lives had been lost. Yet all of the senior Brothers were aware that if they had found the cure earlier, the Interim War would never have occurred. This weighed most heavily on the Supreme Master. Had the Hanama Imperial family not died of plague the Yamaku would never have seized the throne, and there would still be a Botahist Brother advising the Son of Heaven and the Order would have retained its place of power in the Empire.

A tiny spark of light grew until it became the bow lantern of a river scow being rowed out toward the sea; current behind them, wind against them.
Sotura watched the boat pass, until even the sound of oars disappeared into the darkness.

The Supreme Master, Sotura realized, bore a harsh burden. But even more than the situation in the Empire, which Sotura was sure patience and time would change, it was the missing scrolls that destroyed the Supreme Master’s tranquillity…and Brother Sotura shared responsibility for that loss.

The situation was so delicate that the Brotherhood had been forced to react to this blasphemy with the utmost secrecy. The scrolls of the Perfect Master contained much that was unknown outside the Botahist Orders; much that Sotura himself knew nothing of. Information that the Supreme Master was certain would endanger the Botahist Brotherhood’s place in the Empire, if not its existence.

And yet they heard nothing! No demands for gold, not even a rumor that the scrolls were gone. Nothing.

Perhaps this inability to understand the thieves’ motives was the most unsettling part. Where did one start to search for the scrolls when one did not even begin to know why they had been stolen? If it were for profit, that would be one thing. Stolen to blackmail the Brothers, that would be another. He would at least know where to start looking. But as it was….

Perhaps his meeting with Brother Hutto would suggest a place to begin.

Meeting Brother Hutto would no doubt be a risk, but he could see no alternative. At least three days would be taken up arranging such a meeting. Three invaluable days.

The monk shifted his weight from one foot to the other and felt the unfamiliar robe move with him. After a lifetime in the garb of a Botahist monk he would never adjust to another form of dress. Yet the disguise seemed to be working. He was just another Seeker returning from a pilgrimage, even associating with the other religious fanatics on board, though he found their company oddly depressing. All the same, Brother Sotura, the chi quan master of Jinjoh Monastery, had not been recognized.

If he could just get through this meeting with Brother Hutto. It was a problem. The Honorable Brother was watched too closely—the price he paid for being Primate in Yankura. Not that there was a better place for him—that was not the case. A man of Brother Hutto’s talents was a necessity in a place like Yankura—but it was difficult to be there and not attract
the attention of…certain people. Sotura could not afford to become an object of their curiosity, this was certain.

The ship came abreast of the light-boat and seemed to hover there, making almost no progress against the current. Sotura shook his head. Perhaps it would have been better to take passage on a faster boat—but he had deemed this one less likely to attract the attention of the Imperial Guards.

Luckily it was a dry autumn. If the rains had started, the old barge would never have made headway against the current. Patience, he reminded himself, Botahara rewards the patient. He continued his finger exercises, coming to the first closure and beginning the isolation series.

It had been a long time since Sotura had visited Wa and he wished now that it was daylight so he could see the country in its autumn beauty. All of his years on the island of Jinjoh Monastery had left him with the most romantic view of the Empire of Wa. He shook his head. He could not help it—the countryside seemed unimaginably beautiful to him.

He turned his gaze to the shoreline and his imagination swept the darkness aside as though it were a wind gathering up a black mist. A village spread its bone-bleached walls across the side of a hill like the skeleton of some mammoth beast that had fallen in the middle of a giant stride. Above the village, a small copse of pine and sweet linden stood in silhouette, dark against the starlit sky. Rice paddies fell in irregular terraces, their dikes tracing a blue-green web down the dark hillside.

The harvest would all be in now and the time of the peasant celebrations was near. Sotura thought it unfortunate that he had missed the River Festival. He had always had an affection for this celebration, despite its pagan origins.

This thought seemed to break a spell and the darkness returned, pushing the shore into the distance despite all powers of the imagination.

The River Festival had been his destination on his last journey to Wa, eight years earlier. That, too, had been a journey with a political purpose, though he had not been forced to bear the indignity of a disguise.