Lord Oda's Revenge (12 page)

‘Oh, great,' said his friend, looking upward.

‘I thought you might say that,' said Taro.

Above them extended a continuous path of steps, rising in
twists and turns to crest a brow, where it disappeared for a moment, before reappearing much higher up. All along the side of the cracked, mossy stone steps were regularly spaced prayer wheels, creaking in the wind. Taro followed them with his eyes. Thousands. A person climbing, if they spun every wheel, would let fly into the heart of the universe an extraordinary number of prayers to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion.

But Hana didn't want to continue the climb just yet. She grabbed Taro's hand and pulled him towards the Hokke-do. ‘Come on,' she said. ‘This is where the scrolls are kept. You have to see them.' She glanced down the mountainside. The monks carrying Hayao were far behind, deep in conversation with Oshi.

‘Scrolls?' said Taro.

‘The Lotus Sutra that Saido copied, when he first came to the mountain. It's the oldest Japanese copy of the Indian sutras.'

‘My mother is up there,' said Taro. ‘Perhaps we'll look at them later. . .'

‘Yes,' said Hana. ‘Yes, of course. We'll carry on.'

But her eyes were so bright with enthusiasm as she glanced at the Hokke-do, her passion so beautiful, that he smiled and said, ‘Let's have a look first. It won't take long. I last saw my mother in the autumn. I can wait a little longer.'

She smiled at him then, the most unselfconscious and lovely smile he had seen since they'd met Hayao and a heaviness seemed to have come over her heart. Her hand was warm in his, and he wondered if she could feel how her touch sped his heart rate. And now that he was thinking about his hand, he felt it begin to feel strange and foreign at the end of his arm, as if it belonged to someone else, and then he felt his face flush with
heat. He pulled his hand from hers and ran past her, as if he were in a hurry to see the sutras.

Stepping into the cool gloom of the temple, he was struck by its simplicity. Soaring above, the roof was unornamented, just a graceful assemblage of beams. The room was empty, apart from a number of cushions propped against the columns – ready, Taro presumed, for a reading of the sutras. He couldn't imagine sitting still for eight days, listening to a monk reading from a scroll, but then he supposed that a lot of things the nobles did were strange.

‘Not much to see,' said Hiro, stepping up beside him.

‘Shh,' said Hana. ‘Have some respect.'

Hiro rolled his eyes. Hana stood in the centre of the room, looking at a small dais, on which stood eight scrolls. At least, Taro assumed they were scrolls – what he saw was in fact the gold tubes, carved at the top with dragons, in which the scrolls were kept.

‘No guards?' said Hiro.

‘No need,' said Hana. ‘The whole monastery is the guard. There are ten thousand monks here, and they all know how to fight. There are lookouts posted all around – I'm sure they already know we're inside. You'd have to be mad to try to steal the scrolls.'

‘But they must be valuable, no?' said Taro.

‘Extremely. They are very old.'

‘It still seems strange, then, that they're not hidden away.'

‘Why? They are holy. To the Tendai, the scrolls are not just the word of Buddha. They are. . . everything. The world.
Dharma
. It is as if the scrolls don't just contain the secret of the universe – they actually
are
the universe. Do you understand?'

‘No,' said Hiro simply.

‘Well, it would be unimaginable for anyone to take them. Trust me. They won't come to harm.' She reached out a hand to touch one of the gold tubes, then withdrew it. She stood for a moment contemplating them.

Hiro picked his nose.

‘I can
see
you,' said Hana.

Hiro stopped. Cleared his throat.

‘This is a special place, you know,' Hana said, though her voice was more amused than irritated. ‘We're standing in
history
. And not just the scrolls – this very hall is where Genji paid for a reading of the sutras, on the forty-ninth day after Yugao's death. It lasted eight days, one for every book of the Lotus Sutra.'

‘Sounds boring,' said Hiro.

‘Who's Genji?' said Taro.

Hana looked at both of them with a sad expression. ‘You don't know
Genji no Monogatari
? It's a great work of literature. Maybe the greatest.'

‘Oh,' said Hiro. ‘What happens?'

‘Well, there's this man who's the son of one of the emperor's courtesans, and he has several love affairs, and then at one point he's exiled to the seaside, and then he comes back, and has another love affair, and then the woman he's seeing dies and—'

‘That sounds even more boring than the eight days thing,' said Hiro.

Hana sighed, exasperated. ‘Then you'll have to try reading it one day. Actually,
you
could, Taro. It's written entirely in hiragana, because the author was a woman.'

‘Great,' said Hiro. ‘Maybe Taro can read it, and then tell me what happens. Very briefly.'

Just then one of the monks who had been carrying Hayao peered into the gloom, through the pillars. He frowned at them.
‘What are you doing in there?' he said.

‘I was just showing these boys the scrolls,' said Hana. ‘They were both very eager to see them.'

‘Women aren't supposed to come in here,' said the man sullenly. ‘Except on special occasions.'

Hana looked down – not at all the confident, fearless girl Taro was used to. Taro sensed she was biting her tongue. As Lord Oda's daughter, she had spent much of her life being made to learn calligraphy and flower arrangement, instead of the riding and fighting she loved. After the freedom of the ninja life, this restriction on account of her sex must gall her. All she said, though, was, ‘I didn't know. I apologize.'

‘Very well,' said the monk. ‘Now come. The abbot will be waiting for us.'

Hana gave a last lingering look at the scrolls, bowed to them, and then walked towards the door. ‘Let's go,' she said to Taro – as if they hadn't just been told to leave anyway. ‘I'm looking forward to the climb. When he's panting for breath, Hiro hardly says anything at all.'

Hiro made a face at her back.

Outside, Taro joined his friends at the bottom of the steps lined with prayer wheels. Sighing, he stepped up, gripped the first wheel, and set it spinning. Each wheel said the same prayer, when spun –
om mane padme hum
, the characters writing the words on the air as they revolved, the mysterious Sanskrit letters an incantation to the bodhisattva of compassion. A person didn't need to say anything, just spin the wheel. All the same, to the prayer encapsulated in the symbols carved on it, he added his own silent one.

Please, keep my mother safe forever
, he thought. He looked up at the peak, so close now. All these months he had been separated
from his mother, and now only a set of steps lay between him and her. He felt light as air, as though he could fly up them, though he could see from Hiro's expression that his friend didn't share his excitement.

Hiro spun the wheel on the other side of the path. ‘One down,' he said grimly.

 

E
VEN
T
ARO WAS
panting when they reached the top of the path, the wheels behind him hissing as they spun on their axes. He stepped forward onto the grassy summit. When he turned round, he gasped. Hills lay in gentle folds below him, like kimonos that had been discarded on the floor. Far away to the east lay the sea, glittering in the late-day sunlight. The town of Kyoto, capital of Japan, was spread out before it. This was the town where the boy shogun lived, the child who technically ruled the country, and who every daimyo secretly wanted to replace – none more so than Taro's own real father, Lord Tokugawa.

‘Beautiful, isn't it?' said Hana.

Taro nodded. He could understand why the monks would have found this a good place to come, and meditate.

‘It's just as Abbot Jien said,' she went on.

‘I'm sorry?' said Taro.

Hana was always forgetting that he was only a peasant by nature. She recited:

From the monastery

On Mount Hiei I look out

On this world of tears,

And though I am unworthy,

I protect it with my black sleeves.

Hana swept her hand over the distant hills.

‘He meant that when he looked at this view, he felt a desire to shield the world, and the people in it, from harm. Even though it was useless.'

Taro looked at the tiny pillars of smoke rising from houses, the trees like bonsai, the rivers gleaming in the light. Yes. He could understand what the poet meant.

Hiro came slogging up the steps to stand next to them. He glanced at the view. ‘This is it?' he said.

Taro looked at Hana and smiled.

Just below them, on a plateau below the peak, was a large structure similar to the Hokke-do, its roof a sweeping upturned parabola, dragons leaping from either end. From this building came the abbot.

‘
Irasshaimase
,' he said, giving Taro a little bow. ‘Welcome to the monastery.'

‘Thank you,' said Taro. He was looking round the monk, trying to see if his mother was there.

The abbot smiled. ‘Of course. Come with me.' He led the way down a path that ran past the building.

They descended through a rockery, the stones planted with many beautiful flowers and interspersed with many circles of carefully combed sand. At one point they turned, startled, as a muffled
bang
echoed from somewhere over to the west, followed by another.

‘Thunder?' said Hana.

‘No,' said the abbot. ‘Only our unruly neighbours, the Ikkoikki.' He pointed to another mountain, closer to the sea – on the other side to the direction from which the friends had
approached. It was a tall, dark mountain, topped by a cliff. And perched on the cliff was a building like a castle.

‘Ikko-ikki?' said Taro.

‘They call themselves monks,' said the abbot dismissively. He set off again, apparently not in the mood to explain further. Behind his back, Hana shrugged at Taro.

The abbot indicated the vast hall that lay before them, its four open sides surrounded by a grassy space filled with
ume
trees. ‘Our residence,' he said.

Before the residence hall the lawn extended to cliffs, presided over by a wooden framework containing a single enormous bell. Monks were gathered here and there on the grass, talking quietly. A few sat alone, cross-legged, contemplating the view, while others sat with their heads down, contemplating only something that lay within.

Taro was looking around with wonder, stunned by the beauty of this place. Then, as if by some sixth sense, his head snapped around; perhaps he had heard a familiar footstep, something just below the level of his consciousness, that told him everything was about to change.

A woman stepped from the shadow of the hall and onto the grass, and Taro would know that step anywhere, that slight turning of the heel, that way of walking so carefully, as if the ground might at any moment rear up to bite her.

He broke away from the abbot, and then he was running, ignoring the monks as they looked up at him with irritation. She was turning then, and her mouth fell open, and then she was moving too, heedless of the ground and the imaginary dangers it might pose, just rushing towards her son.

He flung his arms out as she did, and they swung each other round in their embrace, laughing.

‘Taro!' she said. ‘My son! You came. I was so worried, when I left Mount Fuji, that you would not know where I had gone. . .'

When the world was no longer spinning, Taro pulled away to look at her, to see her face. There were a few more wrinkles, perhaps, around her eyes, but otherwise she was unchanged, and he could hardly believe that the last time he'd seen her was that night in Shirahama, in their hut, when his father had just been murdered.

But then her words penetrated his consciousness.

‘What do you mean, Mount Fuji?' he said.

‘Isn't that where you've come from?' his mother asked.

Taro frowned. ‘No. We came from. . . somewhere else.' He wasn't ready to talk about the ninja mountain, not yet. ‘From where Shusaku – he's the one who saved us – used to live. Your note said Mount Hiei.'

She shook her head. ‘No, it didn't. It said Mount Fuji, because that was where I was. Then I had to leave – the monks heard that Lord Tokugawa was going to destroy the monastery. It was in his province, and he was ridding himself of all enemies, so—'

‘Wait,' said Taro. ‘You sent me a note saying you were at Mount Fuji? When was this?'

‘Nearly a year ago,' said his mother. ‘As soon as I arrived there.'

Taro was experiencing an unpleasant sinking feeling. ‘Oh, no,' he said.