Beneath Ceaseless Skies #81 Read online

  Issue #81 • Nov. 3, 2011

  “Hence the King from Kagehana, Pt. I,” by Michael Anthony Ashley

  “Read This Quickly, For You Will Only Have a Moment...,” by Stephen Case

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  HENCE THE KING FROM KAGEHANA, PT. I

  by Michael Anthony Ashley

  Visage

  Saga was standing guard when the wasp found him.

  He was a unique man. He alone could prove it was useless to stand upon a wall, watching outward, when the true danger to his lord was lurking on the inside. He could prove the terror that crept the night shadows invisible. He could prove the compound was haunted.

  But Saga was bound by the rules. He was samurai. He obeyed his lord. He did his duty. No matter if he labored at futile work or if the hot afternoon slapped its glower upon his neck, or if his bladder quivered at capacity and his sore feet could nearly growl and his blisters displayed the ingenuity and diligence to grow blisters of their very own. He stared out over the lands cleared by axe and careful fire, and he regarded even the twitch of the brush in the wind with diligent suspicion.

  The brown speck didn’t escape his notice. Across the blasted lands the wasp came, arrowing fast with no regard to the hover-flit-flutter of the insect swarms it passed. It dipped low and high as if tasting the air, twice circling round to sample again some invisible flavor. Then it was darting through the bubbling moat’s vapor and, with speed, over the bamboo spikes and up the face of the wall and between the slats of the palisade. It circled Saga thrice, warily out of arm’s reach, before coming to hover in a satisfied dance above his brow.

  Saga was trained in sword and bow and wore the scars of their hard use. But he trusted his own eyes before any steel. He was vigilant as he lifted his hand.

  The wasp alighted, fluttering its wings and settling in a brown and black curve over the bump of Saga’s knuckle. There was a time when the pinch of a wasp’s foot had set his nerves atickle, and a time later when it became so familiar he’d forget the creatures’ presence and be reprimanded as a dullard. Now the alighting was both second nature and substantial as a wound.

  Saga propped his bow against his shoulder and glanced around with all casualness. He was alone on this stretch of the wall, none of the other guards in the distance paying him any mind. Certain, then, that he was unwatched, he steadied his pulse, ran a finger under the wasp’s pleated body, and found the reed glued to the thorax. It was a longer reed than those past, and thick, and this told him much. But he would have to decipher the message to be sure. Saga scratched along the edges with a fingernail filed thin for the purpose. Slip tug and prise, gentle lest he harm the tiny messenger. Tug and prise until the adhesive began to—

  A footstep sounded.

  Saga coughed as a cover, flicked the wasp from his hand and smoothed the gesture into a shading of his eyes against the red weary afternoon. In half a beat of his heart he’d erased any thought of the wasp from both mind and muscle. His existence was once again his watch. The shadows had grown longer. The cicadae still droned.

  The footsteps belonged to the relief guard approaching with the slap of a quiver at his side marking percussive time. The guard climbed the ladder and eased himself upon the narrow plank walkway that was their post.

  “Good evening,” the soldier said once he’d caught his breath.

  Saga returned his bow. “It’s a hot one, isn’t it?”

  “Ehh,” agreed the man, Meko by name. “But it’ll be cold again soon enough.”

  “K’so! That’s the truth! Between the sweat-rot in the summer and the frostbite in the winter I’ll be lucky if my private pestle survives another year.”

  They laughed tired laughs, and Meko strung his bow and breathed deeply the sulfur-scented air. The joke had done its job, easing the tension on Meko’s brow. The man was heading into a night watch. The disappearances had all occurred at night. The ghost fires too.

  “Is all well upon our lord’s wall?” he asked when he was ready.

  “The wall is secure,” Saga replied.

  “Would you allow me the honor of relieving your post?”

  “Please, the honor is mine.”

  They bowed to each other once more. Saga handed him the signal bell. And with the change of the guard complete, Saga was free of his post for the day. He pissed gratefully between the slats of the palisade and cheered when a measure made it all the way to the moat. He said his goodbyes. He climbed down the ladder.

  He staunchly paid no attention to the wasp that followed.

  * * *

  The stronghold had once been an inn for relaxation and avail among the hot springs, an unsafe place. With the peasants too few and too frail to erect the fortifications alone, Saga and his fellows had been forced to labor beside them—hacking the gardens back, running horses in pounding monotony to flatten new paths, slathering fireproof plaster over the rustic rough-hewn pillars—making their new stronghold suitable and tame. The wall upon which Saga stood his posts represented a nightmare month of construction. The moat, fed by canals cut from the scalding pools, represented two.

  The wall was imperfect, of course. There were gaps, thin and unobvious but enough for the odd breeze to keen despondently through. Whistles and moans. Weary witches, the troop called them. It was a dirgeful noise, contrapuntal to the hiss, bubble, and spit of the hot springs mulling across the grounds in copses and rocky corners—sulfurous mists floating like curtain tatter. This was the theater that escorted Saga and the other members of his watch as they climbed from their perches and made for the barracks.

  Saga fit in with the others. He was ai no ko like they were, a “mongrel of the between,” a mixed-race man bearing both the features of his samurai heritage and the foreign lines that spiced it. For Saga this meant an unusual height and skin the color of barbarian tea. Others bore blue eyes or an eagle’s hooked nose or hair red and stiff as a broom’s foot.

  Among the motley throng, Saga jested as they jested and spat like they spat and bent the curves of his face to hide the fear and sickness and exhaustion just like they did. He even walked like they walked, but faster on this evening, faster so that none noticed the wasp nagging the air above his brow. His goal was the barracks and the dark privacy of his corner thrush mat, and he very courteously sped his way along.

  He hadn’t gone far when he was hailed by a voice eager and loud.

  “Oi, Saga! Tell us barters!”

  Saga looked but did not slow and saw the fleshy-nosed man, whose bombastic voice was outmatched only by the untamed immensity of his mustache, leading a group of samurai in a briskness to match his own.

  It was Uji, an ai no ko, privileged to wear the two swords in his belt but who nonetheless suffered from a barbarian education. “Come, give us challenge!” he called.

  Saga thought of pretending he hadn’t heard, but his heart panged, and he knew the rules wanted otherwise. He paused and bowed to the group of men in Uji’s company. “My mind’s worn thin this evening. If I don’t sleep soon my tongue will turn stupid.”

  “Good! I look better when you look stupid,” Uji declared with a grin. He dipped his finger into the kettle at his side and absently licked a black clot the size of a plum stone.

  Saga smiled at the jest, fell in step with the group—their pace decidedly lessened—and relented to the game. “I’d give my nipple for new armor,” he said, challenging.

  Uji tch’ed, nudging the fellow at his side. “Dung on new,” he said. “Take nipple for armor that fits.”

  Saga thought of the sweat-soaked days leading to damp, chill ni
ghts, of the men shivering on their mats in the night. “Piss on the armor, then. Take mine for a new blanket.”

  “Snot on that. Patches for blanket.”

  “Snot on that!” Saga declared, walking with a hitch to pantomime a tangle in his crotch. “You can have my nipple for a new loincloth.”

  “Ehh!” the group agreed in unison, giving Saga the win and chuckling to a man.

  “Give me a first-class courtesan,” came next from another soldier, “with a good mouth and soft hands. I’ll give you a nipple and a toe besides.”

  “Dung on your first-class,” returned Saga.

  The “ehh” was sounded among a chorus of laughter.

  And so the game went—competitors pairing, the simplest and cleverest receiving applause, new bouts forming without rhyme or pattern.

  They had traveled around a bend in the path near Tomuchi-sama’s headquarters—someone offering an eyelid for rice free of weevils, someone else a fingertip for fresher chugi sticks with which to wipe one’s anus—when a flash of color caught Saga’s attention. He and the others stopped, their game fallen silent.

  Across the audience yard Lord Tomuchi sat upon his dais, his unadorned and ever-present palanquin waiting nearby. On the ground the troop commander General Kumo waited with his sword raised over the slumped form of a kneeling man, waiting patiently while the condemned stuttered out his final words. In attendance were the honor guard, the peasant palanquin bearers with their faces low, and an audience of lesser samurai. And of course there was General Kumo’s consort Lady Amé who waited with her two maids, all three garbed in artful layers of kimono colored gaily as sipping birds.

  The general’s blade flashed fire in the sunset and the kneeling man was felled, the aortal rush of blood chasing his head across the yard in pulses. All in attendance bowed to his corpse.

  General Kumo presented the head to Tomuchi-sama, who nodded his approval, but it wasn’t until the general turned to slip the token into a sack that Saga recognized it as that of Sleepy-Eyed Gozen, a soldier from the night watch. Fair with the sword, better with the bow, best with a sake cup. The contorted face disappeared into the sack, its eyes large and pained and drowsy no longer.

  Saga bowed like the rest, and he realized here was an opportunity to be on his way. He set off once more for the barracks, ignoring the muttered conversations that sprouted among the troop, and refused to turn when Uji’s artless boom rose above the chatter. “What was crime?” Uji asked.

  “Treason,” came the answer. It was Jimushi, standing apart from the others with the shaft of a long naginata propped against his shoulder, his countenance one of a soldier just starting his watch, fresher and less worn than those returning.

  “What do you know of it?” someone asked.

  “Little enough,” Jimushi called. “Another invisible fire destroyed a storage shed last night. We have an execution today. It takes a brief reasoning to suppose he was held at fault.”

  Saga was nearing the corner of the headquarters building when he heard, over his shoulder, Uji rumble his confusion. “You think Gozen was traitor?”

  Jimushi scoffed aloud, provocative. “Do you?”

  The group weighed the question in silence. Their defeats, their hunger, their aches and sicknesses were woes that any warrior could accept. But what about the other calamities, the impossible ones—the water tower that rotted overnight and collapsed; the epidemic of lame horses and cancered messenger birds; the village crops that wilted without blight or pest? And what of the corpses? The deserters found dead in the forest, carcasses whole and unmarked by tooth or claw, drained of blood? Tomuchi-sama had dismissed any idea of ghosts. And the men, despite their superstitions, were forced to accept that word as law. A traitor then, most of them believed, hoped. But was it a man like Gozen who could cause these things? Just an ordinary man? Did they believe that? Saga halted—the wasp zooming ahead but looping back, impatient—and examined the lean faces, dread seething from one to the next like a disease recurred. And he knew the answer, unanimously, was no.

  “Piss on all things,” said Uji in his thick foreign cadence. “I give life to see real spy dead.”

  “Ehh...,” agreed the gathered samurai darkly, and in ones and twos they drifted off for the barracks. Except Uji, who knelt in his barbarian way to pray for the dead man.

  And except Saga, who now had an affront to correct.

  * * *

  Law for a samurai was very simply the word of his lord. For a servant to call his lord’s word into question was disloyalty at best, sedition at worst.

  Saga debated between urgency for the wasp and duty to Tomuchi-sama’s honor. One pushed him to the barracks. One told him to stay. Finally, with a compromise and a sigh, he braced himself and hailed Jimushi. He wasn’t surprised by the haughty irritation on the man’s face. Jimushi was pure-blooded.

  “What is it?” Jimushi said, returning his bow with a shallower one.

  Saga felt his own irritation rise but remembered his duty and kept his voice calm. “You owe an apology.”

  Jimushi grunted. “Isn’t it rude, to say a thing like that so bluntly?”

  The samurai on the lane passed them by and watched the wind in the clouds and otherwise gave no indication they were listening. But they were listening. Saga spoke loudly. “I didn’t know soldiers of the watch were on formal terms.”

  “A symptom of your youth,” Jimushi said, the flesh of his starved face loose and dancing. “Maybe you’ll better understand courtesy when you’ve put on some years.”

  Saga eyed the half-shorn gray stubble atop Jimushi’s pate. “Judging from you, old man, I think that unlikely.”

  Jimushi smirked and looked up at Saga sidelong, the gaze condescending despite their difference in height. “You forget yourself.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Don’t presume and so on and so forth, yes?”

  Saga frowned. “If you want a—”

  “I think there’s nothing you could offer to make this conversation any less tedious. But I do see we’re to expect some liveliness soon.” He turned his back to Saga and nearly earned a lump for it.

  But from across the lane, in beautiful silence upon a glide of tiny footsteps, Lady Amé and her maids approached in their customary splendor. And Saga’s hand fell still of its own accord.

  While most of the consorts and wives were unreachable across the field of war, Lady Amé had been trapped with her retinue during a visit to General Kumo. It was Tomuchi-sama himself who’d arranged their coupling, and though the general had accepted solemnly, there was not a man under his command who failed to notice the lighter spirit on that old gruff face of his. In time Amé and her ladies also became Tomuchi-sama’s joy. He invited them to serve tea just to hear their wit and twittering gossip, while they doted on him as upon a favored uncle. For Saga, Amé was in one body artistry, nobility, and almost peasant pragmatism. She was a goddess of good nature. She was a friend.

  When the she caught sight of him beside Jimushi she waved cheerily. The bow Saga returned was outlandishly somber, the gesture of a man done great favor. Her maids giggled behind their hands.

  “Good evening, Honorable and Deeply Serious Little Brother,” she said in mock solemnity.

  “It is that, Heavenly Elder Sister. Your grace brings life to even the gravest twilight.”

  “Oh, stand up,” Amé said after a brief bow. “This languid air has made you boring.”

  Saga straightened to a painted smile and the scantest flower of perfume.

  “And aged beyond your years,” she told him, continuing her thought. “You unbend like the withered penis of an old and decrepit turtle.”

  The overwrought courtesy was itself a joke between them, for they’d discovered some time ago how much each enjoyed embroidering the crude. Saga flattened his grin with an effort and said, matching her tone, “As the estimable lady has mentioned, I am unaccustomed to performing my duties in this climate. But if she would care to stand my watch tomorro
w, I would be honored to receive her instruction in the art.”

  “Oh, I could never consider such a thing. You’ve been a man some two years now—”

  “Forgive me, but I must disagree,” replied Saga with a bow. “I completed my rite thirty-one months ago. Tomorrow will make thirty-two.”

  The lady returned his bow. “Months! Of course! Your wondrous experience is evident by the—” she squinted “—tens of hairs decorating your face. There is nothing a lowly woman could hope to teach you.”

  “Quite the contrary! I am disadvantaged in matters of war, for my sword has but a single edge, where certainly the Lady Amé’s tongue is dreadful for its two.”

  The maids affected shock before giggling all the more.

  “Do you see, ladies?” she told them. “Never join in a watering match with a man: we lack the equipment to compete!”

  This was met with good humor by the soldiers passing on the lane, including Uji who’d risen from his prayer, broad barbarian face cleft in a grin.

  Pleased, Saga opened his mouth to continue their duel.

  Jimushi interrupted.

  “You two play a cute little kyougen,” he said. “But these farces are typically performed on stage, yes? With nobler audiences?”

  His mockery was vinegar over the sweetness of the moment, smiling faces gone long. But the bitter air lived a meager life, banished by the snap of Amé’s fan. “Oh, but every audience is noble,” she said, the paper trifle conjured in full flutter to tease with wind a hair astray from her chignon. “Thank you for trusting me with your questions, Jimushi. Though, and forgive my woman’s mind—as I said it’s unaccustomed to considering the facets of a soldier’s duty—aren’t you delinquent for your watch? The hour does seem late. And Kumo-sama is very strict when it comes to timeliness.”

  Jimushi’s rheumy eyes flicked briefly at mention of the general, but he recovered his smirk and said, “It’s a simple matter. Saga has had the courtesy to inform me of a grievance for which I must apologize. He’s samurai of a fashion. He deserves my attention.”