Seibo Mura used to have a portable shrine.
It wasn’t the kind of thing Sekken had imagined. He was used to enormous palanquins, larger than a cart and so heavy they took dozens of men to carry, carved on every surface and painted in a riot of colors. In hindsight, he should have realized this village wouldn’t have anything like that; it would have required practically every able-bodied adult to shift, and nobody would have been able to get it down the mountain path even so.
But all of that was a moot point, since the shrine was now a pile of splintered kindling.
“The headman told me it was smashed on the last night of the first full moon,” Sekken told Ryōtora after viewing the wreckage. “Ogano. My apologies.”
He still wasn’t sure why the issue of names affected Ryōtora so deeply. It was perfectly polite to refer to someone by their title – though Sekken admitted to himself that manners hadn’t been at the forefront of his mind, and perhaps he had taken it a little far. But the look on the man’s face when Sekken made that joke about nopperabō… as if Sekken had somehow wounded him personally.
Perhaps Ryōtora had a peasant lover? Or more than one, given that he’d said his duties took him through many villages. No, not that; Sekken couldn’t imagine anyone so upstanding visiting a string of lovers as he traveled, whatever their rank might be. Or even a single one – not when that would mean allowing himself to stray from the path of duty. He’d displayed not the slightest shred of interest in Aoi, even as the girl all but threw herself at him.
Whatever the reason, Sekken was making an effort to use the villagers’ names more often. He certainly knew a great many of them, after collecting their tales. One of the exercises from his training days had involved being introduced to a room full of his fellow students, all with invented names, and having to recite them back to his sensei afterward; this was a much larger list, but the association of names with yōkai incidents made them far easier to remember.
Ryōtora had looked discouraged at the news of the broken shrine, but now his brow furrowed. “Targeted destruction, do you think? Did the yōkai specifically aim to break it?”
“I don’t think so,” Sekken said. “They were smashing a great many things that night. Nothing I’ve heard yet suggests that they made a deliberate effort to go after it. Ogano kept it here in the village, rather than up at the shrine proper, because there was no room to store it up there; everything else in that storehouse got smashed too.”
Targeted or otherwise, it presented a problem. Ryōtora said, “Without a portable shrine…”
Sekken shrugged. “How fancy does it have to be? They have carpenters here, I’m sure. You focus on preparing for the ritual, and I’ll see how fast they can build a new one.”
Ogano directed him to the village carpenter. On his way to the man’s house, Sekken tried to recall why the name was familiar. It wasn’t on the list of people he’d interviewed. As he lifted his hand to knock on the door, he remembered: Masa was the one Ryōtora had told him about, who claimed his daughter Chie had been taken by the yōkai.
Then Masa opened the door, and Sekken realized something else. Masa was one of the two men he’d seen working on the mill’s broken waterwheel – and chanting the kie while he did so.
Sekken forced himself not to frown. By now it was clear that at least half the village sought the Perfect Land, if not more; he could hardly avoid working with them. “Are you the carpenter Masa?”
A wary nod was his only response. Sekken continued, saying, “Your headman Ogano told me where you live. You may have heard that Sir Ryōtora is planning to move Saiun-nushi down to a temporary shrine here in the village? But the portable shrine is broken, so we need something to carry the shintai.”
Already he was making plans for what to do when Masa refused. Some followers of the Perfect Land became reckless, even actively suicidal, because their lives were so wretched that the paradise they believed Shinsei had created for them was far preferable to anything in the mortal realm. Given the troubles in Seibo Mura, Sekken wouldn’t be surprised if people here were beginning to think in similar terms… or were simply uninclined to do anything a samurai said.
But just as the silence stretched out to an unbearable point, Masa nodded. His pause hadn’t been reluctance; it had been him thinking. “Got some beams that will work for the base. Won’t be hard to split some panels for the walls. Decoration, though – that’s harder. Don’t want Saiun-nushi being offended because it’s too plain.”
Sekken’s surprise must have shown, which was a shocking lapse on his part. Masa cocked his head to one side. “You thought I wouldn’t help?”
Calling it out like that was rude – but what else could Sekken expect from a man whose greeting bow had scarcely been more than a nod? And apparently the rough atmosphere of Seibo Mura was getting to Sekken, because he chose to answer with similar directness. “I know you seek the Perfect Land. I’ll admit I’m surprised to find a man of your spiritual inclinations showing such attention to the worship of a mountain kami.”
“Believing in Shinsei’s promise don’t make offending a kami any less stupid. Particularly at a time like this.”
“But your leader discourages or even outright forbids the veneration of the Fortunes,” Sekken pointed out.
“What leader?”
The unexpectedness of that question left Sekken briefly at a loss for words. True, the Perfect Land was much less centralized than the orthodox orders of Shinseism; it had no monasteries, no ranked hierarchy of monks. But it did have a leader, the inheritor of the erroneous sutra that laid out the details of Shinsei’s supposed promise. “You – How can you not be aware of this? How did your beliefs come to this village, anyway?”
Masa’s one-shouldered shrug dismissed the question. “Been here since before I was born. I think somebody brought the kie back from Heibeisu, a long time ago. The kie is all we need; don’t see how a leader would help much with that.”
This barely even qualified as religion. Sekken might not like the Perfect Land Sect, might condemn their beliefs as heretical… but Masa and his neighbors seemed to have reduced it to nothing more than mere superstition. He supposed it was preferable to them all becoming suicidal in the hopes of an escape from their woes, but his scholarly soul was offended by the sheer lack of rigor.
Masa clearly considered the topic over and done with. He scratched his ear and said, “Where are the broken pieces? Want to make sure I get the size right. Nawaro was the one who always put the shintai in and took it out again. Never seen it myself.”
Nawaro, Sekken presumed, was the dead shrinekeeper. He would be the only person permitted to interact directly with the shintai – and even then, the divine vessel would be wrapped in fabric or encased in a box, hidden from touch and view.
Assuming the people of Seibo Mura managed to get that much right. At this point, Sekken was prepared to believe they might throw any point of tradition or orthodoxy off a cliff.
He led Masa to the ruins of the storehouse where the portable shrine had been kept. Once the fragments were laid on the open ground in something approximating their original configuration, Masa measured them with his gnarled, heavy-knuckled hands, mumbling under his breath. Sekken made a point of standing far enough back that he couldn’t hear whether it was numbers he was committing to memory, or a chant of Shoshi ni kie.
To distract himself, he gazed around the village. They were beginning to get some onlookers – including Aoi, who appeared to have escaped Fūyō’s grip. She was watching Masa work with an unreadable expression on her face.
Sekken trusted that Ryōtora would have found the telltale lump, had there been one. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more wrong with Aoi than just her lost memories. When she’d begged to be taken away before the next full moon, she hadn’t said a word about the safety of her mother and brother. It might just be the unconcern of someone who couldn’t remember her life with her ostensible family… but it bothered him.
He’d forgotten to use his peripheral vision instead of looking directly. When Aoi noticed Sekken watching her, she slipped away.
Masa finished his measurements and straightened up, noticing his neighbors gathered around. Raising his voice, he said, “Saiun-nushi’s going to need another home. If you got something carved that ain’t broken – or even if it is – bring it here.”
A murmur ran around the scattering of people, and several of them set off immediately. When Sekken was gathering stories, he’d noticed that for all their general poverty the villagers had a surprising amount of decoration on their belongings. Crude work most of the time, by the standards of samurai art, but some of it was remarkably fine. And the splintered pieces of the portable shrine had also been carved.
Masa had one of those pieces in his hand. Holding it up for Sekken to examine, he said by way of explanation, “Winter here gets long.”
And the villagers apparently got bored. One by one, they began to return, bearing tables and chests and rakes and other tools Sekken couldn’t even identify, all of them carved to one degree or another, even if it was only with a cross-hatching of lines or curved shapes suggesting flowers. Masa sorted through them, nodding at some and dismissing others.
Sekken stood out of the way, feeling simultaneously useless and like it was his responsibility to oversee the process, even though he knew nothing about carpentry. Which more or less summed up how he’d felt since arriving in Seibo Mura – no, since meeting Ryōtora. He’d come here only wanting an explanation for – and an end to – his inugami haunting, but seeing Ryōtora work to help people made him want to do the same.
The only things he’d managed to contribute so far, though, were his skills as a scribe and a dead-end suspicion regarding Aoi. He wanted to do more. When Ryōtora thanked him outside Aoi’s house… for a moment, it had made Sekken feel like his efforts mattered. Like he mattered. Unlike the rest of his family, he didn’t manage a famous library or advise an important daimyō or protect the life of an Isawa shugenja with his blade, but he’d found a place where his knowledge could be of real, practical use.
Maybe of enough use that Ryōtora would even smile for once.
The wind brought shreds of a conversation to his ears. Two women whispered a short distance away as they watched Masa work. Sympathy for the carpenter… and that gave Sekken an idea.
He had no notion how to track someone taken by a yōkai. Plenty of them were kidnappers, usually targeting either children or young women; unfortunately, in many cases the reason to steal them away was to eat them. Days had passed since Chie’s disappearance, so the odds that she was still alive were low. Still, he could at least try to establish whether the man was right – whether Chie might have survived that night.
According to Ryōtora, the last time Masa had seen his daughter was before sunset on the final night. By then the villagers knew they would have to barricade themselves in for safety, or the best approximation of it they could manage. Chie, however, hadn’t returned when she was supposed to. Sekken began to circulate, asking questions – but his nascent theory that she’d tried to flee before sundown was undercut when Tsubame, one of the old grandmothers, told him she’d seen the girl.
“You’re sure it was her?” he asked. “Not someone else in the village you might have mistaken for her?”
“Don’t have all that many girls her age here,” Tsubame said tartly, before adding a belated, “my lord.” In her case he didn’t think it was Perfect Land insolence; just the habitual authority of an old woman speaking to a young man. “And I’d recognize that–”
She cut off abruptly. “That what?” Sekken prompted her.
“That robe,” Tsubame said. “I’d recognize that robe anywhere. Tattered like a beggar’s, I tell you, but she liked it too much to give it up – but she’s dead and gone, and it don’t matter now what she wore. Poor Masa.”
He’d heard that refrain from a dozen people already. It seemed Masa was a widower, and had lost other children before Chie. His daughter was the only thing he’d had left. No wonder he clung to the hope that she’d survived.
Sekken pounded his thigh with one fist. I know so much… and none of it does any good. Not a single scrap of his knowledge could help to lift that poor man’s grief.
It was that feeling of uselessness as much as anything which made Sekken volunteer to go out the next day with the villagers cutting down a cypress tree to use in the re-enshrinement ceremony. Ryōtora was wholly occupied in preparing for his own part, purifying himself in the waterfall and then praying to Saiun-nushi, attempting to establish a rapport before the kami was moved. It didn’t take a shugenja to appease the spirit of a tree before it was felled – the villagers were accustomed to carrying out those small rituals themselves – but Sekken hoped he might find signs in the forest that would help make sense of this entire situation, or give some hint as to where Chie might have gone.
The actual loggers were two men, one older and one younger. Heigo and Daizan, Sekken reminded himself, entertaining visions of saving the village and then capping that achievement by introducing every single resident of Seibo Mura to Ryōtora by name, in syllabic order. With them came Ishi and Tarō, Ryōtora’s attendant ashigaru, to help carry the tree once it was felled. Finally, rounding out their party, there was the girl Rin, the one who’d guided Ryōtora into the village when he arrived. Her stick-thin arms wouldn’t be much use in the heavy labor, but Sekken gathered that she was a deadly shot with her sling, and knew the surrounding terrain well enough that she could guide them to the ideal tree.
“What kind of rocks are good against yōkai?” she asked him as they set out. Like many of those in Seibo Mura, she didn’t call him “Lord Asako” or “my lord,” but in her case it seemed more like youthful oversight than an ideological point. “Round ones? Dark ones? Light ones? Do they need to be blessed?”
Jade rocks, Sekken thought. There was no point in saying it, though. The villagers didn’t have any jade. Instead he said, “If you have any with holes in them, that might be lucky.”
Rin brightened. “My grandmother used to use those for loom weights!” Then her face fell. “But I’m not sure where they went after she passed away. Nobody weaves here any more; we just get cloth from Heibeisu.”
“It seems like the village has been in decline for a while,” Sekken said. “Do you have any idea why?” Although Rin was young, she might have heard tales.
She merely shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. Not just here; my father says it’s the same in Heibeisu. I’m going to look for some rocks with holes.”
With the energy of burgeoning youth, she leapt up the path as fleetly as a deer. Sekken frowned after her, wondering. He’d heard, even back in Phoenix lands, that the Dragon weren’t thriving lately. It was a point of political contention, because they’d begun making marriage alliances with the Unicorn to their west, and the Phoenix and the Unicorn were often in disagreement. But it was one thing to say the clan wasn’t thriving, and another entirely to look around Seibo Mura and calculate it had at best half the population it once possessed. Some of those were recent losses, but not all.
And they had so few children. That was what had been niggling at him, Sekken realized. Chie was all Masa had: very well, he appeared to be a widower, and sometimes families lost most of their children to disease or misfortune, or simply were never blessed with many to begin with. But almost nobody here seemed to bear names like Hajime or Ichirō, indicating they were their families’ firstborn sons – much less anybody called Gorō, because he was the fifth boy. Sekken hadn’t actively counted when he was gathering stories, but he doubted many of the families in Seibo Mura had more than three children, and quite a lot seemed to have fewer.
Was it a clue to the yōkai problem, or merely an unrelated issue? What did any of this have to do with the inugami, and why hadn’t the damned thing appeared since Sekken got to the village?
He didn’t mind questions. But he hated questions he couldn’t begin to answer. If his knowledge and his intellect were the only resources he could offer here, then he wanted them to be good for something.
It put him in a bad mood. By the time Rin brought them to her chosen cypress – thin and straight, and not too tall – Sekken had no tolerance for irritations. He managed not to fidget with impatience as they tied a sacred rope around the tree and thanked its spirit for its sacrifice, but when the loggers began to time their axe-swings to the chant of Shoshi ni kie, he intervened.
“This is being cut to call down the spirit of Saiun-nushi,” he said. “You should be praying to that spirit as you work, not asking Shinsei to save you from the work of enlightenment.”
The surrounding trees blocked enough wind while allowing the sun to penetrate that the air was warm, but the atmosphere chilled as if an autumn breeze had cut through. “Begging your pardon,” the older logger said at last, sounding not at all apologetic, “but we’ve put our trust in the Little Teacher for years, and respected Saiun-nushi at the same time. You’re a stranger here – Lord Asako.”
His use of the title was anything but respectful, and in his mouth Sekken’s family name might as well have been an insult. Sekken stiffened. “Have you considered that perhaps your difficulties have come about precisely because you chant an empty mantra as you work, instead of focusing your devotion where you should?”
“You saying the Little Teacher ain’t worthy of our devotion?”
“You’re not supposed to worship him,” Sekken snapped.
He was ready to deliver an entire theological lecture right there on the mountainside, about the difference between honoring Shinsei and his teachings and praying to him for direct intervention like just another Fortune, when Ishi stepped between him and the loggers and bowed. A proper bow, and when he spoke, his voice was placatory. “My lord, the kie is good for timing the axe-blows. Like blacksmiths chanting while they hammer steel, or women singing as they pound mochi. It keeps the spirit strong and makes sure the men don’t risk each other’s safety. We’ve prayed to the tree’s spirit, and we can pray to Saiun-nushi as we carry the trunk back to the village… but for now, will the kie do any harm?”
Blacksmiths’ chants and mochi-pounders’ songs were often prayers – real ones, not the wasted breath of the kie. But Sekken was suddenly aware that he was standing a very long way from Seibo Mura and his own servant, with two armed ashigaru, two loggers with axes, and a peasant girl reputed to be the best shot in the village with a sling.
He didn’t think they would attack him. When all was said and done, though, the only power he had to compel them to obedience was his status as a samurai. Elsewhere in the Empire that power was substantial, and if he chose, he could have brought heavy consequences down upon their heads for this insolence. But here, with him an outsider, talking to followers of the Perfect Land? That status carried about as much weight as dandelion fluff.
“Do what you must,” he forced himself to say. Inwardly, though, he vowed to talk to Ryōtora again about the Perfect Land. Their beliefs might not be the cause of the yōkai disturbances – but it was entirely possible they had something to do with the withering of the entire Dragon Clan.