EPILOGUE
Something of hope shone from that early morning sunlight filtering into the sky to the east, yet it was a deception, Ash knew, or at the very least a promise broken even as it was being made.
Naked and gasping like a beached fish, the old farlander lay across two corpses bobbing just beneath the scummy waters, his clothes gone in the forces of the flood, his head turned to the side with bloodshot eyes staring through a collapsed portion of sea-wall to clouds approaching across the bay, dragging dark curtains of rain.
Hurry up, then, Ash told the clouds in his near-delirium. Before I die of this damned thirst.
As he bobbed in the freezing sea water he saw warships out there in the Lesser Bay of Squalls, turning their sails now from the incoming weather. His eyelashes fluttered in the sudden breeze pushed ahead of the rain, though he barely felt its cool touch across his skin. Some time in the previous hours of daylight, his teeth had stopped chattering along with the trembles of his body. His breaths came now in irregular sips and sighs.
Ash knew that he was nearing his death.
Still, bad as things were, at least the rain was falling at long last; a fine drizzle at first, then plump drops crashing all around him. The old Rōshun was able to open his mouth wide and drink it down a trickle at a time, wondrously cool, reviving him a little. The rain thinned the caked blood from his face and naked body, washed the cuts and scratches on his skin. Ash sighed with relief, nothing more to be asked for now.
All was as it should be.
His head lolled to the side, letting him watch the blood from his wounds trailing away in the minor currents of the water. He followed the trail as it curled towards the nearest logjam of bodies, where it merged with a larger cloud of blood darkening the water all around them. It was the same wherever he had been able to glance so far. Bodies everywhere.
It was as well there were few man-eating sharks in this region of the world, though around him a feeding frenzy was taking place anyway, for the city’s thousands of birds perched on the floating dead, pecking eagerly at their soft tissues, with hundreds more wheeling and squabbling overhead.
Two mighty walls of the Shield stood at equal distance to the left and to the right of him, one held by the Khosian defenders and the other having fallen to the Mannians during the night. From both opposing parapets, thousands of grimy faces stared down at the flooded space between the walls, rendered mute by their mutual shock.
Only occasionally would someone on a wall point a hand and holler down to the crews in the row boats working through the scene for survivors, calling out to them of some sign of movement. The Khosian and imperial crews passed each other without challenge, even without banter. A truce held between both sides, it seemed, at least so long as it took to recover their comrades.
The boy Nico had made it home safely. He felt it in the fibre of his being; life where once there had been death.
And even though his son Lin remained there in that inner place of loss, the pain of it seemed more muted now, less jagged; as though in making up for one tragedy he had redeemed himself – irrationally, in some small measure – in relation to the other.
He had done all that he could for the young man and his mother. More than had ever been expected of him.
Tiny waves lapped against the farlander’s neck, growing into the bow wave of a nearing boat. Ash heard the chatter of Khosian voices drifting closer. He had no strength left in him, none at all to raise a hand and signal help.
Instead he closed his stinging eyes, fearing nothing, hovering on the very brink of the world.
He had travelled the surface of the planet in his years. He had seen it in all its glory and its madness.
Clear as day, Ash watched his old comrade and mentor Oshō leading the charge across the Sea of Wind and Grasses, the dust rising in a plume as thousands of Shining Way followed him into the maws of the enemy ranks and the bitter climax to the revolution.
Lightning flashed. A storm was raging at sea. He saw young Baso lashed to the mast of a ship, shouting his challenges to the gale and the heaving waves.
A sweep of sunshine, dazzling, through the gauzy air. Now he was watching his old friend Kosh as he sat in peace sketching the Rōshun monastery of Sato on a sunny day, becoming looser, better, the more that he worked through the warming skin of wine by his feet. Aurora, faming in passion across the night sky.
Ash recalled nights when the winds came as storm and vied to have his tent away with them, shoving him as he held down canvas with tired muscles and idiot grins.
He remembered sharing his thoughts with his son on a wintry night on the outside porch, while the frost had crept towards their feet.
A funeral march in Perfume City where he’d watched the people’s grief from behind.
A robin sheltering under a thorn bush in the forest, watching him getting drenched in the rain.
No one there but the trunks swaying in the deep woods.
His wife. Ash thought of his sweet, kind wife. He thought of their first bed, much too small for them, and how they had made do; her pitched stare as they made love. Soft mornings in the glade where she had scattered the crows from her stride, a pretty woman he loved even now.
‘You took your time,’ said a voice of milk and honey.
Ash blinked his eyes open, crusty with blood. Took in the sight of his young wife standing before him, standing there in the green dress she had worn at their joining as husband and wife.
Her dark hair stirred in a breath of wind. Startled, he saw that his own hair hung across his shoulders, long and fine as all northern highlanders of Honshu. Ash was young again. He had his hair again!
‘Butai,’ he breathed in surprise.
‘All that time,’ said his wife brightly, radiant in the sunshine, ‘and you never took another, never started a new family. What a waste! What a foolish waste of a life!’
‘I still lived it,’ he croaked back at her. And for all his longing for the remembered past, Ash recalled why he had always been so restless in his early life, why in the deep calculation of things he had found his rightful place as Rōshun. His great desire to see the world. To live with new horizons daily.
‘Yet here you are,’ she said. ‘Home again.’
‘Yes!’
A breeze rustled through the long summer grasses, drawing his gaze to their simple cottage perched on a mound of ground before the stony face of the hill. Butai was walking towards it now, glancing over one delicate shoulder.
A roar filled his ears.
‘Your eyes,’ Ash called after her. ‘They’re as beautiful as I always remembered them to be.’
In reply his young wife trailed her open hand.
‘Are you coming or going, my love?’
Her love inflamed his own. A boyish smile twitched his lips.
Ash inhaled the sweet winds of the mountains as they flowed through the grasses, through his hair, marvelling that he was home.