Prologue 5: the way back part II
Tome's House, Last Alley of Wakayama. Kii Province — Predawn of the Seventh Day
A bell woke him, not a scream.
That, which in another man would have been a detail of no importance, in an officer trained by Jirōbei Nakata was the first thing his head registered before he had even opened his eyes: a bell, not a scream; which meant that the warning system of Wakayama still worked; which meant, in turn, that the attack had only just begun and that there were, perhaps, two or three minutes' margin before the chaos swallowed the city. Seijuro Nakata opened his eyes. The room was dark. The brazier, into which he himself had thrown the last log before sleeping, kept a low ring of red embers that drew on the tatami a minimal geography: the blanket of camphor and dried lavender, the worn cushions, the silhouette of the bag leaning against the wall. Beyond the ring, all was shadow.
The bell rang again.
Once. Twice. A third time, closer, that the cold predawn wind carried as far as the eave of the house.
And then, yes, the screams.
They were not the screams of drunkards or of a tavern brawl. They were the screams of people just awakened to the fact that something was entering their street and that this something was not in the catalogues of any familiar fear. Seijuro had heard those screams before, too many times, in too many villages that no longer existed. He did not need to get up to recognize them.
He got up anyway.
He laced his boots in the order of always — left first, right after; it was the only superstitious habit he allowed himself, and that one too he had inherited from his father — fastened the field belt, checked the knife on the right thigh, and breathed once before moving toward the fusuma at the back. Behind that panel of paper and wood slept Tome and Suzu. He pressed his ear to it for a second, just enough to confirm that no other sound was coming through yet but the sound of two calm breathings. The little one was breathing faster than the grandmother. It was the short, warm breathing of six years old. Seijuro put it away somewhere and turned to the entrance.
He did not yet open the front door. An officer's discipline ordered him first to see, and only then to step out. He crouched beside the warped fusuma at the front, the one that did not close properly and left a finger of gap between the two panels, and looked outside through the slit.
What he saw was enough to make the first two decisions of the predawn.
The street of the last alley was still empty. The neighboring houses, on the other hand, had already begun opening their doors. A woman came out barefoot with a lantern and two children clinging to her kimono. A man crossed in the opposite direction with a hoe over his shoulder, as if a hoe could serve against what was coming. Far off, in the direction of the center of town, something burned that had not been burning when he lay down: a low yellow stain among the rooftops, like an inverted brazier, fed by the wind and growing slowly.
And among the shadows of the parallel street, some forty paces off, a gray silhouette.
It had no face.
Seijuro looked at it without moving for three seconds.
Then he stood up, opened the door, and stepped out into the street.
He closed it behind him with care.
He closed it well.
Street Along the Canal, Eastern District of Wakayama
The first rule of a Nakata officer, when he entered an attacked city, was not to look for the enemy: to look for command. A provincial city like Wakayama, however small, always had a small military detachment, a token garrison of six or eight men quartered next to the daimyō's tax depository. Those men were not elite troops — the elite were in Osaka, in Kyoto, in the army's bases — but rural soldiers with little training and little real combat. And that predawn, judging by the quality of the screams arriving from the center, those men were already losing the street.
Seijuro walked toward the center at a quick but measured pace, without running.
Running in an attacked city was the second mistake young soldiers always made. Running put them across the path of akuryō in places where they did not want to cross and the akuryō did. Walking quick but measured, on the other hand, allowed the eye to register rooftops, corners, side alleys, and the ear to distinguish between the screams of flight and the screams of combat, for the two sound very different to one who knows how to hear them.
He passed three houses with their doors ajar and at least one body inside each one.
He did not stop at any of them.
A soldier who stops to close the eyes of a corpse during an attack is a soldier who, at the end of the night, will have closed the eyes of none: the only thing he will have done, Jirōbei used to say, is leave more living people without an officer. Seijuro had learned this at seventeen in a village near Bizen, and although he had learned it through hating himself for several months for having learned it, he had learned it well.
He went on.
At the second crossing he saw the first akuryō in motion.
It was one of the small ones, the kind that barely passed five feet, with arms too long and the head tilted at that angle of a tired animal. It walked down the middle of the street, in no hurry, as if the street were its own. Behind a closed shutter, in one of the houses, a child was crying. The akuryō had picked up the sound. It was calibrating.
Seijuro did not give it time to calibrate.
He covered the five paces between them in absolute silence, his guard already raised before arriving — left fist closed at the height of the cheek, right open in front — and brought down the fist along the shortest straight line. It came in at the temple. The creature did not even turn. It fell without a single sound onto the mud of the street and stayed there, folded over itself like a badly filled sack.
Behind the shutter, the child was still crying.
Seijuro went past.
To carry a dead body, he thought without wanting to think it, you need both hands open.
He did not know where that line was coming from, at that hour of the predawn and in the middle of that street, and although he knew perfectly well, he pretended in front of himself that he did not know.
Central Square of Wakayama, by the Public Well
The soldiers were there, as he had imagined.
There were seven of them. Not eight, seven: one of them lay face down three paces from the well, his helmet knocked askew and a pool of blood spreading slowly over the stone of the square. Of the six living, two had their spears trembling in their hands as if the spears weighed more than was reasonable; another two were arguing at the top of their voices, with the kind of useless argument in which neither listens to the other but both believe they are giving an order; the fifth, younger than the others, was holding a torch in his left hand and vomiting against the column of the well with his right; and the sixth, a boy who could not have been more than nineteen, was trying to reorganize the others with the broken voice of one who is discovering firsthand that to command is not simply to say things louder.
Seijuro stepped into the square without quickening his pace.
When he reached the edge of the torchlight, the boy of nineteen turned toward him sharply, raised his spear, and held it half a step in front of his body in a position an instructor at Hiroshima would have corrected with slaps.
"Identify yourself!" he shouted.
Seijuro did not quicken his pace.
"Command officer of the army. Osaka base. I was passing through Wakayama and was sleeping in a house in the eastern district when the bells rang."
"Have you—"
"Lower the spear, soldier."
He did not say it loudly. He said it with the precise density Seijuro reserved for those moments in which a single word was worth twenty. The boy lowered his spear without realizing he had lowered it, and only once it was lowered did he allow himself to breathe.
Seijuro passed beside him and took position at the center of the square, the well at his back and the wide street to the north — the one that gave onto the fire at the far end — in front of him.
"Listen to me. You are going to lose this city if you go on five minutes more as you have been. Do you hear me?"
The six were watching him. Even the one who had been vomiting had raised his face.
"These creatures are not human. They do not feel pain. You can run them through the lungs, the kidneys, the legs, and they will keep coming. They die only by a lethal blow to the head or to the heart. Head or heart. Nothing else counts. Have you understood that?"
"Understood, sir," said the boy of nineteen, his voice a little firmer than before.
"Second thing. You are not going out to look for them. You bring them here. You hold this square as a rallying point. The civilians come here, and you form a closed circle around the well with the torches outward. The light confuses them a little, not much, but a little. You—" he pointed at the one who had vomited, with no hint of reproach in his voice, simply naming him "—go to the western street and come back bringing everyone who can walk.
"You—" to the one with the trembling spear "—do the same to the south. And you three—" to the arguers and the sixth "—cover the north. The northern street is where they are coming from. That one I'll cover myself."
"But, sir, alone?" began one of the arguers.
"Alone."
The soldiers stared at him a second longer than strictly necessary. And then, as always happens when there appears in a scene someone who knows what he is saying, they stopped arguing and moved.
Northern Street, Facing the Central Square
They came almost at once.
They came in a group of five, which meant it was a first scouting wave and that behind it would come a second, and probably a third. Akuryō did not attack in a single wave except when they had a whole city already softened. They did not have Wakayama yet. Wakayama had spent six days distracting itself with small things so as not to have to look at the large ones, and the large thing had arrived that predawn with five gray silhouettes peeling themselves off the smoke of the far fire and advancing down the middle of the street as if the middle of the street no longer belonged to humans.
Seijuro waited for them five paces before the edge of the square.
He closed his left fist at the height of the cheek.
He opened his right in front of him.
The first akuryō was not a fight; it was an execution. The right deflected the creature's open swipe to its own flank, left it exposed by half a step, and the left fist came in beneath the jaw on the rising trajectory he had been perfecting for twenty years. The akuryō's head shot back as if someone had pulled it on a string, the neck cracked, and the body fell. Crack. One.
The second and the third arrived together.
Seijuro stepped aside, let them cross paths with each other — akuryō do not coordinate; they get in each other's way — waited for the second to lose its balance against the third, and came in from the flank. A right palm flat to the second's neck, enough to redirect its head. A left fist to the third's temple, straight. The third fell. The second, still stunned by the palm, took the left in the next half-second. It fell as well. Crack, crack. Three.
The fourth leapt.
It leapt because it was one of the leapers, and because to leap, in an akuryō, was almost always the last mistake. Seijuro received it with both hands at once: the right against the thigh, stopping it in the air, and the left against the sternum, splitting it. The creature did not even finish landing. It hung suspended for half a second in the middle of the street, the gray crack of its face open in an enormous mouth that did not bite anyone, and then it dropped straight down, onto folded legs, without a single sound. Four.
The fifth stopped.
It stopped.
Which was the third strange thing Seijuro had ever seen a creature from the other world do in his life — the first had been the kōtei in the cedar forest, the second the tall one in the clearing of the four rocks, and now this one — and it made him raise his guard a degree higher, because an akuryō that stops is an akuryō that is waiting for something, and what it was waiting for, Seijuro suspected without having time to confirm it, was reinforcements.
Behind the fifth, in fact, the smoke of the far fire began to move.
Three more silhouettes.
Five.
Eight.
Too many to count at that distance.
Seijuro breathed once, deeply, and then, in the brief silence that always opens between two waves of attack and that a trained officer learns to use without wasting, two things happened at once.
The first was that the fifth akuryō, the one that had stopped, tilted its head toward the east, in the direction of the district where Tome's house was.
The second was that Seijuro, from the central square, heard the scream.
Tome's House, Eastern District
It was sharp.
And short.
And a girl's.
Northern Street, Facing the Central Square
Seijuro heard it twice.
The first time with his ears. The second, half a second later, with everything else.
"Hold the circle!" he shouted toward the soldiers in the square, without turning, without even knowing whether they could hear him. "The square! Civilians here!"
And he broke into a run.
He had not run in six days.
He had not really run since he stopped carrying Otsuru in his arms toward the doctor's village, because the running of that afternoon on the cedar trail had been, in its way, the last full run of his life until that predawn. Six days of disciplined walking broke open in five strides. The military uniform, the field belt, the boots. The street along the canal went past as a dark band. A barefoot woman with a lantern jumped aside when she saw him coming and let out a small cry. Seijuro did not register her. He registered only two things: the smell of smoke from the central fire, which the wind was now carrying eastward, and the precise distance still remaining between him and the last alley.
Forty paces.
Thirty.
Twenty.
At twenty paces he understood, without anyone telling him, that he was going to be late.
He understood it from two details that no one else in Wakayama would have known how to read that predawn, and that he, on the other hand, read at once: the front fusuma, which he had closed properly on his way out, was now wide open; and on the eave of the roof, where an hour before there had been only pressed thatch and the cold air of the night, there were two dark stains that moved and that were not shadows.
Ten paces.
Five.
At zero, Seijuro Nakata crossed the threshold of Tome's house.
And then he saw it.
Inside Tome's House
The first akuryō was bent over the body of the old woman.
The second, smaller, took up the back corner and was advancing toward Suzu — huddled against the wall, the doll pressed to her chest and her eyes open too wide — the gray crack of its face open from ear to ear.
Tome was on the floor between the two.
On the floor.
Between the two.
With her arms extended toward the girl.
The large akuryō, the one bent over her, had not even finished lowering its jaw to her neck: what it had done, what was already done, had been faster and older than any bite. It had broken her neck with a single clean twist, that was clear from the angle at which the old woman's head rested on the worn tatami. And it had left her there, her arms still extended toward Suzu, because even dead she had gone on doing the only thing she had known how to do for forty years in that house: to put herself in the middle.
To carry without bending.
To carry to the end.
Seijuro registered everything in less than a second.
And in the second after, inside his chest, his heart did what it only did when it found itself in a desperate situation.
His heart took up the old rhythm.
One beat.
Then another.
Then three in quick succession.
Then five — and the five did not stop.
Five quick.
Four slower.
And the cedar forest, the clearing of the four rocks, Klepsa's chain, the weight of Otsuru on his shoulder, the silent scream of the sanba, everything that had spent six days buried beneath the operational discipline of a Nakata officer rose up at once inside him like a herd that has waited six full days for the opening of a single gate. It rose. And it passed into his hands.
This time there was no guard.
This time there was not even technique.
This time there was a man at the center of a room with a girl behind him, a dead old woman in front of him, two akuryō between, and a single decision to make, which had already been made before being thought.
Seijuro leapt at the first.
The first akuryō, the one bent over Tome, did not have time to understand what was happening.
Seijuro came in over the body of the old woman without touching it, leapt it the way a soldier leaps a ditch in mid-charge, and the left reached the akuryō at the nape of the neck before the creature had finished raising its head. The blow came in rising, against the skull, with the gathered force of five strides and twenty-six years. The neck gave way at once. The head turned on the axis of the shoulder to a position the joints of akuryō did not permit, nor the joints of anything alive. The body fell across Tome's side with a dead weight that Seijuro shoved aside before it had finished landing, because to leave Tome under that body was, that predawn, the one further humiliation he was not prepared to allow the old woman.
The second, the one in the corner, had forgotten about Suzu in the half-second since Seijuro had come in.
That killed it.
Seijuro crossed the room in a single stride, took its head in both hands — the left at the nape, the right at the jaw — and turned in opposing directions with the entire weight of his body. The crack was long. It was not a snap. It was another sound, deeper, more drawn out, the sound of a spinal column that does not resign itself to breaking all at once and breaks instead in stages. The akuryō trembled in his hands for another couple of seconds before going still.
Seijuro let it go.
The body fell.
Two.
Suzu was still in the corner.
Seijuro breathed once.
"Don't look," he said.
The girl did not answer. She was not, exactly, looking. Her eyes were open, fixed, but they were not focused on the corpse of the akuryō in the corner, or on the akuryō in the middle of the room, or on the body of her grandmother. They looked at an indefinite zone of the air a hand's-breadth above all of that, a zone in which the eyes of six-year-old girls, when something too large has fallen on them all at once, take refuge in order not to have to come back at once to the place where they actually are.
Seijuro knew that place. He himself had been there, inside his chest, for six days running.
He wanted to say something more.
He did not know what.
And then, from the square, came the second bell, faster than the first, in double peal, which meant that the main wave had just arrived and that his six soldiers were about to be overrun. Seijuro crouched a moment beside Suzu. He laid his right hand — the open one — on the crown of her head, for a second. Another second. A third second. And drew it back.
"I'll be right back," he said.
The girl did not answer.
Central Square of Wakayama
The main wave was fifteen.
Perhaps sixteen. Seijuro did not bother to count them exactly because counting, at that precise instant, stopped being useful and started getting in the way. What he saw on entering the square again was a defensive ring half coming apart around the well, two torches on the ground, a soldier fallen against the column of the well in a posture that admitted no doubts, and the boy of nineteen trying to reorganize the four still on their feet with a voice now wholly broken, his spear trembling again in his hands, and his eyes searching, without disguise, for the silhouette of the officer to whom he had lowered his spear half an hour before.
Seijuro entered the square from the north, and the akuryō let him in.
Akuryō always let in the one who comes from behind when they are concentrated on what is in front. It is one of the many reasons why akuryō, individually, are stupid creatures. Where they are not stupid is in their numbers.
"The circle!" he shouted toward the boy of nineteen, without breaking his run. "Close the circle again! I'll open their flank!"
The boy did not even answer. There was no need. He raised his spear, shouted two clear orders to his three soldiers — his voice, miraculously, had come back — and the four came together again around the well with the torches outward.
Seijuro entered through the back of the wave.
And then it really happened.
The drums did not fade.
That was the difference, that predawn, from all the times before. In the cedar forest the drums had lasted as long as the combat with Klepsa had lasted, and had withdrawn afterward, the way water withdraws from a tilted tray. In the clearing of the four rocks they had lasted up to the fourth akuryō, the tall one, and had withdrawn there too, leaving inside an empty place. That predawn in Wakayama, on the other hand, they did not withdraw. They beat and went on beating. Five quick, four slower. Five quick, four slower. Over and over, without interruption, for the entire time the wave lasted, as if inside the chest of Seijuro Nakata the last valve that for twenty-six years had kept closed what his blood hid beneath had finally given way.
The first akuryō at the back of the wave fell with a single left fist to the base of the skull.
The second tried to turn and took the right palm to the forehead with a force that drove the gray crack inward. It fell.
The third, smaller, lunged at Seijuro from the side. Seijuro caught it in the air with the right, twisted its neck with a single motion, threw it against the fourth akuryō, and while the two of them fell tangled to the ground his left fist was already coming down on the skull of the fourth. Crack.
Five. Six. Seven.
By the seventh, the soldiers at the well had understood that what was happening at the back of the wave was none of their concern and stopped looking, to concentrate on what they had in front of them. By the ninth, the akuryō still on their feet had begun turning toward Seijuro, understanding — to the degree an akuryō understands — that the real problem was no longer at the well's circle. By the eleventh, a tall akuryō, one of the long-armed kind, reminded him of the one in the fourth-rock clearing, and for an instant Seijuro thought no, not again, and for a longer instant decided yes, again. The creature charged. Seijuro received it with both hands at once. This time he did not push it against a rock: he let the weight of the akuryō drive him back two paces, set his left heel, halted the inertia, and turned on the right hip, bringing the left fist down in a straight line on the creature's temple with the entire weight of the rotation. The head sank toward the other shoulder. The body collapsed the way a sack collapses when it has been emptied all at once.
Eleven.
Twelve.
The soldiers at the well had three akuryō left in front of them. Seijuro heard the boy of nineteen shout the order to charge, and heard the sound of four spears coming down at once at ground level. He did not turn to look. He trusted. An officer, when he has given an order and something more urgent is happening, trusts. He concentrated on his own.
Thirteen.
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
One was left.
It stood in the middle of the street, exactly like the fifth of the first wave. Its head was tilted at the calibrating angle. It did not advance.
Seijuro stopped three paces from it.
The drums were still inside.
Five quick, four slower.
"Look at me!" Seijuro shouted with rage, not entirely sure whom he was saying it to.
The akuryō opened the gray crack of its face and showed the double row of teeth.
Seijuro covered the three paces without raising his guard. It was the first time in his life he advanced against an akuryō without raising his guard. The right hung open at one side. The left hung closed at the other. The creature, which was one of the leapers, leapt.
Seijuro caught it in the air with the right, by the throat.
He held it there, suspended half a meter above the mud of the square, its feet kicking in the void and its arms scratching at his wrist. And then he did something an officer trained by Jirōbei Nakata was never supposed to do, but that he could not, that predawn, manage not to do: he looked at its face. He looked long. He looked searching for something, anything, an eye socket, the root of a nose, the hint of a feature that could explain to a father of three days why his wife had died, why Tome had died, why Suzu was going to die if that predawn did not hold. He found nothing. Akuryō do not carry faces behind the crack. They carry, simply, more gray surface.
Seijuro closed his left fist and brought it up against the skull from below.
The head burst.
The body fell to the ground.
And the drums, inside his chest, gave one last beat, double, and went silent.
Central Square of Wakayama, Moments Later
The silence did not arrive all at once.
It arrived in layers, the way silences arrive in the squares of attacked cities: first the wave fell silent, then the akuryō still stirring on the ground, then the soldiers breathing too loudly around the well, and only at the end, after several long seconds, the human heart fell silent too, in the sense that it stopped beating in the six or seven living men of the square at the speed of one who still believes he is going to die in the next few minutes.
The boy of nineteen lowered his spear.
He lowered it very slowly.
He looked at Seijuro.
"Sir."
"You are alive," said Seijuro, without turning fully. "Good."
"Thanks to you."
"Thanks to your holding the circle with discipline."
The boy did not answer. He was young enough to believe an officer the kind things he was told, and brave enough to suspect, all the same, that they were not exactly true. He nodded in silence. He took stock of his men: three on their feet, two wounded on the ground, two dead. He began giving orders. New torches. Bodies of the akuryō into one pile. Civilians gathered in the center. Send word to the smithy, to the apothecary, to the temple. His voice had come back fully, and for the first time that night it sounded almost like the voice that boy would have twenty years later, when he would be the officer to whom a passing traveler lowered a spear with two words.
Seijuro let him do it.
He started back along the way to the last alley.
Tome's House
He opened the door.
Suzu was still in the corner.
She had not moved. She held the doll pressed against her chest and her eyes on the indefinite zone of air above the bodies, and Seijuro understood that the girl, in all the time he had been gone, had not once lowered her eyes to the body of her grandmother. She had glanced at it from the corner of her eye, perhaps. Not straight on. That was the last frontier a six-year-old brain defends against reality when everything else has already fallen on top of it.
Seijuro went over to Tome.
He knelt beside her.
He looked at her a moment.
The hands.
The hands extended toward Suzu.
To carry a dead body, he thought again, without thinking it, you need both hands open. And for the first time in six days he understood what that old woman had told him the night before, in a kitchen that smelled of miso, while drawing a stray lock of hair back from a sleeping girl.
He lowered both hands slowly.
And he opened them.
Both of them.
He passed the right beneath Tome's shoulders and the left beneath her knees, and lifted her. She weighed little. She weighed what the widows of forty years of absences and dead officers weigh: very little, almost nothing, almost only a kimono and a coiffure and a will. Seijuro felt that almost-nonexistent weight on his open forearms and understood, without need of explaining it to himself, that what he was carrying in his arms was the right way to carry a dead body. Not with a closed fist. With two open hands.
He took her out of the middle of the room.
He laid her down in the back room, on the futon where Suzu had slept the night before. He set her hands at her sides, no longer extended forward: two open hands at her sides, in the posture in which a woman who has finished her work is laid down. He arranged a fold of the kimono. He did it slowly, with the honest clumsiness of one who is doing for the first time something for which he has not been trained.
When he came back to the main room, Suzu was looking at him.
This time she really was looking at him.
Seijuro crouched in front of her. They were at the same height. The girl pressed the doll a little tighter against her chest.
"Your grandmother," said Seijuro, and his voice came out hoarser than he had expected. "Your grandmother did the only thing that mattered. She protected you. To the end."
Suzu did not answer.
"Do you understand?"
The girl nodded once. Very slowly. But she nodded.
"I was not there," Seijuro said, and it surprised him to hear himself say it aloud. "I should have been there, and I was not. I'm sorry."
Suzu looked at him with an attention that was no longer the census of dinner nor the apprentice appraiser's of after, it was something else, an attention older than she was, an attention that in a six-year-old should not yet exist.
"It's okay," she said, in the same exact voice with which twelve hours earlier she had said it's okay, I was very small about her father.
Seijuro swallowed.
"It's not okay."
"I know," the girl answered, finally breaking into tears.
Seijuro laid the open hand on the crown of her head, just as he had half an hour before. This time he did not draw it back so soon. He left it there, still, until time had passed for it to do the only thing that hand could do for a six-year-old girl in a house with two akuryō and a dead grandmother: be there.
Then he drew it back.
"Your grandmother told me your son-in-law is coming tomorrow," he said, and corrected himself at once. "Your grandmother's son-in-law."
"Uncle Genta."
"Uncle Genta. Is he good to you?"
"Yes. He brings dried persimmons."
"Good."
Seijuro stayed kneeling a moment longer.
"I'll wait for him here with you," he said.
And he sat down beside the girl, against the wall, with the doll between them.
Tome's House, First Light of Day
Genta arrived with the first light.
He was a square-built man, in his forties, with the rough hands of a field worker and the round, honest face of a man who had spent his whole life arriving at places on the day he was supposed to. He came with a sack over his shoulder and stopped short at the door of the house when he saw, inside, the officer sitting on the floor against the wall, the girl asleep leaning against his side, and the akuryō's corpse in the middle of the room that Seijuro had not yet taken out because he had not wanted to move her in order to take it out.
Genta did not say anything for a long while.
Then he set the sack down.
"And my mother-in-law?" he asked, in a low voice.
"In the back room."
Genta nodded once.
"How?"
"Protecting her."
The man looked at Suzu. His chin trembled for an instant. He held it. He was one of those who held.
"Thank you, officer."
"No. Do not thank me. I arrived late."
Genta looked at him and did not press. He was one of those who knew when not to press. He crouched beside the sleeping girl, and with a care that Seijuro recognized from somewhere without knowing from where, ran his hand over the crown of her head. The gesture lasted a second. Another second. A third second. Then he lifted her in his arms, without waking her, and pressed her against his shoulder the way one presses the only thing that is going to remain of a sister-in-law dead two years ago and a mother-in-law dead an hour ago.
Seijuro stood up too.
"Take care of her."
"All the life I have left, officer."
"I know."
Genta turned toward the door. At the threshold, with the sleeping girl on his shoulder, he turned back for an instant.
"What is your name? In case she ever asks me."
Seijuro hesitated half a second.
"Seijuro Nakata."
Genta nodded.
"Seijuro Nakata," he repeated, as one who puts a piece of information into a box with a lock. "She will remember it."
And he went out.
North Gate of Wakayama, Morning of the Seventh Day
Seijuro left the city when the sun had already lifted a hand's-breadth above the crest of the eastern hill.
He did not look back.
Not because he did not want to — he wanted to, in fact, with an intensity that surprised him and that he forced himself to put away for later — but because to look back that morning would have meant to stop, and to stop that morning would have meant to stay, and to stay that morning would have meant to give up on the only thing that had become clear to him during the night, somewhere between the eleventh akuryō and the open hand on the crown of a girl who was not his daughter.
Not the whole thing.
Only the beginning of the thing.
The beginning was this: that Otsuru had died in Tanabe. That Tome had died in Wakayama. That in other cities, that same predawn, other Tomes would have died in other ways, and other Suzus would be sitting in other corners with other dolls against their chests, waiting for other Uncle Gentas who would arrive late or would not arrive. That this was going to go on happening, city after city, week after week, month after month, as long as the portal was open. That the Japanese army could not cover every Wakayama in every province. That, until someone did something else, no officer, nor twenty, could do enough. And that, therefore, someone was going to have to do something else.
He did not yet know what.
He did not yet know how.
He did not yet know whether it was he who had to do it, or whether it was someone else, in some other barracks, in some other office in Osaka or Edo, someone with more rank and more information and more years of service than Seijuro had.
But Tome's question, the one that the night before had opened a hole in the kitchen and left him with no answer — why do you fight? — that morning, on the road north out of Wakayama, had begun to answer itself, without asking permission, in the head of the officer who carried seventeen akuryō corpses behind him and two hands gray to the forearms.
Seijuro Nakata had always fought out of obligation.
He had done everything, in fact, out of obligation: the first hours of training at five years old, the first evaluations at nine, the first real combats at fourteen. It had been his father who had enrolled him in the army before he was old enough to decide anything, and from that day on Seijuro had known nothing but barracks, uniform, courtyard formations, and tactical manuals worn at the corners. To fight for his country, for him, was what for other children was fishing with their father or learning their grandfather's trade: the only occupation he had been trained for, the only one he knew how to move in, the only one that offered him clear answers to the questions put to him. He did not question any of it because he had not learned to question. He lived, without knowing it, on the autopilot of a lineage that for two generations had been deciding for him, and that autopilot had worked perfectly for twenty-six years in which no one, not even himself, had yet asked him the question.
And then it had been asked of him by an old woman, in a kitchen, while she drew a stray lock of hair back from a sleeping girl.
Why do you fight? For your country? For yourself? To protect those you love? On your father's order? Out of habit?
The four answers had passed through Seijuro's head the night before, and he had rejected them all four, without quite knowing why, before Tome's brazier. None had been entirely false. None had been entirely true. And that morning, on the road north, with the sun already a hand's-breadth above the crest of the eastern hill, he understood why.
He understood that the true motive had never been in those four answers.
That it had been, all along, in another place.
That this other place, until that predawn, had not occurred to him to look at.
Seijuro Nakata was fighting so that there would be no more Wakayamas.
So that there would be no more Tomes.
So that there would be no more Suzus.
He was fighting for others.
That was the answer.
And he found it, that morning, on the road north out of Wakayama, with his back to a city that was still counting its dead.
Comments (0)
Please login to leave a comment