It was a damp night and the slope of the mountain was wimpled by cloud. If it had come at the other end of the year, the rain would have been unwelcome, heavy enough to tear up the land and beat the persimmons from the trees, but this rain was soft and warm and came sifting gently from the sky. It did not extinguish the lamps that illuminated the bridge and pond and trees, hardly troubled the sparrows that went skipping across the veranda, or the men and women who had gathered in the garden.

Standing between the glossy, budding azalea bushes and the half-barrel bridge, Joji huddled into himself. A pair of men stood slightly apart from him, commiserating the wet. Theirs was a small, quiet murmuring, half-lost under the sigh and shift of trees and rain and the soft sobbing of onlookers. Aside from those, the hour was late, and noises were few; the occasional clatter of hoofbeats, falling quickly with the distance, the patter of feet rushing through corridors.

Joji kept the ground dry under his feet, looking, because she lay near the early-blooming flowers she liked to pick and her father, laid open in the same way, was just ten steps from her and there was nothing to be done.

Her father lay on the pebbled shore, but Ayasha had fallen in the pond. The slow movement of the water moved her hair like seaweed in a quiet harbor and curtained her face.

When eventually he lifted her, he heard a cry, as if some onlooker had only just noticed the corpse of the lord of the domain, his murdered daughter, or the soft spring rain sifting from the sky.


ONE

When the horse finally came up alongside him—he’d been aware of it for the last mile—Hikage was walking with his hands in his sleeves and humming the chorus of the Magpie and the Fox, which he thought was probably the perfect walking song for a man of his stride.

The horse was tall, a semi-mechanical chestnut mare with thick legs and a barrel-shaped coal-chamber, ridden by a woman dressed in an indigo travelling habit and a conical hat.

After that first glance, because a man in his position was either cautious or dead, Hikage studiously ignored the horse’s marvellous clockwork parts, and its unusual rider. He preferred to travel alone.

“Excuse me, Samurai?” said the woman on the horse. “Samurai?”

She used polite words but had a belligerent Doshu accent that Hikage didn’t like much. He pretended not to hear in the hope that she might think him deaf or simple and ride on by. Instead she slowed her horse to match his pace.

“Samurai,” she said again, and then, “Hey, ronin,” like it was a slur.

Hikage gave in. He looked up at the rider.

“Excuse me? Was there something you wanted?”

“I want to hire you.”

He snorted

“Come with me to Rikku. I’ll pay you three ryo, half now and half when we arrive, as long as we arrive safely.”

Hikage looked up at her. Between the brim of her conical hat and her high collar, he could make out a small, pointed chin, a narrow nose and the downward turn of her thinnish lips. When he shook his head, those lips turned down even more.

“Sorry. I’m going to the hot spring at Harukami,” he said.

“I didn’t ask where you were going, I offered you a job. I need a bodyguard and you,” Iyuko gestured at him with one gloved hand, “you look like you need more than just a bath in a hot spring to get yourself sorted out.”

Hikage looked back at the road in order to navigate an icy puddle without soaking his sandals. “Look,” he said, “I’m going to the hot springs, not Rikku, so I’m no help to you. You’ll have to find someone else.”

She exhaled through her teeth at him. “Four ryo.”

“I said I’m not going your way.”

“I haven’t got any more money,” she said. “I really haven’t.” Her voice rose and echoed through the shedding birch trees. “Four is all I can pay you and I need a bodyguard.” She waited, silent a moment. “What are you going to the hot springs for anyway?” she asked. “Do you even have the money for it? There’s a charge to go into the waters you know.”

“Yes, I know.” He walked. Iyuko kept pace. Finally, Hikage looked back at her. “Listen, you offered and I said no. You’ll have to find someone else.”

She laughed suddenly. “Oh, trust me, you’re not my first choice. The thing is there’s no time to hire anyone else.” She pulled back on the reins hard enough that the horse’s head jerked up. She jumped down from the saddle. “Please,” she said and teetered on the edge of a bow.

Hikage stopped walking and turned to her. The breeze, sweet with the scent of tree sap and snow, lifted the long sleeves of her habit and Hikage caught a glimpse of the flesh between fabric and glove. She was scarred, from the heel of her hand up to where the caramel coloured skin disappeared into clothing. The ugly latticework of shiny pink and raised white skin startled him. Hikage’s eyes flicked to the little knife bound under Iyuko’s left arm.

“You’re a magician,” he said.

“Yes.” She frowned at him. “And?”

He laughed. “Well, why would you need help from me?”

Just then Hikage heard the clatter of saddlery behind them, the jingle of loose buckles like the sound of wind chimes in a typhoon. He looked over his shoulder to see two men on horseback far down the road. Tanned and coarsely bearded, Hikage guessed they had spent the long summer living out of doors and now that autumn had set in, they were growing lean. Both of them wore cheap, baggy clothing, patched in places, and belted with twine.

They were obvious about their weapons. Even at a distance, Hikage could tell that one rider was a bowman, the amber wood of his asymmetrical bow hung almost to his knee. The other sat with his weight back in the saddle, the hilt of his sword jutting at an awkward angle from the sheath. Deserters from the Daimyo’s army at best, mercenaries at worst. A knot in Hikage’s belly eased.

“That’s a straight sword that’s been jammed into the wrong kind of sheath, and who knows how long that bow has been strung.” Hikage laughed through his nose and turned to Iyuko. “Is this your trouble?”

“Not exactly.” She gave him wry smile. “These two I could deal with. But there’s a third one that is proving to be a bit of a problem.”

“Three ryo,” Hikage said as he looked at the riders. When the wind changed direction, he could smell the sour tang of smoke and unwashed bodies, as if these two had slept overnight in a smokehouse. Hikage shook his head. “Honestly, I think you’re overpricing them.”

“I told you, there are three of them.”

“I don’t see the third.” Hikage glanced at Iyuko. Her lips were thin, tightened against her teeth. He wished he could see her eyes. As it was, he couldn’t tell if she disapproved of him or the approaching thugs.

“He’s around,” she said quietly.

“Well, we’ll say there are three all together, then it’s one ryo a piece and that’s reasonable.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

Once they were within hailing distance, the riders slowed their horses. They were close enough now that Hikage could get a look at the swordsman. He looked lean and hungry, swamped by colorless clothes. His trousers bunched at the crotch. His jacket hung in loose folds over his sword belt and gaped at the neck. He’d bound the sleeves back with a piece of raw yellow twine, exposing his skinny arms and emphasizing the mismatched sword and sheath.

It wasn’t just the awkward jutting of the sword that declared the swordsman an amateur; after all, any sheath is better than a naked blade. It was the swordsman’s arms that betrayed him. They were tanned and muscled, but the bulb of muscle that comes with serious sword work, that distension just below the joint of the elbow, was missing. He was nothing but a would-be swordsman, making his living killing travelers on the road.

The archer, in contrast, looked a little more professional. He had already shucked off part of his stained brown jacket. His bare shoulder and arm were as tanned as his face. Whatever the one with the sword wasn’t, the archer was. It would have to be the archer first, and then the swordsman.

Hikage nodded. He unknotted the cord from under his belt. Iyuko stepped toward him, one hand outstretched. “Do you want me to-?”

“No, it’s fine,” he said. He knotted the cord and slipped it over his arms, then adjusted his bunched-up sleeves.

While he was playing with his sleeves, the first arrow buzzed close enough to sting his ear. Hikage swore. He looked up to see the archer already knocking a second arrow and stretching out the bow. Hikage shut his mouth and moved.

He jerked to one side and drew his boken, heart thrumming with terror and elation. He leapt for the cover of the nearer horse and whipped the sword down at its bulbous knee. Bone cracked. The animal lurched and then tumbled forward. The momentum sent the swordsman tumbling into the muck of the road.  The injured horse squealed as it struggled up and then fell again.

The rider scrambled to his feet, smeared with mud on one side. His sword spilled out of the mismatched sheath and fell into the muck. He bent to grab it as the horse squealed and kicked. Hoof and skull connected with a bang like the report of a firecracker. The swordsman reeled back and fell in the middle of the road. Hikage eased his weight back and shifted his grip on the sword.

“What the hell is that?” Iyuko shouted. Hikage glanced at her. She was pointing at him, at the sword in his hands. “Is that a toy sword?”

He didn’t bother to answer. There would be no time to explain, not with the archer stretching back the bow while his companion jerked in posthumous convulsions in the mud between them. Hikage turned to the archer and measured the distance. Too far to reach the archer before he could aim and shoot. There were stories of swordsment who could pluck arrows out of the sky, but he’d never met anyone who’d live to boast about it. He certainly couldn’t do it. The only thing left was to hope the archer was incompetent.

Hikage waited for the spiteful buzzing of the fletching, for the sensation of skin coming apart like paper. It didn’t happen. Sound and air changed around him. The leaves falling from the yellowed birches slowed as if the air had thickened like water and the squealing of the injured horse dulled to a haunting echo.

The shivering horse and the ruin of its rider stood out in sharp relief. The tang of urine and blood were subsumed by the smell of wet earth, which grew stronger until the rot and moisture filled up Hikage’s mouth and nose and made him gag. Under his feet, the earth peristalsed. For an instant he stood there and stared at his feet. Then fear unfurled inside of him. He threw himself backward, at Iyuko, suddenly certain that the earth under her was absolutely still.

The road split down the middle like a leather flask bursting. Earth gysered up with a howl that shook Hikage’s teeth. The archer’s horse reared up, and the archer had to throw down his bow to cling to the saddle. For an instant it looked as if the horse would bolt but instead, in terror and confusion, it turned around and around in jerky circles. The great wave of earth crested above horse and rider. It hung for a moment in the air and then came crashing down.

It wasn’t until after the earth stopped shaking and the last of the pellets of dirt had rained down on Hikage, that the ringing in his ears subsided. The smell of earth receded and the scents of autumn, of sweet sap in the falling leaves, returned. Hikage turned from the ruin of the road, the makeshift graves of two humans and two horses, to look at Iyuko.

The rasping of his breath stopped at the sight of her. She had pulled up the sleeve of her habit, and dragged the length of her small blade across her arm. A wound gaped there like a toothless smile and blood ran down her arm to pool in her upturned hand.

“Never seen magic before?” she asked, turning her hand over so the blood splattered into the wet road. Hikage shook his head.

“Never.”

“Well, I’ve never seen anyone fight with a toy sword before. It’s a big day for both of us, then.” Iyuko covered the cut on her arm with her opposite hand and turned back to her horse.

“Bandages?” Hikage asked.

She nodded, the hat bobbed up and down. “If you please. They’re in the back pannier on this side.”

He found them, a little bundle of soft lint and a few strips of brown cloth of very wide weave, and took Iyuko’s arm. The flesh of her arm was hard as old leather, bumpy and raised at irregular intervals. Old, fading scars mingled with those that were shiny and new; the long memory of magic and the agony of casting. Hikage held her arm, pinned the bandage with his thumb, and began to wrap the wound.

While they stood there, Iyuko with her arm held out and Hikage wrapping the lint tight under the bandage, a crow started up a regular cackle. From some distant tree, another crow called back to it. The yellow leaves came drifting down. Autumn continued its way down from the mountains.

“I didn’t see the third one,” Hikage said while he worked.

Iyuko made a soft noise that might have been a grunt of agreement. “No. Neither did I.”

“Two ryo will be fine, then. One a piece.”

“I hired you to protect me until I got to Rikku.”

Hikage exhaled between his teeth. He tied the cloth and tucked the ends. Iyuko pulled back her arm. She tipped up her head to get a good look at him. Hikage looked back.

“I don’t carry steel.” he tapped the sword at his side. “Are you sure you still want to hire me?”

Iyuko reached up and undid the strap under her chin. She pulled off the hat and for the first time Hikage could see the whole of her face; her mouth with the upper lip jutting a little over the lower, her narrow nose, and her eyes, brown as almond skin, bloodshot, and underlined with dark smudges.

“Did you sell your real sword or was it taken from you?” she asked.

“Neither.”

She frowned as if the answer irritated her. “I’m Murakami Iyuko. What’s your name?”

“Hikage.”

“Just Hikage?”

He shrugged and looked past Iyuko’s tired eyes, at the shimmering birch trees bending over the dull brown road. If he had been asked ten years ago, Hikage would have been quick to give his father’s name, and then his own. Five years ago, he would have given the name of the lord who’d adopted him after his father died in service. Last year, if Iyuko had asked, Hikage would have given his father’s name again, such was the rift between Hikage and the lord of the domain. Names were fluid and in the end, they meant nothing. “No family.”

“So you are a disgraced retainer. I thought you might be.”

“I’m wanted for murder,” Hikage said. “And men are hunting me.”

“Oh?” Iyuko’s eyebrows went up. She thumped her straw hat against her leg a few times. “Is that why you wouldn’t talk to me at first?”

Hikage nodded. He wiped the blood from his hands on a leftover bandage and folded the cloth.

“Well,” Iyuko said, “if I was running from my lord, I would carry steel.” She smiled then, for the first time, and Hikage realized she was older than he’d taken her for. Fine lines crinkled into folds at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“What’s so funny?”

“Either you’re stupid, which I doubt, or you’re good enough with the boken that you don’t think you need a real sword.” Iyuko nodded at him as if that was final, and pulled on her hat again. “That’s arrogant, but that’s fine. If you’re that confident in your skills, so am I.”

He thought about asking her exactly what she was running from and then decided against it. She hadn’t questioned him about the murder, so he could permit Iyuko her secrets. After all, it hardly mattered. Rikku lay among the rice fields at the easternmost bend of the River Han, two or three days on a good road, a week or more if conditions stayed as they were, freezing at night and thawing in the day. By the end of a week of travelling they’d be sick of one another. No secrets would last out the trip, and each would probably be glad to see the back of the other.

“Do you ride?” Iyuko asked. He nodded.

“I know how to ride, but…” Hikage gestured to himself and looked down at his clothes.

He was a little startled by the deterioration of his person. When he’d run, there had been no time. He had run with what he had been wearing: hakama, shirt, soft grass sandals.He’d known his clothes were stained, the shirt shiny and thin at the armpits and the small of the back, and the hakama bunching at his lean stomach where a little extra flesh had once pressed against the belt. He had known, too, that the twisted grass of his sandals was rotting from all the moisture on the roads, but hadn’t thought of the mud they splashed up his legs, all the way to the knees where he’d knotted his hakama to keep them dry. “I’m not really fit to ride.”

She turned to her horse and pulled herself into the saddle. “No, you’re not,” she agreed. “But I’m in a hurry and my horse can easily take us both.” She offered her hand. “Come on. And pray to your gods that there’s no one else on the road today.”

Hikage grinned. He took Iyuko’s hand and swung up into the saddle behind her.

TWO

The weather changed while they rode. Clouds rolled over them, northward, blown in from the sea. They were towering and fat, colour of slate, full of the promise of the hard autumn rains that knock the persimmons from the trees and send farmers running for shelter. The tang of snow sweetened the breeze that shifted Hikage’s jacket and chilled his back and belly. He cinched the jacket more tightly, undid the knots in his trousers so the fabric would cover his cold legs. Then he stuck his hands in his armpits and closed his eyes.

The mechanical horse they rode was both metabolism and steam-driven. Heat radiated out of the iron carapace. He slumped to get closer to it.

“What are you doing back there?” Iyuko asked.

“Trying to get warm.”

Iyuko didn’t answer, so Hikage turned his head to watch the trees on either side of the road. It wasn’t long before he fell into a doze.

When he woke, the sky had changed and the shadows had pivoted around them. The cold had infiltrated his clothes, making his limbs feel stiff. The warmth coming from the belly of the horse had diminished and the animal’s gait had wound down to match the diminution of its fuel.

He shifted where he sat, moving a little closer to Iyuko’s warmth She turned so that she could see him in her peripheral vision, then back to the road without comment.

When they’d met on the road, Hikage had expected a prim Doshu lady, someone with more money than brains, who’d left home in a hurry only to learn about the dangers of the road first hand.

“Iyuko,” he said, “where are you going?”

“I told you, to Rikku.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“Research.”

Soon after they passed a small house huddled at a crossroads, a vacant food stand shuttered for the night. Iyuko’s hands twitched on the reins, and the horse turned off the Doshu road.

This road was smaller, hardly more than beaten earth, made slick and wet by rain. The air turned sharp-scented and milky with hanging wood-smoke, and little lights appeared among the trees. The horse’s ears flicked back and forth. It lifted its head and shook its mane so that the head-stall jingled softly. Somewhere in the dark geometry of trees and houses, a horse whinnied at them. After that, the road unwound and spilled into a valley shrouded in smoke that smelled of oil and onions and pork fat frying.

Hikage leaned to look over Iyuko’s shoulder at the town. Below them, the highway became the town’s main street. It carried them across the arch of a small stone bridge that no one was bothering to guard, between houses and shops and under the pointed shadow of a signal tower. With the streets almost empty, some of the tension in Hikage’s stomach eased. He examined the jumble of shuttered shops and the low houses with their sloping, tiled roofs and shoji backlit by lanterns.

“Where is this?” he asked as they passed a quiet tea house and another shop from which the tantalizing aroma of meat dumplings wafted.

“Sasawa,” Iyuko answered and when Hikage made no reply, he saw her smile. “That’s in Katawaza prefecture.”

“Oh.”

“Do you actually know where Harukami hot springs are?”

“North, right?”

Iyuko laughed. “So is the magnetic pole.”

They left the little town behind and took a beaten path through fields that were cut down to stubble. Once Hikage looked up at the sky but it was so hazy with the blue smoke of harvest cuttings that he could only guess the time.

The light was turning orange and shadows were lying long and green when Iyuko guided the horse east along a line of low fences. She stopped the horse and craned to look at Hikage. “Off.”

He slid down, regretting the loss of warmth the moment he’d done it. Iyuko jumped down after him. She untied the laces of a saddlebag and then lashed the horse to the fence. “Coming with me?” she asked.

“Where are we going?”

“This way.” She jerked her head toward a gnarled tree. It was a twisted, squat thing, wading in a field of tangled brown weeds and surrounded by a fence made of saplings. At the fence, Iyuko dug into her saddlebag and withdrew two wooden squares, about the size of Hikage’s hand, that seemed to be stuck together.

With the butt end of a stylus, she pried the two boards apart. Inside, a sticky-soft wax coated the interior of the tablet. Iyuko smoothed the fresh wax inside and began to write. Hikage watched her scratch out the characters, little pictures that meant nothing to him, and then looked back at the tree. It was short, wide, and covered in a cankerous bark. A lone cricket sawed a few times.

“You’re wondering what I’m writing about.” Iyuko said.

Hikage shrugged. “It’s only a tree.”

“Look closely at it,” she said.

Hikage shrugged and looked up at it again. The tree was just as it had been a moment before; fruiting, squat, ugly, with a pair of thick grey sticks growing horizontally from it. Hikage blinked. No, not sticks, legs. They were angular and covered with short, wiry fur. Those… he realized, are the hindquarters of a goat.

Shock made his mouth drop open. The squat and scabby tree was undulating slowly. One of the goat’s legs, jutting like a knife among the branches, jerked and spasmed. Fluid oozed like saliva from the trunk. The fruits pulsated as though they were filling up by degrees. Hikage leaned forward. The earth under the tree was littered with mossy bones.

“Holy gods.” Hikage breathed. “Is it a tree?”

“Yes.” Iyuko’s hand settled on his shoulder. She pulled him back from the fence. “Don’t get to close. It’s a bunjun tree. It arrived here a few years ago and the locals managed to pen it. Usually they roam in packs, but this one must have been separated from its group.”

She looked back down at her tablet.

“Is it an animal or a plant?”

She shrugged. “Does it matter?” When he didn’t answer she looked up from her tablet and frowned. “If I had to, I’d say it’s an animal.” She tucked the tablet under one arm and then turned to Hikage and grinned. “Watch this.”

Iyuko bent to work a stone that was almost as big as her hand from out of the ground. “Imagine this is your body.”

She threw the stone. It bounced and came to rest at the roots of the tree. There was a scream of twisting wood and the tree jerked upright, all its branches suddenly on end.

A branch whipped down and a sack of what Hikage had taken for fruit burst on the rock. Stinking black fluid streamed onto the stone. A branch plunged down at the puddle of fluid, dove into it. Iyuko’s stone broke with a sharp crack as the branch pushed through stone and buried itself like a spear in the ground. Hikage watched the tree pulse, like a leech sucking blood.

“The bunjun tree is a parasite. It keeps you alive as long as your organs can bear it. You hunt, it eats what you catch. You drink, it drinks through you. And when your body dies, the roots pull up and go looking for more prey.”

Hikage opened his mouth to say something but the wind changed direction, came racing toward them from behind the tree pushing a reek of putrefaction before it. A vivid and horrible memory, of bodies lying in the heat, of a border dispute turned bloody, and of Hikage walking with Joji, turning over summer-swollen corpses to find members of the clan, came up too fast for him to push it away. Hikage gagged. He covered his mouth and turned away.

Iyuko touched his back. “Are you all right?”

Hikage straightened. “The smell,” he explained. He hated it even as he said it, the way his voice sounded, thin and weak. When he turned back, he found Iyuko was holding her sleeve to her mouth and nose and felt the shame ebb a little. “It’s disgusting.” He said. He kept his hand over his nose. “Why are you studying something like this?”

“This tree, something it injects into the dying keeps them alive. Something that I think I can isolate, maybe even reproduce. I’m talking about bringing the dead back to life.”

Something fluttered in Hikage’s chest. “Impossible,” he said.

“Now? Yes.” Iyuko jerked her chin at the tree and then opened the tablet again. “Later? who knows. Anyway, packs of bunjun are too dangerous to get close to, but one that’s been penned and, well, almost domesticated, it’s ideal.”

As she spoke she lowered herself until she squatted by the fence. She drew her knife, calmly split the skin of her palm and pressed the wound to the ground. The tree shook. The branch that had split her stone quivered and then the whole tree turned toward her with such violence that the wood shrieked. Hikage saw the dirt stained by the smashed fruit heave up, saw the unnatural undulations of the earth transport the wetted lump toward Iyuko.

“In Rikku and out on the steppe they hold bunjun trees to be magical.” Iyuko told him said as she gathered the earth up in a scrap of cloth and tied a knot.

“Are they?”

“No. Magic is elemental and linked to blood. I believe there’s something chemical about the bunjun’s restorative properties. Here, hold this, will you?” She held out the satchel of earth.

Hikage took it by the knot and held it gingerly. The little satchel, no larger than an orange, reeked of the same rot as the tree and the undyed fabric was turning a rich, wet brown. Hikage squatted down and found a place for the earth in the satchel among Iyuko’s tablets and pens. Then he straightened and looked back at Iyuko, writing.

In the fading light, she seemed to be squinting at the tablet as she made marks on it. Her stylus cut little curls of wax that drifted around her like snow and tangled in the grass. With the butt end, she rubbed out a mistake and replaced it with another word, underlining it so hard that stylus grated on wood. She grimaced.

“You need another tablet.”  Hikage said and held out his hand to take that one from her. “The wax is nearly gone on that one.”

“It’s fine,” she said. She looked up at the purpling sky and sighed. “I’m done, and anyway, the light’s no good for writing anymore.”

Hikage bent and picked up the satchel and then held out his hand. Iyuko folded her tablet and gave it to him and then smiled. “Used to waiting on women?”

“Used to waiting,” he said and followed Iyuko back to her horse.