Prologue 7: a hero without cape

House Nakata, North Slope of Mount Futaba — Hiroshima, Province of Aki, the last days of February in the year 1700

On the engawa of House Nakata, seated at the edge of the wooden boards with his legs folded in seiza the old way, the veteran officer Jirōbei held his grandson in his arms.

The afternoon sun fell oblique across the back courtyard. The willow cast its long shadow across the flat training stone. The wet nurse slept inside, past the kitchen; it was the first afternoon in many that the woman had allowed herself a long rest. The house, empty of children and of guests, breathed the silence that only houses breathe when they have received too many farewells and have learned not to ask.

The boy weighed little more than a service sword.

Jirōbei looked at him.

The baby had his eyes closed, hair already silver and very fine, his cheeks round. The nose was Otsuru's, exactly. The forehead was Seijuro's, exactly. And the left hand, the left, was held closed in a tiny fist, tight, as if he were keeping something inside it that he did not want anyone to take away.

Without anyone having taught him.

Jirōbei drew the back of his index finger along the boy's nape, slowly, in the Nakata gesture of the open hand on the crown of the head. And he stayed that way for a while.

"Forty years ago," he said softly, speaking to the boy and to himself and to the boards that had been there for four generations, "in this same house, my father would have told you what I am going to tell you now: in here, no one ever asks why you fight. In here, you fight, and that is enough. That is why this house is still standing."

The boy did not answer. The boy was sleeping.

Jirōbei let his gaze wander across the courtyard. Across the small vegetable patch, across the willow, across the stone well beside the willow. Across the flat stone where his own father had taught him to hold the guard at four years old. The same stone where Jirōbei, at five, had taught Seijuro the first stance. The same stone that had borne the bare feet of three generations of Nakata children while the mother watched the rice from the kitchen and the father pretended to read a dispatch he was not reading. It was a house that knew how to make sons.

And now the house was empty of sons.

His wife had died in the fifth winter after Seijuro's birth, of no named illness and with no noise, which was how Nakata women died. His father had died before. His mother before. His two brothers had died on a scouting party in the north that had nothing to do with this war and that had no name any garrison still remembered. The whole line of the house, in three generations, had gone falling in silence, in order, like cedar leaves in autumn.

Only he and that bundle of one month and a few days asleep in his arms remained.

And Seijuro.

And Seijuro, that night, was no longer in the house.

Jirōbei closed his eyes.

He saw him. He saw him walking with Nagasuke along the eastern path, his stride long, the left guard cocked at his cheek even in motion. Toward Nagoya. To meet Kojiro the elder. To go on from there toward the central road and, after that, eastward, toward the mountain. Eight hundred ri of walking and fighting, so the dispatches said. Three companions. Three samurai of the ninety-seven. Three men who had carried bodies together along a path of birches and who were now going to carry the world on their backs.

And even so.

It cost Jirōbei to think it without feeling the weight of his age in the small of his back.

Klepsa was a kōtei. So the dispatches of the general staff had said since 1697, though the people went on calling her by whatever name they gave to fear. Kōtei was an old, reserved word that in the garrison archives applied to a single class of creature: those who came through the portal and were not the gray ones. A kōtei was not an akuryō. A kōtei was something else. Bullets did not bite them. Steel barely did. A kōtei could only be brought down by being broken whole, the way a runaway horse is broken, until the will gave out. And no man of the Japanese army had yet brought one down. Klepsa was one. Lucy was another. And no one knew how many more were coming through the open portal.

How many kōtei would Seijuro and his men cross on eight hundred ri of road?

Jirōbei did not want to answer.

The dispatches of January already spoke of three villages attacked; those of February, of five. The count was rising. And as long as the count rose, Klepsa and her kind could do as they pleased in the country, because there were very few men who could break the chain. What his son was going to look for on the mountain lay beyond the dispatches and beyond the garrisons. It was a thing whispered only in the corridors of the general staff, and only to officers who had already seen enough. It had been told to Jirōbei years ago, without proof and without papers, in a room with the door shut. His son had had it told to him two weeks earlier, in the private office in Osaka, and had walked out of there with the decision made. Someone had to go to the portal of Mount Fuji. That was all the law Jirōbei knew that afternoon on the courtyard.

His son had offered to hold.

And the other two had offered to hold with him.

Jirōbei opened his eyes. He looked at the sleeping boy. He settled the head against the crook of his left elbow.

The dispatches that would come in the months ahead, he himself would read on this engawa, with the boy asleep in his lap. Jirōbei allowed himself, for once, what a Nakata officer never allowed himself: to think what he thought underneath.

His son was not going to come back.

He knew it as he knew the great things: without proof, without dispatches, without reason. He knew it with that dull certainty of a veteran who knows where the enemy arrow will fall before the enemy bow has even been fully drawn. He had known it since the main courtyard at Osaka, two weeks before, when he had laid his open hand on the back of Seijuro's neck to receive him and felt, beneath his fingers, that his son had already decided. He had known it in the private office, that night. He had known it on the engawa of this very house, four days ago, while Seijuro placed the boy in his arms and said Father, I leave him to you.

Come back, he had told him then. If you come back well, well; if you come back ill, then ill. But come back.

It was the only sentence he had been able to find.

It was the only one a father can speak.

And even so Jirōbei knew that his son was not going to come back.

He looked down at the boy. The left fist was still closed.

"Then you will have to come back, grandson," he said, in a voice so low that not even the willow in the courtyard heard him.

The boy did not answer. The boy was sleeping.

And the afternoon ended over Mount Futaba.

---

Southern Foot of Mount Fuji — Province of Suruga, the early summer of the year 1703

It took him three years to arrive.

It took him three years because the road between Hiroshima and the foot of Fuji, which in times of peace was made at officer's pace in forty long days, had become in that period what the dispatches of the general staff began to call, without irony, the eastern front. Every city he crossed was under siege or under blockade or under standing threat: in Osaka, where he met with the southern district garrison and where Raisuke supplied him with the first replacement of rifles; in Kyoto, where the imperial palace had closed its gates to the merchants and opened its own to him on the condition that no firearm pass through the city's portal; in Nagoya, where something happened that Seijuro afterward refused to tell anyone, not even the general staff at Osaka when they pressed him for a written report, and from which the garrison could only deduce what was deducible from his eyes when he returned to the road. Every province laid down its dead. Every garrison handed over its detachment and stayed behind to wait for the next dispatch. In three years Seijuro fought more akuryō than the Japanese army had fought in all the centuries before him put together: waves of fifteen, of thirty, of fifty, in coastal villages and in mountain passes and on the outskirts of castles. Three summers. Three winters. Each year that passed, the dispatches that reached Hiroshima were fewer and shorter. Each year that passed, Jirōbei read them with less hope.

When he sighted the mountain for the first time from the plain of Suruga, it was at dawn.

He said nothing.

There was no one to say it to.

And it took him nineteen more days to reach the base of the cone.

He climbed from the southern side, by the path the monks of Fujinomiya marked with painted stones for the pilgrims. The path, however, was no longer a pilgrim's path. Three waves of akuryō ambushed him in the first stretches, in the lower wood. A fourth caught him above the line of the pines. He climbed the last four days without sleeping.

---

South Summit of Mount Fuji, Around the Crater — Sundown of the Nineteenth Day from the Plain of Suruga

He arrived crawling.

He arrived with both feet bleeding inside his boots and both hands cut by the rock and the left guard no longer cocked, because his left arm had not answered upward for two days. He climbed the last hundred steps without raising his head, along a path of black ash, with a freezing wind that came in through the badly closed scar in his side and went out through some place in his chest where it was no longer clear what lay. When he raised his eyes, he had endured seven days without sleep.

And then he saw her.

She was standing.

At the edge of a small platform of rock, her weight set on one leg and the other slightly back, like a guard without guard. She wore a dark armor close to her body, ancient, unmarked by battle, with plate pieces at the shoulders and forearms and a long cape that the summit wind moved slowly, as if the wind, too, were doing her the favor. The collar of the cape was bordered by a strip of pale fur, wild, of some northern animal. Her head was hooded with a black cap of worked cords that came down to her brow and left bare a head of white hair, light, almost silver, that the air shook to one side. She bore no weapon. It was hard to say if she was young or old. It was hard to say if she had been there before the cone or had appeared in the same instant Seijuro raised his eyes. She had no dust on her armor, that much was certain. On the whole summit, where the wind carried ash and everything was covered in gray within minutes, this woman was the only thing that was clean.

And the eyes.

The eyes were yellow. Yellow as bronze heated red. Like two small fires held back behind a plate of glass that did not quite break.

And behind her, on the air itself, there was something.

Something that was not a door and yet not entirely not one. A vertical fissure in the light, tall as two men, wide as one. It had no frame, no leaves, no hinges. Behind it could be seen a backdrop that was not the sky and was not stone. It was something else. It was a thing that Seijuro's eye could not grasp, and from which the mind, after a moment, preferred to withdraw.

That was the portal.

The woman smiled. Without showing her teeth. Hardly more than a change in the line of the mouth.

"You have arrived," she said. "Few arrive."

Seijuro stood still on the path, three paces from her. He brought his right hand to his left side and pressed. He drew breath twice.

"What the devil," he said, and his voice came out raspy, low, without military bearing. "What the devil is this."

"I congratulate you on having arrived," she repeated, without moving from her place.

"Who are you?"

"Someone who has been placed here for the few who arrive."

Seijuro looked at her for a long moment. He clenched his teeth. He looked at the portal behind her. He looked back at her.

"How…" he said, and his voice broke a little, not from fear but from sheer exhaustion, "how does all this stop?"

She looked at him. Not with pity. With something more like the attention of an old functionary receiving a messenger he recognized without ever having seen. She nodded toward a flat stone, on her left, that he might sit.

Seijuro did not sit.

"How do I stop all this," he repeated.

And then she told him everything.

She spoke to him at length. She spoke to him calmly. She spoke to him the way one speaks to a soldier handed his last order: without urgency, without flourish, without half-words. She spoke to him of things Seijuro had never heard from any officer of the army, nor from any Buddhist monk, nor from Jirōbei himself. She spoke to him of the other side and of what lay on the other side. She spoke to him of who waited there and why they waited. She spoke to him of the pact and of the punishment. She spoke to him of the light and of the tower. She spoke to him of what He who ordered the world required, and of what He who ordered the world did not permit. She spoke long. The sun fell two hand's breadths on the horizon while she spoke. Seijuro did not interrupt her once.

When she finished, it had nearly fallen to night over the summit, and the wind had dropped a notch.

Seijuro stood looking at the portal.

He took a moment before asking. He took a moment because he knew the answer.

"Then," he said, and his voice came now without surprise, only with weariness, "the only way to stop this is to go through that damned portal."

"Yes," she said.

A single word.

Seijuro closed his eyes.

And he saw.

He saw Otsuru in the birthing room, whispering that it had been a son and fainting without anyone noticing. He saw the path of cedars beneath the tsunami and Klepsa among the trunks. He saw the burial mound at the Tanabe clearing in the late light. He saw Tome with her arms held out toward her granddaughter, in that back room in Wakayama. He saw Suzu crying for the first time with her head against his shoulder. He saw the main courtyard at the Osaka garrison, Jirōbei's hand on the back of his neck, the informal circle of officers with Raisuke at the head. He saw the engawa of House Nakata, the baby in the lap of his father, the closed left fist of the boy that no one had taught him to make. He saw the square dirt-packed courtyard of House Asano on Mount Futaba, that same February morning, and Nagasuke holding out an open hand without a word. Come back, the son of Nagasuke had said behind his father. I'm coming back, the father had answered. It was a conversation between two generations. Not between two men.

He was there because of all of them.

He was not there because of himself.

He opened his eyes.

He looked at her.

"If I go in," he said, slowly, "does it end?"

"While you are inside, yes," she said. "The akuryō will be gone from the real world in the same instant you cross. They shall not return while you remain."

"And while I remain?"

She did not answer. She only held his gaze with that same old functionary's attention, the attention of one who is not authorized to answer what she has not been permitted to answer.

Seijuro nodded.

Once.

Slowly.

The way he had always nodded, since he was sixteen, before taking the decisions he knew were already taken.

He stepped forward three paces. He passed beside her. The fissure in the light received him with the cold air of a courtyard he had never set foot in. He did not look back. He did not speak again. The left guard, by instinct, cocked itself one last time at the left cheek, in the old Nakata gesture, though the arm did not fully answer. The right hand opened, palm forward. And he went in.

Seijuro Nakata crossed the portal of Mount Fuji at sundown of the nineteenth day from the plain of Suruga, in the early summer of the year 1703.

And that woman, alone on her platform of rock, stood looking at the place where Seijuro had passed.

She smiled again.

As if she had been waiting for him.

---

House Nakata, North Slope of Mount Futaba — Hiroshima, the Same Morning

A few hours before sundown on Mount Fuji.

In the back courtyard of House Nakata, on the flat stone where three generations of Nakata had learned the guard, Jirōbei was teaching his grandson to hold a bokken.

The boy was three years and four months old.

The boy could speak.

"Not here, jiji. Here."

"Here, yes," said Jirōbei, and lowered the boy's right wrist by two fingers' width. "The grip is held from below. Not from above. If you hold it from above, the sword falls when it strikes anything."

The boy put on a face of concentration. His hair was silver and very fine, mussed by his run across the courtyard. His eyes, by now, were the deep red of his father's. He wore a short yukata of unbleached cotton, his feet bare on the cold stone, and a child's bokken that Jirōbei had made him himself over the winter, of young oak, the grip wrapped in white cord. He gripped the right hand as the grandfather had shown him.

The left hand, with no one having taught him, he kept closed in a fist.

"And now," said Jirōbei, stepping back two paces, "show me the stance again."

The boy squared up. His feet apart as Jirōbei had taught him: left foot forward, right foot back, his weight on the center. Bokken up, edge to the sky, point at the height of the imagined enemy's brow that the grandfather always drew on the dry wall of the shed. His face, serious.

"Good," said Jirōbei.

And he laid the open hand on the boy's nape, slowly, in the old Nakata gesture.

The boy smiled.

"Again."

"Not again. Now you rest. The swordsman who trains without rest tires twice over."

"Did Father say that?"

Jirōbei was silent for a second. His son had never fought with a sword. His son had fought with his fists. But he had not yet told the boy that difference, and he did not want to tell him on that morning.

"My father said it," he said.

"And your father's father?"

"Him too."

"Ah."

The boy lowered the bokken and sat at the edge of the engawa, swinging his feet. Jirōbei sat down beside him. The morning sun came in slanted over the willow and drew the well's shadow on the courtyard. It was a clear day. In the three years since Seijuro's departure, Hiroshima had remained, by reasonable measure, on the edge of the eastern front. The dispatches from the garrisons of Osaka, Kyoto and Nagoya spoke almost daily of waves and casualties, but west of the mountain ridge, in the Province of Aki, the akuryō had hardly been seen at all. One dispatch in 1701, two in 1702 (one of them on the coast, not in the city), and so far in 1703, none. The Hiroshima garrison kept its full complement by order of the general staff, not by any need of the field. A veteran in retirement like Jirōbei could allow himself to raise his grandson in the back courtyard of the family house with no weapon in sight beyond a child's bokken.

And then, from the eastern path, there came a sound that Jirōbei had not heard in three years.

A low hiss. Not exactly human. Not exactly animal. But ordered.

There were three.

Jirōbei stood very still.

The boy lowered his legs from the engawa and looked at his grandfather, alarmed by the grandfather's silence.

"Jiji."

"Hush, son."

"What is it?"

Jirōbei did not answer. He stood up slowly, without making the boards creak, and stepped three paces toward the inside of the house. He took the katana from the low stand in the next room, his own, the one of forty years' service. He drew it from the saya just enough to see the edge. He returned it. He came back to the engawa. He crouched down before the boy.

He spoke very low.

"Son. Listen to me well now. Do you remember the creatures I have told you about? The gray ones?"

The boy's eyes went wide.

"The…"

"Do not name them. But yes. Those. Three have come."

The boy looked at the path. Then at his grandfather. Then at the bokken still in his hand.

"They are coming?"

"They are coming."

"And how are they killed, jiji?"

Jirōbei laid the open hand on his nape, again, slowly, and looked for an instant into the red eyes. It was a question a boy of three should not be asking his grandfather in his own courtyard. But it had been asked.

"They feel no pain," said Jirōbei. "No blow hurts them. Severed arms mean nothing to them; severed legs, the same. They die only by two means. A clean cut to the head. A clean cut to the heart. Anything else is no use. Do you understand?"

The boy nodded.

"Then I will do it, son. You are going inside the house. You are going to the back room. You are going to slide the fusuma shut. And you are not going to open it until I tell you. Do you understand?"

"And you?"

"I stay here."

"And if…"

"Son. Now. Inside."

The boy stood up, bokken in hand. But for the first time in his short life, he did not obey fully. He stayed in the inner threshold of the house, the fusuma half drawn, watching the courtyard. Jirōbei did not see him.

Jirōbei had turned to face the path.

And the three were already coming in.

---

There were three akuryō.

Two were of the common size: short, arms hanging to the knees, heads rounded like overturned pitchers. The third was tall. The third was of the tall kind, the long-armed ones, the ones that the dispatches of the general staff noted apart because they knew how to gauge their target before they struck.

Jirōbei went out to receive them at the center of the courtyard.

He drew the blade.

The first akuryō came at him from the left. Jirōbei pivoted on his back foot, let the strike pass, drove the edge in between the two collarbones in a downward stroke, and pulled it out clean. The head of the akuryō was off the trunk before the body had understood that the body was over.

One.

The second akuryō came at him from the other flank. Faster than the first. Jirōbei stopped it in midair with a horizontal cut at the height of the neck. The creature fell forward, headless, its arms still moving for two seconds out of habit.

Two.

At forty years' service with the katana, Jirōbei dispatched the first two akuryō with the same economy with which he would have struck the heads off two reeds in the vegetable patch. There was no alarm in him. There was no haste. There was, not yet, fear. The katana knew. And he, with the katana in his hand, knew also.

What Jirōbei did not yet know was that the third, the tall one, the long-armed, had done a thing that was on file in the general staff's dispatches and was not in the manuals of the Hiroshima garrison.

It had stopped to gauge.

It had looked at the courtyard.

It had counted Jirōbei.

And it had decided that the adult with the katana was not the simpler target.

It had circled to the left, close along the wall of the vegetable patch, making no sound on the packed earth of the courtyard.

It had reached the engawa while Jirōbei was finishing with the second.

It had opened its mouth at the sight of the boy in the threshold of the half-drawn fusuma.

---

Jirōbei turned.

He saw it.

He saw it at fifteen paces, already on the engawa, already bent over the boy. He saw the open mouth of the akuryō, the inner row of teeth like a second mouth inside the first, the final curve of the descent already begun.

And he knew, in the same instant that he saw, that he was not going to make it.

Fifteen paces.

A katana held high.

A grandson of three years with a child's bokken in his left hand, still closed in a fist.

And an akuryō with its mouth already open half an inch from the boy's neck.

He was not going to make it.

Jirōbei knew it.

And even so he ran.

He ran with both campaign boots over the courtyard, the katana raised above his right shoulder, his heart pounding as it had not pounded since the scouting party of '89, his throat opening in a cry that did not become a word.

He ran knowing he would arrive too late.

"Son!"

And then.

Then the akuryō vanished.

It did not fall. It did not break. It did not bleed. It did not cry out. The whole creature, in one instant, simply ceased to be there. As if the air had withdrawn it from within. As if a hand unseen had ripped it from the world in one clean pull. The open mouth was still open, but now into nothing. The gray body was no longer there. The engawa was empty of the akuryō, and only the boy, in the threshold, with the bokken in his left hand and his red eyes very wide, remained where he was.

Jirōbei stopped at three paces.

He lowered the katana.

He raised his face.

---

He understood it in the same instant.

He understood it, first, because an akuryō does not vanish. An akuryō is killed. Its head is broken, its heart is broken, it is beheaded with the katana or its chest is blown open with the rifle, and then it falls, gray on the ground, and smells faintly of the rust of swamp air. But it does not vanish. It does not go from within. It does not erase. Save in one circumstance. Save in one alone.

He understood it, after, because it was he himself who had read aloud, three years before, on the engawa of this very house, a dispatch sealed by the general staff that had been sent to him for the formation of officers in his district. "If at any point in the campaign the akuryō should cease simultaneously and entirely throughout the national territory, it shall be understood that a living human being has crossed into the underworld. The cessation admits of no partiality: either all at once, or none." The dispatch was signed by the office of the general staff at Edo. Jirōbei had kept it in the drawer of the private office, with the rest of the official papers. He had not read it again until that moment.

He understood it, finally, because he knew whom he had said farewell to in the main courtyard at Osaka three years and four months before. And because he had known, since that February afternoon on the engawa, that his son was not going to come back.

His son, no.

But the war, yes.

The war, also.

Jirōbei sheathed the katana, without taking his eyes from the grandson.

The boy was unhurt.

The boy walked two paces along the engawa, barefoot, the bokken still in his hand and the left hand still closed in a fist. He looked at the courtyard. He looked at the two headless akuryō lying on the ground. He looked at the empty hollow of the third, where there was nothing.

He looked at his grandfather.

"Jiji."

"I'm here."

"Where did it go?"

Jirōbei stepped up onto the engawa. He crouched down to the boy's height. He laid the open hand on his nape, slowly, in the old Nakata gesture.

He took an instant before answering.

"Your father called him, son," he said softly. "Your father called him, and now he is gone."

The boy did not fully understand. But he asked nothing more. He laid his forehead against his grandfather's neck, the bokken between the two of them, and he stayed that way, silent. The way the Nakata stayed silent when a great thing happened that was not yet fully understood at the time.

Jirōbei held him.

And over the small shoulder of his grandson, he looked toward the east, toward the path that on that morning no one was climbing and no one was descending, toward the blue ridge that separated the Province of Aki from the rest of the country, toward the mountain that was not even visible from that courtyard and that was, nevertheless, in that moment, the only place in the world that Jirōbei knew how to look.

"You did it, son," he said, without voice. "You did it."

The midday sun struck the flat stone of the courtyard.

The willow did not move.

And the akuryō, throughout the archipelago, in that same exact instant, ceased to appear.

For fifteen years.

What would come after, no one yet knew.