“I wish for peace.”
“At the cost of all else, peace.” The prince turned, hands clasped behind him, looking Yora directly in the eyes.
“You well meet your reputation, poet. I suppose it’s no surprise. Loyalty: such a hard thing to hold onto, in these times. Like water. Perhaps that is what has passed beneath us… sweeping our bridge away.”
With this, the prince’s cloaked guards swept in, and he was guided off. Yora called: “They know you’re hiding something.”
“You’ve no standing over my father’s guards,” Nioh reminded him. “They told you I’m hiding something. What of it? They say, ‘Another word from him and heads will roll.’ They say, ‘The landless prince, he must be angry.’ They say, ‘Something must be up.’”
“I’m trying tohelp.”
“You believe that, but perhaps you should consider what the implications of your ‘help’ really are. I like you, poet. On another day, we could have crossed the bridge together.”
With a sparrow’s nod, Nioh gathered his box with slim fingers and withdrew a flute in a silken bag. “But I forget myself. Please, take this as a token of my respect. One of my great treasures, small as it is. It was given to my grandfather by the great Souchou Dynasty to the west; richest country in the world. They offered this to mark completion of a treaty. You could say, this is why we have a sea-line with the kingdoms of the continent. Apparently, there were two dragonflies sculpted out of wood at the mouthpiece, representing peace, and union, on both sides of the sea, but during transport, someone dropped it, and they broke off. Now there are none. Poetic, I think, for our times. Isn’t it?”
“My niece Kai Gekko’in plays the flute, a little,” Yora said, “though I’m sure not so beautifully as you.”
“The smallest hawk still has a voice,” the prince said. “We would be glad to give it to her.”
Nioh inclined his head; the guards fell about him, close as shadow. “One day, you will start to see. Perhaps you already have. But it will grow in you, it will be cancer. Then things will change. Then maybe one day you will be able to talk about it as you are, and not bright Seikiyo’s thug on a string.”
“We don’t have to be enemies,” Yora said.
“I agree,” said Nioh, and made his leave.
Yora returned to the path to find his bodyguard, a rangy wolf of a man named Kaji Getoh, near the trees. “That was a pretty bit of business,” Kaji grumbled. “What now?”
Yora eyed the gate, where spectators had gathered, moving like little birds. The retired-emperor, Goshira, had exited the palace.
Kaji Getoh rasped, “What’shedoing here?”
“Same as any of them,” Yora said. “Watching, for his sport.”
Goshira stood in his munificence at the far side of the field. Beside him his religious aide, the monk Moro, towered tall and cavernous, hollow in the chest and with the stoop of those of certain height, soft, and lilting. The silent Tessoku, the Shrouded Guard, floated behind them, so named for the veils they wore over their faces, marked with the letter reading “Emptiness.” They slid from the path like wraiths, trailing Goshira to the shade of the willows, their intentions obscured by the hoods they wore at every hour of the day.
They passed, but Yora found the eyes of the retired-emperor locked upon his own, and he bowed, lightly, in respect.
I know, Goshira seemed to say, over the distance.I know of your investigations.
I know what Seikiyo has ordered you to find.
Then he turned, and the gaze was broken, and the air seemed to alter once again.
Sunlight dappled the grass. Yora walked on, for he’d seen the chancellor’s oldest son, Shigeo, in the shade: a young man of the second rank, Shigeo was dressed in clothes of green brocade marked with flowers and the Keishi butterfly on the sleeve. He stood with his wife, Nariko of the Hara clan, and their infant son, Sukehira.Everyone is here, Yora thought. What had he said when Getoh asked? Yes.Watching.
“So you saw that,” Yora observed.
Shigeo removed his gloves. “My father, as lord chancellor… he and ourretired-emperor are ever at each other’s throats. Sometimes I think my friendship to Goshira is the only thing stopping them from all-out war.”
“What does Seikiyo say to that?”
“What do fathers always say? ‘Be happy, serve your house, marry, make a lot of children.’ He knows he has to keep the peace. At least, until the new-emperor accedes.”
“Your sister. She’s well?”
“Complains she is a whale, but the time is close. Actually, she wants a word with you, if you can spare it. Until her child is born, Goshira holds everything. Power over his son the emperor. Over the court. Father asked me, knowing my friendship, to be a liaison of sorts.”
“Good thing you’re loyal,” Yora offered. “You’re close to him. The retired-emperor.”
