江戸物語

Chapter 24 Chichiue

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Content warnings: trauma, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distress

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He moved back to his father’s house a few days later.

It was the natural thing: a son came home to his father’s hall, not his grandfather’s, and the room at the end of the hall where Hyogonosuke had grown up were aired and made ready, the room he had slept in as a boy, three doors down from the one where his father started every morning before the sun came up.

His grandfather let him go without ceremony, only resting a hand on his shoulder at the parting and looking at him for a moment with that reading look, satisfied now, and Hyogonosuke understood what whatever his grandfather had needed to see in those first days, he had seen and was content to hand him on.

His mother was waiting. She had held back during those first days, which was his grandfather's doing again, Hyogonosuke thought, the careful management of how much could come at him at once, but in her own house she could not hold back another moment, and she had him barely through the door before she had her hands on him.

She was a village woman still beneath the years of being a swordsman's wife, broad and quick and undefeated, and she took one look at her son and set about him the way she had once set about her husband's leg, with a brisk maternal horror that had no patience for ceremony at all.

"Look at the state of you. Look at your hair, it's like a horse's tail in the rain. And thin! You're barely there, there's nothing on you, I can see the bones of your wrists! What were they feeding you, were they feeding you at all, sit, sit down, no, by the fire, you're frozen, your hands are frozen—" She had him by the wrist, by the shoulder, turning him to the light, her hands going to his face, to the scar, tilting his head to see the powder-burns, clucking, her thumb at his cheekbone — "and this, oh, my boy, your face, your handsome face—"

Hyogonosuke pulled back.

He did it before he had decided to, a sharp turn of the head out from under her hand, a lift of his own hand that moved hers away from his face without ever touching he. Not the flinch, not the recoil from danger, but something else, something almost forgotten: the simple irritable recoil of a grown man being handled, a son too old to have his hair tutted over and his wrists measured and his face turned to the light like a boy who has come in filthy from playing the fields.

He pulled back, and gave her a look, and the look said, plainly, as plainly as anything he had managed in months without a voice: I am not a child, leave my hair alone.

His mother stopped. She looked at him, at the turned head and the put-away hand and the flash in his eye, the first ordinary human flash anyone had seen in him since he came down the lane, and something crossed her face that was not hurt. It was almost satisfaction. As though in the pulling-back she had found a thing she had been more afraid of not finding than of any scar: that he was still in there, the boy who hated having his hair fussed. She had been braced, perhaps, for someone with no push left. And here was a push.

She put her hands on her hips. "Well," she said. "Listen to you." Which was a joke, because he had not said anything, and she made it anyway, lightly, the way you could make such a joke only if you loved a person all the way down and were not afraid of his silence. It was the first time anyone had played with the silence instead of stepping around it, and it landed in Hyogonosuke like a small warm stone. "Too grand to let your old mother tidy you. Fine. Fine. Sit by the fire at least, you contrary thing, before you freeze, and let me feed you, since I can see nobody else has bothered in two years."

She fed him. She did not get to fuss his hair, that evening, and made a great show of being wounded about it, and fussed about everything else instead, the fire, the food, the bedding, the thickness of his bedclothes against the cold, and Hyogonosuke sat in the middle of it, in his mother's undefeated noise, and let it be the thing it was, which was a room in which his catastrophe did not get to change the rules. It ached. It was unbearably close to being small again, to being the boy he had been before any of it. And it was the first hour since the field that he had felt, around the edges, something that was not grief and not fear, but only the ordinary warmth of being a person his mother loved too much to handle him gently.

His mother did not reach him the way the others had reached him. She did not need to. She was not where the deep thing in him lived. She was where the boy lived, and she tended the boy, and let the men of the house tend the rest.

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The deep thing came at night, as it always came.

He had been back in his father’s house for a few days, sleeping in his boyhood room before it happened. The days had been good, as good as the days could be now: he was warm, he was fed, the leg that had ached with the previous weeks’ travel eased with rest, his mother fussed and he pushed back and she fussed regardless.

He saw his father every morning and every evening. They sat together mostly in silence, which had not been unusual before Hyogonosuke lost his speech, keeping each other easy company, and on the third morning, his father took him out to the yard in the cold. Frost silvered the packed earth and the bare branches of the plum tree stood black against the pale winter sky. They stood for a while and Hyogonosuke thought that was all they would do, until his father crossed to the rack on the engawa and took down two bokuto. The sight of him tightened something low in Hyogonosuke’s chest.

His father handed him one. The wood settled into his hand with a familiarity that was almost painful. His father waited, asking nothing. And at last, Hyogonosuke brought up his second hand and closed both hands around the grip.

Toshikatsu stepped back and raised his own.

The first form came without needing to be remembered. The body knew it. Left foot. Right foot. The settling of the hips. The rise of the sword. The cut. The scar along his leg pulled and complained as they had at the temple, but neither stopped the movement.

His father watched. Again. The second form. Again. The third. No corrections. No instruction. Only his father's eyes following the work of his body the way a carpenter follows the grain in a board, taking the measure of what remained.

The next morning, they did it again, and the morning after. Hyogonosuke getting up with his father before the dawn and practicing his forms in the garden, which was the routine his father had kept since before Hyogonosuke started learning any of his family’s sword style.

The sixth morning, Hyogonosuke’s father handed him a fukuro-shinai instead of the bokuto and stepped opposite him. Hyogonosuke bowed, accepting that they were moving from the simple forms to the thing the forms drilled. His father returned the bow and closed the distance, slowly at first – a cut, a parry, a step, another cut. The old language of the school, spoken in wood and movement instead of words. And then, for a moment, when his father stepped forward, something in Hyogonosuke flinched with the memory of the field.

His father saw it and the tempo changed at once. The pressure eased. The distance opened. And nothing was said as they ended the exchange and lowered their swords, breath standing white in the morning air. Toshikatsu looked at him for a long moment and nodded, the same kind of nod he’d given Hyogonosuke when he was a boy and had finally managed some difficult move after failing at it for weeks. The nod that said, good, that’s it for now.

But the field did not care that Hyogonosuke was sparring with his father or that he was warm and fed and home. It came anyway, on the ninth day, up out of his sleep with all of its old country intact.

He was in it. He was up the lane and the slopes were full of guns and the bright light of the moon, and Suke was … Suke was there, in the field, where he had no reason to be, with the blood at his mouth, the fragment, the edge of the thing he never let himself look at the middle of, and it was happening, all of it was happening at once the way it did, and the sword answered without his asking, and the boy, the woman, his own man, the faces of the village laid over the dead, and he could not stop it and he could not get out of it and he could not, could not —

And out of the bottom of it, out of the deepest place the body kept, where it had kept the one thing it would give up only when there was nothing left and no choosing in it, came the word.

"Chichiue—"

He heard it. Half surfaced, thrashing up out of the field into the dark of his boyhood room, he heard his own voice say it, cracked and strange and unused, a child's word, the word a small boy cries in the dark when the dream has him, the deepest reach the body had — father — and it was out of him before he knew it was coming, the way the breath had never once come when he reached for it, coming now because the body needed it and the need went under all the broken machinery and pulled the word straight up out of the place words came from.

He did not understand, in the first instant, that it was the first word. He only knew the field was letting him go and he was in the dark and he had made a sound that was a word, his voice, shaped, a word.

And the footsteps were already answering.

Step-drag-step-drag, fast, faster than he had ever heard it, down the boards in the dark. His father, three rooms down, who so slept light as all old soldiers sleep, who had heard, through the wall, in the dead of the night, his mute son's first word come up out of a nightmare as a cry for him. The door slid back. His father came across the room, the bad leg and all, no slowness now, and was down on the floor at the edge of the bedding before Hyogonosuke had fully surfaced, his hands finding his son in the dark.

Hyogonosuke did not flinch.

He noticed it the way you notice a thing from very far off, even as the field's grip was still loosening on him and his heart was still going and the dark was still full of it: the hands came onto him out of the dark, his father's hands, and the body did not recoil. For the first time since the field, hands came at him in the dark and the body knew them before it could be afraid of them, knew them as the hands it had just called for, and let them.

"I'm here." His father's voice in the dark, low, close. "I'm here. I have you. It's the dream, only the dream, you're home, I have you."

Hyogonosuke lay in his father's hands in the dark of his boyhood room with the field draining out of him and the word still hanging in the air where he had said it, the first word, father, and he could not say it again. He reached for it. He tried, in the dark, to make it come a second time, to say I'm sorry or I’m alright or chichiue once more on purpose, now that he knew it was in there, and the breath went into the shape of it and came out the other side as breath, the way it always did, because it did not come when he reached for it. It only came when the deepest part of him needed it past all reaching.

But it had come once. The door he had thought had no handle on his side had opened, once, for a single word, in the dark, toward his father — and his father had heard it, and crossed the house on his bad leg, and was here, his hands on his son, not letting go.

His father did not ask him to say anything else. He seemed to understand the way his own father understood things, the way the whole of this family understood things in the end without being told, that the word had been everything, that there was nothing to add to it and nothing to make it do twice. He only stayed, down on the floor with his bad leg folded wrong beneath him, his hand on his son's chest where the heart was still going, and waited it out, the way the kind ones waited everything out, until the heart slowed and the dark went ordinary and the night, at last, let them both be.

Outside, over the valley, the waning moon was setting, white and enormous, behind the western slope. Neither of them saw it. The room was dark, and the word had been said, and the father was there, and the son, for the first time since the field, slept the rest of the night through.

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Previous Chapter | Index

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You may be surprised to find that this story is full of little truths.

Yagyu Hyogonosuke was a real person who lived from 1579 to 1650. He served Kato Kiyomasa, leaving for the 500 koku posting in 1603 against his grandfather’s wishes. During his service, he was sent to suppress a peasant revolt, replacing Ito Mitsukane who had failed to do so. He crushed the uprising and resigned from service almost immediately afterward to wander as a ronin for some time.

In 1615, he eventually accepted a position as a sword instructor to Tokugawa Yoshinao in Owari, at a stipend of 500 koku – the same amount he had been paid by Kato Kiyomasa more than a decade earlier. Hyogonosuke himself requested that he should be excused from any official duties besides those of a sword instructor and that he not be given a higher rank or stipend. He founded the Owari Yagyu branch, married, had children, and retired to a temple in 1648.

Chapter 23 Father

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Content warnings: trauma, emotional distress, grief

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His father wasn’t in the valley then, Hyogonosuke learned that first night when his grandfather told him so over the evening meal Hyogonosuke couldn’t finish. Toshikatsu had gone three days east to the house of a senior student who kept a training hall of his own there and had been bringing him out twice each year to correct the school’s forms in person. He would be there another three or four days yet, though word had been sent by a fast horse, which would likely reach Toshikatsu while he was already on his way back.

“So your father is coming,” Sekishusai said. “He does not yet know what he is coming to, and we will let him travel first and tell him the rest when he is here.”

Hyogonosuke heard, underneath the plain words, the thing his grandfather was not saying: that the telling would be done carefully, that it would not be left to a rider’s message or to the shock of his doorway. That his father would be prepared. He was grateful for it and ashamed of the gratitude that he should need to be handed to his own father gently, like a thing that might break in the passing.

But there was another thing under the plain words, too, and it took him until he was alone in the dark of the small east room, clean, and fed, and lying on clean bedding under his grandfather’s roof, to find it. His father had gone east to teach. The journey took three days over the passes, and it was the edge of winter, and his father still made it on the bad leg carrying him up and over the same mountains Hyogonosuke had just come down, to stand in another man’s hall and correct the angle of a cut because the school needed it and there was no one else whose eye would do. The bullet to his back had not ended his father’s usefulness. It had not made him a thing the family carried. He had spent the years since teaching himself to live in it and then simply gone on, up the passes twice a year, doing the work. He was doing the work now, at this very moment, while his son had walked four hundred ri convinced that a damaged man was a finished one.

Hyogonosuke lay in the clean dark and turned that over, and it would not stop turning. He had built his vision of the future on the absolute certainty that his body would not be forgiven for not being able to do what it could not. Yet his father was three days east disproving it without knowing there was anything to disprove. The wall that had stood so solid all through the winter, the image of being kept as a debt rather than a kindness, the place at the edge of the family's table, the margins of the dojo where students did not bow to him, that wall did not fall that night, but a crack ran up it that he could not unsee, and behind the crack was his father, walking the passes on his bad leg, kept by no one, teaching the Shinkage-ryu at the dojo of a man three days to the east who could afford to invite him.

The days waiting on his father’s return were quiet ones and they were, Hyogonosuke understood much later, a gift his grandfather arranged as deliberately as the carefully telling. He was let alone to be a body that needed mending. He bathed, and the heat went into the cold that had sat deep in his bones since the pass, or perhaps even since long before the pass, since Kumamoto. He slept and it was sleep on clean bedding, behind a wall and under a roof, and even when the sleep was not good, which was most nights, the gray morning came through the screen the way it had at the temple, soft and gentle. He ate what was put in front of him and the kitchen, on his grandfather's order, kept putting it there. Genzo tended him without fuss, with the rough gladness of an old servant who had a young master back to tend. The young one who had tried to send him away from the gate could not meet his eye and went out of his way to do him small silent services, a thing Hyogonosuke wished he could tell him to stop because there was nothing to make up for since the young man had only done his work and hadn’t known any better.

In the evenings he sat with his grandfather.

They didn’t talk, mostly, because Hyogonosuke could not and his grandfather had never been a man of many words. They sat in the large room as the light went, or beside the brazier when the cold came down, and Sekishusai did the small things an old man does in the evenings – read his books, write at his low desk – and let his grandson be in the room.

Once, Hyogonosuke went through his traveling bundle with his grandfather. Sekishusai didn’t ask anything, just looked, his old hands turning over the netsuke hare and the river stone when Hyogonosuke handed them to him. He saw the list of the forty’s names and Hyogonosuke offered it to him to read, but Sekishusai set it down with care and said he understood what it was without being told.

Once, on the third evening, he brought a wooden sword to the room with him and placed it in Hyogonosuke’s hands – just set it across his palms and watched his grandson’s hands close on it, and eventually took it back and said nothing, but something in the old man eased, as though he had checked a thing he needed to check and found it sleeping, rather than lost.

Hyogonosuke understood on those evenings that his grandfather was reading him. Not the way the barriers had read him, for danger, nor the way the village had read him, for placing, but reading him the way Joen had read him under the eaves: as the particular man he was, the man he had become, taking the measure of what had come home so as to know what could be built from it. And he understood, dimly, without daring to hold it up and look at it directly, that his grandfather was not finding a ruin. The old man's face over those evenings did not have the grief of a thing lost in it. It had something more like the patience of a thing recognized, and waited for, and finally in hand.

On the sixth day, in the early dark, his father came home.

Hyogonosuke did not see the homecoming itself. He was in the small east room when he heard it, the sounds of arrival at the front of the house carrying down the boards — the gate, voices, Genzo's voice, the particular uneven tread of his father’s footsteps coming into the entry that he would have known among a thousand, the sound of his whole childhood mornings, and his heart went up into his throat and stayed there.

The tread stopped. There were low voices. And then he heard his grandfather's voice, level and quiet, and his father answering, and then his father not answering, and he understood that out there in the entry, in the cold, before his father had so much as taken off his traveling cloak, his grandfather was telling him.

He could not hear the words and was glad he could not. But he could hear the shape of it: his grandfather's voice going on, low and steady, unhurried, the voice of a man laying a thing down carefully piece by piece so that the man receiving it would not be cut on the edges; and his father's voice coming in less and less, a word, a question, and then not even that, and then a silence that stretched and stretched.

He sat in the small room and watched the door and imagined his father standing in the entry with the cold coming in off his clothes, hearing that his son had come home, and then hearing the rest of it — he cannot speak, the scar, the leg, the powder-burns, he flinches from hands, came home alone, came home like this — and having nowhere to put any of it, the way Hyogonosuke himself had had nowhere to put it.

His father had been carrying something else up the passes home. Hyogonosuke knew it the way he knew the tread. Nearly two years of silence had passed between them: the lord's single letter and then nothing after. A son who had been honored in the field and then vanished off the face of the world and sent not one word home.

His father had been coming home angry. A father's anger, the kind that is made entirely of fear and has nowhere to go but at the one who caused it — where have you been, why did you not write, do you know what you did to your mother, to your grandfather, do you know what it is to wait two years for a letter that does not come. He had been carrying that up the mountain and through the passes after the messenger had reached him, and now his grandfather was taking it out of his hands in the cold of the entry, piece by piece, replacing the picture of the silent ungrateful son with the picture of the son who had actually come home, so that when his father came down the boards the anger would have nothing left to land on.

The silence in the entry went on a long time.

Then the footsteps came. Step-drag-step-drag, down the boards, slower than Hyogonosuke had ever heard it, as though his father were walking toward something he was not sure he could bear to reach.

Hyogonosuke got himself up off the floor, the leg protesting, because he could not meet his father sitting, and he stood in the middle of the small room facing the door with his shoulders drawn in and his hands not knowing what to do or where to go, and the tread came on, and stopped outside, and the door slid back without even a pause allowing Hyogonosuke to gather himself any more.

His father stood in the doorway.

He had not taken off his traveling clothes. There was the cold of the road still on him and the dust of it, and his face above it was the face of a man who had been told a thing in an entryway and had walked the length of his own house not believing it, because no one believes these things until the body is in front of them. He had come down the boards still half made of the anger, Hyogonosuke saw it, the set of a man who had rehearsed hard words over three days of mountains, and then his eyes found his son standing in the middle of the room, and the words did not come.

Hyogonosuke watched his father look at him. Watched the eyes go to the scar down his cheek, the long pale line of it. Watched them go to the grey stipple of the powder-burns scattered around the eye. Watched them drop to the way Hyogonosuke stood, the weight kept off the leg, the old downward wound written in his stance — his father of all men reading a leg, knowing exactly what he was reading, the one man in the valley who knew from the inside what it was to stand that way.

And watched his father understand that his son flinched, because Hyogonosuke could not help it, even now, even here; his father took one step into the room, the half-step of a man who means to cross to his child, and Hyogonosuke's body did the thing it did, the small recoil, the flinch, before he could stop it, and his father saw it. Saw his son flinch from him.

And the last of the anger went out of him. Hyogonosuke watched it go. There was nothing left for it to be; the son who had not written for two years was standing in front of him scarred and flinching from his own father's step, and you could not be angry at that, there was no anger in the world that could hold its shape in front of that.

His father's face, which had come down the hall still armored, came apart the way the old woman's had, the way the grandfather's had, the way every face that truly looked at him came apart in the end.

His father did not cross the rest of the room quickly. He had learned, in his own quarter-century, how a damaged body is best approached; or perhaps he only knew his son now, in this one glance, well enough to know. He came the rest of the way slowly, letting himself be seen coming, the way the kind ones had all learned without being taught, and he did not seize his son. He stopped close, and he raised one hand — Hyogonosuke held himself, held against the flinch, lost, half-won — and laid it against the side of his son's scarred face, over the long pale line, the way you would cup the face of a small child, or a thing you had thought you would not see again.

"Look at you," his father said. Very low and not at all the words he had carried up and down the mountain. "Look what they did to you."

It was not a question, and it did not ask Hyogonosuke for anything, for no word, no account, no apology. It only stood there between them, look what they did to you, a father saying the one true thing, and Hyogonosuke, who had braced for where have you been and do you know what you did, found that this was the thing he could not stand against, the simple grief of it, the my son in it. His face crumpled. His father's hand stayed against it. And his father drew him in, slowly, his arms going around his son, and held him, holding his boy in the small room in the early dark, and Hyogonosuke put his face down into his father's shoulder and made the wordless sound again, the third time that span of days, and his father held him and made a low sound of his own into his son's hair.

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Chapter 22 Grandfather

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The room hadn’t changed.

It was the large room facing the side garden where his grandfather had made his case across three mornings two years ago, where the old man had said I have lost enough family and looked out at the practice yard with the thing in his face that his grandson couldn’t place.

The same room.

The light that fell into it through the closed screens was the gold of a late winter afternoon now as the sun continued its path.

Genzo brought him to the threshold and stopped there, and Hyogonosuke went in alone and lowered himself to sit, the leg folding under him with its pull, in more or less the exact place he had sat the last time. He was painfully aware that he did not sit the way he had sat two years ago, square and easy and certain, taking up his full space in his grandfather’s home by right. He now sat folded inward, his shoulders rounded, the long journey having gone all the way into the bone of him, making himself small in the middle of the plain, bright room.

The mansion was not a grand place. It was never meant to be. It had been built plain and functional on the reduced land that remained the Yagyu after the wars, and yet it was swept and ordered, and smelled of clean tatami and woodsmoke and home, and he sat in the middle of the room in his road-filthy clothes with the mud of the passes on him and the cold still, after the hours spent sitting at the old woman’s irori, deep in his bones. He had never in his life felt so plainly that he did not belong in a place.

He drew his shoulders in a little further, as though, if he only made himself small enough, he might be able to shrink back out of the room, out of the moment, out of being seen at all. He waited, with his heart racing, for his grandfather to come.

He heard the young servant go past the room, quick steps on the boards, toward the inner house, carrying Genzo’s messages in front of him, making the circuit he had been appointed to make – the baths, the kitchens, the room, the master. And then, some time after, he heard his grandfather: the slow tread of an old man on the boards of the hall, slower than two years ago, a small hesitation in it now, but still unmistakably him.

He was unhurried, the tread of a man who, Hyogonosuke surmised, had been warned about what he was walking toward and needed to be ready to meet it. Hyogonosuke kept his eyes down. He could not look toward the door.

Sekishusai entered and stopped just inside the room, the door shutting behind him.

Hyogonosuke heard it and did not look up. He looked at the floor in front of his own knees and waited for his grandfather’s voice, for the thing he had built in the dark of every night on the road: the thing he had imagined his grandfather’s face doing – not anger, anger would have been simple, but rather than look of a man proven right about the one thing he had prayed to be wrong about. Recognition and grief and the bone-deep weariness of being unsurprised. The look the household had worn when Kyusaburo had died in Korea.

The silence went on.

No question came. No who is this? No speak! No name demanded of him. His grandfather asked him for nothing, said nothing, which the old machine that had shown him many versions of this very scenario could not account for.

Hyogonosuke made himself look up.

His grandfather was standing inside the door, looking at him. He had aged in the past two years. He was thinner, the bones of his face nearer the surface, the last of his hair gone wholly white. The hesitation in his steps visible now in the way he held himself. But his back was straight, the way it had been straight at seventy-three, by an act of will that outlived everything else, and the eyes in the aged face were still his grandfather’s eyes, fixed on Hyogonosuke, taking him in. Taking stock: the scar, the powder-burns, the thinness, the silence he had already been warned about. The whole of what had come back up the lane, taking him in without flinching from it, the way the old man had never flinched from anything.

His grandfather’s face did a thing Hyogonosuke could not place. He had built the imagined face so many times that he could not now fit the real one to it. The real one was doing something the imagined one had not done, something complicated that moved across the old features and that would not resolve into what he had braced for. He could not read it. And because he could not, the machine in his mind decided that it was judgment, that he must answer with an apology.

He bowed. He put his hands to the boards, one at a time, and bent over them and put his face to the floor between them, all the way down, holding nothing back. The bow of a man laying his failure in front of the one he had failed.

He held it. The floor was cool under his forehead, and he could hear his blood thrum in his ears. He waited for the voice above him, for whatever his grandfather would say to the wreck that had come home.

He heard, instead, eventually, the slow sound of an old man lowering himself to the floor: the steps coming closer and then the careful folding-down of a body that no longer folded easily, close in front of him. And his grandfather’s hands came down onto his shoulders.

Hyogonosuke flinched. The body did it before anything could stop it, the old recoil from hands that came at him, his whole frame jerking — and the hands did not go away, and they did not grip, they only stayed, light and old and certain on his shoulders, waiting out the flinch the way the kind ones had all learned to wait it out, and when the flinch had passed through him and he had not been let go, his grandfather drew him up off the floor, not roughly, not all the way, just up out of the bow, and gathered him in.

The old arms came around him. His grandfather pulled him in against him and held him, the way he had not held him since Hyogonosuke was a very small boy, before he was old enough to be a swordsman's grandson and put away such things; held him hard, the straight back curving at last around him, one old hand coming up to the back of his head, to the high-tied hair with its thin dry ends, and holding it there.

The old arms came around him. His grandfather pulled him in against him and held him, the way he had not held him since Hyogonosuke was a very small boy, before he was old enough to be a swordsman's grandson and put away such things; held him hard, with a strength the thin old body should not still have had, the straight back curving at last around him, one old hand coming up to the back of his head, to the high-tied hair with its thin dry ends, and holding it there, the way you hold the head of something you have been afraid you would not get to hold again.

And Hyogonosuke, who had braced for the voice and the judgment, felt against the side of his own head his grandfather's face, and felt that it was wet, and felt the old chest move once, hard, and then again, with something that was not speech and would not become speech, that had no words in it and needed none.

His grandfather was not proving anything right. He was not unsurprised. He had stood at the head of the lane for two years in the cold looking up the pass, evening after evening, through two winters, and the thing in his face that Hyogonosuke had never been able to place, the thing from the morning by the practice yard and the thing now, was the same thing, and it had never once been judgment. It had been this. It had been a man who had already lost one grandson to a far shore he never came back from, holding the other, the one who had, against everything the old man had feared and against everything he had let himself believe in the worst of the dark, come back down the lane alive.

Hyogonosuke broke for the second time that day. He turned his face into his grandfather's shoulder, into the smell of him that he had forgotten he knew and knew instantly, that was older than memory, and his own arms came up at last, slowly, with the same reluctance the hand had come off the obi for the cloth at the temple, as though they had forgotten how and were relearning it under him, and he took hold of his grandfather's robe in both fists and held on, and his grandfather held him, and neither of them let go.

---

Chapter 21 Gate

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Content warnings: trauma, emotional distress, grief

---

It was past the middle of the afternoon before she could get him to go.

She had fed him a small bowl of millet and pickles, and then, after he had managed to get that down, a second one. She watched him eat with her flat, practical satisfaction and no remarks, and let him sit by her fire through the short winter’s day while she went about her regular work, talking to him and asking nothing, until the worst of the morning had settled in him and the shaking was gone. The light had begun to turn golden and slant toward the western slope by then.

Then she had stood, rising slowly with her hands on her knees. “It’s time,” she had said. “I’ll walk you. I haven’t had a proper walk in a while and my knees will go stiff with cold if I sit all day long. The chickens will mind themselves.”

He didn’t want to go. She could see it in him and did not argue with it. She simply put away Tasuke’s folded kimono in the chest in her room that held the things that mattered most to her, banked the little fire in the irori, and put on her sandals.

She held the gate for him and, somehow, he found himself through it and in the lane under the golden light with her beside him before the not-wanting had found anything it could take hold of.

They walked up through the village together. The village knew her where it had not known him this morning. People lifted their hands to her from their doorways, for the old woman from the eastern edge of the village, out for a walk before the cold came down in the evening, with one of the dojo’s many ronin keeping her company up the lane, and nobody looked twice. The mansion’s roofs grew larger against the slope as they went.

A little way further, where the lane began to rise toward the gate and his step began to drag with more than his sore leg, she took his hand. “Here, let me have your arm up this bit,” she said, folding her thin, old hand around his as though it were the most ordinary request in the world, not slowing, not making a thing of it. “These old knees of mine don’t care for a slope, and the footing’s bad along here, see, all rutted where the carts come down. There. A body’s glad of a steady arm at my age.”

She kept on, easy, about the ruts and the cart-tracks, and how they never would mend the lane until someone turned an ankle, talking the whole way up so that there was nothing in the air but her talking and the two of them walking. But her hand was steady and his was not, and they both knew which of them was holding the other up, and so she gave him the talk and the reason, so that he did not have to know it out loud. It was the same way she had taken his hand when he was small and the walk home from the far fields had been too long for a child’s legs, folding him into her chatter and walking him home inside of it.

At the mansion gate she let go.

She stepped back from him, put herself in order, and bowed to him low and proper, the bow of an old village woman to the grandson of her lord, putting them both back into the shapes the world had given them in front of a gate like this one. When she straightened, her face was certain.

“Go on in,” she said. “He’s home. I’ll wait here till you’re through the gate so you can’t think better of it.” And then, lower, without ceremony, “You’re a good boy. You always were. You go on. See your grandfather.”

He bowed to her and held it and she let him. Then he turned and went in through the gate of his grandfather’s house. Behind him, once he had passed through, he heard nothing but knew without looking that she had remained standing in the lane until he was through, the way she said she would.

---

A young servant Hyogonosuke did not know, who must have been hired in the two years he had been gone, met him in the entrance court, and this man did not do the careful reading and judging the village had done. He saw a scarred, road-filthy ronin come up limping to the Yagyu house at the end of the day, near the evening meal, with no announcement, and he planted himself in the way.

“What’s your business?” The young man’s voice had the edge of someone guarding a great house against exactly this sort of arrival. “Coming up to the gate at this hour! The master is not receiving. If you’ve come to challenge at the dojo, you come in the morning and you come properly, through the steward, not hiking up the lane at suppertime. Have you no manners at all?” He looked Hyogonosuke up and down: the swords, the dirt, the silence. “Well, do you have a tongue?”

Hyogonosuke stood in the court, his own family’s entrance, feeling the helplessness coming up in him. It was the domain barrier all over again. You shame your house. He could not speak his own name. Instead, he reached into his kimono and brought out the one thing that could speak for him, the little carved hare that his grandfather had given him as a boy and held it out in his open palm.

The young servant looked at it and made nothing of it. To him, it was simply a whittled rabbit in a beggar ronin’s hand. His face hardened another degree and he was about to scold Hyogonosuke for being ridiculous and run him out of the mansion, but another man had come out into the court behind him at the sound of the voices, and this one Hyogonosuke knew: Genzo, who had served his grandfather since before Hyogonosuke was born, grey now and stooped. He’d come to see what the young one was making such a noise about and saw the hare on the stranger’s open palm and went still. Then he looked up, hard, at the stranger’s face, at the scar and the stippling from the powder burn, and the eyes, searching the way the village had not known to search in the morning.

Hyogonosuke watched Genzo find it. He watched the face go from doubt to a terrible, uncertain hope, the old eyes going over the scar and the powder burn and coming back to meet his, searching for the boy he had known. And finding him.

“Young master,” Genzo said, and his voice was not entirely steady. The younger servant turned and stared at him. “Young master, it’s – it’s you.” Genzo started again. “You’re --” He could not finish it. He needed, the way a man needs air, for the young master to say it back to him, to say his name, or to say Genzo, or to say anything at all in the voice the old man had known since it was a child’s voice in this yard, so that it would be true and not simply a thing the old man hoped. He waited for it, his face open, waiting for it to be answered.

Hyogonosuke wanted to. More than he had wanted the words at any gate or barrier or on the whole road home. He wanted to say Genzo to give the old man the one thing he was hoping for, but nothing came. And Genzo’s face was waiting, full of hope and confusion, not understanding why the young master, if this truly was the young master and not some cruel apparition, would not say something.

So Hyogonosuke lifted his hand to his own throat, laid his fingers against the place where his voice should be coming from, and shook his head, slowly, the small broken shake that was not refusal but emptiness. It isn’t here. It won’t come. There is nothing. I’m sorry. And he kept his eyes on the old man’s, asking him to understand the thing he couldn’t say.

Genzo went still.

He looked at the hand at the young master’s throat and the shake of the head and understood. Hyogonosuke watched it reach him, watched the last of the confusion go out of the old face and then watched something worse settle instead.

They had all known the young master was hurt all those months ago. The lord’s letter of merit had said as much: that he had been injured and released from service with awards of money and swords. But none of them had known this, that the young master would return to his family’s home having to try to make himself understood mute, with gestures.

The old man’s composure, which had held through the recognition, came apart now, all at once, his mouth pulling down and his eyes spilling over, and he bowed, very low and very long, perhaps to hide what his face was doing , and when he came up again he had taken hold of himself because someone had to.

“All right,” Genzo said, low and unsteady, gently, the way you speak to spare someone. “All right. You don’t – you needn’t. I have you. You’re home.” He did not make the young master try again. He turned, instead, to the younger servant who had gone white, and gave him low, quick orders – a bath heated, the brazier readied in the small east room, and word to the kitchen – and then, lower, a word in the young servant’s ear that sent him hurrying ahead into the house: go to the master, go now, tell him the young master is home. The young man went, throwing one backward look at the man he had just tried to bar from the gate.

Genzo turned back to Hyogonosuke. “Your grandfather is in the house,” he said. “Let me bring you to him.” And because he did not know how to say any of the rest of what wanted saying, he simply led in the way Joen had led, with his body rather than his words, down the familiar boards of the engawa toward the large room overlooking the side garden where it had all begun.

---

Chapter 20 Tasuke

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Content warnings: grief, trauma, survivor's guilt, emotional breakdown, discussion of death and loss

---

The first face Hyogonosuke saw that morning was the old man who made and mended baskets, in the house beside the bridge. He was at it already in the cold of the morning, sitting on his little bench beside the doorway of the house, a half-made basket between his knees and the split bamboo laid out beside him, exactly as he had sat there in the mornings of Hyogonosuke’s childhood. He was older and grayer, with less hair and bushier eyebrows, but otherwise the same man, the same hands doing the same work in front of the same house.

And Hyogonosuke’s body knew the face before his mind had finished arriving at it, only the knowing went wrong, the way it had gone wrong in the moonlight in reverse. On the road, the dead had worn the faces of the living: the man who mended baskets, the daikon-seller, his little brother, the moon handing him their faces and laying them over the people he had killed in the field. Now the living man sat in his doorway, his hands moving at his trade, and the corps the moon had made of him came up behind Hyogonosuke’s eyes and stood there over the living man, so that, for a moment, he saw them both, the basket-mender and the slack face in the millet, and his step faltered and his breath went short, and he had to look at the ground to keep walking.

The basket-mender glanced up from his bench and looked at him, at a road-worn man with a scarred face and a limp, swords at his side, coming down off the shrine path at dawn with a traveling bundle on his back. The man’s face did the small, careful thing every face on the road had done, the half-heartbeat of reading him, and then it filed him: a ronin, one of the many who come through the valley to train or challenge at the dojo, arriving early off the mountain, and the man dipped his head in the small, neutral courtesy a villager gave a passing ronin he did not know, and went back to his basket.

He did not know me. Hyogonosuke walked past the bridge with the double-image still fading behind his eyes and the man’s not-knowing settling into his chest. All night he had braced against being known. He had not known to brace against this, that he had changed so far past the young man who had ridden out of the valley two years ago that the people who had watched him grow up looked straight at him and saw a stranger. He was thinner than when he had left. The weather of two years had darkened his skin and damaged his hair. The long, pale line down the cheek and the grey stipple of powder burns around his cheek. And he no longer walked the way he had walked, with his chin up and his shoulders square, the unhurried strut of a young swordsman who wanted the world to look at him. He came down the road now with his head down and his shoulders drawn in, the walk the road had taught him, the walk of a man who wanted not to be looked at. The Hyogonosuke who had left would have hated this walk. He would not have recognized himself in this man, either.

He passed more of them. The woman drawing water at the well in the small square looked up and looked back down. Two men loading a handcart gave him a passing nod and went on with their loading. A knot of children ran across the lane in front of him after a tan dog and did not so much as slow. None of them knew him. He was a ronin off the mountain; the valley was full of them. The dojo drew them from every province, and the village had learned not long ago not to take special notice of one more stranger walking toward Sekishusai’s gate.

It should have been a relief that he was not recognized, and some part of it was. But it was also its own grief, walking down the lane of his own village unknown, and the two things sat in him together as he went.

He had thought, on the road, of the faces here as a thing to be braved, a gauntlet of both recognition and judgment he would have to walk through to reach his family. And the village simply declined to play its part. It looked at him and let him pass, the way the herb-seller had let him pass, the way Joen had allowed him to be a shape until he was ready to be a man. The valley was doing the same for him, without knowing it, the one kindness he most needed and could least have asked for.

He did not go to the mansion. He meant to, in some version of the night’s plans, but he found, in the daylight, with the village not-knowing him on every side, that there was somewhere he needed to go first.

He went to find Tasuke’s mother.

---

The house stood on the eastern edge of the village where the lanes yielded into the first of the fields: a modest place behind a low fence of woven brushwood, gone gray with the years, a simple gate set in it. Chickens worked the bare yard inside, a vegetable patch was turned for winter along the southern wall. Smoke stood above the roof, long and straight, the thin thread of a warm irori inside.

It was the house Tasuke’s elder sister had married into, where his mother had gone to live after her husband passed, and Hyogonosuke had been here as a boy more times than he could count. The yard had been one of the places the valley children ran loose, with its low fence and the chickens worth chasing, and Tasuke’s mother had minded the lot of them in the loose way of such women, samurai and farmer’s child alike, wiping their faces and breaking up squabbles and chasing them out of the vegetable rows and off the plum tree, so that her hands had known Hyogonosuke since he could barely tell her his own name.

He stood with his hand on the gate and could not move. It was the same place his body always went now: the short breath, the racing heart, the fine shake coming up through him. But it was worse here because on the other side of this not-crossing was the woman he needed to give the kimono he had carried for four hundred ri, and now that he was at the gate, the carrying seemed suddenly the easier part. He stood with his hand on the gate and the mechanism told him, in its flat way, to go back up the lane and never come back down again.

“Young master.”

He jumped. Not the gun-flinch, the whole-body recoil that lived in him now at the hunters’ guns, but the ordinary startle of a man who had thought himself alone and found someone close by. She had been down on her heels a little way to his right, low along the inside fence, pulling the dead growth away from the roots of the things that had flowered into the autumn, and he had walked to the gate without seeing her at all.

She rose now, a hand to the small of her back, a simple patched apron over her striped kimono, her hands dark with the cold earth. She was in her sixties, Tasuke’s mother, the age folded into her face, her hair gone iron-grey and pulled back plain. She was a countrywoman who still kept the yard and the chickens and the vegetable patch, and she came up off her heels with the grunt of a woman whose knees were not what they were, but who got up off the ground everyday regardless.

She looked at him over the low fence. Looked up, as she was a head shorter than he was. And she did not do the thing the basket-mender had done, the thing every face on the road had done, that half-heartbeat of reading him and filing him away. She looked at the scarred, road-worn stranger at her gate and her face went still, and then it opened, all at once.

"Well," she said. "There you are."

He could not answer her. His mouth opened around the place where a word should have been, a polite greeting, and the breath went into the shape of it and came out the other side as just breath, the way it always did now, and his face must have done something, because hers softened and she wiped her hands on the apron and came toward the gate.

"You're cold all the way through, look at you. Came down off the mountain, did you, sleeping up at the old fox shrine like a child playing at being lost." She said it without surprise, as though he had done it last week and would again next week, and she lifted the latch herself, since he had not, and held the gate. "Come in out of it, there's a fire and there's hot water. There's no one here but me to mind whether you do or don't, so you may as well."

There was no choice left in it: an old woman was holding her gate open for him in the morning cold and there was nothing his body could do but go through it. The chickens scattered from his feet and re-gathered after he passed through. She watched him walk, the limp, the way he came through the gate, and said nothing.

"They're all gone up the north valley, the whole pack of them, the girl and her man and the little one, off to see his people," she said, latching the gate behind him. The girl was her granddaughter, Tasuke’s niece, her eldest daughter’s child, who had been raised in this house. The little one was the girl’s boy, the old woman’s great-grandson, the newest of the long line of children to run loose in this yard, his father was in service to the Yagyu.

"His grandmother's getting on and wanted the boy where she could look at him. Four now, he is, four and a holy terror, into the chickens, into the shed, into everything that'll have him." She said it the way she said everything, as though he had been by often enough to know whom she meant. "So, it's only me until they're back. You'll have tea. Don't tell me you won't. Sit."

She had him sit beside the irori, the sunken hearth in the middle of the big room, and he lowered himself with care, easing down so the bad leg could fold under him in seiza, and it did, but the long scar pulled as it settled, the downward line of the kama cut running tight from high on the outside of the thigh to low at the inner knee, and he could not find the way to sit that did not pull at it. He shifted his weight. He shifted it back. And he sat as still as the ache would let him and could not make himself feel easy in the warm room.

The kettle hung over the fire on its blackened chain where it hung most of the day in a house like this, and she had only to swing it over to herself and pour. She settled across from him on the same side of the hearth, and poured, talking the whole while – the cold this year had come early, the way her knees told her the weather now better than any almanac, the boy and the chickens.

She broke off her talk to ask him, in the ordinary way, turning to him, an ordinary question, had he walked the whole way, then, or hired himself a horse over the steep passes?

And she watched him try to answer her. She watched his mouth open on it, watched the breath go in and shape itself toward a word but come out only as breath, no word, nothing. Watched his face do the thing it did when the word would not come, the frustrated small working of a man reaching into the place words came from and finding it shut.

Her talk stopped.

For a moment, she looked at him, taking it in – that the young master whose face she’d wiped, whom she’d fed at this very hearth, whom she’d chased out of her vegetable patch, could not answer a question about his travels. Something moved across her face very briefly before it was put away. She had known him before he talked in full sentences, a lifetime ago. And here he was come home, unable to tell her whether he had walked or ridden.

Then she picked the talk back up. She did it deliberately, he saw, pitched now so that the conversation asked for nothing back, left him no gaps to fall into, running on easy and unbroken about the boy and the chickens and the early cold, filling the air for two the way she filled it for the four-year-old, so that he could sit in the warmth of it and not have to fail at answering. She had read the whole of it in one stopped breath and folded it into her care without a word, the way she did everything.

He watched her hands do the ordinary work of making tea, the same hands, older, that had wiped his face when he was little and had scraped his knees in the yard. The warmth of the room came up around him and he could not feel easy in it.

He had placed the bundle beside him on the mat and while she talked and the steam came off the cooling cups, his hands went to the knot of it, because if he did not do it now, while the doing was in him, he did not think he could do it at all.

She set the cup down on the hearth-frame within his reach, near his knee, and he could not pick it up. She let her talk run down and watched him work open the knot and did not interrupt. The cloth came open. He moved aside the spare tabi, the little hare of carved wood his grandfather had gifted him as a boy, the smooth gray stone from the river below One-Sword Rock, the folded paper with the forty’s names. And there, at the bottom, folded as he had folded it so many times along the road and in Kumamoto before that, was Tasuke’s spare kimono, the worn cotton, the repair under the left arm where the sleeve met the body, the thing he had carried out of the empty house in the castle town because it was the one thing he could not leave behind.

His hands lifted it out. And the body, which had done this on a hundred nights by a hundred fires on the road and at the temple, began without choosing to do so, to bring the folded cloth up toward his face, to find in it the last trace of the man, the cotton and woodsmoke and the almost-gone smell of Suke at the collar, the most of him that was left anywhere in the world.

He caught himself, his hands stopping halfway up. Because this was not his to do here. He had carried it this far to give it to her. It was hers. He had nearly pressed his face into her son’s kimono in front of her like a thing he was keeping for himself.

He brought it down and held it out to her across his two hands, to give it, and as he did, he looked up and he caught her face.

She had been watching the kimono come out of the bundle and she had understood. He could see it in her face. Perhaps she had understood from the moment she rose from her weeds and saw him at her gate without Tasuke beside him; perhaps she had carried the understanding already for a year, the way the whole valley had carried it, the word gone round from the great house that the young lord had been honored and injured and let go, and then the long silence after, with no son following the word home. But there was understanding and there was her son’s worn cotton kimono coming out of the bundle in her own house, being held out to her across two shaking hands, and her face, looking at it, came apart, quietly, the way a face comes apart when it has been holding a thing a long time and is, at last, allowed to set it down with closure.

And that was what broke him. Her face.

The thing he had not let himself touch since the field, the thing he pushed away in the daylight the way he pushed away his memory of the cousin and the impossible fragments that couldn’t possibly be memory, the thing he had known all along in the place where the body keeps what they mind will not: that Suke was dead, that he had been there, in the field, that the two fragments his mind had kept were the edges of a thing he would not look at whole, it all came up at once with nowhere left to go. His face had gone wet without his feeling it begin. His breath broke in his chest. He was still holding the kimono out to her and his hands were shaking, and before he understood what was happening, he had curled forward over his own knees with the cloth gathered against him, his head going down, and the sound that came out of him was the only sound the body would give him, the wordless tearing thing it had given him in the field and on the lane, given now to this.

He wept over his knees in the old woman’s house and could not stop and could not shape it into anything. Not into her son’s name. Not into I am sorry. Not into, It was quick, he didn’t suffer, there was nothing to be done. There were no words in him for any of it and there had not been for a long time. There was only the sound, and the shaking, and the kimono held against him.

She let him. She did not reach for him, or gather him up, or hush him. She stayed and let the grief have him because she had buried a husband and was old enough now to have learned what the young doctors and the monks sometimes needed to be taught, which was that there are things a body has to do in its down time, and the kindest thing a person can do is to be there and wait it out, and not make it any harder by needing it to be smaller or quieter or more contained.

When the worst of it had gone through him, when the sound had worn down to ragged breath and the shaking had begun to ease, then she moved. She shifted herself closer on her knees, slowly, with a hand going to his arm first so that he felt her there before she did anything, she reached for the kimono and worked it gently from his arms, out of the grip his hands had taken on it, and she held it for a moment against her own chest, her son’s kimono, and then folded it into her lap and smoothed it with her old hand.

Then she took out the tenugui from her sleeve and wiped his face with it.

He flinched at the first touch, the body doing what it did, still, when hands came at him, and she stopped and waited and then brought the cloth back slowly enough for him to see it, and this time he let her. She wiped the wet from his face the way she had done when he was a boy, the same plain, rough kindness that had never once in his life stood on the ceremony of whose grandson he was. She did not say anything for a while. She just wiped his face, and when that was done, she took one of his hands into both of hers, his broken-and-mended fingers sitting in her old ones, and let him breathe.

They sat like that for a while, the fire crackling beside them, and the chickens clucking in the yard, and the cold morning light coming grey through the doorway.

“There,” she said at last, low, gentle. “You brought him home.” She looked down at the kimono in her lap and not at him, which was its own kindness. “That was a long way to carry a thing. You brought him home. That’s the thing that wanted doing and you did it.” She patted his hand. “It’s done now. It’s done.”

He sat with his hand in hers and let her hold it.

Eventually, she went on talking the way she talked, low and easy, about nothing much at all. That he’d want a bath and a proper sleep, that he was thin as a rail and someone ought to feed him, that the cold would be hard this year, she could feel it in the mornings in her hands. He let it go over him. And then, in the same voice, in among the rest of it so that it took a moment before he understood she had said anything different, she said, “Your grandfather’s up there waiting on you, you know. Has been a good while.”

He looked up.

“Two years, near enough. He comes out to the head of the lane, where it turns down off the pass, and he stands there in the evening and looks up it. In the cold, too, mind, in the worst of winter, wrapped up like an old crow. My girl’s seen him, and I’ve seen him, more times than I could count for you. Just stands there looking up at the pass.” She said it lightly, busily, as though it were one more piece of valley gossip. But she had covered his hand again while she said it, the weight of it sitting across his knuckles. “An old man doesn’t stand about in the cold for two winters to give someone a scolding when they come home. Whatever it is you’ve got yourself frightened of –“ she looked at the fire and let him keep his face, “- I shouldn’t carry up the hill with me, if I were you. It’s heavier than what’s waiting.”

---

Chapter 19 Valley

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Content warnings: trauma, ptsd symptoms, anxiety, emotional distress

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The valley took him in at dusk without asking anything in return.

He came down the last of the pass in the failing light of an early-winter afternoon, the cold hardening in the shadows of the slope, and at the turning where the road bent and dropped, he stopped, because the valley was below him and he had not let himself believe it would be until he saw it with his own eyes.

It was nearly three weeks since he had left the temple. He had walked it the way Joen had told him to, without pushing the leg in the climbs, sleeping where he could, drinking only the fast running water in the passes, and his leg had held the whole way and complained only in the mornings and the late, cold evenings, which was, he expected, what it would continue doing for a long time. The swords rode in his obi with their correct weight and had begun, somewhere along the road, to feel like his own weight again. At the bottom of the bundle he carried on his back, folded together, were Tasuke’s kimono and the list of names he had copied out carefully.

The valley lay below him in the last light. The paddies were all standing water, silvering as the dusk came on, and the smoke of hearths and cookfires stood straight from the roofs of the village in the windless cold.

Beyond the village, set back against the far slope where the old land rose, was the dark spread of the dojo, the mansions roofs, the practice yard he couldn’t see from where he stood but knew was there. The home his grandfather had rebuilt after the wars, on the smaller land that remained, the thing the old man had knit back together from his losses.

Hyogonosuke stood at the turn and looked at it and could not go down.

It was the gravel court all over again, the edge of the temple’s court in the rain: want and wariness holding him at the verge with equal hands, except that what awaited across this court was not an old monk with a dry cloth giving him a chance to come in slowly and sit by the fire. It was instead every face he had grown up among. And it was his grandfather. He had ridden out of this valley with one man at his side and he was coming back into it alone. To go down was to be seen, and to be seen was to become, in front of everyone, the thing he had spent the last year learning he had become.

The light went, and the first stars came out hard and small and distant in the cold. And the moon came up over the ridge behind him, not full yet but swelling toward it, maybe three or four nights short, but bright enough to throw his shadow forward into the road and to lay a pale wash down the lane into the valley.

His body knew the moon. It always knew the moon, and he felt the old, strung readiness come up his back, the lamp above the millet field, and he stood with it and breathed and allowed it to be as much of the moon and as little of the lamp as he could make it, the way the temple had taught him, on what was the worst possible night to be asking this of himself.

He did not go down into the village.

He could not, tonight, walk past the lit doorways and the woodsmoke and be a shape passing through the place where he had been raised. But he could not stand on the road all night, either, with the moon climbing and the cold deepening, and his leg stiffening underneath him. He knew where to go. He had known, understood since he had turned onto the lane, perhaps even since the last pass.

---

The shrine stood where the wooded ground rose at the village’s edge, off the lane, up a short flight of stone steps gone lopsided and worn and rounded with moss over the years. It was a small hokora of grey stone, set in a clearing among cryptomeria with a worn pair of stone foxes in front of it, so that it had been an Inari shrine once, though no one had tended it in a long time and the village had built a larger one years ago.

He and the other village children used to play here. The shrine had marked the far edge of the world when he was small, the place you ran to and dared each other to enter after dark. The older children said that the foxes might come alive and carry you off if you stayed too long. He’d crouched behind the left fox a hundred times in the games they played, the one with the chipped ear, and its ear was chipped still, the chip gone smooth now with another two decades of weather.

The little roof that had once sheltered the structure had half-fallen-in and the stone base was furred green with moss. Someone, recently, had left a single dried persimmon on the step, gone soft and frost-touched, so the place was not entirely forgotten; some old woman of the village still climbed up here, perhaps, the way old women kept the small forgotten shrines when everyone else had moved on.

Hyogonosuke got himself in under the leaning half of the roof, out of the direct fall of the moon, with his back to the stone, the bundle and his swords beside him, and his bad leg out in front of him because after the day’s walk and the night’s cold, it would not fold. The cold came up off the ground through him, but he had slept in worse many times over. He drew his knees up as far as he could and wrapped his arms around himself to get through the night.

The moon climbed. It came through the broken roof in a long bar that moved across the clearing as the night wore on, silvering the foxes, silvering the soft persimmon on the step. He sat against the stone of a shrine he had not thought of in twenty years and watched the moon and did not sleep.

He had told himself on the road that arriving would be the end of the hard part. He understood now, sitting in the cold close enough to his grandfather’s roof that he had seen it, that arriving was only the beginning of a different hard part, and that the road had been, in a very different way, a place where he could hide. On the road, there had been no one whose face he had to watch change at the sight of him. He had been a shape among strangers, and the strangers hadn’t cared very much, had allowed him to be a shape, and the worst of them had entered him into a register and sent him on his way. Tomorrow, the faces he would pass were faces who had known him, and they would change when they saw him, and he would have to stand in front of the changing and bear it.

He turned the morning over and over in his mind, playing a hundred different scenarios. He could go down at first light, before the village stirred, and reach the mansion gate while lanes were empty, and be inside before anyone ever saw him. But, he thought, the servants might not know him and would turn away a ragged, mute stranger, and he might stand outside his grandfather’s home unable to say his own name, the barrier all over again. You shame your house. He could go to his father’s directly, but the thought of his father’s face shut the thought down before it was finished. He could wait and go in the full of day, and walk through the village openly, and let it see him and be done with it; the village would gather at its doorways and watch the failed Yagyu heir come home a ghost, and the news would run ahead of him up the lane, so that by the time he reached the mansion gates, the whole valley would have arranged its face.

There was no version of the morning the night did not find the worst of. This was the old machine, the one that ran mercilessly in the dark on the road and at Kumamoto, taking whatever lay ahead and building the cruelest shape it could be made to take. He knew the machine by now, knew how it worked, knew why it works, but knowing did not stop it. It only allowed him to sit beside it while it ran, the way he sat beside the gun-flinch and the moon, allowing it to run its course.

Somewhere in the night, the moon passed above him and began its low fall down toward the opposite slope, the bar of light moved away from him, and the worst of the cold came in the hours before dawn.

He did not sleep as much as he stopped, for stretches, being entirely awake. The field came for him once the way it came, and he surfaced out of it with his heart going and his hand reaching for the swords, and the foxes were there in the greying dark with their patient stone faces, and the persimmon on the step, and the smell of cryptomeria and old wood, and slowly the field let him go, because he was home, and even the field seemed to know it could not hold the whole of its old territory here.

The light came at last, gray and shadowless, the way it had come through the west screen of his room at the temple. The plain gray of an ordinary morning’s beginning. He watched it come up through the trees and fill the clearing, and the foxes lost their silver and went back to being weathered stone, and the day he had walked four hundred ri to arrive at was simply, ordinarily, here, and he could not put it off by sitting in a ruined shrine. He had learned that much on the road, too: that the body, in the end, came out of the rain. That the not-doing ran out of fuel and the thing got done, not by courage but by the simple exhaustion of the alternative.

He got himself up off the cold grown, the leg seizing and then loosening with movement, and he straightened his clothing as well as he could, and fixed his hair tie, and tied his bundle across his back.

He went down the soft stone steps and onto the lane, into the village, into the first of the faces.

---

Chapter 18 Threshold

---

Content warnings: themes of loss and remembrance, uncertainty about the future

---

The temple was not the place to find out whether what had come back was enough. It had given him as much as it would give, and the rest of the finding-out was going to have to happen elsewhere.

He began to understand this in pieces over the weeks following the service, as he understood many of the things at the temple. It came up at the edges of his thoughts first, the small daily noticing that he was now strong enough to leave, and edging closer to being ready to leave, and then began to notice daily that he had not yet left, and the slow turning-over of what staying meant and what going meant.

He knew that the temple would keep him as long as he chose to stay. Some men before him had remained. Most had moved on, to another temple elsewhere, back to their families, and some, he expected, back into some lord’s service. The choice was Hyogonosuke’s to make, and it was not a choice that anyone else would make for him.

He could stay. He could shave his head, the way Joen had done, and become whatever the temple made of him. This thought was not without appeal. The temple’s quiet was real. The work was real and important. And Joen’s life had value, perhaps more than the lives of many of the lords and commanders. Hyogonosuke could almost imagine choosing the life for himself.

But he was not Joen. Joen had come to the temple after his own road had emptied him out. He had stayed because the temple had received him, and because of what there was to be inherited when the old monk who received him died.

Hyogonosuke’s road had emptied him out, too. But he had a house on the other end of his road, and a grandfather who was in his last years, and a father who’d been walking the practice yard and the family dojo with a bad leg for thirty years, and a younger brother whose life had taken a shape Hyogonosuke had not yet seen.

That house, at the other end of the road, was not finished with him. He had been carrying it with him as a fate to be borne, but was beginning now to understand that he had also been carrying it as a place where he was, in some still-unknown way, also expected. He could not yet know whether it had, in the meantime, stopped expecting him, and he would not know until he returned. The not-knowing was hard to walk into. The road home was where he would find out what was left for him, what wasn’t, and what he could make of it. The temple had simply been the rest he needed in order to do the walking. It was never the destination, no matter how comfortable.

He decided slowly.

There was a day, in late autumn, when he noticed he had been thinking of leaving for some weeks and the thinking had slowly taken on the texture of intent. He let the intent sit for a few more weeks before he wrote to Joen. When at last he did, it was the briefest of notes: I will start home soon, before the cold sets in. Hyogonosuke.

He placed the note on the boards besides Joen at the hearth that evening. Joen read it. Set it down. Looked at him for a long, careful moment with the same practiced look Hyogonosuke had felt on him the very first night under the eaves, reading him as the particular man he was.

“Good, Hyogonosuke,” Joen said. “The road has another few weeks of decent weather before the snow comes to the high passes. That’ll be a good window. I’ll have the herb-seller put together a packet for you to take. For the leg. And the headaches.”

Nothing more was said that evening, and the next morning Joen was at the hearth as always, and the second bowl was set out for him as always, and the day continued as it had every day before, the temple absorbing Hyogonosuke’s decision the way it had everything else.

He eventually left late in autumn.

The morning was clear and cold, the leaves on the lower slopes having turned quickly in the weeks prior and most were now down already. The air had taken the sharpened quality of autumn deepening toward winter, the thin light that meant the cold would settle in within a few weeks. If he was leaving before spring, this was his last remaining window.

He packed his bundle, well-mended since his arrival at the temple, with the things that he had come with, Suke’s kimono and his spare tabi, the little wooden hare netsuke and the smooth stone from the river, and the things he had been given, the herb packet from the herb-seller in the village, the small parcel of dried fish Joen had pressed on him, a folded sheet of paper on which Joen had drawn, in his careful hand, the route through the passes northeast toward Yagyu, with the small temples and shrines marked where a man could expect shelter if the weather turned or he needed rest.

Then there was the money to deal with, the sum Lord Kato had given him as a reward, along with the swords and the pass and the letter of merit back home that had started him on his aimless wandering. He’d carried the sum all the way from Kumamoto at the bottom of his bundle, heavy and barely touched. He had eaten cheaply on the road, what little he had eaten at all, and at the temple had needed no money. So nearly all of it was still there, wrapped as it had come to him in clean paper and clean string and purple silk around it all. The sum the lord had set to what he had done in the field.

He counted out from it, by the gray, early light of that morning, the small sum he judged he would neat to eat on during his travels and give to the temples that sheltered him along the way – a small amount and nothing more. The rest, he re-wrapped in the paper and the purple silk and set aside, finishing the remainder of his packing around it.

He did not allow himself to think too hard about it. He knew, underneath, the several things the money represented. It was the price of the field, and he could not carry this home and set it before his grandfather as if it were a thing won. It was the payment for the memorial service Joen had held for the forty men and for which he had never named a price and never would, but which, in any other setting would be paid for with a donation to the temple. It was the money for the herb-sellers packets for the road and the dried fish and the second bowl always in its place and the long months of having been received at the temple; for all the things the temple had done for him that he could not pay and could not thank Joen enough for. He could not say any of it, and he wouldn’t want to be refused, and so he could only leave it where it would be found after he was gone, the way a thing is left at the feet of the Buddha, and let it speak for him.

He took the swords from the corner of his room, where they rested against the wall, and slipped them into his obi for the road. He had worn them to the village many times across the months, but they had not been his on any of those mornings; the weight had still felt wrong, the swords had still been a thing he carried and not a thing he had. This morning, with the bundle on his back and the path waiting, the weight settled into him differently. The swords were for the road and the road was his again, in some new, uncertain way he could not yet name, with his copy of the forty’s name traveling at the bottom of the bundle, next to Suke’s carefully folded kimono.

The cat sat on the engawa the whole time, watching him pack. When he finally came out and tied on his waraji, the cat followed him as far as the temple’s main hall and stopped. Hyogonosuke squatted down and laid a hand on its head a final time, scratching it gently in the soft spots behind the ears, and the cat permitted it but did not purr, the way cats sometimes refuse to perform on demand. He stood up and the cat sat looking at the gate as though it had already turned its attention to whatever came next.

Hyogonosuke went into the temple hall one last time before leaving.

Joen’s morning work was lone done. The hall was empty, the floors swept, the cold, clean light coming in level across it. He went up to the altar with the wrapped packets of coins in his two hands and set it down before the Buddha, in front of the other offerings, where it would be easily found by Joen or Jiko in the ordinary course of the day after he was gone down the path too far to be called back, or argued with, or thanked, or made to take it with him.

He knelt a moment with it set down in front of him. It wasn’t a prayer, really, but the thing in him wanted to be said and didn’t have any specific prayer or word or shape to take. He only knelt with the forty within him, and Suke within him, and the temple around him that held it all, and allowed it to be what it was before he rose and left.

Joen was standing at the gate, just on this side of it. He was not in his sweeping clothes this morning. Instead, he wore the better of his two robes, the one he wore for the higher ceremonies and that he had worn for the memorial service. His hands were folded inside his sleeves. He looked at Hyogonosuke, who bowed deeply to him, and returned the bow with the slow, careful courtesy of a man bowing to an equal.

“The road is dry as far as the river crossing,” Joen said. “After the river, the path climbs steeply. Don’t push the leg. You’ve taught it well, but it remembers. Sleep where you can, eat what you can, and drink only the fast-running water in the passes.”

Hyogonosuke nodded.

Joen paused. He spoke the next part more carefully. “What you walk into at home, none of us can know until we are walking into it. Carry what you must. Set down what you can. The work will continue wherever you are. When the anniversary comes next, find a temple wherever you are. Any temple will hold the service for you as long as you bring the names. This temple will hold the service each year.”

Hyogonosuke bowed again, lower this time, holding it.

Joen made a small sound of acknowledgment in his throat and stepped back. He did not follow Hyogonosuke through the gate, instead remaining on the threshold, just on the temple side. The line of the gate was one he had drawn for himself, perhaps, after thirty years of letting men in and seeing them back out.

Hyogonosuke went through it. He turned at the bottom of the path and looked back once. Joen was still at the gate, hands folded in his sleeves, watching him go. The cat had stayed in the courtyard.

Hyogonosuke turned forward and walked down the path. The road bent, and the temple went out of sight behind the trees. The sun on the morning road was clear and cold and his.

He walked north, slowly, with the leg holding under him and the bundle steady on his back, in the direction of the country he had come from and the house at the other end of it.

It would be early winter by the time he arrived.

---

Chapter 17 The Forty

---

Content warnings: war casualties, grief, survivor's guilt, memorial rites

---

The forty men came to him in the seventh month, when the summer was at its deepest and the cicadas were loud in the pines from first light until well past dusk.

Hyogonosuke had been carrying them since the long, miserable day they died. They had been with him through the village hut where the first doctor treated him to keep him alive, though his recovery in his little house in the samurai quarter with the helpers from the temple, through his months on the road feeling separate from other humans he encountered, through the sheeting rain at the gravel court, and through the recent spring and summer in the temple's quiet.

He had not stopped carrying them because there had been nowhere to place them. The house had been for his own recovery. The road for finding the direction he would go, in between the times his body just braced for the worst. Neither of these places had room for the work he needed to do for the forty men who had been under his command. The temple, however, had the room.

He understood this only slowly, the way things were coming to him ever since that night, and the understanding had gathered around him long before he had a word for it.

The forty had been rising in him throughout the spring and summer, getting closer to the surface as his body recovered and his wariness came down by degrees. He would catch himself, every now and again, standing in the gravel court at first light with the wooden sword in his hand, with a name in his mind that did not belong to the moment.

Daisaburo, his lead ashigaru who liked to chew on a bit of grass, who had been on his left that morning; Kakuemon, who had been a head behind him at the second turn; Genta, who had found the sweet potatoes hidden under the floorboards of the half-burnt home.

The name would surface and dissolve, and Hyogonosuke would be left with the residue of it: a man's face he had not let himself bring to mind for a year and a half, half-formed in the grey light, a specific memory or moment attached to it that was not the man's death. Some had families back home, sent money to their old mothers, bought lacquered combs to bring home to their young wives, carried their sons through the market, handed him persimmons at the fencing hall.

By the middle of the seventh month they were at the surface and would not be held under any longer.

He sat one morning with the brush in his hand and could not work because their names were too close to the surface to write anything else. He set the brush back down and went about his day.

That evening, after the meal, he ground a little ink and wrote on a fresh sheet of paper: Joen-dono. I would like to ask for a service for the men who died. They were forty. It was on the eighth day of the ninth month of last year.

He carried the paper out to the kitchen where Joen was at the hearth, fitting a new handle to his water ladle after the old one had broken earlier in the day. Hyogonosuke laid the paper beside him, as he had taken to do. Joen picked it up, read it, and held it for a long moment, looking at what Hyogonosuke had written, and his face did the small careful thing it did when he was reading a man rather than a page.

"Yes," he said finally. "We can do that. I will need the names, if you can give them. The eighth of the ninth month is only a few weeks off; we can hold the first service on the anniversary itself, and for the years after, on that same day, you may hold it wherever you happen to be." He set the paper down. "Take whatever time you need to write them. I will tell Jiko to come up that day."

Hyogonosuke nodded. He bowed, a gesture more formal than whatever normally passed between them, and went back to his room, where he sat at the low table for a long time with the writing kit in front of him and could not yet begin.

---

He began the names a few mornings later.

He had thought, before he started, that they would come to him in order. He had been at the head of the column; Tasuke had been at his elbow, fussing over his armor, and his men had been arrayed behind him in the formation he had set them in, Daisaburo at the front.

He had thought he could walk the formation in his memory and write the names down as he came to each man.

He did not write Tasuke. The list was for the men he had commanded, and Tasuke had not been one of his soldiers. He had been at his elbow because he had decided to be there, by the older tie, the tie that went back to Hyogonosuke's childhood, the morning walks to the dojo, the hands of a young man teaching a little boy how to fold his own clothes.

He sat with Suke's absence for some minutes before he went on to the first of the names, still not allowing himself to put the two disjointed pieces of Tasuke to conscious thought because to do so may be to acknowledge that he was not still somewhere out there.

Writing the names did not work as he thought it would.

The formation rose in fragments. He could see Daisaburo on his left, Kakuemon a half-step behind. He could see, in pieces, the three men who had been at the very rear with spears, but he could put names to only two of them, and the third was a face he had known well, a man whose laugh he had shared at the fire two nights before the march, whose name had been on his tongue a hundred times, and which he could not now bring forth no matter how hard he reached for it.

He wrote what he could.

He wrote slowly, in the careful hand he had used as a boy when his grandfather had set him to copy texts. Daisaburo. Kakuemon. Genta. The names came in the order they came. When a name arrived, he wrote it. When a name would not arrive, he set the brush down and sat with the absence and let it be there.

By the end of the first evening he had ten names.

He worked at it over the next few weeks. The names came in their own time. Some came at the table in his room as he worked. Some came in the middle of sweeping the court, or carrying water from the well, or watching the cat sleep by the hearth, and he would set down whatever he was doing, walk to his room and write the name down before it could go again. Some came in dreams, and he woke in the dark and wrote without lighting the lamp, the characters going down by feel.

By the end of the third week he had thirty-four names.

The remaining six did not come.

Two of them he could see clearly in his memory: a man with a scar across the bridge of his nose and a young man recently married whose wife had pressed a small charm into his hand the morning of the march, but the names sat just behind a thin wall he could not reach through.

Three more he could not place by face either; he knew they had been there, he had counted them in the formation at the start of the march, but the men themselves had slipped under the surface and he could not retrieve them.

The sixth he was uncertain about. He thought perhaps the name was Ryosuke, or perhaps Ryoji; he could not be sure he was not confusing the man with another.

He sat with all six for several evenings and could not bring them up.

He wrote at the bottom of the list, in characters as careful as the ones at the top: And six others, whose names I cannot now bring forth. May they receive the offering as fully as those I have named.

He took the list to Joen in the morning. Joen read it through slowly, all the way down, folded the list, and took it to the writing desk in his own room where he prepared for services and kept his accounts.

---

Jiko came up the mountain the morning before. He arrived in the late afternoon with his usual bundle of vegetables from his master's garden, but the cheerfulness with which he normally pushed open the kitchen door was muted today, as he set his bundle down without his usual catalogue of what was in it.

Hyogonosuke understood at once that Kenshu had explained to the boy what he would be helping with tomorrow, and that the boy had spent his walk up the mountain holding the weight of the explanation, and was holding it still as he came into the kitchen.

He greeted Hyogonosuke with a small bow, deeper than his usual nod, and said quietly, "I am sorry for your dead, o-samurai-sama." It was a formal phrase that he had clearly been taught to use and was using carefully, the way a child uses a formal phrase the first few times after learning it. Hyogonosuke returned the bow and laid his hand briefly on Jiko's shaved head, the first time he had touched the boy, the gesture arriving without thought and accepted by Jiko with the easy un-selfconsciousness of a child who has only ever been touched kindly.

Jiko helped Joen prepare the temple's hondo that evening and Hyogonosuke watched from the doorway as they worked: Joen placing the ihai bearing the collective names of the dead, and Jiko arranging the small offering vessels they had filled with water, seasonal wildflowers, rice, sake, and incense before the Amida Buddha statue, a plain wooden standing figure of about three feet, whose gilding had own and darkened with time.

Jiko worked with a careful seriousness Hyogonosuke had not seen in him before. The boy who chopped daikon and chattered was somewhere else this evening. The boy lighting the candles was a small monk in training, doing the work he had been taught to do, conscious of the work's weight.

---

Hyogonosuke slept poorly and rose before light to his forms and to washing himself as well as the cold water allowed, so that he would be ready and clean for the ceremony.

The mountain air in the hondo was sharp and damp. Jiko had cut pine that morning and laid it at the altar, and the green smell of it was in the room under the sting of the incense. The chipped Amida looked out from the altar into the unpainted dark of the rafters. Joen was in his proper robes, not the ones he wore for sweeping. A cushion had been set for Hyogonosuke at the right distance from the altar, and he knelt on it with his bad leg folded under him as well as it would fold, his back straight, the hair gathered as cleanly as he had been able to manage.

Joen turned and bowed to him. Hyogonosuke returned the bow. Joen turned back to the altar.

Jiko took up the small mallet and struck the hand-bell. He struck it in the rolling seven-five-three, the strokes falling sharp and then close and then sparse, the metal sound clattering up into the rafters and out through the open front of the hall into the fog, going out over the valley to call up the scattered dead who had been given no rest.

When the last of it had died, Joen raised his voice in the Sanbojo, the Three Callings, in the low rustic drone of a mountain temple with none of the polish of the capital in it, asking the Buddha to come and witness the grief that was in the room. Hyogonosuke did not know the words. The Yagyu were not of this tradition. He let them pass over him, and the not-knowing was its own kind of attention, the words doing their work on him without asking to be understood.

Joen did not take up the paper yet.

Men who die in terror do not rest easily, and their spirits must be softened by the Dharma before they can hear their own names; Joen knew this, and so the names would wait. Jiko raised the leather-headed striker and brought it down on the standing bowl-gong beside the altar, and the deep sound rolled out and sat in the wood of the floor and in the small statue and in Hyogonosuke's chest.

On the second strike Joen began the Amidakyo. His voice became a steady unbroken wall of sound. The sutra described a land of gold and lotus ponds, a country with no mud in it, no blood, no screaming of men, and Hyogonosuke knelt inside the sound of it and let it hold him. Partway through, Joen gave a small nod without breaking the chant.

Hyogonosuke got to his feet. Every part of it was a slow negotiation with the leg and with the cold that had settled into it overnight. He crossed to the burner, took a pinch of the sandalwood powder between his fingers, lifted it to his brow, and let it fall onto the glowing charcoal. The white smoke went up in a thick plume and stood between him and the altar. He bowed deeply, his face tight, and returned back to the cushion.

The sutra came to its end. Jiko struck the bowl-gong a last time and let it ring until the sound thinned and decayed of itself into silence, and then there was only the wind moving in the mountain cedars outside.

Joen reached into his sleeve and drew out the folded paper. He unfolded it slowly, the paper rustling in the quiet, and smoothed it flat against his knee. He looked once across at Hyogonosuke. Then he began to read, and he did not chant now, but spoke in the plain vernacular, the same voice he used for the business of the day.

On this day, he read, on the anniversary of what had happened at the valley, the merit of this Dharma was given over to the forty men who had fallen in service.

Then he read the names. Because they had been ashigaru, foot soldiers handed spears, they carried no titles, and Joen read them as they had been used in the fields and the barracks, the plain names, one after another with nothing between them.

Daisaburo. Heihachi. Goro. Kakuemon. Sasuke. Chiyomatsu. Taichiro. Kyubei. Mataroku. Tokichi.

By the tenth name Hyogonosuke had begun to weep. It came silently, his face down, the tears falling onto the cushion before him as his vision swam. He had not wept for the forty in the year since, not properly; he had wept on the road for many things but not for them, not the names, not the men themselves. The weeping arrived now with the names and went where the names went.

Heisuke. Rokuemon. Yasokichi. Denzo. Magohachi. Kanbei. Tarobei. Shoji. Hikoichi. Gennai.

It was the unbrokenness of them that undid him, the roll call running on with nothing to mark off one man from the next, no bell, no pause in which to set himself again. The thing he had built over a year of staying alive cracked along its whole length at once. The names took his rank off him. He was not a commander who had lived. He was a young man who had left forty men in the mud, and the names kept coming, the ones he knew the sound of, the country names, men he had eaten beside and given the order to that had killed them.

Seijiro. Manzo. Kichiemon. Yohei. Sankuro. Tomekichi. Ihachi. Genta. Kasuke. Buntaro.

By the twentieth name his breathing had steadied. The weeping went on but the body had taken over the doing of it, and he knelt straight and let the names come. He took hold of his own thigh, the bad one, and held it hard, because the holding was the only thing left to do with what was rising in him.

Tahei. Kumazo. Shinkichi. Rihei.

Joen read the last of them and let the silence sit a moment. Thirty-four names. There had been forty.

"And six others," Joen read at the end, his voice no different than it had been, "whose names cannot now be brought forth. May they receive this offering as fully as those who have been named."

The six were Hyogonosuke's failure and he knew it as the words were read. Six men who had marched out under him and gone into the ground and taken even their names out of the world, because the one man who should have carried the names had not been able to keep them. He bent his head further. There was nothing to be done about the six but to ask that the offering reach them anyway, and Joen had asked it.

Joen folded the paper.

He did not look back at Hyogonosuke. He left him the dark of the hall to weep in, which was a thing given. Jiko struck the bowl-gong once more, softer this time, a rounder and gentler tone than the calling-strikes had been. Then the monk and the boy together said the nembutsu three times into the quiet, committing the forty to the compassion of the Buddha.

Namu Amida Butsu. Namu Amida Butsu. Namu Amida Butsu.

Hyogonosuke could not say it with them. But it had begun to seem wrong to him, somewhere in the reading of the names, to kneel and only be washed over, to take the whole of the ceremony and give nothing back into it. So he shaped the words. He set them against his teeth and breathed them and made the three callings with his mouth the way he made them at night alone in his room, and nothing came out of him, no sound, only the shape of the words formed and let go. It did not matter that they were silent. The attempt was the offering. He gave what he had to give, which was the motion of the words and not the words themselves, and he gave it three times with the two voices that could carry sound, and the not-sounding was its own kind of speech.

The service was ended. The incense smoke thinned in the cold air, and there was the wind in the cedars, and under it the small sound of a man at last mourning his men.

Hyogonosuke knelt a long time before he could move. Joen and Jiko waited at the altar, neither hurrying him nor leaving. When at last he was able to lift his head, Joen came across the floor and knelt in front of Hyogonosuke and held the paper out.

"It goes into the chest with the others," Joen said. "It will stay here. If you would like to make a copy for yourself, please do. The anniversary practice from here on, you may hold the service wherever you are, in whatever tradition the local temple keeps. Each year on this day. The men are placed now. The placing was the first work. The carrying is the second, and that one is for a longer time."

He set the paper gently into Hyogonosuke's hands. Hyogonosuke held it. The forty names were on it. The six absences at the bottom. The slow neat hand of a man who had been a boy copying the family scrolls in his grandfather's house and was now a man kneeling on the hondo floor of a temple far from that house, with his men placed.

He bowed to Joen, all the way down, holding it until Joen made a small gentle sound and laid a hand briefly on his shoulder. Then Hyogonosuke straightened, folded the paper, and stood up slowly on the leg that was still bad, and walked out into the morning sun.

Jiko was in the kitchen when he reached the living quarters. The boy looked at him once, gravely, and went back to the rice he was rinsing without saying anything. The unspoken acknowledgment of a child who had understood, in the limited way a child can understand such things, what he had been part of that morning.

Hyogonosuke laid the paper on the low table in his room. He sat in front of it. He did not unfold it again that day.

---

He copied the names over the following weeks.

He had thought, when he sat down at the table the second day, that the copying would be the easier work. The names were on the paper in front of him, all he had to do was write them again. It was not the easier work. Some names that had come hard the first time came easily on the second pass; some that had come easily slipped from him as he transcribed them and he had to set the brush down and sit until they returned. One of the names he had been certain of the first time, Heihachi, the man with the long reach who had been on his left at the second turn, felt, on the second pass, as he wrote it, slightly wrong. He sat with it. He could not say whether the name was wrong or whether his sense of its rightness had shifted. He left it as he had written it the first time.

By the end of the third week he had his own copy. It was less clean than Joen's temple copy. His hand was less steady on some of the lines, the ink uneven where he had set the brush down and picked it back up, but the names were there, all forty of them placed in order, with the six absences at the bottom.

And six others, whose names I cannot now bring forth.

The six absences felt different on his own copy. On Joen's paper they had been the formal absence the service had committed. On his own paper they were the thing he was going to have to live with.

He understood, sitting at the table with the brush still in his hand and the new copy drying in front of him, that some of the thirty-four named men might one day join the six. Their names were slipping even now; the second writing had taught him that. There would be a year, perhaps, when he sat down to write the names for the anniversary service and found that he had thirty-three left, then thirty-two, then fewer. The carrying Joen had named as the second work was going to include this, the slow loss of what he had recovered, and the work of continuing to hold the men whose names he no longer had.

He folded the new copy and put it in the bottom of his bundle, with Suke's kimono.

---

The temple settled around him differently after the service. It was not a change he could have named. The forty had been placed, but he was not at peace with their deaths; he never would be. Yet the weight he had been carrying in some specific way for two years had been set down in some different specific way, and the body that had been carrying it had room in it now for other work.

His sword practice became truer to what he had learned before. His sleep deepened. The cat began to sleep on his folded futon during the day when he was out at the well or in the village.

He did not understand all of this at the time. He understood it in pieces, slowly, the way the temple was teaching him to understand things. He only knew that something had shifted.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

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Chapter 16 Name

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Content warnings: trauma, grief, disability, discussion of shame and self-worth

---

His cousin came to mind in the fifth month.

Hyogonosuke had been afraid, in the very long winter on the road, that his life, if he returned to the Yagyu village, would be like his cousin's: someone who was kept and cared for but ultimately pitied, a shadow of who he was supposed to have been. He had imagined it in the lowered version of accuracy that his road-mind had been capable of.

The image came back to him now in a different shape.

He was sitting on the porch of the living quarters in the afternoon sun, mending the section where the sleeve of his under-kimono attached to the body of it, when the thought arrived: his cousin had been content. His cousin had watched the birds. He had sat in the sun in the household's yard and had been, by every account, perfectly happy. His daily life had not been a misery to him. It had been a life in which his family had cared for him, and the years had passed in this way and had not, as far as anyone in the family ever told it, been bad years.

Hyogonosuke did not know if he could be content the way his cousin had been. His cousin had lost the part of himself that would argue with his fate; Hyogonosuke still had some of that, even if it was buried under exhaustion and some other, deeper thing. Hyogonosuke would carry the shame of his own choices where his cousin had nothing he had to be ashamed of.

But the image had stopped, at some point, being the whole of his future. That was the change. It had been, on the road, the only future he could imagine, standing at the end of the road like a wall, with nothing else visible beyond.

Sitting on the porch now, he found that the wall had become just one possibility, just one shape his life might take. There were others, which were still much harder to see, that would also be available.

The temple itself was one. Hyogonosuke did not think of it as a real possibility, but the example of Joen sat at the edge of his vision the way the writing kit had sat at the edge of his vision in the first weeks.

There were other shapes too, that he could not yet see, that being well may let him see in the future.

Going home was not the only shape, either. He had been carrying on the road the known fate of returning home to face his grandfather's disappointment, but sitting on the porch he now understood that his fate was not yet known. It would be known when he arrived. He did not know what his grandfather would say. He did not know what his father would do. He did not know whether Toshiyasu was where he had imagined him, or somewhere else, or whether the family had been doing what Hyogonosuke had been doing on the road, which was imagining the worst because it was the only thing the lowered mind could imagine.

It was not hope, exactly, but it was the small uncertainty hope was made of.

He finished the sleeve and sat in the sun a while longer. The cat, which had taken to following him about the temple in the unsentimental way of cats who have decided a particular human is theirs, came up onto the porch and pressed itself against his leg. Hyogonosuke laid his hand on its head and felt it begin to purr.

---

It was perhaps a week later that he signed a note for the first time.

The note was nothing in itself, a practical question about whether to harvest a particular patch of the herb now, while it was at its strongest, or to leave it for later in the autumn. He composed it in his head while sweeping the court in the morning, sat down at the low table after the meal, and wrote it out in his careful hand. At the side, where he had not written anything on prior notes, he signed his personal name.

He looked at it a long while before he carried the paper out to the kitchen.

He had thought about giving Joen the name for some weeks. The thinking had been slow, not pressed, arriving in pieces while he was doing other things.

Joen had not asked for his name and Hyogonosuke knew that he was not going to ask, simply because Joen did not ask things. The name was Hyogonosuke's to give or not to give, and if he did not give it, Joen would not be hurt and the temple would absorb the absence.

But Hyogonosuke had been at the temple five months by then. The writing-and-speaking had become the way they communicated between them now. Joen had taught him a true thing about his stance. Joen had laid out the brush, the inkstone, the sword, the cloth, the second bowl, and the warm water on the moonlit nights, all the small set-within-reach gestures by which a man was offered the conditions of his own recovery without being pressed for anything in return. Joen had done all of this without knowing his name. The chapter of his life that the temple had received did not require it. The temple had simply received him as the man who came in out of the rain.

But Hyogonosuke understood, sitting at the low table with the brush still in his hand and the new characters drying at the side of the page, that he wanted Joen to have it. Wanted it as a thing offered, not as a thing needed. The name was the small thing he had to give.

He carried the paper out to the kitchen where Joen was at the hearth. Hyogonosuke laid the paper beside him.

Joen picked it up, read it, and his eyes traveled across the page and then to the side, where the name was. He read it. He did not change his expression. He did not look up.

"Harvest it now," Joen said, in the same voice he had used for the cracked jar months before. "It will be stronger than the late autumn cut. Use the small basket from the storeroom. I have extra paper if you need to fold the harvest in it."

Hyogonosuke nodded and Joen set the paper down and went back to the rice. The whole exchange had taken perhaps a dozen heartbeats.

Hyogonosuke walked back to his room and sat at the low table and did not understand, for some minutes, what had just been done between them. Joen had read the name and not made anything of it. He had answered the practical question and had let the name go without ceremony.

Hyogonosuke had been afraid, before he wrote it, that the giving would be a small earthquake, that Joen would have to acknowledge it, that there would be a moment that would require something from Hyogonosuke he was not sure he could do. Perhaps even that Joen had heard of the Yagyu commander who had gotten his forty men killed. But there had been no moment: Joen had simply received the name and absorbed it into the fabric of the day.

Hyogonosuke understood, slowly, that Joen had given him back something in return, the gift of not making him do the ceremony. He had wanted to give the name, but he had also not wanted to perform the giving. Joen had let him have both. He had not understood, until that moment, that this had been one of the things he'd been afraid of.

---

Joen did not use the name for some days. The notes continued the way they for months, with Hyogonosuke writing and Joen answering aloud, the practical small business of the days passing between them in a routine they had settled into. The name at the side of Hyogonosuke's notes was the only mark of the change. Sometimes Hyogonosuke signed; sometimes he did not. Either was now possible.

Then one morning Joen handed him a bowl at the hearth and said, "Here, Hyogonosuke. The miso is the new batch. Tell me if it's too strong; this jar came from the storehouse this morning."

The name went into the air between them as the ordinary form of address it had now become. Hyogonosuke took the bowl and sipped the miso. He nodded, the saltiness was just right. Joen turned back to the hearth.

That was all. The name had been used and the day continued. Hyogonosuke sat at the kitchen hearth with the bowl in his hands and understood, distantly, that he had been called by his own name for the first time since he had left the house in the castle town. The name itself was the smaller one, the personal name, not the family name. He had not been Yagyu-anyone in this exchange. He had been Hyogonosuke, the way a man's mother or his close brother or his oldest friend might call him.

He finished the miso. The day went on. Joen called him Hyogonosuke from then on, casually, with no further remark from either of them.

---

Summer came in over the temple, slowly and then all at once. The gravel court grew hot in the afternoons. The pines smelled of resin. The herb-seller's stock changed over to the summer crop. Jiko brought up cucumbers from his master's garden. The cat went out into the long grass behind the temple and came back smelling of mice and of warm earth.

Hyogonosuke practiced his forms with the foot square. The limp was barely present now in the middle of the day; it returned in the early mornings and the late evenings but had gone shallow. He carried water from the well, walked the back lane down to the village and back up, wrote to Joen on small sheets of paper about the things of the day, and Joen answered aloud, and the asymmetry was the temple's way and they both held it without remark.

He still tested the voice at intervals, but it did not come. He had begun, in the slow way the temple was teaching him things, to think that this was how things were. Some things came back, like his leg had mended, and some things did not, like his father's leg did not.

---

Chapter 15 Voice

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Content warnings: PTSD symptoms, panic responses, trauma triggers, social anxiety

---

He wrote his first message to Joen at the end of that month.

The occasion was small: a jar of herb decoction had cracked overnight in the cold, and Hyogonosuke wanted to know whether it could still be used or whether it should be poured out. He had stood looking at the jar for some minutes, trying to work out how to communicate the question without moving the jar, and had given up and gone to his room, ground a little ink and wrote, in plain characters on a small sheet of paper: The jar in the cold room has cracked. Should the contents be used or thrown out?

He carried the paper out to the kitchen where Joen was at the hearth. He laid it on the boards beside Joen without looking at him directly. Joen picked it up. Read it. Set it down.

"It will be fine," Joen said, not looking up from the rice he was tending. "If you can pour it cleanly into another jar without losing any to the floor, it's good."

Hyogonosuke nodded once and Joen returned to the rice. The whole exchange had taken perhaps ten heartbeats.

Hyogonosuke walked back to the cold room with the paper still in his hand and did not understand for some minutes why his chest felt as it did. He stood looking at the jar. He understood eventually that what he had just had was a conversation. The first conversation he had had with another person since the morning of the field. He had asked a question; the other person had answered.

That the question had been about a cracked jar and the answer had been about what to do with it did not matter at all. He had reached out toward another mind with a thing and the other mind had received it and reached back with the corresponding thing. A conversation.

It had been eighteen months since he had last done this. He stood in the cold room with the paper in his hand and could not move.

The jar was salvageable. He poured the decoction into another jar, washed his hands, walked back to his room and sat at the low table and looked at the writing kit for a long time.

He wrote more after that.

Small things. Practical questions for Joen; the occasional brief observation about the day. Joen answered everything aloud and asked nothing back. The asymmetry, Hyogonosuke writing, Joen speaking, settled in as the temple's way of having him.

Hyogonosuke noticed within a week that he had begun to compose the messages mentally well before he wrote them, the way a man composes speech in his head before opening his mouth. The composing was the part of speech was not lost, only speaking it out loud was the part that was gone. Writing was opening the mouth in a different way, with a different instrument.

He tested his voice still, sometimes, in the privacy of his room at night. He shaped the words against his teeth. He breathed into them. Mostly nothing came. Once or twice he got the small unvoiced approximation of a syllable, the kind of sound he managed once at Rokubei's. Nothing more. It was not a thing to argue with. The body returned what the body returned, which he held on to gladly, and let what was not returning be.

---

The moon was the slowest to soften.

For weeks a bright moon over the court still meant a night spent sitting up against the wall, breathing, waiting it out.

Joen knew and never said anything about it. On full-moon nights Joen left the lamp burning in the kitchen instead of putting it out before bed, and a small kettle of warm water sat on the hearth where Hyogonosuke could find it if he came out.

Hyogonosuke did sometimes come out, in those first months, and sat at the hearth with the warm water in his hands until the moon set or his shaking eased. Joen was always asleep. The lamp burned itself low. The warm water did its small work.

Somewhere in the third month Hyogonosuke found that he could stand on the porch under a near-full moon and look up at it, flat and white and indifferent over the pines, and have it be, for whole minutes together, only the moon and not the lamp that had lit the dead.

He did not trust this. He tested it cautiously, the way he tested the leg, by going out for a few breaths and going back in if the body went wrong, and trying again the next clear night.

The moon held more often than it failed. By the start of the fourth month he could sleep through full-moon nights more often than he could not.

The gun-flinch did not lift in the same way.

A matchlock went off in the slope below the temple one afternoon and Hyogonosuke went down into the gravel of the court before he understood he had moved, breath gone, the field roaring up around him with all its old force.

Joen was in the court at the time. He did not move toward him and instead sat down on the porch where he had been standing and folded his hands in his lap and waited.

When Hyogonosuke came back to himself, rising to push himself onto his knees in the gravel with the wooden sword in his hand, Joen was still on the porch in the same position, his face neither concerned nor calm, simply present.

"Hunters on the slope," Joen said. "It happens here every few weeks this time of year. I should have told you to expect it. Forgive me."

Hyogonosuke sat back on his heels. He slid the wooden sword into his obi as though it were a real one, which it was not, and the gesture's incongruity reached him slowly and, when he realized, almost made him laugh. He nodded to Joen, got up, went to his room and lay down on the futon and shook for some time.

He understood that the gun was not going to soften the way the moon had. Some things would soften and some would not. The body decided.

When he came out for the evening meal Joen had laid out the second bowl as always and said nothing about the afternoon. The day continued. The temple absorbed what had happened in the way the temple absorbed most things, which was by not making more of them than what they were.

---

The village simply read him as Joen's stray.

He had been afraid, the first time he went down, that the road into the village would be the road outside the apothecary's, or that he would be the failed Yagyu walking into a town with his damaged face and his walking stick and his silence drawing every eye and every judgment.

He had taken his time getting ready that morning, washing, tying his hair back, putting on the clean kimono. He carried his coin purse tucked inside his sleeve. He had thought about the apothecary's gate and made himself count to a hundred before he started down the path.

The herb-seller looked up when he came to the stall. He was an older man, perhaps fifty, with the sun-darkened hands of someone who had grown his own stock for thirty years. He took in Hyogonosuke at a glance — the marks on the cheek, the walking stick he still used for longer distances, the swords at his side, the obvious not-from-here — and his face did its small careful thing for less than a heartbeat, the way the trader at the pawnshop's face had done its small careful thing, and then he relaxed entirely.

"Ah," the herb-seller said. "You'll be the one staying up at Joen's, then."

Hyogonosuke nodded.

"He sent for you a few weeks back, did he? No, he didn't, you came up yourself. Bad weather, was it?" The herb-seller did not pause for an answer, did not seem to need one. "Always brings folks up that road, that weather does. What does the old man need today, then?"

Hyogonosuke took a folded paper from his sleeve, unfolded it, set it on the edge of the stall. Two kanme of the dried mugwort, if you have it. Joen says to ask whether you have the autumn cut or only the spring.

The herb-seller read it without remark.

"Spring cut's better, of course, but I'm out till the new crop. Autumn will do for what he uses it for. Two kanme is a lot compared to what he normally buys. Is he running low on his stores?"

Hyogonosuke nodded.

"I'll wrap it up. Tell him the price is the same as last winter, he won't argue. He never argues. Two coppers off if he sends the boy down with the empty paper next week, I can reuse it."

Hyogonosuke nodded; the herb-seller weighed and wrapped. Hyogonosuke paid, and the herb-seller passed him the package and a small folded note for Joen, as well as a separate piece of golden-yellow bekko-ame, which he pressed into Hyogonosuke's hand with the gruff casualness of a man passing a child a sweet.

"For your walk back up," he said. "It's a long climb on a bad leg."

Hyogonosuke bowed. The herb-seller bowed back with the small unhurried courtesy of an equal, not of a townsman bowing to a samurai, and Hyogonosuke walked away from the stall with the package under his arm and the bekko-ame sweet in his mouth, and the entirely unfamiliar sensation of having been received as an ordinary man.

It was not, he understood walking back up the temple path, that the herb-seller had not noticed who he was. The man had noticed everything, had read him in that first half-heartbeat as a road-worn samurai, scarred, who can't or won't talk, and had filed him under one of Joen's, and treated him from inside that category for the rest of the exchange.

The category was benign and the herb-seller had been kind without making anything of the kindness. He had passed the bekko-ame the way one passed sweets to children: not as a special grace, but as the small thing done when the occasion called for it.

Hyogonosuke walked back up the path more slowly than he had walked down. His leg was tired and something else was in his chest. He had been, for the duration of the exchange, only a man buying mugwort. Not the Yagyu commander whose forty men had not come back. Not the failed son walking home. Not the man with the gun-flinch and the moon-fear who couldn't speak. He had not understood, until walking back up the temple path with the candy, how heavy the rest had been.

He went down to the village every few days after that. The fish-seller, the rice merchant, the woman who sold the small twisted candies Jiko was fond of. The bracing eased in small increments at each stop.

By the end of the third month he could pass through the market on a busy morning without his pulse going to his throat. The women still made him brace, which was the body's older and deeper learning, and it eased only by fractions, but he could walk past a stall with two women behind it, half a step further back than he needed to be, and the women would take his coin and give him his fish, and the older one would say come again, young master, and the younger one would smile, and Hyogonosuke would bow without lifting his eyes and go on to the next stall. It was awkward. He knew it was awkward. They knew it was awkward. Nobody made anything of it. He came back. He went the next time. The awkwardness lessened, by the temple's slow measure.

---

It was in the fourth month, on a morning walk down to the village by a back path he had not used before, that the lane caught him.

He had taken to going down by different routes when he was strong enough for it, partly because the main path bored him by now, partly because the leg liked the variation, partly because he had been a young samurai once who had liked exploring the back ways of any country he was in and that man, in the smallest of ways, was beginning to wake up.

The back path he had chosen that morning ran down through the rice fields below the temple, on a raised lane between paddies, with wooded slopes on either side.

He had walked perhaps fifty paces along it when his body knew the ground.

It was not the lane in the field this time. The body knew that, more or less, by now. The field's lane had been narrower, steeper, the slopes closer in, a different kind of geography. This one was a different lane, but it was also the same kind of lane. The same raised path between water on both sides, the same wooded high ground rising up on either flank, the same long visible run in front and behind with nowhere to step off. The shape that the country produced wherever rice was grown in narrow mountain valleys. The shape that his father had told him once when he was very young, had been the shape of the place where he had been shot.

He stopped in the middle of the lane.

He had heard the story only once from his father, but it had been stored somewhere safely at the back of his mind: Toshikatsu at twenty, leading a small detachment along a narrow raised path between paddies in some country valley. The gunners on the slope above, who had been waiting to ambush them. The volley. The bullet in the lower spine as he tried to carry his cousin to safety. The men who had carried him out in turn. The leg that had never afterward functioned as before.

Hyogonosuke had walked into his own version of that lane at twenty-five, in a different country, against a different enemy, but with one result for forty men and a different result for himself.

The two lanes were two lanes and the country was full of these lanes. They did not simply stop being lanes just because they had taken people. Some of them would take people again. Some farmer or soldier was, somewhere in the country, perhaps even at this very moment, walking into a third one.

He stood in the middle of the lane he was on and did not bolt. His body was watchful, every line of it strung tight, the way the cat had been strung tight in the doorway, but the body knew, also, that this was a lane in spring sunlight on a path he had taken to go and buy fish, and there were no gunners on the slopes, no enemy watching him, and the lane was, for now, only a lane.

He stood. He breathed. He did not draw the sword. The hand wanted to go to it; he did not let it. And the wanting passed eventually.

The body stayed strung. He looked at the slope on his left and at the slope on his right and at the long pale stretch of the lane in front of him and the long pale stretch behind him, and he let the shape sit on him for as long as it needed to.

His father had walked into one of these and had come out broken. He had walked into one of these and had come out broken in a different way. The same ground took both of us. The thought was not relief nor grief. It was the cold flat recognition of something that had been true his whole life and that he was only now seeing for the first time.

His father had walked into the lane at twenty without knowing what it would cost him; Hyogonosuke had walked into his lane at twenty-five with all his grandfather's caution against just this thing in his ears, and had walked in anyway. The cost of the not-listening was the thing he was carrying.

He stood in the lane a long time, not going forward or back, as the sun moved across the slopes. A bird called and another answered.

Eventually he turned around and went back up to the temple without buy fish that day. He found, when he got back to the temple, that he was shaking. Not the gun-flinch shake, the deeper one, the shake of having seen a specific frightening thing. He sat by the kitchen hearth until it passed.

Joen, who was at the hearth tending the rice, looked at him once and said: "Long walk."

Hyogonosuke nodded.

Joen handed him a cup of warm miso soup. Hyogonosuke held it in both hands until the shaking eased and the broth was cooled enough to drink. The thing sat between them, quietly recognized without being named, the way many things sat between them now.

He went back to the lane two weeks later, on purpose, to see whether he could walk it through. He could. He walked the whole length of it, bought his fish at the village and walked back the same way. The body was strung the entire time, but it did not bolt and did not draw the sword.

He understood, walking back up to the temple with the wrapped fish, that he could not unmake the country, but that he could, with attention, walk on it. The shape of the lane would always be what it was. He would always know what it had done to his father and to his men. He could walk it anyway.

This was a smaller thing than he had wanted, but it was the thing he had been given.

---

Chapter 14 Patience

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Content warnings: trauma, chronic pain, grief, emotional withdrawal

---

The cat came a week later.

It was a half-wild thing, scarred about the ears, with the dull grey-brown pattern of a creature that lived in the gap between the temple and the forest and belonged to neither. It wanted the kitchen warmth and the heads of the small fish Joen sometimes had, but it could not make itself trust the distance across the floor into the kitchen to get them. It would come as far as the open doorway and stop, low to the ground, every line of it strung tight, wanting and afraid in equal and paralyzing measure, and at the smallest movement it would be gone in a grey blur back into the dark.

Hyogonosuke had named that shape to himself the first night at the gravel court, and recognizing it again now in another body was its own small confirmation of what he had become.

So he did with the cat what Joen had done with him: he asked nothing. He left a little fish at the edge of the doorway where the cat could reach it without coming near, and he did not look at it directly, and he made no move toward it. Night after night he set the fish a finger's width closer, and night after night the cat came to take it, and weeks went by in this slow negotiation conducted entirely without words on either side, which suited him better than any other arrangement he could have devised.

Jiko, when he was up the mountain, watched these proceedings with amused patience.

"The cat has been at the temple for two years already," Jiko said, "and has never let anyone touch it, though Joen has been feeding it the whole time. He'll come in when he's ready. Or he won't. Joen says cats are the same as men that way."

It was, in the end, the cat who closed the distance. One cold evening near the start of his second month it crossed the whole kitchen floor while he sat close to the hearth, pressed itself against his folded leg for the warmth of him, and after a long wary while began, grudgingly, to purr. Hyogonosuke sat very still so as not to scare it, and felt something in his own chest ease by some small fraction, some pressure he had carried so long he had stopped knowing it was pressure.

It is possible, then, he thought. A creature can be that frightened, and still, in the end, come in.

He did not let himself make more of it than that. But he noted it, the way he had taught himself to note things now, quietly, without expectation, lest the noting frighten it off.

---

The writing kit sat on the low table in the corner of his room for the better part of a month before he touched it.

Joen had laid it out on the second day: a brush, an ink stone, a small water-pot, a few sheets of plain paper, all set carefully in the corner where the light came in best from the paper screen. He had placed it without saying anything and had not said anything about it since.

Days had passed; weeks; the kit sat untouched. Hyogonosuke had been aware of it from the first morning. He had not approached it.

What kept him from it was not that he could not write, his hand knew how to hold a brush, the same way his hand still knew how to hold a sword, but to write was to send a thing out toward another mind, and the part of him that had reached for the spoken word and found nothing for the last year and a half had taught itself not to reach. Writing, like speaking, was a form of reaching.

The kit sat in the corner every morning as he woke, and every evening as he settled down to sleep. It did not move and it did not press. It was simply there, the way the wooden practice sword was simply there in the open shed beside the living quarters, propped against the wall as though some prior guest had set it down and walked away. Things were laid within reach at the temple. Whether they were taken up was up to the one they'd been laid within reach for.

He sat at the table one morning at the end of the third week without quite having intended to. He had been folding his futon and while bending down to place the futon in the corner, his hand had found the edge of the table and knocked the brush off its edge. He sat down. He picked up the brush. He held it.

He had not held a brush since the morning he had left his house to go on campaign, and his hand remembered it the way the body remembers any tool it has used since childhood: the small precise balance, the give of the bristle, the slight roughness of the lacquered shaft against the pads of the fingers. He did not move the brush to ink. He sat there with it in his hand for a long while, looking at it, while the morning light moved across the table. He did not write that day. He set the brush back where Joen had laid it and went out to sweep the court.

Two days later he sat down at the table again and ground a little ink and wrote, for something to write, the character for mountain because he was on a mountain. He looked at it. His hand was unsteady, it had been a year and a half. He sat looking at it until the ink dried. Then he turned the paper over and used the other side to write water, and temple, and then stillness, and then a few others to practice his hand. The hand steadied as he worked. The characters came out smaller and more controlled by the bottom of the page than they had been at the top.

He did not show the paper to Joen. He folded it and put it under his futon and planned to put it into the kitchen fire later.

The next day he found that Joen had quietly replaced the paper in the kit with a fresh sheet. The water-pot had been topped up. The ink stick had been laid out closer to where his hand would fall on it.

Nothing was said.

He began to write a little every day after that. Small practice. Characters that came easily, then ones that came less easily. He did not yet write anything that was a message. The kit was for the hand, for practice, not yet for the part of his mind that communicated with other people.

---

Hyogonosuke began, after a while, to also practice the sword again in the early morning before the first light.

The first time he took the wooden practice sword from where it sat in the open shed, his hand closed around the grip and his body went very still. He had not held a wooden sword since before he went on campaign with his forty men. The shape of the grip in his palm, the small balance of the weight, the smoothness along the tsuka where countless hands had held it before his, all of it came up to meet him as a real sword, with the wrong year attached. For one bad moment he was back in the dawn before the march, his men gathering their things behind him. The sword was the thing in his hand at the start of the day that ended in the field.

He stood in the gravel court with the wooden sword in his hand and then set the sword down against the wall of the shed and went back to the kitchen to sit by the hearth until the wrongness passed.

Joen had been at the well drawing water and not looked at him when he came back. He said nothing about the sword going back into the shed unused.

The next morning Hyogonosuke picked it up again. The shape of the grip was there again, the wrong year was there again, but smaller this time. His body had used up some of the worst of it on the first morning. He moved through the simplest sequence he knew. Slowly, badly, his body compensating for the bad leg in ways that felt foreign to him. He set the sword down and went back to the kitchen after.

The morning after that he ran through two sequences. By the end of the week he was running the basics daily, slowly, in the gravel court while the eastern sky was still grey. The memory of his other sword gradually became a thing he was working with, rather than a thing that stopped him.

The leg was strong enough now to take the stances correctly, even though he was still limping when he walked. He kept his practice short and didn't try anything he wasn't sure he could finish because the point was not strength but accuracy. He was testing what his body could still do, how his training had survived in his new condition.

Joen was sweeping at the far side of the court that morning, taking the leaves off the gravel with an old straw broom. Hyogonosuke had finished and stood breathing, the wooden sword down at his side.

Joen, without looking up from his sweeping, said: "It's the leg. You turn the foot out to compensate, and it pulls the line of the swing off. You see it most on the second cut."

Hyogonosuke went very still.

Joen kept sweeping. After a moment he said, with the small dryness of a man hearing himself, "Old habit. Forgive me."

Hyogonosuke looked down at his foot, the bad-leg foot. His toes were turned out, maybe a few fingers' width, from where they should have been. He hadn't noticed. The compensation had been so gradual through the months on the road, when every movement had been against the leg's protest, that it had become the shape of his stance. Joen had read it across forty paces of gravel court at first light.

He squared the foot and ran through his practice again, slowly. He felt the difference at once. The line of the swing came out true, where it had been a fraction off before, the second cut landing where the first had pointed instead of wide. The body that had been correcting for the leg had been correcting away from the truth of the form.

He stood with the wooden sword down at his side and breathed.

Joen had gone back to his sweeping. The remark had cost him an effort, Hyogonosuke understood. Not the effort of speaking, but the effort of crossing a boundary he had set for himself years ago and had crossed only rarely since. Hyogonosuke did not know how he understood this. He just knew. The old man was a swordsman who had stopped being a swordsman, and the seeing was still in him whether or not he wanted it to be, and it had come out of him this morning because Hyogonosuke's foot had been wrong and Joen could no more not see it than he could not see the leaves on the gravel.

Hyogonosuke ran the sequence a third time with the foot straight. Then he turned toward Joen, the sword held in his right hand, and bowed slowly, respectfully, the way one bows to a teacher.

Joen, at the far side of the court, made a small sound that might have been embarrassment, and went on with his sweeping.

The next morning Hyogonosuke took the sword again and ran the sequence with the foot square from the start. Joen swept the leaves and said nothing, and nothing more was said about it for many days. But Hyogonosuke understood, going back to his room after that morning, that something had shifted in him that he did not yet have the language for.

He thought of his grandfather, who had taught with his voice and could not teach without it. He thought of his father, who taught with his voice and his bad leg both. He thought of the dojo at home and what teaching had looked like there for the whole of his life. And he understood, in the small obscured way his understandings came to him now, that teaching could be other things, not only what his family did.

---

I've had The Moon over the Millet Fields sitting in my drafts forever and I'm using the I-currently-only-have-one-easy-course break in my graduate program to break the story into chapters and do some light editing so it can be uploaded, both here and on AO3.

I wasn't planning to write this story at all, originally, although it has been at the back of my head since at least my first Whumptober, in which Hyogonosuke makes a brief appearance, though still in very unpolished and unfinished form.

So why am I writing it now? Because I have been pushing my re-write of Suigetsu ahead of me for longer than I care to admit, and time has given me some ideas to add to that story - such as Hyogo serving as a kind, helpful figure balancing Jubei's cruelty to an extent. And then I started writing Hyogo's backstory, which is where we are now.

Good news: my writing blog is actually having some writing posted to it that's not just history notes and random thoughts.

Bad news: there will be more walls of text as I'm editing and posting the remaining chapters.