From Kakita Nanmaru’s Collected “Letters From the Wall”
Tenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
Where am I, sister?
I have joined the cackling madmen.
If there is a lesson here, it is that one can get used to anything. Four months ago, I knew that my life at court was over. Slight one Shosuro, and you might live. Slight three, and they won’t be kind enough to give you a duel.
They have a nickname for us here. Ponies. It is from the old Yasuki practice of sending lame ponies as gifts to the Hida rather than killing them, to be tethered and used as bait when the ogres seek fresh flesh.
Only the Yasuki, my sister. And only the Crab.
I began my first day running in full armor, which I was late putting on, though the servants did the best they could. I expected the jibes and my placement with the retainers, and I expected my fainting and vomiting from exertion. I did not expect the hellish wind atop the Kaiu Wall, making the largest Crabs sink their stances while running and convincing me I was about to die when we took our exhausted legs down its rain-slick steps as fast as we could. I did not expect the pitifully screaming goblin captives to be released into the Shadowlands to be shot in the back for kyujutsu practice.
And the suspicion! A bushi blundered into me, apologizing. At first I thought him clumsy, but I saw he had palmed an arrowhead of jade and touched my skin with it, expecting I might burn at the touch. Routine, they call it!
Today in the barracks they told the hohei a tale. A Kuni goes into the Shadowlands in search of his lost Hida cousin, and finds him living in a cave, with wild hair and eyes, surrounded by goblin skulls and armed only with a tanto. The Kuni checks him and incredibly, the man is free of Taint.
“How did you live, my cousin?” asks the Kuni. “You had no food or water.”
“It was terrible,” the Hida whispers. “But I remembered you said the Earth within living creatures resists the Taint longer than food. So I scrambled among the rocks until I found a fat little scorpion. I severed its legs and sucked at the stumps, and that served for water.”
“You have learned my lessons well.” The Kuni smiles. “The other men will want to know. How does scorpion taste?”
“Not so different from phoenix.”
The young Crabs in the room all laughed.
The older Crabs did not.
Eleventh Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
“I am under orders to carry weapons,” a heimin told me today. “These are yours if you please, but the bakemono come after us sometimes, because we are easy.” Her hair brushed the floor as she showed me her sai without looking at my face. Her friend had a kama.
“You think you can defend yourselves?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, Kakita-sama, the samurai defend us. We cannot be samurai. But the bakemono, the ogres…if they get food, they can stay some time. So….” She shrugged.
Her friend gave her a glance, and they showed me where they keep the nunte. “Please, Kakita-sama, it lets us reach them before they reach us.”
I could not believe it. There is no law here. The Crab would pluck the stars from the sky if they thought they could burn the Fallen God with them.
“You don’t think of anything else?”
“Never”
She stared in my eyes. This heimin woman has killed before.
Yet she spoke the truth.
Twelth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
I am on the second shift. They have three here: from the Hare to the Horse, from the Goat to the Dog, and from the Boar to the Tiger. I guard the work crews.
The tunnels require constant vigilance. When goblins flood in, the traps must be reset or next time they will not be slowed. If too many creatures know about a tunnel, it is sealed up. If the Crab need another, they open an old one and hope the creatures have forgotten. Or they open an old one and put in twice as many traps.
This practice is more businesslike than imaginative. Most traps are variations on spiked pits and locking chambers with murder holes. Ground glass or crystal is sometimes worked into the mortar to discourage creatures from climbing up. Poison has little or no effect on Shadowlands creatures.
They said this without shame.
We ran drills for when they burst through. “Know where the stone is,” my sempai ordered. His name is Seiki. “Stone doesn’t stop oni, but it gives you time. Never trust wood.”
“There is no room to fight,” I said.
He put his fist to my face, opened it, and touched his fingernails to my eyelashes.
“This is room enough.”
I finished the drill on the wrong side of a closing portcullis.
Fourteenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
“Be careful,” I told Seiki,” the softest thing cannot be snapped. I have been taught to use your strength against you.”
Hida Seiki smiled. “What makes you think I will give it to you?”
I bled on the floor and I did not know how.
“Soft things,” he snorted. “Fighting like water. Fighting like wind. You are not an element. You are a man, with joints and sockets and weight.”
He showed me. What they use is not a way. It is a school, kobo ichi-kai. Jujitsu, but not like ours. Seiki spoke of ranges, centerlines, circumferences of circles, facing the point of contact, weight distribution in terms of commitment, time in heartbeats.
“Imagine we are ogres,” Seiki offerd.
They surrounded me, until I learned how to fight a crowd.
I put my gaze on one, and they struck me from behind.
I tried to throw one, and they fell on me until I was on the ground in their midst.
I spun like the whirling Dragon, and they struck my back as I turned.
I watched the ground, and I could see all their feet. As soon as one moved, I lept on him to kill him. Though he was in armor, I could still shove him into the others. The rest struck me from behind and knocked me to the ground.
I watched the ground, and as soon as one moved I ran from him, forcing him to chase me, striking down his opposite who was not expecting it. I ran through them, and then I ran back, knocking them down, not meeting their eyes.
I will not be reborn as a peasant.
I am one already.
Seventeenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
Blows today. We took off the armor, and after an hour of strangling and breaking, they made me stand. They waited until I tried to breathe and they hit me again. With fists.
“We start of light,” Seiki announced. “Breathe in, breathe out, but stay tense. The muscle makes the shock go through the body, the body to the legs, the legs to the earth.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to get out of the way?”
“Of course it is,” he said. “This is training for when you fail.”
“I will not fail.” Let him eat the motto of his family.
“Then you’ve never been asked to do the impossible more than once.”
He hit me with a boken, and I doubled over. My abdomen was water and my limbs were heavy as gold. They laughed at me, but I stood up again.
“I am no courtier,” I said to Seiki later in the halls. “Use the boken from now on. Give me hard blows.”
“That wasn’t hard,” he said, waggling his tetsubo. “This is.”
Nineteenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
I killed last night.
They gave me a bow.
I awoke in armor as he came screaming down the length of our beds. Goblins had burst through to murder us in the night. They said to follow him as the others charged to the catacombs.
The floor exploded and my sempai fell to his death. The keening little things swarmed over the dead, jabbing blades. We turned our bows on them through the smoke and fire. Follow the screamer, they said, while the bodies were breaking. Follow the screamer. I held one of them, like a cracked bowl, and all the soup leaked down my armor. He was hugging me. His name was Nanashige.
Something with nine heads rose beneath us and pulled on a samurai-ko. She had no bfeath, she was clay stuck together with red paint. The arms came off, and the paint just stayed there. I kept shooting, and it stumbled like a drunk bushi, like the arrows made it stupid, and men died telling me to follow the screamer.
I followed him into the halls. The candles blew out with his passage and I ran in the dark. I heard him screaming they were coming from below, get the jade below. They he ran and screamed to the top of the wall while everyone died down in the stone pit. I ran along the wall in the wind behind him and our Crabs charched down the steps and I was going to turn once we reached the third tower, but he just kept running. And I looked back and something with wings was behind me and they were taking the jade below and I rememberd it had nine heads, not ten, because she’d cut it, she’d cut it before she died and they were taking the jade below and the thing with wings was chasing me and not making a sound and I stood my ground and shot it and it flicked the arrow away and the shadows were all over the moon, shadows with wings and crawlers with nails that could climb stone and the arrows all flicked. I
I shot the screamer.
My new sempai said I did the right thing.
I didn’t want to know his name. He told me anyway. It is Muneru.
“Your eyes aren’t steady,” he said this morning.
“How can you stand it?” I asked. “I hunted for three years for the man who killed my cousin. One man. And last night the distraction alone killed fifty. Yet I…”
I could not say it.
I only looked at my tea.
We line up at breakfast for it. The Hida are so polite to us. To me. They turn their backs as we walk to the line. They know. And we all know they know. There are no secrets here. Secrets are for Scorpions and oni. Not for us. But they are polite for this.
I leave the petals for Iso, who cannot afford it. Iso has no mouth, ubt he pokes a hole where it used to be, and sempai helps him swallow.
“I have lost two cousins,” Munery said, “a grandfather, and uncle, and two of my friends. I command men who will live the rest of their lives drinking tea like ours. In the barracks at night, I hear them crying in the dark because now they will never be married. But they must look strong for those who need them.” His gaze probed the rough futon, and I knew he saw the stains of my eyes.
“They come to me.” Muneru held up his arm. “And I ask them, “You ever fight with knives?”
I shook my head. Either I had my swords or I was in the house of someone who held them for me. “It’s not like kenjutsu,” he said softly. “It’s messy. Both hands are threats; feet too. The knife kills you, but the free hand hits you and drags you into the blade. The legs kick yours to hold you still. “
I watched as he pulle doff his kote. “When everything happens quickly,” he said, “you’ll be cut and you’ll get scars. But you can wear them here with muscle and bone,” he ran a finger down the outside of his wrist, “or you can wear them here.”
Muneru held his thumb over the tendons and arteries on the inside of my arm. I knew a man who’d been cut there once. He can no longer close his hand.
“A Crab wears his scars on the outside.”
They must look strong for those who need them.
I understood more than he knew.
Where am I, sister?
I have joined the cackling madmen.
If there is a lesson here, it is that one can get used to anything. Four months ago, I knew that my life at court was over. Slight one Shosuro, and you might live. Slight three, and they won’t be kind enough to give you a duel.
They have a nickname for us here. Ponies. It is from the old Yasuki practice of sending lame ponies as gifts to the Hida rather than killing them, to be tethered and used as bait when the ogres seek fresh flesh.
Only the Yasuki, my sister. And only the Crab.
I began my first day running in full armor, which I was late putting on, though the servants did the best they could. I expected the jibes and my placement with the retainers, and I expected my fainting and vomiting from exertion. I did not expect the hellish wind atop the Kaiu Wall, making the largest Crabs sink their stances while running and convincing me I was about to die when we took our exhausted legs down its rain-slick steps as fast as we could. I did not expect the pitifully screaming goblin captives to be released into the Shadowlands to be shot in the back for kyujutsu practice.
And the suspicion! A bushi blundered into me, apologizing. At first I thought him clumsy, but I saw he had palmed an arrowhead of jade and touched my skin with it, expecting I might burn at the touch. Routine, they call it!
Today in the barracks they told the hohei a tale. A Kuni goes into the Shadowlands in search of his lost Hida cousin, and finds him living in a cave, with wild hair and eyes, surrounded by goblin skulls and armed only with a tanto. The Kuni checks him and incredibly, the man is free of Taint.
“How did you live, my cousin?” asks the Kuni. “You had no food or water.”
“It was terrible,” the Hida whispers. “But I remembered you said the Earth within living creatures resists the Taint longer than food. So I scrambled among the rocks until I found a fat little scorpion. I severed its legs and sucked at the stumps, and that served for water.”
“You have learned my lessons well.” The Kuni smiles. “The other men will want to know. How does scorpion taste?”
“Not so different from phoenix.”
The young Crabs in the room all laughed.
The older Crabs did not.
Eleventh Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
“I am under orders to carry weapons,” a heimin told me today. “These are yours if you please, but the bakemono come after us sometimes, because we are easy.” Her hair brushed the floor as she showed me her sai without looking at my face. Her friend had a kama.
“You think you can defend yourselves?” I asked.
“Oh, no, no, Kakita-sama, the samurai defend us. We cannot be samurai. But the bakemono, the ogres…if they get food, they can stay some time. So….” She shrugged.
Her friend gave her a glance, and they showed me where they keep the nunte. “Please, Kakita-sama, it lets us reach them before they reach us.”
I could not believe it. There is no law here. The Crab would pluck the stars from the sky if they thought they could burn the Fallen God with them.
“You don’t think of anything else?”
“Never”
She stared in my eyes. This heimin woman has killed before.
Yet she spoke the truth.
Twelth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
I am on the second shift. They have three here: from the Hare to the Horse, from the Goat to the Dog, and from the Boar to the Tiger. I guard the work crews.
The tunnels require constant vigilance. When goblins flood in, the traps must be reset or next time they will not be slowed. If too many creatures know about a tunnel, it is sealed up. If the Crab need another, they open an old one and hope the creatures have forgotten. Or they open an old one and put in twice as many traps.
This practice is more businesslike than imaginative. Most traps are variations on spiked pits and locking chambers with murder holes. Ground glass or crystal is sometimes worked into the mortar to discourage creatures from climbing up. Poison has little or no effect on Shadowlands creatures.
They said this without shame.
We ran drills for when they burst through. “Know where the stone is,” my sempai ordered. His name is Seiki. “Stone doesn’t stop oni, but it gives you time. Never trust wood.”
“There is no room to fight,” I said.
He put his fist to my face, opened it, and touched his fingernails to my eyelashes.
“This is room enough.”
I finished the drill on the wrong side of a closing portcullis.
Fourteenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
“Be careful,” I told Seiki,” the softest thing cannot be snapped. I have been taught to use your strength against you.”
Hida Seiki smiled. “What makes you think I will give it to you?”
I bled on the floor and I did not know how.
“Soft things,” he snorted. “Fighting like water. Fighting like wind. You are not an element. You are a man, with joints and sockets and weight.”
He showed me. What they use is not a way. It is a school, kobo ichi-kai. Jujitsu, but not like ours. Seiki spoke of ranges, centerlines, circumferences of circles, facing the point of contact, weight distribution in terms of commitment, time in heartbeats.
“Imagine we are ogres,” Seiki offerd.
They surrounded me, until I learned how to fight a crowd.
I put my gaze on one, and they struck me from behind.
I tried to throw one, and they fell on me until I was on the ground in their midst.
I spun like the whirling Dragon, and they struck my back as I turned.
I watched the ground, and I could see all their feet. As soon as one moved, I lept on him to kill him. Though he was in armor, I could still shove him into the others. The rest struck me from behind and knocked me to the ground.
I watched the ground, and as soon as one moved I ran from him, forcing him to chase me, striking down his opposite who was not expecting it. I ran through them, and then I ran back, knocking them down, not meeting their eyes.
I will not be reborn as a peasant.
I am one already.
Seventeenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
Blows today. We took off the armor, and after an hour of strangling and breaking, they made me stand. They waited until I tried to breathe and they hit me again. With fists.
“We start of light,” Seiki announced. “Breathe in, breathe out, but stay tense. The muscle makes the shock go through the body, the body to the legs, the legs to the earth.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to get out of the way?”
“Of course it is,” he said. “This is training for when you fail.”
“I will not fail.” Let him eat the motto of his family.
“Then you’ve never been asked to do the impossible more than once.”
He hit me with a boken, and I doubled over. My abdomen was water and my limbs were heavy as gold. They laughed at me, but I stood up again.
“I am no courtier,” I said to Seiki later in the halls. “Use the boken from now on. Give me hard blows.”
“That wasn’t hard,” he said, waggling his tetsubo. “This is.”
Nineteenth Day, Month of the Ox, Fifth Year of Hantei XXXVI
I killed last night.
They gave me a bow.
I awoke in armor as he came screaming down the length of our beds. Goblins had burst through to murder us in the night. They said to follow him as the others charged to the catacombs.
The floor exploded and my sempai fell to his death. The keening little things swarmed over the dead, jabbing blades. We turned our bows on them through the smoke and fire. Follow the screamer, they said, while the bodies were breaking. Follow the screamer. I held one of them, like a cracked bowl, and all the soup leaked down my armor. He was hugging me. His name was Nanashige.
Something with nine heads rose beneath us and pulled on a samurai-ko. She had no bfeath, she was clay stuck together with red paint. The arms came off, and the paint just stayed there. I kept shooting, and it stumbled like a drunk bushi, like the arrows made it stupid, and men died telling me to follow the screamer.
I followed him into the halls. The candles blew out with his passage and I ran in the dark. I heard him screaming they were coming from below, get the jade below. They he ran and screamed to the top of the wall while everyone died down in the stone pit. I ran along the wall in the wind behind him and our Crabs charched down the steps and I was going to turn once we reached the third tower, but he just kept running. And I looked back and something with wings was behind me and they were taking the jade below and I rememberd it had nine heads, not ten, because she’d cut it, she’d cut it before she died and they were taking the jade below and the thing with wings was chasing me and not making a sound and I stood my ground and shot it and it flicked the arrow away and the shadows were all over the moon, shadows with wings and crawlers with nails that could climb stone and the arrows all flicked. I
I shot the screamer.
My new sempai said I did the right thing.
I didn’t want to know his name. He told me anyway. It is Muneru.
“Your eyes aren’t steady,” he said this morning.
“How can you stand it?” I asked. “I hunted for three years for the man who killed my cousin. One man. And last night the distraction alone killed fifty. Yet I…”
I could not say it.
I only looked at my tea.
We line up at breakfast for it. The Hida are so polite to us. To me. They turn their backs as we walk to the line. They know. And we all know they know. There are no secrets here. Secrets are for Scorpions and oni. Not for us. But they are polite for this.
I leave the petals for Iso, who cannot afford it. Iso has no mouth, ubt he pokes a hole where it used to be, and sempai helps him swallow.
“I have lost two cousins,” Munery said, “a grandfather, and uncle, and two of my friends. I command men who will live the rest of their lives drinking tea like ours. In the barracks at night, I hear them crying in the dark because now they will never be married. But they must look strong for those who need them.” His gaze probed the rough futon, and I knew he saw the stains of my eyes.
“They come to me.” Muneru held up his arm. “And I ask them, “You ever fight with knives?”
I shook my head. Either I had my swords or I was in the house of someone who held them for me. “It’s not like kenjutsu,” he said softly. “It’s messy. Both hands are threats; feet too. The knife kills you, but the free hand hits you and drags you into the blade. The legs kick yours to hold you still. “
I watched as he pulle doff his kote. “When everything happens quickly,” he said, “you’ll be cut and you’ll get scars. But you can wear them here with muscle and bone,” he ran a finger down the outside of his wrist, “or you can wear them here.”
Muneru held his thumb over the tendons and arteries on the inside of my arm. I knew a man who’d been cut there once. He can no longer close his hand.
“A Crab wears his scars on the outside.”
They must look strong for those who need them.
I understood more than he knew.