Guardian of the Dream
Part Two - The Flower's Guardian
Chapter 1 - Magic Weaving and Star Reading
There was a small shop along the side of the canal that commoners in the Lower Fan used to ship heavy things from place to place. This shop was centrally located between the Blue Bow River and the Bird Song River. A cheerful sign over the door proclaimed for the world to see: ‘The Anything Store.’
The storefront was cluttered with miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Inside, Toya and Saya bustled back and forth, moving at a furious pace. The store had a good reputation in the area. If something couldn’t be found at the Anywhere Store, then it couldn’t be found anywhere else in the city. Toya’s reputation as an errand runner preceded him. He knew the Lower Fan of Kosenkyo so well that he moved through it at preternatural speed. When people asked how he managed it, he just laughed and said, “I know all the shortcuts!”
Saya, Toya’s new wife, ran the shop while Toya ran errands and fetched goods for the store. Some of the regular customers worried about her being left alone so frequently. The Lower Fan wasn’t such a safe place that a young girl could be left alone for very long.
"Aren't you worried, leaving your pretty wife behind in the shop by herself?” they asked. “It would be terrible if she caught the eye of some devious rogue that wished her harm."
But Toya and Saya laughed off comments like that.
“Thanks for your concern,” Saya said. Her voice was high and sweet. She didn’t worry about much of anything. She knew Kosenkyo just as well as Toya, and like him, she was good friends with Balsa the spear-wielder. Balsa’s reputation as a bodyguard was well-known throughout New Yogo. No one would lay a hand on Saya if they knew that Balsa would come to save her.
Balsa had been spending more time in New Yogo since the incident with the water spirit. Whenever she was in the city, she stopped by to say hello to Saya and Toya and check on their shop.
The city’s criminal underclass all knew about Torogai and her connection with the store. Torogai’s reputation preceded her as the strongest magic weaver of the age, and she was known to be a frequent customer of the store. There weren't any villains in the city brave enough to stand up to a short-tempered magic weaver who could apparently turn people into turtles--or worse.
As it happened, Torogai came to visit the store that day before dawn. She came to the back of the shop, her long limbs mostly obscured by mist. She knocked twice on the back door; the door opened and she stepped inside. Shortly after, Shuga came as well, dressed like a merchant. He repeated Torogai's actions, knocking twice on the back door before being let in.
Toya was startled when he noticed the expression on Shuga’s face. Shuga was usually so calm. Toya couldn’t remember ever seeing him so ruffled.
"Is the Master here?" Shuga asked.
"Yes, of course."
Shuga brushed past Toya before he even finished answering the question. The he pulled on a decorative ribbon hanging from the ceiling. Part of the ceiling opened out with a thud, and a narrow ladder fell out. From the outside, the shop appeared to only have a ground floor, but there was a cleverly made secret storage space between the store sign and the roof.
Torogai scowled as she caught sight of Shuga climbing the ladder. "What's wrong? Did someone notice you?"
Shuga shook his head. "Master Torogai, I've done something terrible…"
"Calm down, then speak. This isn't like you."
"His Highness… His Highness the Crown Prince won't wake up. Just like the First Queen."
Torogai's narrow eyes opened wide. "What? Since when?"
"Yesterday morning." Shuga buried his face in his pale, cold hands. "The day before, I told His Highness about these secret meetings of ours… It was thoughtless of me."
Shuga lowered his hands slowly, then looked up at Torogai. "You told me that people get trapped in their dreams because those dreams make them happy. If a person is happier in a dream, why would they return? His Highness held no hope for his current life. He thought that he was locked up in a dark and stuffy box. And I, cruelly, opened up a hole through which he saw the outside world. A hole that he could only look through..."
Torogai considered Shuga in silence. When she spoke, it was in a hushed whisper. "You probably know this yourself, but it sometimes helps to hear someone else say it." She sighed, then said, "You're not responsible for Chagum seeing the world outside the palace, or that he can never return to it, no matter how much he wants you. You’re not the one who forced him to be the Crown Prince, or to grow up to be the Mikado. Matters like these are beyond the power of men. It was Chagum himself who chose to escape from that by staying in his dream. You do understand all this, don't you? Stop blaming yourself; it’s completely pointless.”
Shuga didn’t move a muscle. Torogai shrugged her shoulders. "Having said that, we can't leave Chagum to die like this."
"How long do you think we have before he... dies?"
"Normally it would be about ten days, since you can make him drink water... but food is out of the question. The girl that I'm treating with Tanda has been getting weaker very slowly. She's been asleep for five days already, but she hasn't weakened much. Her pulse has slowed somewhat, but it’s still going strong. Whatever this is seems to be different from normal sleep."
"Yes, the Star Reader looking after the First Queen also said something to that effect."
"But even if he won't die twenty days from now, the fact that he will eventually doesn't change. I think it's time to try the Soul Call after all,” Torogai muttered. She lifted her head.
"That's right... I was so distraught over Chagum that I forgot, but there is something I've been meaning to tell you."
"You said that the Tendo speaks of a connection between the stars and the fates of men, right?"
"Yes, but that connection is very complex."
"Well yeah, it would be. I understand that much, but if there’s a connection between stars and men, then there should be some similarity between Chagum's and the First Queen's stars, shouldn't there?
"I think there is a possibility of that, but…"
"Why not use those Tendo skills of yours to find out? If we put together our magic weaving and your Tendo, we might see an entirely new picture. Possibly a picture that no one has ever seen before."
"While that might be true, a way that takes too long to save His Highness is useless."
Torogai grinned broadly. Shuga glared at her. "What’s so funny? Am I wrong?"
"No. I just find your your naivete adorable. Take a step back and think about the current situation. No matter how much you rush, you can't save Chagum with just Tendo. It seems that magic weaving is faster. So just sit back, and leave it to me."
Shuga’s frown deepened.
"Waiting is hard. I understand. But what else can you do? Once you've calmed down a bit, think about what I told you. That's what my teacher always used to say. Knowledge might not be useful right away, but that doesn’t make it useless.”
***
Tanda spent every day by Kaya, who continued sleeping. Torogai visited once and examined Kaya as well. She confirmed that Kaya's soul was not inside her body, but she decided to keep waiting for new developments. Neither she nor Tanda performed a Soul Call to summon her soul back to her body.
Tanda's brother, Noshir, was annoyed that Torogai didn’t do anything. He complained that she wasn’t as great as her reputation suggested. Noshir's short temper was nothing new, but this time it cut Tanda deep. Torogai's caution was baffling to him. She was usually willing to take more risks.
As a magic weaver, Torogai was fond of flashy magic weaving. She was so strong and so practiced that she had no fear of diving into situations head-first and resolving any issue with raw power.
Why is she being careful now? I understand that there are many things we can't predict, but just patiently waiting and seeing what happens will get us nowhere…
Tanda walked in the front door of Noshir’s hut and took a breath full of the smell of the smoky roof-straw. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw Kaya wrapped up tightly in shilya bedding, lying next to the sunken hearth. Noshir and his wife had two younger children and field work, so they couldn’t remain by Kaya’s side all day long.
Tanda sat down by Kaya’s pillow and looked at her sleeping face. As always, she was smiling happily... but she also looked thinner than she had a few days ago.
Kaya was starting to starve to death.
Tanda took Kaya's hand gently in his. It was cold and dry. Her small palm was rough with cracks and fissures.
He suddenly remembered something Kaya had said before, when she was looking at her work-roughened palms. "Sometimes I feel really strange. I think about how these hands will hold a baby in a year or two… And then in fifteen years that baby will get married and will be holding another baby. When I think about the future like that, everything seems so pointless and empty."
Kaya's feelings were similar to those of Torogai in her youth. Girls of her age mostly knew what the rest of their life was going to be like. Some girls felt a terrible emptiness at what they perceived as a bleak future.
Tanda understood Kaya's feelings. He was always different from others in the village, and he hadn’t followed the usual path of villagers like his brother. He knew deep down that his family loved him, but he also knew that his mother and father felt uneasy around a son that could see shadow of death in his grandmother's face at tea-time, or birds flying in lazy circles at twilight that no one else could see. His siblings had laughed at him outright in childhood.
When Tanda was eight, he saw birds in the sky that no one else saw. They glowed with a pale light that fascinated him. He followed those dreamlike birds into the middle of the mountains. The birds flew through the trees and eventually alighted on the roof of a ramshackle hut standing in the middle of a meadow.
Tanda watched from a distance as the birds descended towards the chimney of the hut and disappeared.
The door of the hut opened. A woman with a blackened face came out. She was uglier than any other woman he had seen in his life. She looked straight at Tanda, who was hiding in the bushes, and said, "Come out, boy."
Perhaps Tanda should have been afraid, but he was a brave boy. He came out of the bushes as he was told, then approached the old woman, who was beckoning him closer with the hook of one finger.
"Why are you here alone at this hour?"
Tanda told her that he’d followed the mysterious birds, which seemed to greatly interest the woman. "Ah. You saw those birds? I sent them, you see."
That was the last thing Tanda expected to hear. His siblings had teased him for so long that Tanda had started to wonder if the birds really were all in his head. The old woman's confirmation of their existence reassured something in him. He felt joy, as if he’d just made a new friend. "How did you send them? Why did you send them?"
"What do you think?"
"Were they searching for a soul?" Tanda asked.
The old woman's eyes twinkled with mirth. "That's right. Why did you think that?"
"I saw those birds yesterday, too. They circled above the Bird Song River above the Crying Depths before suddenly disappearing into the water. I thought that they must be looking for the lost child from the village to the west."
"That's right. That child was most likely called by a river spirit, a Nouno. If I’d been told about it sooner, I could have saved the child… Now that he's gone to the other side, I can't do anything at all."
The woman looked at Tanda for a long moment. Then she grinned. "My birds couldn't bring back that child's soul, but it seems they brought me another one."
That scared Tanda. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was being lured by someone--or something. "Are you a mountain spirit?"
The woman scowled. "Don’t be a fool. Spirits don't have physical forms. If you knew mountain women, you'd understand."
"What are mountain women like? Do they eat people?"
The woman laughed out loud. Tanda’s eyes showed no fear now, only open curiosity. "You like stories like those, huh? You might become a decent magic weaver after all."
That was how Tanda met Torogai.
After that, whenever Tanda had any free time, he would spend it at Torogai's hut. Over time, Tanda's parents mostly gave up on their slacking son and tacitly consented to his strange new life. As a third son, he wouldn't inherit any of the fields anyway.
While staying with Torogai, Tanda met an odd, gruff Kanbalese man and his daughter: these were Jiguro and Balsa. The two of them stayed at Torogai’s hut from time to time, not as lodgers but as guests. Balsa was two years older than him. She was usually all scratched up and was thin as a rail. Jiguro, her father, was tall and muscular. There was a sharp, wary glint in his eye; he was like a predator aware that he was being hunted.
Tanda found out that Balsa and Jiguro weren’t blood-related after a while, but that didn’t seem to matter much. Both were close-lipped and didn't speak to Tanda of their own volition. Tanda noticed that they spent all day from dawn until dusk in the mountains, but he wasn’t sure what they were doing out there. Sometimes, they sparred on the grassy patch in front of Torogai’s hut with real weapons.
Once, Tanda saw Balsa--who was only ten at the time--get slashed on the forehead by the tip of Jiguro’s spear. These days, he would classify the wound as a shallow one, but since forehead wounds tended to bleed a lot, Balsa’s face was entirely covered in blood in seconds. At the time, Tanda was terrified.
Jiguro kept attacking Balsa, even when she couldn’t see a thing through her own blood. Tanda, surprised, was motivated to do something to help, but Balsa seemed prepared for Jiguro’s continued assault. She jumped backwards and avoided Jiguro's attack, not pausing even for a second to wipe the blood from her eyes. She sprinted into a small grove and stayed there for a long while. When she came back out, her forehead was tightly bound with a strip of cloth that she’d made out of her own sleeve to stop the bleeding.
Balsa glanced at the dumbfounded Tanda and asked, "Where is Jiguro?"
"He just sharpened his spear. He went towards the swamp a while ago."
Balsa nodded, then headed for the swamp. Tanda called out, a bit hesitant, to her before she passed out of sight. "Doesn't your wound hurt?"
She turned around and answered curtly, "It does."
"Wait a second, then." He rushed back to Torogai's house and brought back a small medicine jar. He removed the makeshift bandage from her forehead, then smeared the medicine on her wound. It probably hurt a lot, but Balsa endured the pain without a grimace. Tanda winced in sympathy just looking at the cut.
Balsa did up her hair again, then offered Tanda a rare smile. "Thanks."
That was the first time Tanda had treated one of Balsa’s wounds. It wouldn’t be the last.
Tanda smiled to himself.
What is she up to now?
Balsa hadn’t chosen to reject the path her life would naturally take, like Tanda or Torogai. At the tender age of six, she was pushed off of that path, and she hadn’t been given a choice. Her father was murdered, and then she was pursued by assassins and forced to live from day to day, never knowing when death might come. The Kanbalese King that had ordered the assassins to hunt down her and Jiguro finally died when Balsa was twenty-one. By that point, it was too late for her to return to a normal life like being a wife and mother in Kanbal.
Balsa didn’t want a normal life for herself--at least not anymore. She knew the smell of blood--so much blood it had seeped into her, unable to wash it off--and she knew herself. The desire to fight bubbled up from inside her, hidden most of the time, but intense and hideous when it surfaced.
And because Balsa knew herself, she chose to continue to be a bodyguard even when she no longer had to. That was her path in life.
After Jiguro died, the only place Balsa could call home was Torogai’s ramshackle hut. That hut was Tanda’s now, too. In between bodyguarding jobs, Balsa would usually pop up there and stay for a few days. Like a migratory bird taking a rest on the way to a destination, Balsa would stay with Tanda for awhile before setting out again for work.
Neither Balsa nor Jiguro (when he was alive) was particularly talkative. Balsa would usually tell Tanda a few stories of her travels whenever she returned to the hut. When she did, Tanda considered the ragged raw hole in her tales--the violent parts that she would never tell him. He could feel that lack, understanding that there were always going to be parts of Balsa’s life that he couldn’t see or understand.
It had been twenty years since they’d first met. There were times when Tanda was overcome with the desire to keep Balsa with him, always, but he usually kept this to himself.
His feelings for Balsa, intense as summer sunlight in youth, faded in intensity as they both grew up. His feelings for her were still like sunshine, but it was the milder, cooler light of autumn. Most of the time, he considered the way that they were living now appropriate for them both.
Tanda did get lonely, sometimes, and then his desire for Balsa to be with him intensified, like the swinging of a pendulum. When Torogai was at the hut and teaching him magic weaving, it was easier to forget his loneliness, but Torogai traveled frequently, like Balsa, and he never knew when she would or wouldn’t be at the hut. And when he was left all by himself in his mountain hut, all of his confused feelings eventually caught up with him.
Tanda looked around his brother's house slowly. There were six straw cushions neatly arranged around the sunken hearth. He could imagine a sweaty Noshir plopping down with a thud on one of these dirty, squashed, straw cushions at dinner time after a hard day's work, just like their father used to do. Their father, who’d always been surrounded by the inconsequential noise of family life.
Tanda wouldn't ever return to that kind of life. He’d chosen the path of magic weaving, surrounded by the silence of his solitude that was punctuated only by the whispers of spirits.
He rubbed his chin.
Thirty years had passed in the blink of an eye. He had maybe forty more left. What else could Tanda do in the forty years that remained to him? What could he achieve in one single lifetime? What had he gained in return for giving up a life surrounded by his family?
Tanda remembered what Torogai had said when she’d first taught him the Soul Call. He could hear her voice in his ears, as if she were present.
"Humans are weird creatures, y’know? They need a reason to live. Birds and beasts and insects don't dwell on such things. But humans sometimes worry so much they end up killing themselves.
"Listen, Tanda. It's not enough just to look for a soul when performing the Soul Call. You have to help the soul, which has lost its way and wandered away from life. You must help them to remember that they're still a living being--remind them about the red-hot power of life. And about the thread that connects them to that life."
These words had a resonance now that Tanda hadn’t felt when they were first spoken. He remembered the first time he’d sent his own soul away from his body, under the guidance of Torogai. He went giddy with surprise and delight, gazing at Nayugu and the world of the spirits with awe.
"Kaya." Tanda addressed his sleeping niece. "There is joy as well as sadness in life. There are so many different things to look forward to. Were you in such despair that you would die in your sleep rather than return to us?"
Tanda felt the pulse in Kaya's thin cold wrist, then made his decision. He would try to do the Soul Call by himself.
He would be risking his life, but that was why he’d learned how to do Soul Calls in the first place. If he wasn’t willing to risk himself now, then learning how to do the Soul Call was meaningless. Torogai was away right now, meeting Shuga in the capital. If he started the preparations now, he could go after Kaya's soul before Torogai could stop him. He stood up and hurried back to his hut to prepare the things he needed for the Soul Call.
No comments:
Post a Comment