Guardian of Heaven and Earth - Prologue - River of Light

  Guardian of Heaven and Earth

-

Rota

(Book 8 of the Guardian of the Spirit Series)

Author: Uehashi Nahoko

Translator: Ainikki the Archivist

 

 Prologue - River of Light

    

     The bright light of sudden fire flared up in the darkness. The reflection of several pine torches were reflected in the surface of the river below. Dim outlines of fishing boats were faintly visible in the torchlight.

    “Ah! It’s time! It’s time!”

    An old man stood in the tall, dry grass near the riverbank, carrying his grandchild on his back. His son and other family were on the water, carrying the torches. This was the first time the old man’s grandson had watched the family fishing at night, so the old man held up a candle and pointed out all the details that were visible.

    “Won’t the fishies burn?” his grandson asked when he saw the torches.

    “No, no, the fish won’t burn. We’re just trying to surprise them. They’re still sleepy, so they’ll swim wherever they’re guided. But they’ll need to yell louder and direct the light better, or the fish will all swim off in the wrong direction.”

    The old man’s son and the other men in boats all waved their torches frantically and cursed.

    The old man’s grandson poked him in the shoulder and whispered, “Grandpa, there’s fire there, too! Look!”

    The old man’s eyes scanned the river’s surface. “Where?”

    Only one family was permitted to fish in this area per evening, so there shouldn’t be anyone else here. No one in the village had ever broken the rules around night fishing before.

    “It’s there, and there,” the old man’s grandson said, pointing to the other side of the river and into the grasslands beyond it.

    The old man frowned when he looked out at the grass. There really was light coming from that direction. There were many points of light, small and faint but definitely there. One of the points of light danced and flashed, then split in two before his very eyes. The light kept splitting into pieces: two, three, four...the longer he looked, the more points of light there were. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

    The tiny points of light kept splitting; the old man thought they looked a little like a mosquito swarm. They gathered into a huge cluster and rose toward the sky.

    The old man heard a sound like the whispering of many insects’ wings. He and his grandson watched in stunned silence as the lights rose up and flew directly toward them like a huge school of fish swimming through the dark blue of the night sky.

    The old man heard the shouts of the torchbearers on the river getting closer. He returned to his senses and called out, “Run! Get out of the water! There are strange lights over there, coming this way!”

    But the men’s voices were so loud that his own couldn’t be heard through the din.

    The old man set down his grandson and threw stones at his son’s boat. Every stone hit its target and bounced off the side of his son’s boat into the river. When his son looked in his direction, the old man called out, “Get away! There are weird lights over there!”

    But it was too late for his son or the other fishermen to do anything; the lights were almost right on top of them. The old man’s son looked at him dubiously, as did some of the other fishermen. The old man and his grandson could see the mysterious lights, but his son and the other fishermen couldn’t. The fishermen felt that the air was slightly warmer than it had been previously, but they could perceive nothing else.

    Suddenly, the smell of the smoke from the pine torches changed to something distinctly oily and fishy. The old man forgot to breathe; the sight before him was terrifying. His son and the members of his family were caught--stuck inside the huge swarm of lights. But his family did nothing but look at him as if he was crazy.

    The lights kept coming; they were close to the old man himself now. He picked up his grandson with trembling hands and ran off, away from where the lights seemed to be headed. After running a short distance, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the river and grasslands were bright with tiny dancing lights.

    When the old man reached the edge of a nearby forest, he heard the buzzing of insects’ wings again: hundreds or thousands of them. Fish that didn’t usually appear at night jumped out of the river and onto the forest floor as if they’d gone mad. The fish were trying to eat the tiny points of light; the lights reacted as a group and flew high above the river in the forest’s trees.

    Finally, the points of light stopped moving. They hovered above the site of a recent landslide, then formed a spiral shape and dove into the muddy ground with great speed. All of the lights vanished when they hit the ground. The old man and his grandson stood very still and watched the lights flicker out.

 

 

    Warm summer sun fell over Tanda’s shoulders. The aftermath of a landslide was reflected in the surface of a clear mountain stream. Tanda saw uprooted grass and dead vegetation mixed in with mud.

    Tanda faced the old man standing behind him. The man was influential in his fishing village and had been chosen to speak for them. He claimed that he’d seen a huge number of bright lights moving through the night sky toward the site of the landslide.

    “So you saw the strange lights somewhere around here?” Tanda asked.

    The old man nodded and tracked the line of the landslide along the edge of the river with his finger. “They came from the direction of the forest. They moved like a school of buyo fish, only they flew through the air instead of swimming through the water. The fish and the birds both tried to eat them as they flew past.” 

    The old man folded his arms. “Doesn’t all of that sound strange? It was like I was seeing a river that I never knew existed, only the river was in the air and birds flew through it to eat the fish.”

    “Hm. I see.” Tanda closed his eyes and readied a spell. He went over the words of it in his mind and gathered his concentration. When he finished the spell, he saw Nayugu behind his closed eyelids. It was underwater in Nayugu here, but Tanda still felt the solid ground of Sagu beneath his feet.

    Tanda opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He was sweating from the heat. He sank deeply into thought for a moment, then lifted his head and caught sight of a figure crouching down near the edge of the area damaged by the landslide.

    “Master?” Tanda asked.

    The ground beneath Torogai’s feet began to buckle. She leaped to safety as nimbly as a monkey, but the ground kept collapsing under her. Tanda rushed forward and caught her with his right hand before she could fall.

    Torogai was a remarkably ugly old woman. Her skin was dark and her face was wrinkled as finely as a spider’s web. She was the greatest magic weaver of the age.

    “What are you doing here, Master?” Tanda asked. “It’s dangerous!”

    Torogai slapped away Tanda’s hand. “It wouldn’t have collapsed like that if you hadn’t shouted like a clumsy oaf.”

    “Huh?”

    Torogai placed her hands on her thighs and looked up at Tanda. “My legs hurt. You’re going to carry me home.”

    Tanda lifted an eyebrow, then sighed. “All right. But why are you here, anyway? What are you looking for?”

    Torogai snorted dismissively. “First, tell me what you’ve learned.”

    Tanda schooled his expression to seriousness and said, “This place is significantly warmer than the surrounding area. I have the sense of moving around in hot water. I think that Nayugu and this place are closely connected.”

    Tanda wiped sweat from his forehead “When I was last here, I observed a ravine or a gorge in Nayugu, but now it’s completely full of water.” Tanda swept his hands out wide, encompassing all of the damage caused by the landslide. “But even within all that water, there’s a hotter spot than the rest, like an energy source. I think that place is what’s making the rest of the water warmer.” 

    Torogai nodded to him, then faced the old fisherman from the village. “I don’t think those lights you saw are anything to worry about,” she said. “Sometimes fish from Nayugu are visible on this side, too, though I’m not entirely sure why. Some of our birds and fish can see the ones that glow in the dark in Nayugu, which is why you saw so many of those lights being eaten, I think.”

    Tanda rested his chin in his hand. “It is strange that birds from Sagu would be eating fish from Nayugu, isn’t it?”

    “We can figure that out later,” Torogai said. “Right now, we have bigger problems.” 

    Torogai held up her right hand. There was a large beetle in the middle of her palm with wicked-looking black pincers. “Do you know what this is?” Torogai asked, showing the beetle to the fisherman.

    Tanda took a closer look at the beetle as well. It was fully armored all over its body and about the size of Torogai’s thumb. Its pincers were large and sharp like shears. The beetle’s back was covered in mud; its pincers moved sluggishly as if it were tired.

    “These are called cutworms,” Torogai said. “They cut and eat the roots of plants--they especially like eating tree roots. Anyway, they’re pests, but I’ve only rarely seen them before. And I’ve never seen them at all in the autumn until now.”

    “So their population is larger in summer?” Tanda asked. “Is that when they usually come out?” 

    “As to that, I’m not sure,” Torogai said. “My father harvested wood from aromatic trees. He told me that he saw these bugs most often in summer. They’re called cho.”

    “I’ve also seen cho from time to time,” the old fisherman said. “They’re a favorite food of the oshoro, a migratory bird. I’ve seen them eating a lot of cho eggs in spring; the cho lay their eggs along the line of the river.” 

    He paused, then continued, “Oh! I just remembered that I didn’t see any oshoro at all this year. It’s been unusually hot all over--maybe they flew off in winter and never came back in the spring.”

    Torogai looked down at the cho in her hands and frowned. “There’s a swarm of these around here.”

    Tanda looked at Torogai in surprise. “Maybe they caused the landslide?”

    Torogai tilted her head to one side. “Not on their own,” she said. “There were a lot of rakkaral off the coast this summer.” Rakkaral were huge windstorms capable of sinking ships; having one touch down on land was rare, but it sometimes happened at the end of summer. “We’ve also had an unusual amount of rain. All of that softens the ground--but the cho do, too.”

    Torogai looked down and thought in silence for a while. She looked at the old fisherman and said, “The lights you saw weren’t evil spirits. Don’t worry about that.”

    The fisherman took a bundle of dried fish from his belt and offered it to Torogai. “Forgive me. I can’t offer anything else for your help, but please accept this as a sign of the village’s thanks.”

    “Nah, three fish is all I need.” Torogai removed three fish from the bundle and handed four fish back to the fisherman. “Besides, I want to ask you something.”

    The old man’s face expression was difficult to interpret. “What would you like to ask?”

    “You lead all the men in your village, right? I want you to ask around and figure out if anyone else saw what you saw. I want to hear all of their accounts, if possible.”

    The old fisherman nodded. “I’ll gather all the witnesses I can. That should be easy enough. Thank you.”

 

 

    Torogai and Tanda said their farewells to the fisherman and started walking home.

    “Are you worried about the landslide, Master Torogai?” Tanda asked.

    “What do you think?” Torogai asked.

    “I think that because it’s spring in Nayugu, the water level has suddenly increased all over. Even places that never felt the influence of Nayugu before are feeling it now. The weather pattern has changed in Sagu--birds that usually fly away in winter and back in the spring are so confused by the warm weather that they never came back. They didn’t eat any of the cho eggs this year, so the population of cho is much larger than usual.”

    Torogai nodded. “And all of this is happening in just a single place that we know about. Think about what might be happening elsewhere.”

    Tanda faced Torogai. “We could let the heads of each village know about the landslide. They need to work on leveling the ground near the river to prevent more landslides.”

    Torogai shook her head. “The village leaders have their hands full with imperial recruiters already.”

    About a year and a half before, the Talsh empire and Sangal had joined forces and declared war on New Yogo. Every man from the age of fifteen to the age of fifty was conscripted into New Yogo’s army. Conscripted men left their homes to protect the capital and build fortifications around it. None had returned home since New Yogo started preparing for war.

    Men between the ages of sixteen and forty drew lots and got sent out as recruiters for more men. Fear spread in the villages that all their young men would be taken away; no one knew who would be conscripted next.

    So there was no one left to spare to level the ground after a landslide.

    “Shuga’s in a difficult position, too,” Torogai muttered. “He’s in the thick of it in the capital.”

    Tanda nodded. He frowned as if something pained him. He was worried about Shuga, but he was even more troubled about what had happened to Chagum.

    Torogai took in Tanda’s expression and snapped her mouth shut. She increased her walking pace and pulled ahead of him, looking straight ahead as she descended the mountain path. She didn’t turn to look at Tanda once.

    Tanda stared at Torogai’s back as they traveled down the mountain. Tanda’s memories made his heart feel like it was being squeezed. Torogai probably felt the same. She never talked about Chagum anymore.

    Tanda thought about Chagum all the way home. When he and Torogai approached their hut from the rear, Tanda stopped and crouched down. There were footprints and other signs of people.

    At first, Tanda thought that Balsa must have come back, but the man he saw standing to the right side of the garden was a stranger. He had a large build and looked like a hunter or a trapper.

    Torogai frowned when she realized that she and Tanda had a visitor. She entered through the hut’s back door to avoid the man.

   Tanda approached the visitor and waited for him to state his business.

    “Excuse me, are you Tanda?” the man asked.

    “Yes.”

    The man’s expression instantly transformed into one of relief. “Thank goodness. I hate to cut right to the point, but I’ve been looking all over for you. I need to find someone named Balsa...”

 

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