Guardian of Heaven and Earth
-
Kanbal
Part 2 - Disturbances in Nayugu
Chapter 3 - A Soul in Flight
The next night, Tanda awoke from unquiet sleep. Men snored all around him. He extricated himself silently from his warm bedding and stood up.
It was freezing. His shilya bedding was thick enough to keep him warm even in the middle of winter, but he’d left his bed so fast that he felt the cold like a stinging slap. He picked up one of his blankets and settled it over his shoulders. He stepped around his neighbors carefully so that they wouldn’t wake up. Eventually, he reached the edge of the camp near a forest.
If he was really going to project his soul, he needed a susuki leaf as a charm. Susuki leaves had the power to guide souls to a destination; if he had one, he’d be able to find his way back easily after he found Torogai. The leaf would make a glowing trail between his soul and his body. He also needed a certain kind of bamboo to surround himself with so that his body wouldn’t be disturbed by evil spirits while his soul was gone.
He found a susuki leaf in the forest, then tore it in half and folded it into a charm, chanting all the while. He still needed bamboo; evil spirits shunned it. If he left his body alone for too long, one of those evil spirits might come and try to possess it.
He searched the forest for hours, but he didn’t find any bamboo of the right type for his purposes. He gave up the search for the moment, then went down to the river to bathe. By good luck, there was a long, thin stalk of just the right kind of bamboo growing near the river’s edge. He cut it, wrapped it in bamboo leaves, and went to the outskirts of the village. He now had everything he needed to project his soul over a far distance.
Tanda asked some of the men from his village to keep watch over a weapons shed that didn’t get much use. He concealed himself inside and got to work. The men keeping watch were curious about what he was up to, but he was a magic weaver. Even when he tried to explain it to them, they didn’t entirely understand.
Tanda walked through the woods and looked up at a sky bright with silver stars. It was almost the end of the year, so the moons were scarcely visible. Most people celebrated at the end of the year and the start of a new one, but there had been no celebrations this year. The war would begin before spring. Soldiers from Talsh and Sangal would come and crush villages beneath their heels like so much dust.
It all seemed so unreal to Tanda. If anyone had told him a year ago that New Yogo would soon be at war, he would never have believed them. The commander of New Yogo’s forces had given many stirring speeches about the Talsh coming to kill their families and burn their homes to motivate the raw Yogoese recruits, but Tanda didn’t feel any braver or any more like a soldier than he had when he’d first taken Kaiza’s place in the army.
It was also hard for Tanda and the other men to view Sangal as an enemy; they’d been allies with New Yogo for as long as anyone could remember. It was easy for Tanda to envision the Talsh as some kind of ravening beast intent on bloodshed, but he couldn’t think the same way about New Yogo’s long-time trading partner and ally.
Tanda usually didn’t pay much attention when the commander gave his big speeches against their enemies. He was a practical man, and his months of travel and hard work had made him cynical. The Yogoese were originally from the same continent as the Talsh; they had conquered the Yakoo’s territory and treated them as second-class citizens. It was hard to believe that the Talsh would be much worse after a takeover. The initial battles would be, but the aftermath could be better for the Yakoo, for all Tanda knew. The commander seemed to lack awareness that most of the men in his army were Yakoo and not Yogoese.
It was true that the people of New Yogo had a long history of peace; there had been no wars in living memory, so New Yogo had no battle-hardened veterans to send to the battlefield as Talsh did. Tanda sometimes wondered if the Yogoese’s peaceable attitude was the reason why the Yakoo had never fought them after they’d landed on the Nayoro peninsula.
If the Yogoese had come bearing weapons, Tanda was certain that the Yakoo would have run away. Many Yakoo had run to the mountains when the Yogoese had first appeared on the continent, but most hadn’t remained there. The Yogoese hadn’t come to fight. They made farms, planted rice, and built villages and cities, and they didn’t exclude the Yakoo. After the Yakoo started living among the Yogoese, they taught them the best places to find clean water and the best times to plant. Over time, the Yakoo and Yogoese peoples had mixed together, living in peace if not always in equality.
Aside from high nobles and warriors, most people in New Yogo were of mixed race, with darker hair and skin than the Yogoese settlers. Given enough time, even nobles and warriors might be integrated into that same mixed race that almost everyone shared. Tanda thought that would be a good thing; discrimination based on race wouldn’t be possible if everyone was more or less the same one. But he also thought that it shouldn’t matter what race someone was--Yogoese, Yakoo, Sangalese, Talsh. People were people, no matter where they came from. If the Talsh did manage to conquer New Yogo, he expected the end result to be much the same as what had happened with the Yogoese settlers. Within a hundred years or so, the Talsh who settled there would have mixed with the natives.
The Mikado might care if a foreign king or emperor took over his land and deposed him, but that didn’t matter at all to Tanda. All he wanted was to live out his life in peace. It didn’t really matter to him who was in charge. The people who really mattered were the farmers who grew the rice and the traders who moved goods around the continent. Together, they kept everyone supplied and fed.
Tanda had no desire to kill for the Mikado’s sake. While shoring up the trenches, that thought had been the only one on his mind. Even if he was the kind of man who could kill, he wouldn’t do it for the sake of the Mikado, a man he’d never met and didn’t like. That being the case, he should probably desert and go home--but if he did that, all the soldiers in the army from his village would be killed.
Tanda sighed heavily while looking up at the clear, cold sky. It seemed likely to him that Asra and Kocha’s premonitions of disaster concerned the Talsh somehow. The mass migration of water dwellers to the north coincided with the movement of the Talsh invasion force. Could that be a coincidence? Tanda didn’t know. But he was a magic weaver, and that meant that he had to figure out what was going on in Nayugu and interpret it.
If you really want to be a successful magic weaver, you have to keep your eyes and ears open, Tanda.
Torogai had told that to him often. Being a magic weaver meant seeing things that other people couldn’t see and hearing things that other people couldn’t hear. The people in his village had laughed at him when he was younger and pointed out things that they couldn’t see, but he couldn’t let other people discourage him.
He wanted to see Torogai. He hadn’t seen her dark, craggy face in what felt like ages.
Tanda reached the nearest village and stopped in front of a tall tree. He reached out and touched it; he could tell that it was an ukal tree by its fragrance. Ukal trees were often used to make perfumes.
“Mr. Tree, allow me to stay here tonight,” he said with a slight smile. “I need your protection for what I need to do next.”
Tanda surrounded the tree with bamboo leaves from his special bamboo to make a barrier, then placed his back to the tree. It felt warm on the ground with the tree blocking the wind. Tanda took the charm he’d made from a susuki leaf in one hand, then closed his eyes.
Tanda chanted the words that would allow his spirit to leave his body. He felt his spirit detach slowly, rising above his head. He felt much warmer now than he had while walking to the village. His soul thread rose in a straight line from his forehead, emitting faint light as it stretched out. Tanda manipulated the shape of his soul thread so that the thin and delicate thread transformed into the wings and body of a bird, then took flight into the night sky.
The soul of every creature he could see emitted light. Gold and blue illumination mixed below him, revealing the spirits of trees and animals and insects. Viewing all of it from above was an astonishing sight. He’d expected to see more damage from the war preparations: trees cut down, animals displaced, rivers polluted with waste, but everything he saw teemed with life and health. The war hadn’t come yet. He didn’t want to imagine seeing this view after a battle.
As Tanda approached Nayoro peninsula, the colors he saw became richer and deeper; the smells were earthy and pleasant. He felt like he was coming home. Warmth cocooned his soul thread as he flew.
Tanda smelled the sharp, clean smell of Nayugu’s water and blinked.
This must be a place where Nayugu and Sagu overlap...
It was often difficult for Tanda to see Nayugu, even in spirit form; he usually saw it all dimly, as if through a misty haze. Now he saw it with slightly more definition, like a reflection or shadow. There were mountains below him--the mountains of Nayugu--but everything but their peaks were underwater. The mountains looked like islands dotting a vast ocean.
Mixed in with the water, Tanda saw more glowing figures, all headed in the same direction: north. He squinted and saw that the glowing figures were all different colors: blue and white, red and yellow, purple and green. It was a riot of color; he’d never seen so many spirits of different types gathered in one place like this before.
The light that Tanda saw pulsed, revealing Sagu again. It pulsed again, revealing Nayugu. Tanda felt his heart beat faster in his ears, as if he were face to face with the woman he loved.
It’s spring, Tanda thought. It was spring in Nayugu. Nayugu wasn’t limited to the Nayoro peninsula: Rota and Kanbal would also feel the effects of Nayugu’s spring. Everything thrummed to the rhythm of Nayugu’s pulse. Tanda saw the full cycle of life from the sky: plants and animals dying, then growing and laying eggs and being born. He felt drunk from the complexity of the perspective and closed his eyes.
When Tanda opened his eyes, he was flying over mountains again. He’d lost track of how far he’d flown, but he knew that he needed to follow the line of the river through the Misty Blue Mountains to find Torogai’s hut.
The river will take me to Kosenkyo. From there, I just need to fly east for a little while.
Tanda suddenly felt cold. His physical body had been weakened by harsh treatment in recent days. Sending his spirit flying over such a long distance was rapidly draining his remaining strength.
His wings felt as heavy as lead as he pushed himself to keep flying. He felt pain along the line of his spine whenever he flapped his wings. He started to descend far before reaching his goal.
He just had to make it a little longer. The capital was in front of him. He was almost there.
Master Torogai... Please be home when I get there. I won’t be able to search for you if you’re not there.
Slowly, so slowly, Tanda flew onward until the mountains stretched out below him. Familiar landmarks and smells gave Tanda something of a second wind; he kept encouraging himself to go just a little farther.
When the hut finally came into view, Tanda closed his eyes and let despair overwhelm him. There were no lights on inside. He couldn’t keep flying anymore. He half-fell, half-flew onto the roof of the hut, then slipped inside.
A bright light flashed before Tanda’s eyes. He felt his body being suspended in the light.
“Ah!”
There were four susuki leaves in the hut: one in each corner of the hut. They each emitted a streak of light, interconnecting with each other in a criss-cross pattern. In the time it took for Tanda to blink, he was caught in a net of light formed by the susuki leaves.
The net lifted him up--all the way up, out of the hut and into the sky again. His exhaustion gradually eased; the net was comfortable and sustaining. He passed over a low mountain slope into a valley. This was Sahnan, where the water spirit’s egg had hatched.
Tanda’s spirit dropped gently into Torogai’s hands. Since Tanda was in spirit form, he could see the golden brightness of Torogai’s own spirit.
“There you are, my clumsy apprentice. You pushed yourself so hard that you can’t move, huh? Stretch yourself out now so you don’t get stiff.”
Tanda trembled all over, but he did as Torogai said and tried to stretch. His spirit returned to its human shape and size.
“You really are hopeless,” Torogai said. “How many times have I told you not to fly so far? You’re not strong enough to make it back.”
Tanda laughed. “If that’s the case, Master, why not come and visit me? I haven’t seen you once since I went off to war.”
Torogai’s eyebrows shot up. “Idiot! Do you think that I would fly so far, at my advanced age, without a very good reason? Projecting the soul is a young magic weaver’s trick. The older you get, the stronger the pull of the other world becomes.”
Torogai stretched out her hands and cupped Tanda’s cheeks as if he were a little child. “But I’m glad to see you. And I’m glad you made it. Well done.”
Tanda swallowed a lump in his throat and blinked back tears.
“Master, please listen. I flew all the way here because I had to tell you something no matter what.”
Tanda told Torogai everything he’d heard from Asra and Kocha, as well as his own observations of Nayugu’s water level. He felt that something terrible was about to happen, but he didn’t know exactly what, or when.
Torogai nodded at him when he finished speaking. “You’re right. Something terrible is on the horizon. I’ve been thinking much the same thing for a while. I’ve been meeting with other magic weavers. Though we’re still not sure what we can do, we’re committed to doing everything we can.”
Tanda’s heart was lightened by Torogai’s words. He had told Torogai his message and discovered that she was working to prevent the disaster that he feared. He should probably get back to the army camp as soon as possible.
Torogai helped Tanda’s spirit regain its bird shape. She clutched Tanda to her chest briefly, then released him into the sky.
“Don’t you dare die on your way back,” she scolded. “You must live, and return again someday.” She said a few magic words to lend Tanda strength for the journey back to his body, then started walking back to her hut.
Tanda flew away from her, though he kept looking back until she was completely out of sight. The day would come when he would see her with his own two eyes again.
As Tanda picked up speed, he noticed that it was almost dawn. He shivered and raised his eyes to the sky. When he got back to his body at the base of the tree, he was so cold that he hunched forward, rubbing his arms for a few minutes to get the feeling back into them. He’d made it back to the camp. The hug he gave himself wasn’t nearly as warm as the one he’d received from Torogai.
I think the magic weavers are one of my favorite aspects of the Moribito universe.
ReplyDeleteAlso, its really cool to see what colors spirits can have!
I think this is the first time we've seen Tanda's powers in this level of detail. :)
ReplyDeleteI wish Uehashi used her magic weavers better, including Tanda, but I'm glad to see what Tanda's capable of here, too.