Heaven's Net Is Wide, Lian Hearn [reading the story of the txt] 📗

Kiyoshige smacked it; one of the priests who had been sweeping the entrance to the shrine came hurrying over, scolding the boys. “Leave that holy horse alone!”

“It’s still just a horse,” Kiyoshige said quietly. “It shouldn’t be allowed to get away with bad manners!”

Hiroki, his younger brother, trailed after the priest, carrying two straw brooms that were taller than he was.

“Poor Hiroki! Does he mind having to be the priest’s servant?” Takeshi said. “I’d hate it!”

“He doesn’t mind,” Kiyoshige whispered confidentially. “Father said that too-Hiroki is not a warrior by nature. Did you know that, Shigeru? When you gave your opinion?”

“I saw him dance the heron dance last year,” Shigeru said. “It seemed to move him deeply. And he cried when your older brother drowned, while you did not.”

Kiyoshige’s face hardened and he said nothing for a few moments. Finally he laughed and gave Takeshi a punch on the shoulder. “You have already killed-and you are only eight. You’ve outstripped both of us!”

No one else had dared say this aloud, but it had occurred to Shigeru, too, and he knew others thought it.

“It was an accident,” he said. “Takeshi did not mean to kill Yuta.”

“Maybe I did,”Takeshi muttered, his face fierce. “But he was trying to kill me!”

They dawdled under the shade of the curved eaves of the shrine building. “Father can’t help putting the horse first,” Kiyoshige said. “Even if it’s a question of an offering to the gods. The horse has to have the right nature to be an offering-most of the horses would be miserable standing in a stall all day, never having the chance to gallop.”

“Or to go to war,” Takeshi said longingly.

To go to war. The boys’ heads were full of it. They trained for hours with the sword and the bow, studied the history and the art of war, and at night listened to the older men tell stories of the ancient heroes and their campaigns; they heard of Otori Takeyoshi, who had first received the legendary sword Jato-the Snake-from the Emperor himself hundreds of years earlier and who had slain a tribe of giants single-handed with the same sword. And all the other Otori heroes right down to Matsuda Shingen, the greatest swordsman of the present era, who had taught their fathers the use of the sword, who had rescued Shigemori when he had been ambushed by the Tohan clan, five men against forty on the border with the East, and who had been called by the Enlightened One and now served him at the temple at Terayama.

Now Jato had been passed down to Shigeru’s father, and one day it would be his.

Above their heads hung carvings of the long-nosed goblins that lived in the mountain. Glancing up at them, Kiyoshige said, “Matsuda Shingen was taught the use of the sword by goblins. That’s why no one else came near him.”

“I wish I could be taught by goblins!” Takeshi said.

“Lord Irie is a goblin,” Kiyoshige replied, laughing-their sword instructor did have an abnormally long nose.

“But the goblins could teach you all sorts of things Irie doesn’t know,” Takeshi said, “like making yourself invisible.”

There were many stories about men with strange powers-a tribe of sorcerers. The boys discussed them endlessly with a certain amount of envy, for their own skills emerged slowly and painfully out of rigorous training. They would have loved to be able to escape their teachers through invisibility or other magic skills.

“Can people really do that?” Shigeru questioned. “Or is it just that they can move so fast it’s as if they were invisible. Like Lord Irie’s pole when it hits you!”

“If it’s in the stories, someone at some time must have been able to,” Takeshi said.

Kiyoshige argued with him. They talked in whispers, for the sorcerers from the Tribe could both hear and see from afar. The other world of goblins, ghosts, and inhuman powers lay alongside their own; occasionally the membrane between the two worlds thinned and one rolled into the other. There were stories, too, of people who strayed into the other world and then came back to find a hundred years had passed in a single night. Or of beings that came from the moon or the sky and seemed like women and made men fall in love with them. There was a road leading toward the south where a beautiful woman with a long neck like a snake enticed young men into the forest and fed on their flesh.

“Hiroki used to cry about the goblins,” Kiyoshige said. “And now he’s living here among them!”

“He cries at everything,” Takeshi said scornfully.

5

Isamu’s body was buried first by falling leaves and then by snow and lay undiscovered until the following spring when the village boys began to search the mountains for mushrooms and birds’ eggs. By that time his murderer, his cousin Kotaro, was long back in Inuyama, the clan capital of Iida Sadayoshi and the Tohan, where he ran a business making soybean products, lent money, and behaved much like any other merchant of the city. Kotaro told no one of the precise details, only that the execution had been carried out and Isamu was dead, and he tried to put the whole affair out of his mind with his customary callousness, but at night Isamu’s face floated before his eyes and he was often woken by his cousin’s fearless and incomprehensible laughter. He was tormented by the fact that Isamu had refused to defend himself, had spoken of forgiveness and obedience to some lord. Death had not removed his rival, the traitor; it had made him more powerful-indeed, invincible.

Kotaro had at his command a network of spies, for the Tribe operated throughout the Three Countries, working at this time mainly for the Iida family as they tightened their grip on the East and began to consider how they might expand into the Middle Country and beyond. The Iida family kept a close watch on the