Blade's Edge, page 3
part #1 of Chronicles of Gensokai Series
“Do the students live here?” she asked, before she could stop herself. She dropped her chin and hoped she wouldn’t be reprimanded for speaking out of turn. Tenshi did nothing but answer her question.
“Kuma-sensei and I, and the other servant girls, live here,” she said, gesturing to the building that they were directly in front of. “This will be your new home. The male Kisōshi who study here go home at night, or if they are from farther away they board at a nearby ryokan.”
Mishi was too awed by her surroundings to notice anything odd about Tenshi choosing the words ‘male Kisōshi.’ Mishi tried to take in the details of the building even as she attempted to keep up with Tenshi’s stride. The sheer size of everything, not to mention the covered walkways that surrounded all the buildings, almost made her stumble as she walked. The orphanage she’d lived in her whole life along with dozens of other children could have fit within the main courtyard alone.
“I’ll show you to your room in just a moment, Mishiranu-san,” Tenshi said, as they entered the long low building that was the residence hall. “But, first I’m to take you into Kuma-sensei’s rooms. He likes to meet all new students as soon as they arrive.”
Mishi nodded again, but her brain tripped over Tenshi’s last statement. New students? The woman must be tired after the long trip.
Mishi didn’t correct her, worried that it would only earn her a scolding. Haha-san would have smacked her for correcting an elder.
Tenshi said nothing else as she led Mishi down the entire length of the sparingly decorated residential hall, dotted with sliding doors to the left and right, to the door farthest from the main entrance. Tenshi slid the shoji open and gestured for Mishi to enter.
Inside Mishi found a nine tatami room that was sparsely decorated with scrolls containing landscapes that captured all the beauty Gensokai had to offer. The first breath she took within its walls smelled of the dried grass of the tatami mats and the steam of green tea.
In the center of the room, a large man sat in seiza before a low table which held a small pot and two cups. The uwagi and hakama the man wore, along with the katana and wakizashi sticking out of his obi, marked him as a Kisōshi. As that truth dawned on Mishi, she threw her knees to the floor and pressed her forehead down to meet them.
“Get up, child,” said the gruff voice on the other side of the table, even as Mishi heard the shoji slide closed behind her.
Mishi froze for a moment with her head still pressed to the tatami. Of course she should have known that the instructor at a school for Kisōshi would be a Kisōshi himself, but somehow she hadn’t made the connection between that obvious fact and the name of the man Tenshi had been bringing her to meet.
Now, here she sat, frozen in obeisance to a man who could kill her simply for making eye contact with him, and he was insisting that she get up; an act that would require raising her head above the level of his own. An act punishable by death.
Was it a trick?
“It’s not a trick or trap, child,” Kuma-sensei said from his place behind the table. “I wish to see your face, and wish for you to see mine.”
Mishi cautiously raised her head, though she still knelt, and her eyes instantly began to scan the room, looking for anything to focus on other than the man who sat behind the low table.
“Come closer, child. You can’t drink tea from back there.”
The man’s voice was deep and gravelly, like a pile of rocks being pushed down the side of a mountain, but it was calm and kind. She could find no trace of anger in it.
“You need not fear me, Mishiranu-san. I have been searching for you for many cycles, and I wish you no harm.”
That statement was so startling that Mishi forgot her fear and confusion for a moment and looked directly into the man’s eyes. His eyes were the green of a deep forest, and shone with a light that Mishi thought she recognized. Was it mischief? His face was broad and open, golden from having spent cycles in the sun, and he had a few small scars on his brow and chin. His black hair was pulled into a tight knot on the top of his head, the style typical of most Kisōshi.
“Aha! There you are!” he said, as their eyes met. “This is much better, Mishiranu-san. I will not allow my students to hide their eyes from me. Yours are such a lovely grey. Haha-san informed me that that’s why they called you Mishiranu at the orphanage. Understandable, I suppose, but I think I prefer the name your mother gave you.”
Mishi’s vision blurred, though not from tears, and she found her eyes locked on Kuma-sensei’s even though she kept meaning to look away. Two thoughts warred in her mind and she couldn’t decide which required her more immediate attention. Kuma-sensei had called her his student, and he had mentioned her mother. She was still trying to decide which statement made less sense to her when Kuma-sensei continued.
“Mishiranu-san, you are my student, or you will be if you like, as you are a Kisōshi, just like your mother before you.”
~~~
Mishi sat on the tatami of her room–her room, no one else’s, just hers alone–and tried to force her mind to understand all that she had been told.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she murmured to her hands in her lap.
“I can answer your questions!” chimed a voice from the doorway, where her shoji stood open. Mishi looked up to see a girl quite a bit smaller than she was dressed in the same type of kimono that Mishi had found folded into her new dresser. The girl’s face was hidden behind a wide smile, but she had bright open eyes of a tawny shade and a wide forehead that made her face look pleasantly welcoming.
“Who are you?” Mishi asked, before she could stop herself. Iyah! Haha-san would have smacked her for her rudeness.
“My name is Ami,” the other girl said, apparently taking the question as an invitation to enter, and folding herself onto the floor in front of Mishi.
“I’m Mishi,” she replied.
“Nice to meet you, Mishi-san! I’m your sister! Sachi-san is around here too somewhere, but she said she doesn’t want to meet you.”
Mishi didn’t know what to make of a statement like that so she stuck to the things that made sense to her.
“Nice to meet you, Ami-san. What do you mean you’re my sister? I’m an orphan, I don’t have any family.”
“Oh? What’s that like?” Ami smiled as she asked the question and then shook herself as though in scolding. “I’m sorry. You asked about being your sister. Well, all Kisōshi are considered brothers, so we are sisters.”
Mishi tried to make sense of that statement, but was struggling.
“The boys who train here are brothers, even if they come from different families,” Ami continued, as though she could sense Mishi’s confusion. “So we must be sisters! Ne?”
Mishi nodded, simply because she didn’t see any other way out of that particular point of conversation. Ami smiled again, and nodded enthusiastically.
“See,” she said, still beaming, “I told you I could answer your questions. What else don’t you understand?”
Mishi didn’t think she could even list all of the things that she didn’t understand, even if she just limited herself to things she had learned today, but she tried to focus on something simple. Like how the school worked.
“How is it that we can train here and no one knows about us?” Kuma-sensei had focused mostly on how Mishi’s mother had come to be his student, but Mishi still didn’t understand how this school managed to exist in secret.
“Because to everyone else, this is a school for male Kisōshi. The normal kind. What everyone expects. No one thinks female Kisōshi exist, so they don’t look for us. The boys practice here during the day, which explains why Kuma-sensei has a school full of training equipment, and he even sends them off to test for rank when they reach their 17th cycles! They test with the Rōjū and everything.” The look on Ami’s face as she said this made it look as though she were envious of this distinction, but Mishi couldn’t imagine why.
“So everyone is convinced that this is just a normal school for Kisōshi?”
“Yes!” Ami beamed at her, her smile radiating approval that Mishi had picked up the idea so quickly.
“But we train here at night?” she asked.
“Yes! And on holidays, when the boys don’t come to train at all, we train all day.”
“But we act as servants normally?”
Ami shook her head, and that confused Mishi even more thoroughly until she said, “We don’t act as servants, Mishi-san. We are servants. We spend all day cleaning and mending, tending the horses. You will learn many useful skills here.”
The way Ami said that last sentence made it seem as though it was something she’d been taught to repeat, but held little enthusiasm for.
“And after we spend all day working, we train?” Mishi asked, beginning to wonder when she was supposed to sleep.
“Oh yes!” Ami said, and the way her eyes lit up at the mention of training made Mishi suddenly more eager for it than she had been. “We learn everything that the boys do! History, math, geography, poetry… everything!”
Mishi’s heart felt like it was burrowing its way to her stomach. Her face must have fallen as well because Ami asked, “Mishi-san, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t read or write,” she admitted, before she thought to stop herself. She felt the blood run to her cheeks as she realized how stupid the other girl would think her now.
“Oh? Have you tried it before?” Ami asked, her face suddenly serious.
“No. No one has ever taught me.”
Ami’s face cleared and her grin spread wide.
“Silly, Mishi-san, if you haven’t tried it then you don’t know that you can’t!”
Mishi almost smiled then. Ami’s laugh was so infectious, but she couldn’t help but wonder how many times she would hear that same expression in the next few days, and how many times her ignorance would prove that she was in no way meant to be a Kisōshi.
“A WOMAN’S NATURAL tendency towards evil cannot be trusted with strong kisō,” said the black robed man at the front of the class.
Taka could barely remember the sequence of events from the moment Washi-san had taken her from Iizuna-san and handed her over to the Yukisō who ran the Josankō. A handful of days traveling and a chain of strangers passing her along had lead to her arrival at a small collection of buildings whose high walls and stern visaged keepers had made her feel more like a criminal than a student.
This morning, after being herded into the room with a dozen other girls between the ages of nine and twelve cycles, Taka had barely had time to take in a breath of the dust and oil filled air before this man had introduced himself as an earth kisō and healer, though he hadn’t bothered to include his name. Then he had begun lecturing them the moment he had stepped in front of the rows of rigid desks that lined the room.
“In addition,” he continued, “her body and mind are too weak to control kisō properly. Both of these factors contribute to a woman’s imminent corruption should she possess any greater kisō than that of a josanpu. Because of this danger, measures need to be taken to ensure that females with such abilities are never born. As you all know, no woman could be born a true Kisōshi, but a woman might be born with a lessened version of that kisō. This would inevitably corrupt her. Part of your training will be to learn to recognize any kisō present at birth and to act accordingly.”
Taka’s mouth went dry. The way the man had said ‘act accordingly’ had made her shiver. What could he mean?
“What do you mean, act accordingly?” came a hesitant voice from the other side of the room.
One of the girls had raised her hand to ask the question. Taka was startled, not by the question itself—after all, she had just been thinking the same thing—but by the reactions of the other girls in the room. They were all staring at the girl with white faces and widened eyes. Taka couldn’t fathom why they would react that way to a simple question.
“I meant that you will learn to take care of such situations as part of your training,” responded the black robed man, “NOT today.”
Then he motioned his pointer at the door and a guard appeared in the doorway.
“Take her to the cages,” said the instructor.
The girl who had asked the question jumped from her seat.
“What? Why? What did I do? It was just a question. What are you going to do to me?”
The girls around her did nothing, but paled even more than they had before. The guard came forward, grabbed her by the shoulders, and began taking her towards the door.
“What did I do? I don’t understand! What did I do?!” the girl screamed, as she was dragged from the room.
She struggled, but the guard was over twice her size and solid muscle. Nothing the girl did seemed to affect him. Before Taka could think about the repercussions she jumped to her feet. It was as though something inside her had broken on the day they had taken Mishi away. When before she would have stood still with fear, she now felt compelled to act. She didn't know where the screaming girl was being taken, but judging by the looks on the other girls' faces it couldn’t be a good place. She wanted to help, but she didn’t know what to do. She took a step towards the girl still struggling in the guard’s arms.
“What are you doing, girl?” the instructor had turned his chilling gaze on her and no one else in the room made a sound.
“Where are you taking her?” Taka asked before she could stop herself.
“You’d like to know, would you?” the man asked, a cruel smile spreading across his lips. “Well, why don’t you join her then?”
Taka almost screamed when another guard came forward and grabbed her about the waist, but she managed to contain herself. They wouldn’t kill her for asking a simple question, would they? She tried to assure herself that it couldn’t be that bad, but she was too frightened to move, too frightened to fight back. All the bravery she had felt at seeing the other girl taken had fled from her and she was left frozen. She simply let the man carry her away; too stunned to do anything else, and all the while wondering about the answer the other girl had never gotten. What did they do to female babies born with more kisō than a josanpu?
~~~
Taka’s terror no longer gripped her like a talon. She and the other girl had been made to wait outside of the instructors’ offices for so long that her backside was sore from sitting.
“Do you think we could escape?” the other girl asked. Taka had to blink to be sure she’d actually seen the other girl’s mouth move. They had been silent for so long that she thought it might be her imagination. She cleared her throat before answering.
“There was a girl from my village brought here who tried to run away,” she said, when she’d found her voice. “They came for her as soon as she returned to us, and after that we never saw her again.”
The other girl nodded as if that was what she had expected Taka to say.
“So why are you here?” the other girl asked, after a long pause.
Taka felt color rush to her cheeks, though she wasn’t sure why she was embarrassed. “I stood up, when they dragged you out of the room,” she said, at length. “And I asked them where they were taking you.”
“Oh.” The other girl seemed to think about that for a while, but eventually she spoke again. “Thank you,” she said, “for caring what happened to me.”
Taka shrugged. “I don’t understand why they would punish either of us for asking a simple question… at least, not in a way that made all the other girls so frightened.… Do you have any idea what they’ll do to us?”
The other girl shook her head.
“I’ve only been here a few moons, but one or two girls have been sent to the cages since I arrived. They’re not allowed to talk about it once they return though, so none of us know what it is. We only know we can hear the screaming all night long.”
“Screaming?” Taka asked, but the other girl only shrugged.
“What’s your name?” Taka asked, after another long pause.
“Kiko. And you?”
“I’m Taka.”
“Nice to meet you Taka-san,” Kiko said.
“And you, Kiko-san,” Taka replied.
They sat in silence for a few moments and then, finally, another man in black robes and two more guards came to escort them out of the building that housed their classrooms, the mess hall, and the dorms. Taka had only been at the Josankō for one night, but she had already seen most of what there was to see of the compound.
As they were walked down a path that led to the far side of the grounds, the sky began to darken the edges of the horizon, catching starlight as it encroached on what was left of the day.
Taka was surprised when she realized that she was being taken past the outer wall of the grounds themselves, and even more surprised when they continued deep into the woods that surrounded the complex. Hadn’t Kiko said that she had been able to hear the screams of the girls who were taken to the cages? How was that possible if they were so far away?
Either they were being taken somewhere different than the other girls had been taken, or the instructors must use air kisō to amplify the sounds of the cries so that they still reached the dormitories even from this distance. Not long after they passed the outer wall, Kiko was taken down a path branching off to the left and Taka almost cried out at the separation. Somehow, knowing she was going into this punishment with company had made it less terrifying. Now her legs began to tremble despite her best efforts to reassure herself that she would be fine.
They had walked for a short candle burn when they finally reached a small clearing, which contained a small bamboo cage that Taka could just make out in the scarce light that the last rays of sun provided. It was a cube, only an arm-span wide on any side. Taka was unceremoniously shoved inside the cage and the door was latched and then locked with a steel clasp. The instructor said nothing as he turned with the guard and headed back the way they had come.
