Heaven's Net Is Wide

4

Mori Kiyoshige became Shigeru’s closest companion. While his younger brother had been sobbing on the weir, Kiyoshige had run to his home to fetch help. He had not cried then or later: it was said of him that he never shed tears. His mother had been prepared for her husband’s death and the family’s ruin; when Yusuke returned home alive and with the news that Kiyoshige was to go to the castle, she wept in relief and joy.

Kiyoshige was small in stature but already immensely strong for his age. Like his father, he had a great love of horses and great skill with them. He was self-confident almost to the point of brashness and, once he had got over his shyness, treated Shigeru in the same way as he’d treated Yuta, arguing with him, teasing him, even occasionally scrapping with him. His teachers found him irrepressible-Ichiro in particular found his patience stretched to the limit-but Kiyoshige’s good humor, cheerfulness, physical courage, and skills at horsemanship endeared him to his elders as much as he irritated them, and his loyalty to Shigeru was complete.

Despite their relative prosperity, the family had been brought up with great frugality and a disciplined way of life. Kiyoshige was used to rising before sunrise and helping his father with the horses, then working in the fields before the morning’s lessons. At night, while his mother and sisters did sewing work, he and his brothers were expected to study, if they were not engaged in more practical tasks, like making sandals from straw while their father read to them from the classics or discussed theories of horse breeding.

The Otori valued two sorts of horses above all others-blacks and pale grays with black manes and tails. Mori bred both sorts and ran them in the water meadows. Occasionally a gray would be so pale as to be almost white, with white mane and tail. When the horses galloped together, they were like a storm cloud of black and white. The year Kiyoshige went to the castle, his father gave a young black colt to Shigeru and a black-maned gray the same age to his son. He presented a pure white horse to the shrine along with his youngest son, Hiroki. The white horse became a sort of god itself. Every day it was led to a stall in the shrine grounds, where people brought it carrots, grain, and other offerings. It became very fat and rather greedy. The shrine was not far from Shigeru’s mother’s house, and occasionally he and his brother were taken to festivals there. Shigeru felt sorry for the horse that could not run free with the others, but it seemed perfectly content with its new divine status.

“Father chose this one because of its placid nature,” Kiyoshige confided in Shigeru one day that summer as they hung over the poles at the front of the horse’s stall. “It would never make a warhorse, he said.”

“The god should have the best horse,” Takeshi said.

“It is the best-looking.” Kiyoshige patted the snowy white neck. The horse nuzzled him, looking for treats, and when it found none drew back its pink lips and nipped the boy on the arm.

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.