Abruptly all eyes turned to Saga. “Of a fashion?” he demanded.

  Jimushi grinned all the wider. “Dirty, of course.”

  Uji frowned and spat. Even Amé’s fan hitched its rhythm.

  Saga, though, clenched his features into careful stoicism. “‘Barbarian-’ or ‘mix-blooded’ are the legal and more acceptable terms.”

  “But ‘dirty’ is legal too, isn’t it? Both that false Denrai-dog emperor in the north and our beloved true emperor of the southern court have declared it so, correct? So you’re dirty. Legally dirty.” Jimushi’s delight was smeared from ear to ear.

  An ai no ko was a creature of inconvenience. He was what the Denrai clans called unclean, confusing, evidence of the rape of their beloved empire by the Khan’s Peace. The Kindai clans, ever more permissive, politely named him an “unfortunate.” The greater part of Tomuchi’s fighting force comprised mixed-blooded men who’d sworn their swords to the Kindai for a chance at a better way. Judging from the angry faces, Jimushi’s philosophy was proving unpopular.

  “We should return to our earlier conversation,” Saga told him, “and not waste time grinning over japes.”

  Jimushi aimed a moping swat at the wasp dancing on the air between them. “You’d like to scrape this smile from my face, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d like to get this finished and complete my routine for the evening. But what I’d like is irrelevant. Our lord has declared there to be no ghost. And yet you implied the opposite, publicly, in the presence of our lord’s servants. You owe an apology.”

  “So that’s what has your navel bent?” Jimushi waved his hand dismissively. “I was caught in the emotion of the moment just like Uji and the rest, just like you. I’m no rebel, so don’t worry.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good,” Jimushi said, and began to bow.

  “But you must apologize.”

  Jimushi stopped half-bent, his embarrassment blatant in the flush of his face. “Again with your bad manners, barbarian!”

  “So sorry, but I am samurai. And you must apologize.”

  “I won’t!”

  “You must.”

  Jimushi growled, pulled the sheath from the blade of his naginata and grasped the shaft in both hands. “Who are you to command me? Step away or be cut down.”

  “Lady Amé,” Saga called.

  The lady stepped closer, her fan held circumspectly before her face. “May I be of assistance?”

  “If I’m cut down, please inform General Kumo of Jimushi’s words and ensure that my remaining coins and rice are burned with my body for the journey to Buddha Amida’s land.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, lady.”

  Jimushi slid deeper into a fighting stance, the naginata poised for a heavy downward cut.

  Saga set his bow aside and removed his two swords from his belt. He knelt on the path, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and laid the swords in front of him, the long before the short. He carefully set his hands on his knees and waited.

  For a time Jimushi stared, taken aback. “Are you mocking me?”

  “Take back your words.”

  “I’ll kill you first.”

  Saga nodded, unsurprised. “My life is my lord’s. Your life is my lord’s. I’ll not end either without his permission.”

  The quiet had fallen as a curtain. None were walking, none were speaking. Lady Amé’s perfume floated to Saga on an occasional ebb of the heavy air. In the distance belched the gurgle-hiss of the hot springs, their mists gliding out across the grounds. The wasp droned past his ear once, twice.

  Finally, Jimushi made up his mind. He shifted both hands to the end of the naginata’s shaft and swung for Saga’s neck.

  “Enough!” came a guttural shout, its echo ringing Saga down to the belly. He rolled in the same instant that Jimushi swerved his blow. The naginata clanged to the ground. Saga came to his feet some three paces distant.

  He immediately dropped to his knees again, bowing low as did every man in sight, a cacophony of jostled armor. For it was General Kumo who’d shouted, his brow dark and his fist clenching the neck of the grisly sack. And beside him was the palanquin, its door open and Tomuchi-sama watching.

  * * *

  Tomuchi no Yoshihiro had earned his reputation as a young man, no older than Saga, when two traitors had thought to catch the emperor alone with naught but powdered servants and this the weakest of lords. They erred. The first of the assassins found himself dragged to the floor and his eye sockets gouged empty. The second knew his last healthy stride before the gilded edge of a writing desk smashed his spine.

  The gaze that swept the yard now was as steady and strong as a mountain root, unchanged from that young man who had fought heedless of sword blows for the life of his emperor.

  “Kumo,” said Tomuchi-sama into the sudden quiet, his voice weighty and broad. “Our men are livelier than you had me believe.”

  “Yes, lord,” replied the general.

  Tomuchi-sama leaned forward from the shadows, the sleeve of his haori green and marked with his family’s crest. “Saga.”

  Saga dipped his head. “Yes, Tomuchi-sama.”

  “We have not spoken in a while, have we?”

  “No, lord.”

  “You seem more stubborn than I remember. Or was that courage you showed there?”

  “I—I cannot answer that. I merely did what I thought would honor you most.”

  “You would have died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Without regret?”

  “Without regret, lord.”

  Tomuchi-sama grunted. “What did Jimushi say that involved my honor?”

  Saga bent until his head touched the dirt, watching Jimushi’s troubled face from the corner of his eye. “I should not say, lord.”

  “Fool!” shouted the general, but Tomuchi-sama stilled him with a gesture.

  “Why not?”

  “You have ordered us to respect each other as brothers. My brother, Jimushi, has been sick with the heat and thus spoke outside of his mind. It would be poor service to repeat such absurd, mad gibberish to you, our lord, and shame my brother needlessly. Please accept my silence on this matter.”

  “I see .... Kumo.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Saga here is the one you call ox?

  “He is, lord.”

  “For his dependability?”

  “And his stubbornness, yes, lord.”

  “Do you have any concerns regarding his lineage?”

  “He is pure samurai on his father’s side, a line back to Baba Akifusa. They are a good family. His mother’s people, though, are traders from the far edge of the Khan’s emp—” The general’s words choked off. “Tomuchi-sama!”

  Saga raised his eyes to see his lord climbing from the palanquin.

  Tomuchi-sama was not an old man, not old enough even to be Saga’s father. But of his father, his brother, four uncles and nine cousins stricken by the Bone Fever Plague, only Tomuchi-sama survived to be lord. The Crippled Lord. The Bone-Fever Samurai.

  From his palanquin he stepped to the ground upon feet swollen grotesquely, knees showing bulbous beneath his kimono, hands marred by zigzagging fingers. The yard was susurrant with gasps of sympathetic pain.

  “I am fine,” growled Tomuchi-sama, waving away General Kumo’s help. He surveyed the yard, veins jutting stark in his neck but features stoic. In a battlefield voice, he boomed: “Death lives with us. We are samurai and want nothing less. For without death’s friendship, without the proper contempt for our bodies, we cannot do our duty to its perfection. Saga, raise your sword.”

  Saga did as he was told, holding the weapon in its sheath across his palms. He watched Tomuchi-sama reach for it. He smelled the sting of liniment. He saw the tremble in his lord’s hand, and he was smitten by a pang in his heart. He pushed the sword forward until its scabbard touched Tomuchi-sama’s crooked fingers and stilled them.

  “It’s been well kept,” said Tomuchi-sama between his teeth. “Show me the blade.”

  Saga unsheathed a finger’s breadth.

  “Is it sharp?”

  “It is, lord.”

  “Good. A warrior’s sword is a reflection of his soul.” By now the pain was beginning to show on Tomuchi-sama’s face, but he kept his dignity as he strode back to his palanquin and climbed inside. Without assistance, Saga noted with pride.

  “Kumo,” Tomuchi-sama said when he’d settled.

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Promote him to my personal guard. He knows honor. And his wit has always been a good match for Amé’s. Their play will perhaps make this summer pass more quickly.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  Tomuchi-sama closed the palanquin’s screen with a hand pale and unsteady. “And do something about these mists, Kumo. The visibility at this hour is appalling.”

  “Yes, lord.” General Kumo bowed low.

  At Tomuchi-sama’s gesture the bearers rose as one and set off, the palanquin swaying in stately rhythm until it disappeared at a bend in the lane.

  The silence over the yard endured even then, for the instant Tomuchi-sama was out of sight General Kumo came to stand above Saga, glowering. “Do not embarrass me,” he said by way of greeting, pointedly lifting Gozen’s head in its sack. He then gave the new orders. Saga was to finish his day in the lower barracks, but at dawn he was to report to the watch master to receive the armor, arms, and passphrases of his new station. The instructions were punctuated with more thrusts of the sack. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Kumo-sama.”

  The general’s face broke into a smile. “Congratulations, then, skinny ox. The honor is well-earned.”

  “Thank you. Kumo-sama.”

  The general dipped his head and set off, Lady Amé at her place behind him. As she passed she gave Saga the barest smile. He saw congratulations there in the turn of her mouth. And to his disquiet, faintly sketched but too soon gone again, a trace of sorrow.

  * * *

  Once their masters had gone, the others in the yard got to their feet and immediately began the gossip of this most incredible circumstance. They eyed Saga jealously and all but shunned Jimushi as he made his way on unsteady legs to his post.

  “That maggot carcass!” muttered Uji, watching him go. “Cowardly whore pus.”

  “That’s rude,” Saga told him seriously.

  “You’re right. He’s arrogant whore pus, then. And he smiles too many times, like monkey.”

  “He invited me to scrape that smile from his face.”

  “K’so! I wish I had invitation. I’d scrape twice.”

  Saga said nothing to that.

  Uji went on his way, tugging at his fierce mustache, but dusk was in full flame before Saga was alone enough to stand. He retrieved his bow and replaced the swords in his belt.

  The men were hungry for detail, following him with their stares as he set off to begin his toilet. What would he do? How would he behave? Conscious of the audience Saga ignored the wasp yet longer. He walked to the edge of the compound and meticulously blew his nose into the brush, holding one nostril closed then the other. He turned around and moved his bowels. When he was finished he found chugi sticks upon the ground, not fresh. He cleaned them as best he could, careful to hold them by the right end, and wiped himself. Later in the baths he stripped naked and scrubbed his body with fine ash then rinsed inside a great stone basin full of cold water. He watched the peasants who, with the water tower in ruin, now refilled the basins with buckets hauled from the nearest mountain stream, a rocky torrid rush that had already claimed one of their lives.

  When Saga was clean he moved to the hot springs and soaked until the air of rotted eggs became tolerable, his muscles unraveling to sink him in torpor. But he roused himself, leveling a burnished steel mirror against the torchlight to pluck the edges of his beard and shave his pate—paying close attention to the beard, for his barbarian hair was curly and if barbered undeftly returned ingrown. By the time he finished, a crew of peasants and samurai had arrived, as Tomuchi-sama had ordered, to tame the pools for lesser mists. They were having little success when Saga left them to their work.

  There was always someone asleep in the barracks, so removed his shoes and entered quietly through a door in the folding screens that served for walls in the summertime, light-stepped on padded tabi socks past the curtain partitions that divided the barracks into rooms. He found his corner and lay upon his rush mat with his swords beside him. He waited, listening, until all from his watch had arrived, gossiped, and settled—their open-mouthed snores and mingled breath playing harmony in the familiar refrains.

  Only then did he open the secret window he’d cut into the screen wall.

  The wasp entered immediately, buzzing with an energy heedless of the quiet room. Saga offered his hand to quiet the thing, and again the wasp alighted. By touch Saga repeated the process of removing the reed, his hands more sure in the dryer air. And when the reed at last came free it was by touch that he read the coded message. Twice.

  He lay in silence for a time under the gravity of his orders. Then he put the reed in his mouth and chewed. The wasp began to skitter, sensing the change as Saga slipped his own reed from a compartment in his scabbard, a message he’d written long ago in readiness of this day. “Prepare the children,” it instructed. And when it was secure in place beneath the wasp, Saga blew gently, giving the insect its return scent from the chewed reed on his breath. With a flick of his hand he sent it on its way.

  * * *

  Saga the samurai, faithful servant to the lord Tomuchi no Yoshihiro, had been born less than three years ago, when one living boy assumed the identity of one dead in the crowded and bloody aftermath of the Battle of Henten.

  Saga the akunin was much older.

  On the evening of his promotion to Tomuchi’s personal guard, he pretended to be restless from nightmares and left his barracks with an offer to relieve a member of the night watch. The nerve-wracked guard accepted eagerly, grinning as he walked off into the night. Saga then promptly abandoned the post.

  With a box of crickets strapped to his back to mask the shuffle of his steps, he snuck beyond the compound’s perimeter and picked his way up Mt. Yaban’s slope through a bamboo grove, following it to the edge of a sandstone outcrop where he watched the last of the sunlight melt away from his former lord’s encampment. He’d spent three years maiming the troop, eating the food he’d made scarce, guarding the wall he’d studied for weakness. But now he had new orders, and his dubious service to Tomuchi was at an end.

  Once the sky grew dark, Saga sat in the brush among the softly flashing fireflies and curving bamboo leaf, the wind strumming a music of the hollow trunks, thock, thock-thock, thock, thock. He’d hidden his samurai clothes and weapons and chosen to dress as a peasant, girding his waist with a long sash and his feet with hempen sandals. His face he covered from nose to chin with a soft green cloth, his rice-straw hat pulled low over his shorn pate. To his side he laid his walking stick and a black cloth bundle.

  Across his lap he laid the Knotted Rope.

  He closed his eyes.

  Saga’s first lesson—or, to be true, the first he could remember—had been given to him by an elder of the village Kagehana, a woman whose name he never knew. She slapped him awake when he was four years old, him with no memory of who he was or where, and held up three fingers. “The conscience drives duty,” she told him. “The ghost drives want. And wisdom negotiates between them. Every one of us is composed of these three natures—conscience, ghost, wisdom—all working together. But you, Sofurabi Saga, are not one of us.”

  So that’s my name, he’d thought.

  It was the day he’d tied his first Knot.

  It was the day he’d met Marrow.

  Saga, now in deep darkness under the bamboo, arranged his hands and limbs in the patterns he’d been taught, slipped away all the burdens in his mind until his own nature loomed great like the world. Then he pushed.

  Threads of heat unspooled from the pit of his belly, strand by strand and with greater speed until he felt his very life spilling in gouts from a burning wound at his navel. The music of the crickets fell away, the touch of the wind, the press of the earth beneath his legs all fell into an ungoverned void... then all came rushing back, a flood of awareness, of thought, searing thought, magnified. And when a familiar cold crept from the crown of his head and the tips of his fingers down into the core of him, he clipped off the hot thread and came back to himself.

  Saga opened his eyes.

  His vision was double. With one regard he saw himself as others would—thin, shadowed with his large hat, sitting cross-legged beneath the forest. But with the other regard, his natural regard, he saw a ghostly version of himself—lean as he was, muscled as he was, but shadow from head to foot and faceless, a silhouette blotting out the night.

  His name was Marrow, and he was Saga’s ghost.

  * * *

  The It

  Marrow stretches the void of his arms into the air and howls, free! free! free! ....

  The slow-men playing their stupid rules while he’s quiet smelling the hot stink of their food and their women and their blood and wanting it all on his tongue, in his arms, with his teeth, with his sex, and not having any of it, being quiet and wanting and having nothing. Will he get to play now? Or is it time for work?

  “It’s work,” Brother-Anchor says with voice and mind.

  Is it more killing the little animals? Because that is the most boring thing Marrow has to do and he doesn’t even want to do it because he likes some of those animals and they aren’t even food.

  “But they would have been game for the samurai, and my assignment was to make the samurai hungry. I have a new assignment now.”

  Brother-Anchor explains their work with thoughts, what he will do and what Marrow will do and why.

  Marrow grasps a bamboo stick and breaks it because he doesn’t want to do this work because this is bad work because he likes Safe-Father-Leader Tomuchi.

  Brother-Anchor holds up the knotted rope. “The Rope’s will is my will. I’ve compromised as best I can.”