Ansei

Enemies were nothing to wish for, but for much of my life, a mutually antagonistic predator circle saved my skin. Blocking each other’s assaults. Training me to vigilance. As much as they threatened, their mutual hostility seemed to assure my survival.

Survival, but no quality of life. The best I could hope for was to choose the violence I liked best. Given time, one death did show up preferable even to old age, though by first impressions, it offended like a bad odor.

* * *

The old tavern stood off in the distance, like a voyer vagrant at the far edge of the village. The songs of men within competed with the howl of feral cats on their night prowl. My shadow fell across the doorway and silenced the din to a hushed muttering of oaths and barely audible appeals to dead ancients.

“Get rid of that creature you are harboring, Jiro—or I will,” muttered the bar keep, gripping his staff in his arthritic right hand.

“Don’t stir yourself on Ansei’s account. I’ll go.” My Uncle Jiro gathered himself to his feet. “Son of a traitor,” he murmured, spraying my face with dry spittle as he collapsed against my shoulder.

Bracing my uncle’s weight against my back, I half hauled, half dragged his drunken mass through the door of the tavern, his katana blade scraping a fine track across the stone pavers with every step.

He filled my ear with his sake-soused grievances all the distance to the house, repeating the words: traitor…never forgive her.

I knew who he meant, and I felt much the same, but doubted his reasons agreed with mine, exactly. Face burning, I wondered how well he knew my mother.

The hour was well past the extinction of lamplight when I dragged him up the genkan and laid him across his futon. He wouldn’t remember the oaths or whispered confessions elicited by my mother’s memory, and this was just as well for me. The wine distanced him from fresh reminders of our kinship—his brother’s firstborn and rightful heir of the Nagaishi birthright, and at the same time…the spider bred son of a traitor.

* * *

We were the Nagaishi Clan, known to our imperial enemies as The Spider People for our legendary alliance with the Earth Kumo—shape-shifting she-warriors who occupied the peaks of the Yamato Mountain. Cooperatively, the clan and the Earth Kumo preserved the domain from imperial invasion for nearly four hundred years. The alliance prospered, so long as the Nagaishi pledged never to trespass into the Earth Kumo’s deadly cave-dwelling realm.

But in the final year of the Warring Clan Period, an Earth Kumo lured Chieftain Toyo Nagaishi into her lair and poisoned him with her venom. On the eve of our enemy’s advancement inside our clan’s borders, second in command Jiro Nagaishi dispatched a messenger and conceded defeat.

Chieftain Toyo Nagaishi was my father. My mother, his murderess.

* * *

My mother made occasion to impress me with my duty to my Earth Kumo roots. Her visits always coincided with the sun’s disappearance. Earth Kumo don’t compete with inferior light sources, even for an audience of one.

She rose up from behind the mountain, awakening the valley of pines to a light brighter than day. At once, I startled from a shallow sleep and shielded my eyes from her.

I hustled into a low bow of obeisance. This wasn’t my first interview with my mother, but they came rarely, and I was never prepared for them.

“Ansei.”

“Mother.”

Unannounced, yes, but my mother’s etiquette wasn’t so backwards as to fail in the matter of gifts. She flung a small carcass into the low burning coals. “It will strengthen you. Eat!”

I fetched the thing out of the coals, fingertips burning, and stared at the charred offering, dripping with roasted fat. I hated to think what celestial beast had been sacrificed for the rite, but I would not have dared refuse it. The previous gift had been raw and bloody, but uncommon strength had, in fact, followed digestion.

I brought the thing to my mouth and ate it two fisted, polishing the bone and joint clean of flesh. Wiping the grease from my face with a grimace, I bowed low again. “To what do I owe—”

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“Your uncle has given your name to the Shogun. He’s enlisting you in the military at Western Capital. He’ll pass you off as his firstborn to spare his own son the obligation. Pack your things.” Under her breath she muttered, “And Jiro considers me the treacherous one.”

My throat closed and I choked, “How can he get away with that?”

My mother answered, dryly, “The circumstances of your birth were uncharacteristic, Ansei. Do you think any detail was recorded so faithfully as to prevent a forgery? He can call you his firstborn son if he so chooses.”

This was true. Births between Earth Kumo and humans never appeared on Okugawa’s annual census. I could be whoever my uncle said I was.

The Shogun’s military unit at Western Capital was an elite group of youth assembled from the firesides of the Ruling House’s most troublesome clans and kept like hostages, insurance for his enemies’ loyalty. Training was rumored to be deadly—to keep the force lean, and motivated. No one volunteered for the honor of enlisting and I shuddered with the impact of my mother’s message.

“Good can proceed from these obligations, Ansei.”

“You want me to serve?” No Earth Kumo would willingly give her loyalty to Okugawa, so much less my mother.

“Training can be repurposed, and you will be more useful to the Earth Kumo this way.”

Shifty pragmatism was more like it, but I bowed my neck. “As you say.”

“I came to warn you, and…” she paused, “to make a one-sided introduction. It’s both long overdue, but it is premature at the same time. Remember, Ansei, your potential after this life is great. But you must make the most of your time. And though you are gaining strength, you are still so vulnerable. If you ever hope to achieve immortality, as I expect you will, you must choose your alliances.”

“You mean, in the Stars—”

She threw her head back and laughed openly, like a man. “What have the Earth Kumo to do with the Stars? Even in our immortality, we are bound to our earthly realm, struggling alongside mortals with their ceaseless wars.” Her eyes gleamed. “Someday, we will change all that. Someday, we will take the Sky as well.”

“Who is my earthly ally?”

“Look!”

I followed the path of her immortal finger over miles of space to a simple cottage with a thatched roof. Outside, a young girl bore two heavy water buckets, and heaved them with a strength belying her size.

“Who is she?”

“She is Furi. I know she appears slight, and humble, but believe me when I say she is mighty. I chose her for you on the day she was born.”

“One of yours?”

“No. Her mother gave her to me to bless with certain of my gifts. She was born to the Goddess Orihime.”

Highborn indeed. I cocked my head. “Which of your gifts?”

A self-satisfied smile lit my mother’s eyes.

“Poison.”

Hearing this, I resolved to hate the girl. My mother, I knew, intended her poison for me.

“Ansei. Furi can lead you to immortality.”

When my mother said immortality, I heard only death and for the first time, I met my mother’s gaze with a challenge.

“Where is my father? Where is his immortality?”

She almost flinched at the bitterness in my voice.

“Your father was composed of rougher materials than you are, Ansei. Remember, he was full mortal. Do you think celestial status is so easy to achieve from such beginnings?”

She stretched out her arms and let them fall, sending a rush of wind at my face and I grimaced.

“You have a chance, but I can see you despise it!”

In her anger, she abandoned me there beside the flooded field of rice seedlings.

I loitered all morning, watching the girl toil at a spinning reel. She was quick and strong. But thin and under nourished. This might have inspired my pity, but it didn’t. One thing moved me, and the moment was so brief I might have easily missed it. While I watched, a shaft of light touched the girl’s eyes, upturned to measure the sun’s movement across the sky.

The light ignited them from the outside with an intensity I had never seen before. My breath caught in my throat and I retreated an involuntary step. Then I cringed.

A stinging hiss, not unfamiliar, raised my shoulders an involuntary inch.

I turned and peered into the shade of the forest edge, and a pair of empty eyes met mine. They’d been watching me from the screening of a white fir. When she stepped fully into view I knew her for a jorogumo—a cousin to the Earth Kumo, but the worst kind.

“You’ve grown up.”

I glared at her. She spoke like she had some kind of personal stake in my growth and well she might.

My jaw tensed and I called a warning.

“You cannot attack me now, and you know it.”

Her reply came slow.

“I know my boundaries, Son of the Earth Kumo. Aren’t you glad to have your mother and her friends to protect you? Don’t you have a lot to look forward to in the future? Or you could come with me voluntarily now? No rule against that.”

Her mouth curved, alluring as a jorogumo was. She waved her hand and the magnetism of her open gesture almost drew me a step closer, but I stiffened with the thought of what tortures she had reserved for me.

“No? Perhaps not now, no. But I have rarely caught the scent of a more burdened soul. It’s all up for you soon enough. Choose death or let death choose you—the end is the same. You may as well come with me now rather than await the inevitable.”

I must have seemed easy prey; she revealed her intent so freely. I hated my dispensability. Earth Kumo men were never long for life, and I had learned from the cradle about my sacrificial destiny. Yet, I still wanted my life to matter. I knew my death mattered.

I steadied myself and threw out the worst slur I could think of.

“My father spurned you for an Earth Kumo.”

The words hit their mark. She turned a thin shade of purple and shrank back inside the darkness of the forest line.