Begin the Journey-- I

Hajime Matsuko ran through the wood-paneled halls and dark woven closed-rooms, across bridges where sunlight turned the careful grass bright, and then again into shadow. His sandaled feet flopped on the ground; his black hair, just shy of long enough to be pulled into a tail, flipped in spikes in front of his eyes that he pushed away. His eyes were blue and wide, his clothes the brown-rust robes and layered white of the samurai. He had a black obi and a long sword pushed through it on the right, and he held in his hands two elaborate knife sheaths.

The boy stopped at a wide wood porch looking out on rolling fields and calm land, with the buildings of the dojo scattered about in purposeful chaos among the natural curves of the hills. One pennant flew from a high corner, and two boys sat beneath it between the porch and the grass, laughing.

“Satome!” Hajime growled. “Disako, the thieves...” And he ran to them, summoning saved bravery he had seen so many times in the faces of the men and sensei. He stopped on the porch and looked down on the two. They both had black hair; Satome was fatter and his hair was longer. Disako was throwing a knife, catching it, throwing, spinning it. Hajime fisted his hands.

“Those’re my sai, Disako, and I need them back.”

Disako caught the knife and put it near him with the other short blade with prominent, thin guards that matched it, between his feet on the steps.. Satome stood up. “We stole them with great skill, little one, but you can try to get them if you really want to...”

Hajime had not earned those knives; his father had, before a rebel had cut his throat. Hajime stepped forward and Satome raised his fists; Disako smiled in his devilish way and crouched on the lower step like a frog, waiting.

A door clattered behind them, and someone tall walked out, some visiting warrior. The boys relaxed, and Disako kicked the knives off the steps onto the gravel path. Immediately Hajime leaped after them, skipping the stairs and scraping his hands on the gravel as he took the last few movements on hands and knees. Disako whirled and grabbed at Hajime’s cloak, and Satome turned around and piggishly yelled. Hajime blocked Disako’s grab with the back of his left hand, grabbed the two knives one by the blade and one by the hilt, sat down on the ground and pushed off again. Now the sai sheathes, designed to be worn crossed at the obi, were scooped up by Satome. The combination of instinct and training had the knives in Hajime’s hands and menacing the two, but he knew in his heart that he was just to small to beat them, and that jumping and hiding may be his talent but fighting once the jumping was over was not.

Smoothly, the man who had distracted them a moment ago pulled the sheaths out of Satome’s grip and looked down at them all. Hajime had never seen him before; visitor or mercenary? He dressed in leather beneath the cloak, and his hair was almost white, his face noble. Whatever his origin, he gave all of the boys pause. Hajime brought his hands down.

“These belong to you.” The man said, looking at Hajime. It became an order; the other two stood and bowed to the newcomer, cowed thoroughly by a master’s mere presence, but Hajime too feared. He took the sheaths when the man offered them, and put the knives in but did not arm himself.

“Thank you, sama.”

The man nodded, and gestured to be followed. They all fell in behind him as he walked along the porch; then Satome gave Hajime a pay back shove and the master turned, his eyes angry.

“Get out of here, you two. Back to your masters. Darkness take boys who steal!” In the light of this harshness, Satome and Disako scuttled away. Hajime could see in the newcomer’s stance an anger that seemed to outweigh the crime, but it faded quickly as he looked instead at his remaining companion.

“Thank you.” said Hajime.

“The son of a samurai should not have to fight petty wars as well as great ones.” He said. “Watch out for the greater darknessess too, however. There are rumors of kamito-sant.”

Kamito-sant: monsters in the hills. The word was nonsense or some other language’s personification of the demon-people that some said had come to or returned to Japan recently, and they sent shivers up the backs of even the masters around fires late at night.

“But they’re not real, are they?” There were real enemies a plenty; rebels against the shogunate.

The man nodded slightly, a nod that did not imply ‘yes’, and showed small white teeth. “Not in the light of this day. Now, go back to your studies. Go on.” He gestured, and Hajime ran into the complex that held his small room.

He slept in a tangle of apprentices, in one large room with slatted windows that cast rippled squares on the bodies and bedrolls and blankets. The night was cool. Outside, wind rang wooden bells together, and their dull clunk seemed just another sound to remind him that he could not sleep because it felt like he was wasting every moment of life spent placid and unmoving.

Giving up, he rolled over and pushed himself off the floor, clothed now in a long, white shirt. He pulled his pants, obi and pair of knives from under the bedroll where no apprentice was going to step on or steal them and quickly dressed, then picked his way toward the door.

People snored and moved and mumbled things; a scarred boy in his teens clenched his right hand on a long staff when Hajime maneuvered his feet between the boy’s weapon and his head, stepping on cool silk from someone else’s wardrobe. Moonlight slanted through the window; Hajime made it to the sliding door and opened it just enough to slip through unnoticed.

Outside, moonlight tinted the grass metallic, and the stream behind the samurai compound trickled over rocks and around bends. Already Hajime knew how to blend with shadow; this he did, and walked around the corner as casually as he could in this spy-cover mode. The stars shone outside the wooden porch roofs, bright in their constellations.

A sliver or flicker of light caught his right eye--a lamp lit inside, swinging for a moment at the crack of a door?

Hajime moved out under open sky. It was so peaceful, so compelling, just the small boy warrior and the sky, the air tasting of freedom.

Someone slipped over the top of the hill, someone hunched over who had stepped on a stick that snapped loud as a cry in the night. Hajime caught the breath in his throat, looking out over the landscape, trying to stretch the pupils of his eyes. A hunched, indeterminate shape crept down to ward the kitchens, where smokeholes cut into the roof bled smoke in the daytimes and where barrels stacked outside, wordlessly under the protection of the samurai’s honor code, crowded about the windows where dried plants hung all in shades of gray. Hajime started a shout. Wings and feathers and a pierce inside his mind came in a blur of birdlike flurry, and Hajime turned, gripping the slats of the building, as a something just around the corner from him stamped its clawed feet and raised wings the length of a human arm, throwing a graceful neck and spearlike beak into the air.

Another cry, like a hawk on the wing flew inside the boy’s head.

He heard himself scream, and flung his hands up to ward off the thing, feeling his right side hit the wall there. Across the grass, shouts of men were raised and something spirit-white began to run with the gait of a great tiger along the porch of the kitchens, where the apprentices sat for evening meal.

One voice, Matsuodi Makasha, master samurai and Hajime’s teacher, called out. “Kamito-sant! Kamito-sant, be gone, thing of the night!”

Hajime hit hard against the thing around the corner, a blind strike with his fist as his left had pulled out the right-facing sai, and a human cry and thump heralded the disappearance of the bird-entity. Spurred on by the men’s voices, by the drawing of swords and the irate shouts of the cook inside the kitchens, Hajime jumped behind the corner with his knife held low.

There was no bird there, no monster, no kamito-sant.

There was a little girl.