His voice was a whisper under the broken sparrow song.
“Father…”
*
The throne room was as silent as Yoritomo’s tomb. Muddy light filtered through tall windows, long slabs of illumination painted by a clumsy brush in the pall of ashes. A blood-red carpet marked the path to the Shōgun’s throne, a charred breeze thumbing through the high tapestries. The throne itself was immense; a gaudy lump of golden tigers and silken cushions throwing a clawed shadow across the floor.
Hiro hadn’t ever mustered the courage to actually sit in it.
Two figures waited at its feet. A woman, arrayed in a j?nihitoe as red as heart’s blood, embroidered with golden flowers. Her face was painted white, jet hair swept into a layered coil pierced with glittering needles. She glanced up as Hiro entered the hall, and he met her eyes for the briefest of moments, dull pain in his chest.
Mother.
His eyes fell on the figure to her left, and all sense of joy or sadness fled, black nothingness in their wake. A voice from childhood, harsh with rebuke. A raised hand, and the memory of shameful tears.
Father.
He sat in the chair. That cursed chair that was his home, his concubine, his sentence. The breather over his face was a heavy, graceless thing of rubber and brass, affixed with fat buckles behind his head, long, graying hair still swept back in warrior’s braids. But no warrior sat in that chair, no. A shell of one, perhaps, who dreamed of days before the gaijin rotor-thopters blasted his ship from the skies, left him twisted in the wreckage on some Morcheban plain.
His face was a knot of scars. His left arm desiccated, strapped in place. A bulky knot of pipes and bellows was affixed to his little iron throne, his thin chest moving with a measured cadence, like clockwork, like the arm at Hiro’s side, like the voice in Hiro’s head.
“Lord Orochi-san,” he said. “Lady Shizuka-san. You honor me with your presence.”
“Great Daimyo.” His father’s voice was a tortured wheeze, each pause punctured by a metallic rasp. “Blessing of Lord Izanagi … to your house.”
His mother sank to her knees, pressed her forehead to the floorboards. “Great Daimyo.”
Hiro stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Mother, do not—”
A sharp glance from his father, halfway between outrage and horror. The look dragged Hiro to a halt, caught him by the seat of his pants and hauled him to his feet, the pain of the skinned knee or bruised knuckles or aching back forgotten.
“A samurai does not show emotion. No pain. No fear. Never.”
Hiro covered his fist and bowed.
“Lady Shizuka-san. You honor your Daimyo. Rise, please.”
He could see it in her face: how she longed to throw her arms about him and shower his face with kisses as she’d done when he was a boy. But instead, she rose slowly, eyes to floor, mouth pressed firmly shut. As was fitting. As was proper.
“To what do I owe the honor of your presence in the Tiger’s Palace?” Hiro said. “The journey from Blackstone province could not have been easy given your … condition.”
“It is no trouble, great Daimyo.” Orochi waved his good hand as if shooing away an insect. “News has reached us that you have consigned yourself to suicide … after the Shōgun’s assassin is dispatched…”
Hiro looked at his mother then, but her eyes were still downcast. Could they have come here to talk him out of it? To step aside and leave all this behind?
“I … that is to say we…” Orochi drew a shivering breath, “… wished you to know…”
Could they?
“Your actions make us proud … Make me proud.”
No.
Hiro found himself speaking in a voice that sounded nothing like his own.
No, of course not.
“You honor me, Lord Orochi.”
“The shame of your failure … has been difficult … for your mother and I to endure. Many nights I sat with blade in hand … contemplating my own seppuku in protest that you … had not followed your Lord into death.”
Orochi pressed the control lever beneath his withered hand, the chair trundling forward on fat rubber wheels. He stopped close enough for Hiro to see the gleam in his eyes.
“But I knew you would do … the honorable thing. That you and the Elite would spare your families the disgrace … of your failure.”
Wooden swords in the yard outside their home. Wind blowing in the lotus stalks. No room for tears. No place for pain. To wield the long and the short swords, and then to die.
“I will not fail, Father. Our honor will be restored.”
“I know it.” A nod. “You are samurai … my son.”
“Gracious husband,” said his mother. “The letter?”
A cold glance over Orochi’s shoulder silenced her like a slap.
“Letter?” Hiro looked between the pair. “What letter?”