Autumn Bridge (8 page)

The ground shook with the concussion of charging Mongol horsemen. They came at high speed, in ordered ranks, with lances aimed straight ahead.

“Do not shoot until they reach the base of the hill,” Masamuné told his men.

An instant before they were there, flames flashed from the tubes the Mongols had set up on the beach, accompanied by smoke and a roaring like angry wind, and moments later, impossibly, stars and constellations exploded in the daytime sky above them. His men stayed where they were. Many others among the samurai ran screaming in panic.

“Shoot!” Masamuné said.

His archers felled many of the Mongols, but they were few and the Mongols were many. The samurais’ defenses were breached with little effort. Just as they were on the verge of being inundated, the right flank of the charging Mongol cavalry suddenly wheeled and attacked their own men. These renegades shouted a war cry different from that of the other Mongols, words that sounded to Masamuné’s ears like “Na-lu-chi-ya-oh-ho-do-su!”

This sudden treachery from within their own ranks confused the Mongols. Though they had the advantage of both numbers and position, they broke off the attack and retreated. In the lull that followed, the renegade closest to Masamuné hit his chest with his fist.

“No, Mongol,” he said in rough Chinese. “Yes, Nürjhen.” And so saying, he pointed at his comrades, who gestured in similar fashion and said, “Nürjhen.”

Masamuné’s lieutenant said, “Are they saying they are not Mongols, my lord?”

“Apparently they are” — he struggled to duplicate the tongue-twisting syllables the barbarian had uttered — “Na-lu-chi-ya.”

“What is Na-lu-chi-ya?”

Directly above them, stars and constellations once again exploded in the sky. The samurai hugged the ground as tightly as they could. Masamuné spit dirt from his mouth.

“They are enemies of the Mongols,” he said. “What more must you know?”

This time, the starbursts were followed by deafening roars on the beach, the sound of invisible objects flying through the air, and, moments later, horrendous explosions in their midst.

“Get up!” Gengyo yelled. “They’re coming again!”

Many of the samurai who did get up did so not to man the earthworks but to turn and flee, a futile effort. The continuing rain of explosions shattered men into ragged, bloody remnants of flesh and bone no matter whether they stayed or fled.

The second Mongol charge crested the defenses once again, and the enemy was among them on horseback, killing with sword and spear. Behind the horsemen came men on foot firing strange bows that launched short bolts. One of these bolts struck Masamuné in the chest and easily penetrated his armor.

“Ah!” There was only a momentary flash of pain, then no feeling at all, just a weightless kind of dizziness. A Mongol horseman came at him with a spear to finish him off. Masamuné was too weak to raise his sword in defense. Then the Na-lu-chi-ya who had first spoken knocked aside the attacker’s spear and stabbed his short two-edged sword into the man’s armpit. Blood flared and the horseman fell.

His Na-lu-chi-ya savior smiled at him and said, “No fear. Live! Live!”

Masamuné lost consciousness.

When he opened his eyes again, his lieutenant was dressing his wound.

The Mongols were gone. Samurai went among the wounded rescuing their own men and killing fallen Mongols. The samurai had won, at least for the time being. He saw the Na-lu-chi-ya dead all around him. No, that one still breathed. He could see the chest move ever so slightly. One of Gengyo’s men went up to him and raised his sword to stab him.

“Stop!” Masamuné said. “That is not a Mongol.”

“He looks like a Mongol.”

“Idiot! Are you questioning my word?”

“No, Lord Masamuné, not at all.” The man bowed.

“Attend to his wounds.”

“Yes, lord, but he is very badly hurt. He will probably die anyway.”

“If he dies, we will pray for the peaceful repose of his spirit. But see that he does not die.” The Na-lu-chi-ya had saved his life. Masamuné would return the favor if he could.

Eroghut did not die, but all the others did. His brother and cousins and every last kinsman were gone. He smiled through fever and pain as the cart that carried him rocked back and forth. His mother had gained a reputation for sorcery and prophecy through a clever and fortunate combination of lucky guesses and tireless self-promotion, always off casting spells and going into trances when she should have been caring for her husband and children. Now he alone was the entirety of the Nürjhen Ordos. If it were to rise again, it would arise from him, Eroghut, son of Tanghut, of the Nürjhens of the Red Dragon River and the Blue Ice Mountains. But there was no Red Dragon River anymore, or Blue Ice Mountains. The Mongols had given them different names when they had conquered his tribe. And soon, there would be no more Nürjhens. He wished he could see his mother one last time, so he could laugh in her face.

The cart carried Eroghut to another island, which he later learned was called Shikoku. The samurai he had fought beside, Masamuné, was lord of a domain called Akaoka, and there they presently arrived. Though Masamuné comported himself no differently from a khan, his domain was hardly big enough to have a name of its own. Even a Mongol — vastly overrated horsemen, in Eroghut’s opinion — could ride from one end to the other in less than a day.

In the beginning, Eroghut and his new lord spoke in pidgin Chinese.

“My name Masamuné. I lord Akaoka kingdom. You?”

“My name Eroghut. I Nürjhen country. Now Nürjhen country no more.”

“Your name?” Masamuné repeated, a look of confusion on his face.

“Eroghut.”

“Eh-ho-go-chu?”

“E-ro-ghut.”

“Eh-lo-ku-cho?”

These Japanese were hopeless. Because their language was so simple, they could hardly form any unfamiliar words, even simple ones.

“’Ghut,” Eroghut said, shortening it the way an infant would.

“Ah,” Masamuné said, looking very pleased at last. “Go.”

“Yes,” Eroghut said, giving up. “My name Go.” And from then on it was.

Go learned the language of Japan very quickly. It was not difficult to form the words, because there were only a few sounds. The Japanese were like the Mongols in one way. They loved war. As soon as the Mongols were gone from these shores, driven away by a storm, as they had been during their first attempt at conquest, Masamuné began fighting first his eastern neighbor, then his northern one, for reasons Go did not understand. It seemed honor was at stake more than land, slaves, horses, or trade routes. There could be no other reason, since the manner in which the samurai fought — a bizarre form of mass single combat, where every warrior sought an opponent of equal rank — guaranteed that almost no battle could result in clear-cut victory for either side. Their armies were not armies in the highly organized Nürjhen sense, but rather wild, heroic, uncoordinated mobs.

When the samurai told stories of their battles, they exaggerated not only their courage but the courage of their enemies as well, and wept for the enemy dead as well as their own. In one battle, an enemy lord, a fat pimply youth of perhaps twenty, was killed by his own falling horse as he turned to flee. When the story was later told, that lord had become a youth of almost blinding beauty, his courage enough to fill the breasts of a thousand brave men, his death a tragedy of nearly unbearable sadness. Go watched as Masamuné and his samurai drank rice wine and wept at the loss of the hero. Yet these very men knew the enemy lord well, had fought against him in many previous engagements, and knew he was not beautiful, not even moderately handsome, and his courage… well, how much courage does it take, not to mention the level of skill, or lack thereof, to turn the horse in such a way that it would fall on the rider and break his neck?

So it was that Go came to live among these overdramatic, though unquestionably brave, barbarians, fighting alongside them in their meaningless, utterly inconclusive battles, drinking with them, singing with them, and eventually reciting the same ridiculous lies of heaven-shaking fortitude, dazzling physical beauty, and fearless and defiant death. They lived for nothing beyond war and drunkenness and the mythology of their own courage.

Go felt right at home. Before Kublai the Fat’s grandfather, Genghis the Accursed, gathered together all the steppe tribes, forced them to become Mongols, and gave them the mission of world conquest, the Nürjhen had been much like these Japanese. Perhaps his mother had not been so very wrong after all. Perhaps these primitive islanders were the new Nürjhen Ordos. It was amusing to toy with the thought anyway.

Go’s skill with horses was much appreciated by Lord Masamuné. Under his tutelage, the samurai of Akaoka Domain soon learned to move in rapidly shifting units, rather than as inefficient individuals, the units themselves able to join to form larger units, or split apart to form smaller ones. Signal flags were used to communicate commands over long distances during the day. At night, lamps and flaming arrows served the same purpose. These were the same tactics the Huns had used during the centuries when the steppes of East Asia were theirs to command, tactics inherited by their Nürjhen kinsmen, and the same tactics the Mongols had stolen and used against them.

In the spring of the second year of Go’s life among the Japanese, the Akaoka cavalrymen he had trained so well rode like Nürjhen warriors of old against the clumsy army of the Hojo regent, an army ten times their size, and destroyed it in a great slaughter on the Shikoku shore of the Inland Sea. When they returned from battle, Masamuné gave his youngest and most beautiful concubine to Go for a wife. By the fall of the next year, Go was the father of a son, whom he named Chiaki, using the Chinese characters
chi,
“blood,” for the Nürjhen blood in his veins, and
aki,
“autumn,” for the season of his birth.

All was well until a second Nürjhen was born among the Japanese. Then Go had cause to remember that the blood that ran in his veins, and the veins of his two children, was also the blood of his sorceress mother and that other, Tangolhun of ancient times.

“I see you are hard at work as usual,” Genji said.

Emily had been so taken by her reading, she had not noticed his arrival at the doorway. She suspected he had been there for some time, watching her, before he spoke up.

“Not working nearly hard enough,” she said, rolling up the scroll as casually as possible. Her feminine intuition told her it was best, at least for the time being, not to mention the different nature of the newly opened narrative.

His appearance had undergone little change in the six years since they had met. This despite serious injuries suffered in battle, the tremendous stresses of political leadership in a time of nearly endless crisis, and involvement in an intricate web of plots and counterplots involving the Emperor in Kyoto, the Shogun in Edo, and rebellious warlords in the west and north of Japan. There was also possible foreign intervention to worry about, with the navies of England, France, Russia, and the United States always prominently in Japanese waters. If this were not complicated enough, there was also Kawakami Saemon to consider.

Saemon was a son of Genji’s former nemesis, Kawakami Eiichi, who at the time of his death — under Genji’s sword — had been chief of the Shogun’s secret police. Saemon was Kawakami’s eldest son, by a lesser concubine rather than his wife, and had supposedly hated his father. When he and Genji met shortly after the unfortunate incident, he had showed every indication of friendliness. Furthermore, he and Genji were on the same side of the restoration question. They both favored the abolition of the Shogunate and the Emperor’s return to power after a thousand years of political eclipse. Genji seemed to trust the man. Emily did not.

He was too much like his father in two ways. The first was in appearance. He was handsome and vain, and Emily had little faith in men who placed excessive importance on appearances. The second, more telling, was in behavior. He always gave Emily the impression of never meaning what he said, or saying what he meant. It wasn’t that he lied exactly. It was more an impression — of slipperiness, of insubstantiality, of an inclination toward treachery — than confirmable fact. Perhaps it was circumstance alone that gave rise to her doubts. She could not help but wonder whether any son could truly have kindly feelings for the man who killed his sire.