Prologue
SIX DAYS passed since the samurai in black had fed his Jungle Crows and he felt their patience would thin out given a seventh. There was plenty to go around, but they didn’t see it that way.
Should be called vultures, he grinned.
As he walked alongside his Emperor’s coach, the young man he’d sworn to protect with his life, he looked up checking on his avian chums who hovered a quarter mile above the royal pageant which he’d been asked to watch from arm’s length. He alone heard their excited caws urging him to get back to his dirty work already.
The alpha male, a broad silver wing tipped and red-eyed fellow, head bumped a smaller member of his murder, no doubt testing him to see if he was weak enough to turn against, maybe make a quick meal of him mid-flight. He’d observed them go cannibal with or without his objection. The samurai in black shook his head.
Again, no loyalty in the animal kingdom.
His Jungle Crows, like any wildlife men had attempted to tame, hated waiting for their next feeding. They batted their wings feverishly sideways showing their disapproval of his sluggish work ethic. Their talons had sunk into many a man in their time under his employ, and they’d turned a dark purple.
The blood chips fell into the crowd as snowflakes. It was another vile protest which the samurai ignored feeling he’d been put in charge of the black carnivorous demons by some cosmic fate, and he alone chose when they ate.
It’s about time we had a fresh pecking, lord samurai. Feed us now, or we’ll make you our next morsel!
The samurai in black made a quick figure eight scan of the area. His eyes moved in a fashion which his training had, over the decades, turned into nothing more than a reflex. He landed on a parchment advertising the latest grand monster hunt – his curiosity peaked.
The fictional beast sighted at the time was the epitome of “a sight for sore eyes” with huge fangs, thick, brown, tree bark-like fur. It stood sixteen feet tall, with long, steel claws, and those ferocious, ‘don’t you ever dare mess with me’ eyes which often came with the savages roaming the dark wilderness. The monster hunt wasn’t of a mythical Bigfoot or Yeti, though that idea did amuse the samurai in black.
He held his composure in the crowd for he wanted to laugh at the top of his lungs. There was one exception which caught his eye even further; though it was a quadruped, it stood on its two hind feet to chase down any pray albeit select, or unlucky…and some say to scare the life out of them. That had been the main horrific rumor passing from one ear to the next, hopping from village to town.
The beast was alleged to devour fear itself for its sustenance.
The flyer’s illustrator didn’t know where to place the eyes, so there were many. Word was the monster’s several traveling eyes wandered around its head and could be anywhere the beast wished them. The samurai figured this meant it didn’t have to move its big old head too darn much. It could look ahead and behind itself at the same time.
What a nightmare! What a freakish mess it must make of the imagination, he laughed again on the inside.
The samurai in black favored hunting humans, not creatures of frail men’s imagination. They were a tamer thing to him, the humans. Though, at times, they were more dangerous prey to stalk. Before his own eyes, he’d seen them act more animal than the beasts of the wild. Most of the men whom he’d been asked to hunt down, like the wild dogs they were, deserved it, whereas the animals were just minding their own business.
You leave them alone, they leave you alone, he’d often say.
He envisioned that the son and grandson of farmers would rather be in their lush rice fields in times like this. Though, as a father, he wished his wife, Oichi and his son, Endō, as well as his daughter Nakano, could come to the festival instead of baking in their rice field back in outskirts of Osaka. He felt they’d enjoy the pageantry despite their modesties, and it wasn’t too far away.
Yet, on that festive occasion, drunk peasants and merchants got to mingle; guzzling Doire Roots and dancing crazed dances, with sweat the size of raindrops on their foreheads, as the greats passed by to bless them for another year. The Festival of the Great Lights; a festival for which blood had to be spilled for it to be had in the first place, wasn’t about debauchery. He wouldn’t have allowed his family to see that part of the services.
He turned his attention back to the festivities, closing his mind away from family and farm life. To think, it had taken place in Osaka on seven Sunday mornings under Emperor Yamamomo, with tens of thousands of people clogging the streets only to see their emperor renew his vows to reassert that he’d be their deity. That he, Emperor Yamamomo, would protect them from brutality and strife always from the Chrysanthemum throne way back in Kyoto.
They were a sea of dirty clothes to the samurai in black. Any of them an assassin, a traitor. He couldn’t trust even a boy, old lady, or a beggar, for to do so meant a dead Emperor and the loss of his family’s honor for three generations. The Shogun, Nagasaki-no Akira, would never tolerate such a failure either; nor would he ever grace them with his presence in such pageantry which was why he’d sent his despotic nephew Commander Sora to ride behind the Imperial family’s coach.
The Emperor rode securely with Empress Minamoto-no-Tatsuo, their son Ryuu, his brother Takahiro, and his cousin Ryota in a yellow coach splattered with gold trimmings. They were surrounded by troops and Samurai, but their real champion was the samurai in black; a member of the Unbound Samurai lineage – a shadow, or Sons of the Moon. He served as deterrent used by generations of emperors who’d counted on their services to counter a threat worse than any assassins to have ever existed in Imperial Japan.
The Haduat.
He was instructed to blend in the crowd as an aristocrat or a peasant and hide his weapons at his side just in case there’d been an attack by a Haduat and in the rarest occasion, a Saduat.
He remembered how the first emperor who’d kissed death because of a Haduat; Emperor Jimmu, did so a century ago. Jimmu had called on a very powerful Mystic in his deathbed, who’d been able to heal in real time. The mystic was named Baku Tenenbaum, an outlander, who then was able to rescue him from mortal peril.
Mystics were later forbidden by The Shogun but never made officially illegal on the books by the Emperors who followed Jimmu. The samurai had never met one, but if he did, he’d probably have to sever their head for essential law keeping.
The prime minister, Prince Goro Fujita, came next in the royal procession. He was no priority to the samurai in black. The emperor was his task. Hayato Kojima, the Emissary to the Shogun, who had a purple coach went after the prime minister’s coach accompanied by an even numbered amount of royal guards. General Yuma Kojima, the Commander of the Armed Forces, choosing to be frugal as he often did, sat next to his cousin in Lord Hayato’s coach.
Though there were military and royal guards there, the samurai in black knew his role in the story as the real last call should they all fail his master, and according to the legend, the specialist assassin had succeeded every single time except for Jimmu.
He stared deep at the peasants once more for what they looked like and how they acted to him seemed strange. Was it the Sake or was it too much Doire Roots going to their heads? To the roof above he saw dingy houses which needed repair. The street lights were in need of repair, the pungent scent of street food, and dancing entertainers distracted every sense in his control. They dressed as green as Argwars, bright yellow as Ansolis, dark as the Relic of Death, as beautiful as the Daudanes.
The people hadn’t celebrated the end of The Great War Era, which many elders felt was a worse tragedy. Worse for those who were old enough to recall the brutality. As the imperials passed, the samurai saw a group of twenty women, some dressed in black and some in white sheets, sprinkling green scaly flakes on the ground and over the crowd.
Their image reminded the samurai of the Sacred Children of the South; those green and scaly beings were once hunted down for godly treasures. They’d gone into extinction by the time he was a teenager. The SCOTS, they were called for short, used to be spotted all over the Northern Isles, but of late, they’d been thought of as mythic creatures, mere folklore, and another atrocity born of the mind of zealot menfolk. More real to him than the monster hunt, he chuckled. Yet the annual giving of thanks had its own weird beginnings.
He’d heard long ago, as a child working the fields, of the Insane Pretender Emperor, named Asahi Itsuki, who’d ordered a division of his most loyal men to slaughter the entire Village of Hyuga. A total of thirty thousand perished by sundown.
The village was near the mouth of the Oyodo River, where women and children of peasants had refused to accept him as God Almighty. His men had already killed twenty thousand just on their way to Hyuga, many of them pagans, before being stopped by his own generals over their payment and land disputes. It seemed greed prevailed over bloodletting.
Many more had defected after being sickened by the sheer enormity of the carnage, and a regiment of Army troops led by then Colonel Yuma Kojima made sure Itsuki never saw the next daybreak. At the end of the ordeal, over fifty thousand peasants were dead all over the Kagoshima Province during the Insane Pretender’s infamous massacre.
There’d been so many bodies, that the river water, which emptied near the village, turned to a crimson color for miles upstream frightening many residents in the area, for which it was later called the Crimson Massacre.
The samurai in black had read only brief notes on scrolls, but he remembered it as if he were there. It all started with several groups of demented male nomads known collectively as the Kam, the Ari, the Rams and the Gori and sixteen unnamed groups of female nomads.
They were once a simple folk who roamed many village outskirts, avoiding ‘other’ human contact, as disintegrated families. They remained disunited and hungry until they intermarried and joined forces as one forming the mess which later became one of the most powerful clans in Japan.
They were Clan Kamari.
For centuries there was plenty of bloodless infighting among the Ari, Rams, Kam, and Gori for supremacy over the sixteen unnamed female tribes. This stopped when a new princess arose among them from the blood of an emperor.
Jimmu, then Emperor of Japan, couldn’t keep his fly shut but he’d refused to acknowledge the princess. Through this princess, they had a claim to the throne regardless of the denial. She was said to be the most beautiful Kamari clansman ever brought forth to the world of the living, and if ever a man had met a Kamari clansman he wouldn’t beg to differ. They were an especially ugly lot according to the text of the time, with the women often being mistaken as good-looking men while the men were often confused with ugly women.
The samurai in black veered his mind away from ancient stories, as they reached the end of the parade. The royal family bid their people farewell and headed back to Kyoto. The partaking of drink between peasant and merchant quickly ceased as they replaced their old façades, though the party went on in large segregated groups. Towards the end of the festival when all men and women had gone too drunk to walk, and children into their homes, the samurai in black was brought a contract for a young peasant in the North, so he headed straight to his sail team on the coast.
That night, The White Horned Devil paid the city a visit. A single candle fell from a drunkard’s hand onto a cesspool, igniting a bright green spark; Osaka began to burn.
Only after a mortal has lost all things
Will he turn his eyes North
And beg us for a sweet fling
With the kingdom of the South
Pleading to be pulled by a string
His heart opens and praises pour out his mouth
Like a lovely harp his honeyed melody shall ring
And he’ll yearn again for days filled with simpler things
- The Great Oracle, Canto One
