The Festival of the Divine Prince
by Fox in the Stars
for down, Yuletide 2013 fanfic exchange
based on Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit by Uehashi Nahoko and Production I.G.
Summer had arrived in Kosenkyo, and the sun lingered long above the rooftops of the city before making way for the festival lanterns to show off their colors in the dusk.
By that time, Tanda's work was done, the herbs he'd stored up for the day all sold. Even with the Star Readers declaring arbitrary dates — using arcane astronomical rules as cover in a plan to co-opt the Midsummer Festival and slowly move it back to the Spring Equinox, or so he'd heard through Torogai — festivals unfailingly brought peddlers and performers from everywhere, and Tanda had a good trade in herbs to the wandering medicine-sellers who put on shows with weapons to attract customers. Thinking back over those men and their whirling, tasseled blades, he couldn't help wondering which ones Balsa would have looked twice at, if any.
Then he couldn't help wondering when she would be back from her journey to Kanbal.
The dense crowds were making their way toward the center of the city to see the royal pageant on the wide boulevard that separated the nobles of Ogi no Naka from the commoners of Ogi no Shimo. Tanda had already seen that version of the Divine Prince Chagum's story performed once and wasn't eager to see it again, so he took the time to wander among the vendors that were left, now that the streets were clear enough to actually see their faces. When he tired of it, he could go to Touya and Saya's shop to spend the night. He was a bit weary already, but some thin thread of the festival spirit had taken hold of him and whispered that there was something left to see, something that was here for just this day and that he wouldn't want to miss if only he knew what it was...
A red Kanbalese tunic caught his attention, but the next moment he was chiding himself for his silliness — only out of the corner of his eye could he have mistaken its owner for Balsa. It was a Kanbalese woman, yes, but a short woman with a full, square face; she was stationed at one of the vendor stalls, tending a sizzling vat of oil with a wire-mesh dipper. A man beside her was only visible down to his shoulders, which rocked back and forth as if he were kneading dough.
A rich, savory potato aroma floated toward him as the woman dipped golden rolls out of the oil. "Fresh losso from Kanbal!" she called out. "Hot and crisp, and just wait until you taste the filling! You've never had anything like it! Hurry while they're hot!"
Balsa might be eating one right now... Well, Tanda decided, after a good day of sales, he could afford to indulge his curiosity.
He was halfway to the stall when he was suddenly stopped by a familiar grip on his shoulder. "You never told me you liked those," came the matching voice. "I should have asked my aunt to teach me how to make them."
"Balsa!"
He whipped around and there she was, in a Yogoese kimono with her spear slung over her shoulder and the lanterns' colors shining off her ebony hair. A smart smile quirked her lips; a wry, affectionate laugh twinkled from her keen, dark eyes. For a moment Tanda let the mingled emotions wash over him: joy, relief, resigned consternation that she thought she could step back into his life as if nothing had happened...
"You made it back in one piece for once," he said at last, quite casually; she could step back into his life just like that, and they both knew it. "You met your aunt?"
Balsa nodded. "I hope I can introduce you someday. She's a healer, too; I think you two would get along." Her smile softened. An unmistakable hint of melancholy passed over her face, but it also suggested some sort of deep fulfillment.
"Did something happen?"
Her eyes lowered for a moment, dipping deeper into that bittersweet place. "Too much to tell you about here. But soon."
As they settled into the line at the stall, Balsa easily darted to attention and looked down the street at the horizon above the rooftops. Smoke was billowing into the sky, lit from below with the color of flames; from that direction, part of the crowd noise in the distance had changed.
"The pageant must be starting," Tanda said, brushing it off.
"Burning the effigy of Ninomiya Palace," Balsa observed.
"You already know how it goes, then?"
"Everyone who lives near the main roads knows how it goes. The county magistrates are all putting it on to show their loyalty." Her tone was flat, but she kept her face toward the distant orange glow.
Tanda turned his back to it contrarily. "I saw it the first time they put it on last year. It's really just embarrassing..."
Balsa didn't argue; she only looked at him, with the kind of steady gaze that had once made a band of slavers admit defeat. Tanda stiffened his jaw, but in the end she threw him over with an ingenuous lift of her brows.
They took their time eating the losso and making their way through the crowd, long enough that before the fake palace came into view, it had already crumbled into embers. Further ahead, Tanda heard the exclamations of awe; they must have come to the part when the dancer playing Chagum walked over the coals. The sound of the crowd gave way to the words of the story, not sung in the kind of simple melody the common people would use, but in an arcane, elliptically droning chant.
As they told it, a spawn of the Water Demon slain at the founding of the country had come to take revenge by possessing the youngest prince, but little did the monster know that Prince Chagum was the First Mikado Torugaru reborn. He had recognized the Water Demon, lured it into the Mikado's precinct where the pure blessing of the Gods would weaken its power, then set fire to his own palace, sacrificing his life to cleanse the land of the demon's curse and take the monster with him to the underworld.
When Balsa and Tanda came close enough to see the platform erected for the pageant, the dancer playing Prince Sagum was dancing across it alone. Wearing a veil lest even an imitation of the royal gaze strike onlookers blind, he hurled himself to one corner and then another in fluid yet spasmodic movements designed to express an extremity of grief.
So great was the older prince's grief, the cantors declared, that he summoned a Yakoo Spell Weaver whom he had heard could pierce the veil of the "underworld."
At the edge of the dance floor, a smaller platform was raised up, bearing a theatrical caricature of a Spell Weaver and two Yakoo assistants.
Balsa laughed. "Is that supposed to be Master Torogai?"
"That would make the other two us, if it was," Tanda pointed out.
"May be," she grinned.
"Anyway, I wouldn't want to have been that Star Reader she talks to after she saw it for the first time." Tanda had gotten enough of an earful just being in Torogai's path around then.
"And of course," he complained, "it's the prince who goes to the Yakoo who has to die in the end."
"That's true. I suppose that is how they would tell it." Balsa's amused smile faded, but that was all. She understood the significance, but she knew too much about the ways of royalty to be shocked by a merely denigrating story.
In the meantime, the Spell Weaver, in gratitude for the blessings the Mikado's line had brought to the land, had agreed to send Prince Sagum into the underworld to search for his brother. She gave him two large paper flowers — no doubt intended as shigu salua flowers — one for each brother to allow them to return, and so that the demons would not recognize and attack him as one blessed by the Gods, she disguised the prince's spirit in the form of a nahji bird. The two assistants swept forward and threw a white feathered cloak over the dancer-Sagum's shoulders.
"They also made a law," Tanda explained. "Since the prince turned into a nahji, killing a nahji is treated like killing a prince." In another hundred years, there would probably be no more rattling bones across a village entrance anywhere — which seemed a small price to pay if it meant the nahji would always be there for Nyunga Ro Im, but the thought still left a little empty place inside him.
As Prince Sagum descended into the underworld, a thick curtain of white smoke rose up around the dance floor. The next thing the onlookers saw was the Water Demon, a hideous, bright blue contraption manned by a team of coordinated dancers who pounced out from the smoke, first here, then there, raising squeals of fear and delight from the crowd.
Tanda shook his head into his hand, both deeply ashamed and deeply grateful that Nyunga Ro Im either didn't notice or chose to forgive this nonsense. Through the noise all around them, he could barely hear Balsa chuckling at him.
When he looked up again, swirling gouts of flame were flashing from the haze. At last the smoke cleared, revealing eight dancers who warded the water demon away from the center of their circle with twirls of those flame-throwing spears that had been made to fight the Rarunga; the spirits of the legendary Warriors Eight had returned to fight alongside the reincarnated spirit of their Mikado — Chagum, who now stood on another raised platform at the center, holding a replica of the Mikado's sword.
The crowd cheered as the heroes of legend did intricate, graceful battle before their eyes. Tanda just sighed and crossed his arms. "It's different when you think to yourself, 'I've met those people,'" he remarked.
Balsa regarded the dancers thoughtfully. "I don't know if I've met any of those eight," — she leaned closer to his ear — "but if the 'Princes' took off the veils, I think you'd recognize them."
Hunters, Tanda realized. No doubt Balsa could put names to them just by the way they moved. Even to Tanda's less-trained eyes, now that he looked, they were obviously formidable men. When "Chagum" began to dance, despite his slight figure he made the huge, visibly-heavy sword look like a toy in his hands. When "Sagum" reappeared, dancing nimbly in and out among the warriors and dodging the Water Demon's jaws, teasing the audience with his last-second escapes, the intended feeling of watching a noble innocent in peril was lost on Tanda, not only because he saw through the theatrics, but because he saw that the man behind the veil couldn't shed an assured and dangerous air.
However fake it looked, the dance of danger reached its tragic climax. The Water Demon pursued Sagum onto the central platform, and there, just as he had reached his brother's side, upraised for all to see, the monster snatched one of the flowers from his hand and ground it to bits in its jaws. Torn paper petals flew from its mouth on the breeze as the crowd cried out in sorrow and rage.
Their revenge came quickly; Chagum struck at the Water Demon with the Mikado's sword, and it fell away, coiling on itself. The demon and the Warriors Eight resumed their battle dance, but the demon's movements had changed, its dancers' steps coiled more tightly as if it were writhing in pain. At last, after a few final, flourishing thrashes, the Warriors subdued it and presented it to Chagum, who raised the sword and struck off its head. As the Water Demon died, it proclaimed that another of its spawn would return every hundred years to take revenge on New Yogo, but, the cantors declared, come though they might, their kind would never be a match for the Gods or for the Mikado who had the Gods' blessing.
The time had come to return from the underworld. With only one magical flower remaining, Chagum tried to send Sagum in his stead, saying that it was only right for the younger brother to defer to the elder, but Sagum refused. He confessed that had defiled himself with Yakoo magic and shed his divine form for that of an animal; no doubt this was why the Gods had allowed one of the flowers to be lost. Chagum must be the one to return and bring the blessing of the Gods to the people of New Yogo.
Sagum, the Warriors, and even the remains of the Water Demon danced off the platform, sweeping around Chagum in a widening spiral before departing. When they had all disappeared, a blast of horns rang out. Banners that had been hung overlooking the pageant were drawn aside to reveal another platform, far higher than any of the others, where stood another veiled figure, this one in the role of Chagum's father, the Mikado himself. He gestured with magnanimous sweeps of his flowing sleeves as the cantors supplied his voice, proclaiming Chagum as the rebirth of the first Mikado Torugaru and hero of the land, and calling upon the people to cheer in veneration of their Divine Prince.
The crowd eagerly took up the call, but Balsa and Tanda watched in silence. Tanda only looked at the figure of "Chagum" standing starkly alone on the platform. The moment was supposed to present him in glory, but it struck Tanda with a cool, hollow, irresistible shot of loneliness; he could only hope that, wherever the real prince was, his life didn't truly look like that.
Of all the lies that had been marched across that stage, the idea that Chagum was standing there before their eyes suddenly seemed like the cruelest lie of all, for reasons that wouldn't matter to anyone in a hundred years but that to him in this moment mattered more than all the others. He pulled a deep breath and tried to blink the feeling away, chiding himself for his sentimentality.
Balsa's hand came to rest on his shoulder, as firm and steadying as any man's, and yet Tanda could feel conducted through her touch the same empty ache he was feeling himself. "Let's go," she said. "Touya will be out late tonight. Should we give him a nice surprise when he gets back to the shop?"
"Let's. Saya might be home already." As usual, Balsa seemed to know everything without Tanda having to say a word — well, not everything, but the practical moment-by-moment things, and sometimes they were what mattered most.
When he'd said, a year and a half ago now, "Let's live together, the three of us," he had been thinking foremost of himself and Balsa, but now, as the two of them made their way out from the thick of the crowd cheering the Divine Prince Chagum, he keenly felt the void they were sharing between them, a void in the shape of a courageous, intelligent boy.
Why don't you marry her? it asked him.
Tanda could only answer it the way he had answered Chagum, the real Chagum:
It's complicated.
— Because the real answer couldn't fit into one breath.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to.
I think I already have.
終
Author's Notes: I am very tardy in crossposting this, sorry!
This is mostly anime canon, but I consulted the glossary of book one and assumed the events of book two. (BTW, if you haven't read book two? Run don't walk — it's awesome. Must study Japanese harder so I can read the rest of the series...). The detail of weapon-show medicine-peddlers was lifted from The Water Margin but seemed fitting for the Moribito world.
Didn't make it into the text, but in my head, that's Jin playing Sagum in the pageant. Giving his life for Chagum was an aspiration for him, well, now he gets to do it every Spring (even if he does suck at not looking like a badass while he does it).
I had long been curious what kind of story the government was going to come up with to square this circle, so this is my attempt to answer that question, of how they might try to weave in some of the important bits of the truth that needed to be preserved while not admitting publicly that they had ever been wrong about anything.
Moribito is one of my favorites, and it's always been one that felt like it was just on the edge of my "range," if you will. Some story worlds I can't wait to wade into and play with, but Moribito is one that can feel so beautiful and perfect that turning my own hand to it is more intimidating. I'm pleased with how this story came out, though, so thank you to my recipient for pushing me to stretch myself, and I hope you enjoy it!