Landscape

The garden is silent, and I am alone. There is a strange peace here, amongst the stones and trees. The air is still, almost rare. Not a breath of wind disturbs the branches or causes wrinkles on the surface of the pond. The doves are quiet in their roost. Even the fish lie torpid.

My brushes are ranged around my ink stone beside a cup of water. These are all placed on top of my paper, upon which nothing is written and nothing is attempted. It seems a pity to fracture the peace, and so my hands are still, clasped lightly in my lap as I sit.

I can smell wood smoke. I know that, if I were to look up, I would be able to see it filtering through the trees, catching blue-grey on the last few rays of the dying sun. It is a homely, welcoming scent, but it holds other meanings for me now. It is not the scent of death – no, that is both cold and hot: cold stone, cold water, cold steel, and then the heat of shame and love and blood – but wood smoke is to me the scent of grief.

I am numb, but still I feel. I wish I had lost my sense of smell.

There is movement in this garden: a frozen movement, the kind that flashes past quicker than the eye can see, or so slow as to evade perception by its muted crawl, inching along like mountain ice. This movement fools its viewer into believing that it is stationary.

The movement is both static and fluid, a contradiction not often found and so prized more highly. I turn my head towards it. What is it – What could it be, but art?

On one side of the courtyard are the wooden screens that Sesshu painted years ago. They are the monastery's treasures, and yet they stand in the cloister where the elements, if determined, will get at them. When I first came here, I tried to move the screens back into the shadows to protect the images. The abbot stopped me. All things in life are transient, he said; even the greatest works of art will one day be as dust. He told me to leave the screens where they stood, but to make sure to angle them so that visitors in the courtyard would be able to enjoy the paintings.

I was anxious, and worried incessantly. Sesshu's work is so very fine. The images he'd painted upon the screens were full of life. It hurt to think that they would fade beneath the bright sunshine on this mountaintop.

In time, I came to realise that it was not the death of the paintings that I was mourning, but my own. I had not thought that I was afraid of dying, not after what I had survived, what I had seen.

Later still, I realised that it was not so much my death that I feared, but the deaths of those I loved.

In art, we can forget ourselves. That is what I was taught by Kenji. It was one of the many things he taught me, although I was unaware of it at the time. Back then – and it was not so long ago, a matter of months rather than years - I thought that art was a reward for my learning of harder lessons.

Ichiro would chastise me for spoiling the paper with my scribbles – an elegant crane, a flight of sparrows, a face drawn from memory – and I would protest at his anger, saying that my hand had picked up the brush of its own accord, had painted of its own volition.

Ichiro did not believe me. He thought I was malingering.

"If he is to be a lord, a proper lord," Ichiro would complain, but quietly, out of earshot or so he thought, "then Takeo must learn how to write!"

My lord Shigeru agreed. I must learn everything, and quickly, he said; I was to be his heir, and it would not do to disobey him in any respect.

I admired Shigeru, loved him, even; and so I tried to learn. I struggled on with Ichiro's lessons, nodding over the books and scrolls he set upon the cherry-wood table, hopelessly muddling my history. What hope did I have in understanding the country's history when my own was so confused?

I continued to draw on my paper and on the margins of the books. Ichiro scowled and threatened, and then carried away my drawings. I thought that he must burn them, or throw them away; but instead he took them to Kenji and Shigeru.

They came to me one day with a sheaf of paper. It was dry, and it crackled and whispered between Shigeru's fingers when he held it out to me.

"The boy has talent," Kenji said. He sounded proud. "It is more proof that he is one of us, a Kikuta. Art is a skill of the Tribe, and it makes good cover for a spy. Who would suspect a lowly artist?"

My hearing did not need to be so sharp to know what they were thinking. Their expressions told me instead. I might be a dunce at my studies, and Shigeru might despair of my fledgling swordsmanship, but I was of the Tribe; and the blood of the Tribe had gifted me with extraordinary hearing, light feet, the ability to split myself and to throw a false shadow to confuse my enemies - and now, it seemed, it had given me the gift of art.

"Let him continue with his studies," Shigeru said. He was a cautious, practical man in almost all things, and though he loved me, I was also a pawn to him. He smiled at me: "But let us also encourage his art. It may prove useful in the future."

I do not think it has proved useful, but it has provided distraction on many occasions. My first visit to Tereyama was spent copying the work of Sesshu. The artist had been a guest here for ten years. In that time he painted the wooden screens that are still arranged so elegantly beneath the cloistered walkway surrounding the courtyard. He also designed the garden, where now I sit.

It is more beautiful than a dream, but for me dreams have become nightmares. They trap me in memories I cannot escape – my lord Shigeru, my lady Maruyama, and my own love, Kaede. Odd that my nightmares involve not enemies but those for whom I feel affection.

The garden, however beautiful, is also a trap, like a cage. I find no peace here in this restful place. As soon as I leave Tereyama, I will have responsibility thrust upon me. Debts will have to be paid and collected, but I do not think that I am ready to become an assassin. Not yet. Not again. It is surely enough that I killed Shigeru.

Shigeru's head is buried here. He lies with his brother Takeshi, as he wished. I fulfilled my last promise to him, to bring him the head of Iida and to place it on their grave. I hope their spirits are pleased.

There. That is the thought that rules me most: the memory of Shigeru's death. My hands unclasp, grope for brushes. I push aside the ink stone and cup, smooth out the paper upon the wall. I do all this consciously, but it feels as if I am watching myself from a great distance. I hear the silence close around me even as I break it with tiny sounds – the rustle-sweep of the paper, the gentle tink of the brush tapped against the ink stone, the swill of water in the cup.

At last I am ready. I do not think about what I will paint. Not this time.

In the past I had copied Sesshu to gain understanding. My own paintings were so flat in comparison. They did not leap from the paper as if alive. No matter how hard I looked, how much I tried to perfect the stroke of the brush this way and that, the image refused to move for me. Sesshu's paintings, even when caught, still moved; they still lived. Indeed, one of his screens was blank, and it was said that the birds he'd painted there were so lifelike that they had flown away.

"A painter can capture time and make it stand still," Kenji had said to me on that first visit to Tereyama; and he was right, it was true. What he did not tell me then, what I found out later for myself, was that a great painter, a master like Sesshu, could create time within a void.

I wish I could turn back time. I wish I could stop it. When I paint, I seek out the state of trance that comes upon me when I use the gifts of the Tribe. When I hunt and kill another human being, I have to stay on the right side of the trance; I cannot allow myself to sink into it, for fear that I will prove my undoing.

But in my painting, I search for the void. I want to rush headlong into it, into the crack of time where we all exist together in safety: Shigeru, Lady Maruyama, Kaede, Makoto, and myself. It would be easy for me to draw our likenesses, a family portrait of sorts, and for me to pin it up onto the wall of my room. It would become a false god, for I know I would worship it. Who would not worship sanctuary and perfect bliss?

But it would not be real, and that knowledge would eat at my heart until it destroyed me.

I paint until the sun has sunk down beyond the horizon, and the garden is hazy with twilight. There is sound, now, to match the movements of my brush. I can hear the distant chime of bells, the murmur of conversation and the slap of sandaled feet. I can hear the sigh of the cedars and the screech of a night bird. From somewhere within the monastery, I can hear – if I close my eyes and concentrate – I can hear the sound of the flute.

Makoto plays the flute sometimes. He played for me when I was too full of grief at Shigeru's death that I did not know where to turn. I had grasped after the notes, a pure, sweet sound, and I had followed the music like a fish on a line. He plays the flute in the same way as I paint: neither of us are expert, but we are both good. Good enough to recognise art in one another; good enough that we learned to forget ourselves in admiration of each other's gifts.

I put down my brush, sighing as I move. I deliberately block out the sound of the flute. I can still smell the wood smoke, but it is less now. It does not bother me so much, but out of habit I lean forwards and inhale the scent of my painting. The ink is still fresh, smeared roughly over the paper in places while in others it is watered to the barest trace of shadow.

I sit back and examine my painting with a critical gaze. It is unlike anything I have produced before: a landscape, curiously empty. I do not recognise it from the real world, but I know it from the floating world, from the visions we carry within us.

In the background there is a mountaintop, pale-washed and rounded, three-crowned. In the foreground is a tree, its roots growing over a rock. It looks fragile, as if it clings to life; but one look at its branches shows this to be a lie. This is a healthy, vigorous tree. Its foliage is thick – ink splattered hard upon the paper, savage lines cutting across to measure branches – and the tree is upright and sturdy.

I look at the painting for some time, until I am aware of the bell that calls the monks to supper. There are no rules or expectations placed upon me while I stay here, but if I do not make an appearance at the table, then someone will come to find me. I do not want anyone to see this painting. I am not sure what it means, save that it is the first time I have painted a landscape.

At first I am disappointed. I usually draw people, or birds, or animals – creatures that move, that change. I tell myself that landscapes always remain the same, immutable, unchangeable. How can I hope to capture time and make it stand still when I paint a tree, a rock, a mountain?

And then I wonder if I touched the void as I was at work. A landscape is a thing of slow change and swift change, the collapse of the mountain beneath the elements and the change of the tree's brocade within the wheel of the seasons. I look again at my painting and wonder at what it could mean.

I allow myself to hope that it means an end to my nightmares.

Shigeru and Takeshi are buried in the monastery's graveyard, a place of deep shadow even during the day. The trees are tall and knotted, blocking out the light. My lord's tomb lies beneath a twisted cypress, a tree so aged that its bark is silver. I lift a candle to examine the tree, and then set the tiny flame down upon the grave. I bow three times, after the manner of those who follow the Enlightened One. In my heart I still say the prayers of the Hidden. I am sure that Shigeru understands.

I crouch down and take the scroll from the front of my robe. The paper is dry now. The ink, where it was applied thickest, smudges slightly, dustily, onto my fingers as I unroll the painting.

Even in the advancing darkness I can see the landscape. The mountain is obscured by night, but I can see the tree clinging to the rock; I can see how strong and determined it grows. One day its roots will crush the rock beneath it. One day I shall paint this landscape again and make it anew.

I roll up the paper again, as tight as I can; and then I scratch at the ground until I have dug a shallow hole. I give thanks to Shigeru and Takeshi as I dig, and then I bury the painting in their grave.

I leave the graveyard without a backwards glance.

It was only later I realised that, for the first time in weeks, I had not wept that day.

end