Rhapsodies in the Dark: Chapter 4
The Warmth of an Illusion
"I don't trust him! Not one bit." Takemura barked as he downed a goblet full of wine and aristocratically smeared his lips across the sleeve of his tunic. Pig. That was the first thing the other man in the room thought upon looking at the Commander of the Northern Armies. But a rich and powerful pig.
"No one ever said that Tenpou Gensui was a trustworthy man. No one ever said that he was a trusting man either. I bet the feeling is mutual."
Takemura nodded gracefully, resembling a marionette in the hands of an arthritic puppeteer. "And that General Kenren!" He drank another gulp to accentuate his hate, aristocratically spilling wine down his chin.
"Just be thankful they don't even know each other. That would be the end of things."
"I don't give a crap about that drunken slob!"
"Of course, sir." General Uraga of the Western Army agreed. After all, he was paid to agree. "With all due respect, sir, I do not believe that you called me here just to complain about my superior."
"What was that?!"
Uraga rolled his eyes. Nothing worse than a man who goes half deaf the more he gets drunk.
"WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, SIR, I WANT TO KNOW WHY the fuck," he added discreetly. "YOU GRACE ME WITH YOUR PRESENCE HERE TONIGHT!!??"
"Oh. Is that all?"
"It is, late sir!"
"A servant told me that he went to meet with Konzen Douji and hasn't returned since..."
Who would have thought? Uraga thought to himself, but before his mind took even one step into the gutter, Takemura's booming voice pulled him back to the shores of propriety. More or less.
"Send a man into Tenpou Gensui's room. Search for anything suspicious, but don't spend too much time on it. Just make sure to slip this into the wine bottle."
Takemura rolled a small vial across the table. The other looked at it, then at the Commander, a knot the size a glacier forming in his stomach. This was well across the line of mutiny. Would anybody fall for it? Konzen Douji would certainly argue against it and not even a hundred men had the authority to pit their political power against that of the bureaucrat's. But given the current circumstances, it might just come off as believable.
"IT'S GOING TO LOOK LIKE SUICIDE, SIR!" Just as much as he loved the idea of payoff, Uraga hated the twisted politics and under-the-table dealings he had to do to get it.
"WELL DO YOU WANT IT TO LOOK LIKE MURDER!? AND KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN! DO YOU WANT THE ENTIRE CITY TO FIND OUT?"
"But sir..." Uraga whispered, memories of his military ethics course jabbing at his conscience.
"WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO SUCCEED THE MAN? WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PAYOFF IS, ANYWAY?"
"Oh." Now that you put it that way…
Shien opened his eyes upon hearing the sound of jangling chains hanging over him like a vigilant ghost. Apart from the isolated resounding, the room was static and colder than when Tenpou had been here.
Ever since losing his sight, Shien gained a strange awareness surrounding the nature of things in heaven: without the façade of cherry blossoms, marble statues, manicured gardens, and bubbling fountains, heaven was how it felt now- static and cold. Or perhaps this was merely the musings of one who had spent too much time on earth where the ground locked up the heat of the sun like a precious secret and vibrated with its life even during the darkest of nights, even beneath a blanket of snow.
He thought of clinking ice when he heard the chains again, but this time they were farther away, outside the window. Despite thinking 'ice,' despite thinking 'ghost,' a furtive warmth held fast to that sound, bringing Shien to remember the soft moss clinging to the bases of Under Heaven trees. In that one hallucination, because surely I must be imagining this, there pulsated more life than in all lands of heaven.
It rang again even farther away. This time he decided to follow it. His head turned towards the door. Yes, it was time to leave.
Not much of a moment after he had stepped out, Uraga had broken the lock and walked in.
Strange, the intruder thought, the bed's still warm. But he shrugged it off when an open wine bottle caught his eye. "Let's drink to my promotion, shall we? We'll give you a grand funeral, just like they give the kings of Earth."
That man…
Shien bit his lip as he silently crouched outside the window. He knew he started hating that man long before this moment. With a cleaned memory, Shien probably could have forgiven him for the past, but now he was left with new reasons to do the exact same thing.
Who was this man? Where was Tenpou? What was going to happen to him?
These questions were soaked up by the night when the chains resumed their distant serenade. While the rest of the world receded into the plane of his un-memory, Shien plunged into the darkness to follow the warmth of an illusion.
It seemed that with every step towards that warmth, a word was remembered or perhaps a face. The only thing he could do was to continue walking until he felt his feet recognize the already trodden path of what was forgotten.
The chain-link rattle Zenon had made for the child fell off the kitchen table and jolted him awake in his chair. Reaching over to pick it up, he gauged by the shortening candle that he had been asleep for only an hour or so. Beside that was a partly empty bottle of wine. The sweetest wine ever tasted in this world. The most forbidden because it was stolen from heaven. Beside that was a partly empty glass.
"Are you sure, Zenon?" she said tentatively as she swirled the drink in her glass over and over again. "Won't we get in trouble for this?"
They'd most likely kill you, if they found you. "I don't care. Drink it. One hundred years with you aren't enough for me." But I won't let that happen. Ever.
"The villagers will think I'm a witch...for never aging. And the child..."
"Then move away from the villagers."
"Zenon, is it because you are so afraid to be mortal with me?" her voice came in a whisper that rippled the smooth surface of the wine.
"Does immortality frighten you?"
"Yes."
"Then 'yes' is my answer as well." Zenon ran a tired hand through his hair and sighed, plucking the glass from her hand and placing it on the table. The dry thud it made upon contact with the wood sounded like death. "Pregnant women shouldn't be drinking alcohol, anyway. Get some sleep. I just have to finish this before I go up again. There's something I have to talk to someone about."
"Ah yes. You needn't be so specific, Zenon. My head is starting to hurt from all the details," she joked.
A ghostly kiss at the back of his neck and she retreated into the bedroom, her careful footsteps betraying that she walked for two. The door squeaked. Got to fix that too, Zenon made a mental note for himself.
He worked for another two hours on a set of three rattles: one filled with shells, the second with pebbles, the last with chain links. Then he fell asleep. Just like that; and upon waking up he found that she had gone and made herself immortal while he wasn't watching.
They say that anything brought down to earth from heaven takes on earthly tastes, like a still pool that has no color save for that which reflects from it. But not this wine that sat here now. Zenon slowly drank the rest of the glass with a sense of peace, placing his lips at the exact spot where hers touched when she drank. It tasted better than heaven and better than earth.
Absently, he gently shook the rattle and looked into the bedroom where his wife slept. She had forgotten to close the door on her second trip to the kitchen. A cradle that had yet to be painted rocked with the entering night breeze from the open window. Can you hear this? Zenon asked the unborn child. I want you to have this so you can laugh and play and mock the gods that detest you. They'll hear the chains that bind them. They'll hate you because you'll be happy when they never were. When they still don't know how.
The world was silent as he walked away from the small house with hands stuck in his pockets and gun slung over his shoulder. Tenpou must be expecting him soon with a report. No doubt, the man was on to something if today's findings were indeed genuine.
"Who knows, I might even get paid for this," Zenon said contentedly to himself but stopped short when he heard the jangling of chains. His head snapped back towards the house. The lights were still off. "Who's there?" He was ready to shoot, but the abrasiveness of his voice caused whatever it was to run back into the bushes.
Zenon dismissed it as an escaped farm animal or a dog still on its leash.
"Gotta have fucking nerves of steel to live down here," he muttered. "How does she do it?"
The image of Kasei's face appeared in his mind as a bleary watercolor, shifting every time he blinked.
"Are you sure this is a wise thing to do?"
"Oh, I'm positive that this is stupid," Kasei's voice cut through the night air, crisp as the distant clanking chains. "But it's right. He was only a child, not like the other itan. Though that's not to say that I have a clean conscience about wiping them out either. I wonder…if they're as much a threat to heaven as Uraga says they are."
Hard green eyes looked towards the dark void of the forest where they allowed the boy to escape, wrists and ankles bound by steel. "The limiting power of the diadem and chains should eliminate any threat he may pose to the local populace."
Shien said nothing, only squinted his eyes and drew his bow. In the darkness, the retreating shadow melted into its surroundings, but he could feel enough of the boy's life energy to point a poisoned arrow at it. "If what you're worried about is eliminating threats..."
"What are you doing?" Kasei cried. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Eliminating the threat." As the energy signal got weaker, Shien pulled the string farther back. "What is right is not my concern. As a soldier, and as your servant, it is my obligation not to be concerned."
He let loose, but Kasei was quick to jolt the bow and the arrow went flying into the leaves.
"Kasei-sa-"
Kasei struck Shien in the face and he took it silently, without a fight. "I said, what the hell are you doing?" Kasei repeated indignantly, his lips forming a grim line on an otherwise gentle face. "You disobeyed my orders."
"Just the same. You're disobeying orders as well."
"So that gives you the right to reciprocate the favor?"
"What is right is not my concern." Only you, even though at that moment, Kasei was glaring at him with as much venom as he could muster, which wasn't much.
When it came to hate, the young man was like a leaky bucket. It would drain out of his system before he found any use for it, and when he finally found one, there wasn't enough hate there to create a sufficient impact. Much like a child...Though that didn't keep Shien from feeling the instant coldness that descended upon the both of them with the other's change of mood.
At that moment, a soldier ran up to meet them from behind. "Kasei-sama! Uraga Taishou has arrived. He wants to see you."
"I'll return to camp shortly," Kasei answered then turned to Shien, his voice lowering. "Whether you like it or not, Shien, it's your concern now."
Shien watched his retreating figure. The boy just didn't seem to get it. "Lie well, Kasei-sama."
He was drifting off to sleep when Kasei slipped into his tent and into his bed. Shien could feel him trembling at his back, his breathing erratic. "Shien, we have to leave camp and return. It's safer there. Tenpou will make sure that nothing happens to us. He'll make sure-"
"What happened?" Shien whispered as he turned over, only to be struck by the sight of Kasei's brused face. He grit his teeth at the smell of blood, but his voice took on a new softness and he pulled Kasei closer. "You fool. You shouldn't have let him do this to you."
"I lost my temper."
"I figured."
"And I didn't listen to you. You told me to lie well to him."
"Yes. I hope you know what I meant. I was being literal. Very literal." he emphasized.
"He wasn't." Kasei clutched the front of Shien's tunic and buried his face there. "He wanted me to lie down for him. The bastard. I told him to go fuck himself and leave us the hell alone, but I know he won't. In the end, I acted like the kid you always said I was and signed our death warrant out of selfishness. God, I'm sorry."
"No need. With the path we chose, this was inevitable."
Shien had said nothing afterwards, only tightened his embrace around him. You're too young for this.
It was such an easy thing to kill. Perhaps it was the fact that he was an archer and never took a life at close range. The guilt never touched him and he was blind to it due to distance. But the longer he lay like this with Kasei, the more he delighted in the fantasy of stabbing Uraga to death.
He gently stroked Kasei's face. "I'll kill him while smiling."
But none of them ever made it to first light. Before dawn even hit, they heard the cry of wolves and everything turned bloody and hellish. The sun rose, but nobody could see it.
By the time Shien had reached the gates of the holy city, all the sand in the murky pool of his memory had settled and he now had a clear picture of what he didn't want to see. Maybe it was better not to have remembered any of it. "What I fool I was…" To have survived this long without saving a single life I cared for.
"And you're still a fucking fool, you dolt." a voice ripped through his night. "You're lucky I'm the only one here to see you be such an idiot. Otherwise all three of us'll be on the smoothest road to hell." The man paused and took a deep breath. It seemed to calm him down. "Tenpou must be looking for you."
"Ten…pou," Shien mouthed, the name suddenly sounding foreign. "You work for him?"
"Well if being blackmailed into doing what he wants is the same thing as working for him, then yeah, I work for the asshole."
The present and the past seemed to have collided into a single moment, tangling up in one confusing knot. What was recent seemed so far away and what was long gone…only too close. "Tenpou…Kasei. He's going to die. They're going to kill him."
He's lost his mind, Zenon concluded, scratching his nose. "He's already dead. Come on. Let me take you back to-" He reached for Shien's arm only to have his hand slapped away.
"No." Is this what you would want me to do, Kasei? "Tenpou. They are going to kill him."
Do you want me to save him even though I couldn't save you? I wonder if this is my punishment, protecting a man because I couldn't save the one before him. I wonder if this will be my eternal guilt.
Shien heard the click of a lighter and another intake of breath, and then smelled the scent of tobacco burning. "Well we can't let that happen, can we?" Zenon replied.
Shien shifted uncomfortably before this man's stare. Even though he couldn't see, he could feel it. He could feel it the moment the stranger closed his eyes and opened them again, as if he too were blinking with him.
"So you'll help me save him?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Zenon replied. "I'm just doing this to save myself. You should too, even though you think there's nothing much left to salvage. Tenpou, though. That's one hell of a shipwreck if I've ever seen one. We might be too late."
"You might as well start looking before you speak like that." Shien opened and closed his hands in a futile gesture, wishing he still had his own weapons. "And save those words for a time when you know that action is no longer a possibility."
Life was nice like this, sitting in the peaceful dark under the cherry blossom trees drinking good wine. Perfect wine. Where not seeing the amber of it made the taste even better. Under a perfect moon where you could smell the flowers without seeing their color.
"Now the only thing to finish off the picture would be a pretty lady," Kenren smiled to himself, but it died as quickly as it came.
Typical of him to be sitting out on a beautiful night drinking and dreaming about having great sex, but something's been bothering him as of late. Dreaming about great sex was all well and good, but dreaming about great sex with a man was something totally different. A goofy-looking man who sure as hell didn't look like a soldier. It wouldn't have bothered him so much if he had kept sleeping with women after dreaming up a storm with that guy, whateverthefuck his name was. But he hadn't been at it. Not at all. And it pissed him off.
I'm not like that.
Maybe it was just a phase he was going through.
Yeah, that's it. A phase. The concept seemed feasible enough. If a person's immortal, he's bound to change a little bit to keep things interesting. It's a long life after all.
Kenren took another swig and began to do some more thinking out loud. Being tipsy, things just had to be said in order to make sense. Otherwise, a potentially brilliant idea might be lost within a sea of alcohol.
"If it's a phase, then to make the phase pass, so I can start sleeping with women again…I have to pass the phase." Good job, Kenren, he congratulated himself. We're getting somewhere. "So if at the completion of the phase, I can start sleeping with women again…that's it! I've got to sleep with a man so I can sleep with women. I've got to sleep with him!"
"With who?"
Kenren jumped and turned. Bad idea, he told himself as he fought the urge to just pick up and run fast as hell. It was The Guy. Kenren would have died right where he stood because there...
No, right here, he was standing with the very guy he said (out loud) that he was going to screw. Suddenly, his face felt hot. He wasn't imagining it. It was dark and he couldn't see him too well, but one thing stood out clear as the moon: this guy smelled like sex and by the way he was smirking in the shadows, it was obvious that he had it good. And the simply the thought of it made him hard. Just a phase. Just a fucking phase.
"With…uh…" Oh, fuck it all. "You! I'm gonna sleep with you."
"You can't be serious." Tenpou smiled, but he warily took a step back. "Besides, my bed's already occupied."
"I'm dead serious. If I don't sleep with you-"
"Surely I can't be that special. Look, let me help you out. Walk up the hill. There's a nice lady looking a bit lonely sitting in the garden. Sleep with her."
Kenren thought about it for a moment. It might just work, skipping the guy altogether and going straight for the woman. With a little more wine, it might just work. "Fine." But something still bothered him. "I'll do it, but…uh…Don't ask me to explain anything, okay? It's just that I need a favor."
"I'm not one to issue favors so easily," Tenpou started, but seeing that look in the other man's eyes, he couldn't help but relent. Something about turning him away bothered him, but he was too tired to search for an explanation. There were more urgent matters that needed explaining. "What is it that you want?"
"Just let me kiss you first." If he was going to pass through the phase, he was going to at least get something from it, dammit. "Shit, I swear after this I'll act like we never even met. I never saw you in the infirmary and I sure as hell didn't see you trying to kidn-"
"That was you, wasn't it?" He sounded thoughtful. "Very well then. One kiss. If this is what you want in return for your aid, then I'll happily give. Besides, I hate owing anybody anything. After this, try not to find me…again." That last word was practically lost as Kenren pulled close, leaning down to kiss him with so much of a sweet slowness that it seemed to be his last kiss ever. As if death were waiting for them both once they pulled apart to take a breath.
But Kenren kept his end of the bargain and kept it at one kiss. He wasn't satisfied, but he stepped back anyway and wordlessly left to seek less impressive pastures. "Fuck," he muttered. "That's not going to get me past anything."
Tenpou watched him until he was out of sight and breathed in deeply. It really was a beautiful night tonight. And for once, it felt like something was stirring beneath Heaven's skin. It was dark and it moved quietly. But it still moved. He smiled at the thought.
It was dawn when Konzen woke up to a servant frantically pounding on his door.
"Go the hell away!" he barked, burying his face in the pillows. Stupid Tenpou. His mind wasn't capable of creating more elaborate epithets, given the early hour. I'll kick his ass when I'm really awake. The pounding resumed. "WHAT THE FUCK?! Whatever it is, I'm not opening the door. Can't it wait?"
"No, Konzen-sama. My humblest apologies, but it's urgent!"
"Fine. Just tell me from there!"
The knocking stopped with Konzen's command, but the servant no longer shouted. His voice crept through the cracks of the wooden door, but went no further.
"What was that?" Konzen said, biting his lip. He didn't just hear…
"I said…" The servant's whisper seemed to suck all the air from the room, through the door cracks and into the cold hallway. "Tenpou Gensui is dead. They found his body only minutes ago. The marshal killed himself…"