In the first thousand years of his life, a tengu learns the art of battle from an older tengu. He does not learn the fancy moves and sword juggling that is fashionable nowadays. No he learns the traditional forms, which are based on skillfullness, fluidity of movement and immediate reactions. Furthermore they learn tactical principles based on the processes of the universe, what you would call Zen teachings.
On very rare occasions, if a tengu finds someone worthy of his arts, he will take a student. If such a person is found, the tengu will become the most diligent of senseis. Every move you make will be perfect, your stance sublime, and every lunge of the sword will be as if you were dancing on the wind.
One such student, is a hero you know very well. He was called Yoshitsune no Minamoto by the rest of the world, but the tengu had a special name for him, this was Ushigawa-Maru.
But now we get to the real story...
One day, our young hero was wandering the mountain paths, lonely and just a bit hungry, when he saw an old man wearing a monk's clothing and practicing with a staff.
He went up to him and watched for a while without speaking, then he moved. But he did not move pointlessly. He moved in a perfect mimicry of the monk's forms except instead of a staff, he used his walking staff. He did not stop at the end of the form, instead he easily flowed into the next, and the next, until he had reached the ninth form. Only then did he stop.
"Old man with the especially long nose," he queried in his high childish voice " will you teach me the art of the sword?"
"Child with the extremely short beak, why do you seek to learn?" the old man asked.
Yoshitsune pondered for a moment, "I seek to learn that which has been forgotten but should not" he answered at last.
This tweaked the old man's interest, and he decided to test this hopeful young boy's resolve. With a small movement of his hand, his illusion vanished. Instead of the old man in the monk's clothes, there appeared a wizened being with long white hair, tomato red skin, and a very long nose. This was actually the tengu king, Sojobo.
The strange boy did not flinch, and only raised his eyebrow in surprise. Sojobo decided that this boy had a very wise karma and that he liked this boy who had no fear. He liked him so much that he decided to train him.
"You have the heart of a great warrior" he told Yoshitsune solemnly. "Let us eat lots of mochi to celebrate your good fortune" he cheered. He went by the policy that it was good to keep one's students on their toes and always trying to guess what one would do next. Either that, or he was mad as walnuts, from too much time spent alone on the mountain.
Yoshitsune's training began without much ado, but at first it did not seem like training. His tasks consisted of cleaning the tengu's cave and moving boulders to enlargen it. The rest of the time he was spent either upside down on his head, or right side up balancing on narrow ledges. If not in those positions he was either climbing the trees or falling through the air because one of the branches he had grasped had broken off. Fortunately the old tengu's magic prevented him from doing any serious harm to himself. Gradually he built up enough strength and endurance to be able to withstand hours of sword practice, which was the whole point of such exercises, besides the need for his cave's spring cleaning and the old tengu's personal amusement.
Once he started seriously working with the sword, Yoshitsune progressed quickly. Soon he had learned up to the thirtieth form, and after a year he was proficient enough to create his own forms. After two years he could hold his sensei off for fifteen minutes, and after three years, he could actually defeat him. It was only then Sojobo began to allow him to practice with the other weapons. Yoshitsune learned and perfected the use of the naginata, the staff and he mastered the bow and arrow, but he always came back to the sword. For some people there are certain weapons that just meld into the cadence of one's life. For Yoshitsune, this was the sword.
After five years the tengu king gifted his pupil with two things. Firstly he gave him a name with which all tengu would recognize him and give him aid as needed. Secondly he crafted him a sword made of steel, which was called Shinakio, which loosely translates as shining hope. This was the sword that he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
"All right then little moe, tiny flower on the tree branch, are you happy now? Will you let an old man rest? Go off and do sprightly young things" he laughed as he shooed her outside.
"So then Kage" I looked at the boy before me in question. The boy had a serious look on his face, even more serious than usual.
"Grandfather," he asked finally, "What does it mean to die?"
I gazed at the normally silent one. If this was the kind of questions he had, I wonder if he had been a monk in the past life. It was a good question.
"To die can mean many things" I told him. "It can mean to soar on the next journey. It can mean the end of the dream. It can be the ending of one existence in order to prepare for the next. Death can be honorable, it can be the natural end to a long existence on this plain."
He pondered this for a few minutes then he excused himself. Yes, such answers always took a while to fully process.
Getting up to look outside, I noticed that summer had begun to end and the touch of fall was making its way into the trees. The other children were running around shrieking as they pushed each other into piles of the fallen leaves. Had there been a time I was so young? There must have been, and I clearly remembered my brothers chasing after me in fun. They were all dead now. Lost in the constant bickering of the higher ups. I missed them sometimes. Or at least, I missed the easy companionship I had shared with them before we had all grown up.
Too soon we had grown apart, angry and quarelling over, of all things, a woman. This woman was my wife. She had been a newcomer to the area, beautiful in her strangeness. She was a recent exile from the court, and things had seemed so new and simple to her. He remembered how she used to sit in the gardens and read, without the obsessive care for her coif or her clothing that was required at court.
We were young idiots then, this was before I had left to fight for the Minamoto, and we had very little serious things to worry about. We spent our days racing on our horses and annoying our parents with our pranks. Basically we did whatever we wanted. Too young to have responsabilities, and too old to be told what to do. To a certain extent, that is. Our father was dead, and though our mother railed at us to behave in a respectable manner, there was little reason to listen to her. We had our whole lives ahead of us, and plenty of time to settle down and be serious.
These were my fondest memories of my brothers. On their fine horses, crouched over and laughing into the wind. There were four of us then. I, the second youngest, had two wonderful brothers to look up to in their exploits, the second eldest just close enough in age to merit competition. Our youngest brother was the baby of the family. He was five years younger than me, the product of our parents' middle age, and he was born just before our father died. The five years separating us, was an almost impenetrable distance, which annoyed him to no end. Atsuki and Eiji, my two elder brothers, used to tease him mercilessly.
"You can do it Hotaka" they yelled down to him as he strove to reach the top of the wall which we, with our taller bodies and stronger muscles, had breached with ease. That was not his true name of course, his name was Kazuiki, but my brothers found it hilarious to call him names like 'step by step' as Hotaka translates into, for those who studied the classical literature of the Heian court, as my brothers did every once in a while. Kazuki, of course, did not. And so, while he did not know the actual meaning of such names, he could tell they were not to his benefit. This absence of knowledge infuriated him and drove him on.
It did not help his situation that our mother favored him the most, and made it obvious to the rest of us. She was always giving him small treats, and wept piteously over the smallest of scrapes to the point that even he grew disgusted with her.
"Mother" I would often hear him sigh with exasperation, "it is just a small scrape. I have not broken my neck and died, merely skinned my knee on a rock." This exhortation was generally followed by a wail from our mother at the prospect of him dying. She would plead with him not to go riding, which he ignored.
While I did not go out of my way to bring Kazuki into our circle of older, and thus superior, brotherhood, I did not contribute to the rigorous mockery he received. I was well aware that, if I had been just a few years younger, and remained the youngest, it would have been I who would have dealt with the brunt of the elder's sense of cruel humor. At first Eiji sought to change this behavior by teasingly labelling me as 'the gentle one.' When I proceeded to pound him, the nickname was lost in the impermeable mist. This was generally the manner in which we behaved since, Atsuki liked to act as if he was above our disputes. I was built more muscular than Eiji and enjoyed the outdoor activities to a greater extent than he. But Eiji was usually faster, so we evened each other out. His focus was towards the skill or talent found within such exploits as swordmanship, whereas I was more interested in the strength. We never saw Kazuki's focus, he died before he could come of age.
It was not a freak accident that came from our wildness, as our mother had prophecied. Rather he fell to the call of nature. He was just shy of sixteen when he fell ill. It was a horrible wasting sickness. Not the clean death of a sword stroke, but the gradual weakening of the body and the corruption of the mind. It took him two months to die. At that point, he was like an old man in body, and a child in his actions. He was unable to move from his cots, could not feed himself nor get up to rid himself of his bodily waste. His eyes were bright with curiosity, and he often asked us what, this or that object was. Things he knew by heart when he was well. Towards the end, he did not even know our names. I think, if he had been aware, he would have welcomed the end to such an existence. After all, man's life is like that of a flower, scarcely having blossomed before it withers away. There is no point in mourning his leaving us. There is only a faint sadness at his absence.