Crossroads by Moto Maratai
"No wall stands forever. Only duty stands forever."--Kaiu Hosaru, A Perfect Cut
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Crossroads
by Moto Maratai/Yoon Ha Lee
A magistrate with nothing material to prove who he is must persuade a border guard/warden/magistrate as to who he/she claims to be.
Thanks to Hida Jiremi for answering a last-minute topographical question, and my parents-in-law for providing a few acres of swamp and the associated mosquitoes.--Maratai
"'A leisurely post where you can write poetry,' he said," Ide Hinojo told the darkness. "'Contemplate the beauties of the wild-blooming cosmos and the crickets' songs.' And I don't even like poetry! Why did I believe him?"
Patrolling the border of this dismal corner of Unicorn lands, riding back and forth, forth and back, had gotten Hinojo into the habit of sharing all-too-candid thoughts with the sucking mud and the mosquitoes. Oh, yes. Her daimyo had failed to mention the mosquitoes. Then again, the last time her daimyo had gotten his rump off a cushion and onto the back of a horse was--
Don't think about it, Hinojo told herself before the words could escape from her mouth. One never knew whom the mosquitoes gossiped with, after all. She was going to be hopelessly gauche by the time she returned to her daimyo's court.
It would have been one thing if she could gallop side-by-side with a hot-blooded suitor--a fashionable poetic cliche when Hinojo left--but galloping was a poor idea in this bog. She had found that out after the bog ate her horse's eyes, those soft morsels. Hinojo ran her hand over the supple scales of Fireflower's neck; the horse's ears pricked toward her. "Only talking to shadows," she said. The horse stopped and turned its head to fix her with a burning stare. "And you." The horse resumed its sinuous path along the border. The frogs and crickets left a ripple of silence around them as they passed.
Hinojo could not remember the last time she had met a traveler, which was unsurprising in this miserable humidity, or stopped at a village to receive her due of rice-balls and a warm pallet. Thus she pressed Fireflower to a halt when she saw a lantern ahead. Foxlight? she wondered. The bogs bred strange fancies and stranger creatures, sunlight-shy.
Come to think of it, she couldn't remember the last sunrise she had seen, either. The rain, the over-friendly fog, the canopy of mosses and leaves and hanging vines, all these made sunlight a difficult proposition. There's a poem, she thought sardonically--and stopped again. The lantern had moved, bobbing up and down the way a person's head does, or a horse's, walking.
The silence that accompanied Hinojo and her horse receded. She thought she heard breathing, and it wasn't hers, or the horse's. "Who walks at this hour?" Hinojo called out.
A young man walked forward, indiscriminately splashing through puddles and upon half-closed blossoms. The marsh, however, seemed little disturbed by his passage. Water cleared itself of ripples; stems and petals unfolded from his weight. "Oh," he said. The colors of his mon were closer to the hues of ash and cloud in the lantern-light that those of any clan Hinojo knew. "Magistrate Kuni Gishin. On the way to--" He faltered; his eyes were young, so young, in the darkness. "--to anywhere."
Fireflower snorted; steam cleared its nostrils and thickened the air. "Papers," Hinojo said. She knew her duty to her daimyo, even if she couldn't imagine what any Crab would be doing on an errand out here. Perhaps he's a witch-hunter? she wondered. No, no, that's not something for a lowly border guard to think about. Just check the papers.
"Papers," Gishin said. He sounded incredulous. Then he swallowed. His scrabbling among his satchels and scroll-cases became desperate. "Wait, wait, are these--" The Crab's hands contained what looked like a thread of cobweb tangled with a wilted petal. Ephemera. Not papers.
Hinojo shifted upon the horse's back, tapping her katana's tsuba. "Crab," she said, "I know what your Clan is, but I do not know who you are. And this is a poor place for pranks."
Kuni Gishin swallowed again. Was it possible for a Crab to be so young? "Ide-san," he said, "truly, these are my--" He looked down at his hands. The lantern dimmed; his face blanched. "Oh, kami."
She flinched. "Don't say that. Papers. If you don't have them, I can't let you cross."
An understanding too terrible for her to read was written in his eyes, those forever-young eyes. "I think I have already crossed where I must go," he said.
"Then you're turning back."
It was his turn to flinch. "Not precisely." Kuni Gishin dropped the petal, the cobweb strand. The swamp swallowed them with scarcely a ripple. "How long have you been guarding this border, Ide-san?"
"Papers," Hinojo said stubbornly. It was true what her daimyo said: find the thing you know and stay with it. She wasn't going to be distracted by some Kuni imposter's sophistry. His voice, though, his young, quiet voice--
"Papers," he said, and sighed. "Ide-san, when there are no papers, no people, how do we know who we are? When there are no maps and the boundaries blur, how do we know where we are? How do we prove anything?"
Hinojo had not thought about such things for a long, long time. She moved her fingers away from the katana's hilt. "Tell me," she said, relenting this much.
His hands held something else now, a disc of jade, one of the Sun's bright tears: water truer than water, truth truer than the duty that tied her here. "I don't know," said the Kuni, now resolute, "but I can walk somewhere to find out. Will you come with me?"
The stranger's manner troubled Hinojo's horse; it laid its ears back and hissed at the man. She dug her fingers into the horse's scales, reminding it who rode whom. "My daimyo," she said, yearning. He could bore her with all the trite poetry he liked if only she could see him again, and the rest of that easy-mannered court.
"I suspect he will be waiting for you, as mine is for me."
The horse fought and bit every step of the way, but Hinojo was relentless, and the Crab seemed unfazed by the burning eyes, the taloned hooves, the pointed teeth. They rode out of the swamp and into the dawn. Hinojo blinked.
Where the Crab had stood, nothing remained but a wisp of mist, a fragment of silk. And after a burning moment, Hinojo and her horse, too, were gone.
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