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Spring’s exodus:
birds shriek
fish eyes blink tears.

  - Bashō

The pallid light of the moon spilled over onto the grasses of Mino plain. Their stalks wavered uneasily, as if sighing, alive with the breath of the night air. Pinpoints of starlight glowed like cold embers in the sky above, their number greater, even, than that of the eight million gods belonging to the land below.

Netarō Sansuke took all of this in with an indifferent eye. He scratched his neck, fingers moving impatiently, and tried to suppress a cough. A portion of smoke, from the campfire he had just left surreptitiously, lingered still in his throat. He blinked twice, clearing his vision, and glanced away off at the copse of fir trees to the west. Oh, how he wished he could be anywhere else than here! As he began to walk again, heading toward the trees, a pheasant erupted from its hidden place in the tall grass. Sansuke started, and watched with mouth agape as the bird disappeared in the darkened sky. A flame -- perhaps a reflection of his masters’ fire behind him -- smoldered in its little glossy eye. A grumble escaped his lips, not too loudly, for he feared above all else being caught shirking duties.

It was the last night of the winter. The snow was gone from the branches of the evergreens, their needles still awake and vigilant as always, and in their boughs were hung eerie, ethereal lamps, their glowing tongues not lit by the efforts of men. And clement was the air that grazed Sansuke’s cheek that evening, for in the high antiquity the brumal chill of winter was ever repelled by the virtue of the gods.

Of a sudden now, Netarō Sansuke spotted two things through the angular boughs of the firs, to which he had come quite close: two things that filled his limbs with dread and stopped him short in his stride. A house, a farmhouse by the look of it; innocent and imposing it stood, its thatch disheveled like the knot upon Sansuke’s head. It looked the kind of place that might have a leak in its roof, a thing more fearful than a wolf or a bill-collector. Far beyond the house floated weirdly wisps of blue flame, burning weakly, blurring and fading yet returning ever, dancing in the air sluggishly as if beckoning to a traveler. Netarō Sansuke shivered, but stepped closer all the same.

It was not a lone house, but a village. Sansuke knew there had lain one near to the house of his lord, but, hunter though he was, he had never wandered this far west before. Looking back over his shoulder, he wondered if the four lords had yet noticed his absence. In spite of his better wisdom, he turned again and threaded his way among the array of field and farmhouse. His throat tightened at what he saw, but what arose in him was unlike fear: something small and fragile, like a seedling. Every dwelling was a shell, emptied of its human inhabitants. Tools, foodstuffs, clothing remained, but the village seemed deserted. He called out over threshold after threshold, glanced over the entrance halls of every household. Not a single response was given: not a single hearth was lit. A dead weight lay over this place, a funereal air. Sansuke began to wish he had never left his post of watchman by the side of the fire.

In the last house in the village, he stepped up onto the raised floor, not bothering to shout or even remove his sandals. He simply wondered if there might be a morsel of rice to eat, feeling guilty all the while for that thought.

“Take her,” a weary voice pierced that awful silence. It caused Sansuke to jump in surprise, almost wetting himself. He looked and saw now what had escaped his notice before: a disheveled pile of clothing lay to his left along the kitchen wall, and when he peered closely a woman’s form emerged from within the tattered, homespun garments. The woman held up to him another bundle such as she, but smaller. It, too, had a face, an infant’s, but one that silenced Sansuke for some reason.

“Save her,” the woman urged him again, and shambled forth to his feet. She pushed the child into his arms, and he could not think of how to protest. It was clear now, from the looks of this mother’s face and arms, that she was stricken with the pox. Likely the entire village had been, too. Whether the other farmers had all died off, or had left the settlement to avoid contracting the disease themselves, Sansuke did not know. He had heard of such things happening before.

“I...I...” Netarō Sansuke could think of nothing to say to the woman, but only stepped back, clutching to his chest the child. He could not bring himself to look at it. The woman breathed deeply, having fallen over again, and did not stir. It was a long time before Sansuke could find the courage to move again.

When at last he returned to the fire where the lord and his three companions were partaking of the pleasure of each other’s company, as they were wont to do yearly on this the eve of the planting season’s first day, Sansuke knew that he could not merely sneak back into his appointed place and pretend that he had never fled from the acrid miasma of smoke to clear his eyes. It was not that he knew he had been missed, for in the midst of their celebrations the four would not have noticed the absence of one retainer. None of them had many equals in this world, and despite anything which might come between them they prized each other as the firefly cherishes the summer night. No, it was the presence of the child that prevented Sansuke’s indiscretion from remaining in shadows. He looked at the bundle in his arms, and it seemed to his eyes to be a flower of death. Stepping forth decisively, though he felt in his bones the very inverse of boldness, he dropped to his knees and set the flower of death before him, placing his palms upon the earth. He could not bring himself to speak, and instead stole a glance at the four figures sitting together around the fire: the two men facing south, the two women looking back to the north.

Lord Natsukimi, Sansuke’s own master, had been speaking in a voice filled with wry mirth. The other lord, a younger figure with a piercing clarity resting splendidly within his eyes, looked silently at his friend and gave a soft smile. The younger of the women, Natsukimi’s wife Harume, laughed with a clean liquid voice like that of a bush warbler. Her companion, clad in a robe with a pattern of red maple leaves, poured another bowl of rice wine for the younger lord, who was her brother. Her berry-black hair, gleaming even in the gloom of night, fell well past the length of a normal woman’s, reaching almost to the ground.

The four looked down at Natsukimi’s retainer in long silence. Fear and a desperate devotion dwelt in his features, and it seemed that though the whites of his eyes flickered in the firelight, his face reflected instead the light of the moon.

“Netarō Sansuke,” Natsukimi declaimed in a methodical voice, his rising and falling tone making a song of the name. He listened in stony silence as the hunter pleaded forgiveness, and spoke of the village and its sole survivor. Before their eyes, the pitiable man brought forth from a garment of soot-stained death a tiny vision of life.

Death, death was come into their encampment! A spirit of disquiet entered within their midst: death and disease were unclean things, their taint no less than a spiritual plague. At a sign from his lord, two retainers approached Sansuke from either side, and flung at him and the child water, and over them waved wands hung with folded white paper streamers. Sansuke endured these rituals silently. That tiny seedling had returned within him, and flowered, and he feared now not for his own sake, but for the child’s.

“Well,” spoke Natsukimi anon. “This certainly is surprising -- doubly. But it was a good thing to have rescued this person, Sansuke.”

“Yes, indeed,” spoke the woman with the robe of autumn leaves. Her name, the prostrate hunter remembered, was Akiha. “What, then, are we to do with her?”

“By your leave, friends, must we do anything?” Harume spoke. Her husband looked thoughtfully at her, yet said nothing. “The winds that blow about this child’s fate are harsh indeed, yet such is the way of the world.”

Doubt now was etched upon Sansuke’s face, and he held the infant girl close to him. Akiha looked kindly at him, her round face all but smiling. She glanced then to her right, at her clear-faced younger brother, as if wondering what he might be thinking.

The lord Fuyuki looked intently at the shivering child, and what he saw in her gaze moved his heart. He looked upon the beauty of the stars reflected in the dark pools of her eyes, hanging there in those miniature nights like falling snowflakes. He stood, and taking her into his hands he held her close.

As he gazed into her eyes, a presentiment entered his mind. He knew a certain thing, and he knew that it was true. For a moment he said nothing, and amazement was etched in his face; but at last he set his jaw, and the pale lord broke his silence.

“I shall take this child into my own house,” he declared, “and there she will grow from her childhood. I name her Oyuki, for I have a premonition about this girl, though I do not wish to share it here.”

Sansuke was relieved, and in his very skin he felt now a deep weariness. The four lords did not speak for a while, unnerved by the way that silent, inscrutable Fuyuki had acted so decisively. Yet Sansuke remembered talk that he had heard, rumor that spoke of Lord Fuyuki as the kindest and most compassionate of the four, though also the saddest. Akiha looked upon her younger brother with care and concern, but his eyes were only for the child. They flickered, Sansuke suddenly thought, with a look of resignation, though faintly and seldom. Dawn crept, ever so slowly, over the shoulder of the sky. And so on a whiles the four lords took leave of each other, returning to their own homes to oversee once more those domains given them to protect.

Many are the traditional beliefs of the Sunrise Country. Deep is its people’s storehouse of memory and wisdom, and far back into history do its traditions date. Some would say superstitions, and no doubt some would be partly right, for some lore seems to contradict itself, if only the surface is glimpsed: for the people of Nippon have often valued beauty and emotion over logic. A simple man, then, had he happened to witness the events on the Mino plains on this night, would have thought to himself of the good fortune befallen the child Oyuki, to be rescued and taken into the homes of such august people; for certainly they were provincial lords, or perhaps even persons of the wealthy nobility.

Yet one who saw more deeply and clearly into the heart of things would have at once dismissed such thoughts. Such a one would know better, simply by catching a glimpse at their otherworldly faces and their strangely tall forms. Even in the darkness of night, their features shone with a divine light. Their eyes were sharp, revealing the inner life of the rivers and forests, of the leaves and the stones. The four figures were of the kami, the spirits of nature, the souls of all that inspires awe in the minds of humanity.

As the sun dawned on the first day of spring, the farmers throughout the land readied themselves for the planting of rice seed beds which laid ahead. In the eyes of these ordinary, slow-changing peasants, this day was merely another in the unending cycle of the seasons. And yet a lone survivor of a disease-ridden village passed out of this cycle on that morning, and from that time on her life as one of the abiding folk was over.

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