The Sword Buried in Izumo

In 1981, a bronze sword was unearthed from an ancient tomb in Izumo, Shimane. Inscribed along the blade were the old characters: "The sword personally made for Kagetora, Lord of Echigo." Buried underground for more than two thousand years, it emerged as sharp as if newly forged, cold light still running along its edge, not a trace of rust upon it. To this day, archaeologists cannot explain why the treasured sword of Echigo's lord came at last to rest in Izumo.

The first time Asagiri saw Fujiwara Kageharu, she was dancing with a sword beside a stream.

Asagiri Village lay with mountains at its back and water before it. Every spring the camellias bloomed over the hillsides like fire. She stood in the shallow current, and the bronze sword in her hand stirred a spray of broken light from the water. Her movements were fierce enough to scatter fallen petals all around her, yet not a drop touched the hem of her clothes. The morning mist had not fully lifted. Kageharu sat on horseback and watched her for a long while before finally saying in a low voice, "What fine swordsmanship."

After saying that, he let his gaze fall upon Yukishiro, who stood behind her.

Yukishiro was washing cloth in the stream. Water glimmered on her fingertips, and when she lifted her eyes, it seemed the whole current hushed itself to look. That was the first time Asagiri learned that beauty could be like a blade. It needed only to lie there quietly for everyone else to lose their voices.

Fujiwara Kageharu took Yukishiro away.

Asagiri ran after the carriage for a very long distance, begging him to take her too. Kageharu only threw her a single indifferent "No" before flicking the reins and leaving. That same night, Asagiri packed her belongings and left the village alone, setting out for Echigo.

When she knelt before Kagetora, the wind came through the open hall doors and made the candle flames tremble.

"This common woman can take the life of Owari's lord within five paces."

Kagetora looked down at her from above. His eyes were dark as well water steeped in night. "You are already within five paces of me," he said. "Try it."

In the next instant Asagiri sprang up. Her blade flashed like lightning and cut straight for Kagetora's throat. The attendants in the hall cried out in shock, but Kagetora did not move. The sword stopped a bare inch from his neck, though the force of its edge still sliced through the jade pin that bound his hair. His hair fell loose, and a thread of blood ran from his brow.

"How dare you!" The attendants' spears came down onto Asagiri's shoulders almost at once.

"Stand back." Kagetora raised one hand, but his eyes never left her.

Asagiri knelt on the cold floor and lifted her face to this man. He was not angry. He had not even raised his voice. He only bent over her, looking at her the way a man might look at a newly forged blade not yet tested in battle.

"If you mean to kill Haruasa, your skill is still not enough," he said.

Asagiri stared. "Then what use is there in my coming here?"

Kagetora straightened and looked toward the iron-gray sky outside. "Owari's lord, Haruasa, is not the sort of ruler whose kingdom would fall just because one sword took his life. If Owari is to perish, his heart must be thrown into disorder first."

Only afterward did Asagiri learn that Yukishiro too had already been brought into the court of Echigo. The officials all said that Yukishiro was beauty sent down by heaven, that if she were sent to Owari she could disturb an entire city's spring waters. Others said that while Asagiri lacked Yukishiro's softness and allure, her brows were colder, her spirit sharper, and she resembled a hidden blade. Both women, they said, should go.

Kagetora bestowed his own sword upon Asagiri.

"This blade was forged by the swordsmith Munechika," he said. "From this day on, it belongs to you."

Asagiri accepted the sword with both hands, her fingertips burning. Then Kagetora bent close to her ear and added in a low voice, "You do too."

In that moment Asagiri understood that in his eyes she had never truly been a person at all, only a sword carefully polished bright and made ready to be sent into an enemy state.

Even so, she was willing to take that sword in hand.

On the day they entered Owari, Yukishiro wore white, and Asagiri a pale blue outer robe. The party that escorted them stretched long behind. Fujiwara Kageharu stood below the steps and did not look at Asagiri even once. He looked only at Yukishiro. Before getting into the carriage, Yukishiro secretly clasped Asagiri's hand and whispered, "When everything is over, we'll go home together."

Asagiri said nothing.

Both of them knew that once they left, they might never return.

When they reached Owari, Haruasa fell under Yukishiro's spell exactly as everyone had predicted.

Yukishiro had been born knowing how to smile, how to coax, how to let her sleeve stir under lamplight so that it seemed all the flower shadows in the hall had fallen over her body. Haruasa built her a Spring Palace, ordered spring water channeled from the mountain into its garden, and planted the grounds with camellias everywhere, simply because Yukishiro once said she missed her homeland.

Asagiri was different.

She did not smile. She refused to lower her head, and she seldom competed for favor. The first time Haruasa watched her dance with a sword, he was struck into silence for a long moment. The three-foot blade spun in her hand, the sword wind skimming the candles until the flames shuddered. At last Haruasa praised her. "What fine swordsmanship."

Asagiri lowered her eyes, sheathed the sword, and withdrew.

Haruasa touched her cheek and asked softly, "Are you unhappy?"

Asagiri leaned in his arms, but her gaze drifted beyond the heavy blaze of lamps to somewhere far away. "I only miss home," she said.

So Haruasa ordered camellias planted all behind the palace, making the whole Spring Palace resemble Asagiri Village. Yet she still could not smile. Night after night she held the sword Kagetora had given her and looked out the window toward the direction of Echigo, like someone who had left her soul behind in another land.

Yukishiro came often to keep her company.

"You care for our lord, don't you?" Yukishiro asked one night without warning.

Asagiri's fingers trembled so hard she nearly knocked over the candle tears.

Yukishiro rested her head against Asagiri's knee, her voice soft as mist. "I know. The way you look at Lord Kagetora is exactly the way I look at Fujiwara Kageharu."

This time Asagiri was the one struck silent. "The one you love is Fujiwara Kageharu?"

Yukishiro smiled, but her eyes glistened. "Who else? If he had not told me that once this was all over he would take me away from this place, how could I have consented to come to Owari and stay so many years?"

Something sharp and sour turned in Asagiri's chest, but no words of comfort would come.

Both of them had placed their lives in someone else's hands. Fate, however, has never been known to return people where they were promised.

In the ten years they spent in Owari, Asagiri grew quieter and quieter. Yukishiro, by contrast, became more and more beloved. Haruasa gave her the most splendid crimson dance robe, hung with gold bells, jade pendants, and fine tassels. At every banquet, when Yukishiro danced, the bells sang through the hall as if she had put an entire prosperous age on her body.

Asagiri did not envy her.

Only in countless deep nights did she dream of Asagiri Village under blooming camellias, and of Kagetora standing in the wind, telling her, "We have won. Return to my side."

When she woke, the palace lamps were dying and the world around her lay empty. She would sit with the sword in her arms until dawn, feeling like a petal dried hard by the wind, still there and yet long drained of all moisture.

Ten years later, Echigo finally marched against Owari.

The armies of Echigo broke through like bamboo split beneath a blade and pressed all the way to the foot of Mount Arashi Castle. Haruasa was defeated and trapped in his retreat palace. The nobles fled in every direction. The maids cried until the air shook. The first thing Asagiri thought of was not herself, but Yukishiro.

She found her amid smoke and fire, still holding that crimson dance robe at the far end of an empty corridor.

"Come with me," Asagiri said, catching hold of her. "There is still time."

Yukishiro shook her head. Her eyes were frighteningly hollow. "I am not going."

"Fujiwara Kageharu is still waiting for you!"

"But Haruasa is waiting for me too." Yukishiro lifted her face, and tears rolled down silently. "Without me, he will be lonely."

Asagiri stood there stunned, and suddenly she understood she would never be able to take Yukishiro away.

Yukishiro embraced her gently and pressed the crimson dance robe into her arms. "Sister," she whispered, "go home in my place."

Then she turned and ran toward the thickest blaze of fire without ever looking back.

Asagiri stayed where she was, clutching the robe while the warmth of Yukishiro's body still clung to it. Everything before her blurred. The killing cries in the distance rose like thunder. Nearby, flames licked up the corridor pillars. At last she slowly drew on the crimson robe and pulled out the sword Kagetora had given her.

When the soldiers of Echigo rushed into the palace, what they saw was this:

A woman in red, her hair loose and wild, standing between firelight and blood. She looked like Yukishiro, and yet she did not. Bells rang at her wrists and along the hem of her robe, but the cold light of her sword was colder still. The first soldier to charge her had his wrist split before he even saw her face. The second and third staggered back in turn. She fought until all her strength failed. An arrow lodged in her shoulder, and even the bronze sword in her hand finally snapped in two.

Someone cried out, "It's Yukishiro!"

Asagiri heard, yet she did not correct them.

She retreated until the burning stairs were at her back, the blaze roaring behind her and the spears of Echigo before her. From the bundle on her back she drew Kagetora's own sword. Firelight struck the blade, and the old inscription shone so fiercely it hurt the eyes. The crowd went suddenly still.

"The sword of Echigo's lord..."

"Is she Yukishiro? Or Asagiri?"

Asagiri could hear them no longer.

She raised the sword to her throat and closed her eyes. In that moment she saw not fire, not blood, not a city collapsing into ruin, but the camellias spread wild across the slopes of Asagiri Village and the cold, bright eyes Kagetora had turned upon her that year when his hair fell loose.

Before the blade could fall, someone struck it aside.

When she opened her eyes again, Fujiwara Kageharu stood before her.

"You're still alive," Asagiri said, her voice light as a sigh.

Fujiwara Kageharu's hand was trembling. "If I had come a moment later, you truly would have died."

The news he brought was that Yukishiro had died in the flames beside Haruasa. In the eyes of the Echigo army, the woman who had fought to the end in the crimson dance robe with Kagetora's sword in her hand was Yukishiro.

Asagiri was silent for a long time. At last she only said, "That is for the best."

On the day they returned to Echigo, Kagetora held a banquet for her.

Only the two of them were present. Kagetora looked at her with the same face he had worn ten years earlier, a piece of winter ice that never melted. But Asagiri knew she was no longer the girl who could be set alight by a single sentence.

"The whole realm says Yukishiro was a ruinous beauty," Kagetora said, filling her cup. "She could not be allowed to return alive to Echigo."

Asagiri lowered her eyes to the wine and suddenly smiled. "So my lord wishes me dead?"

Kagetora did not answer.

Asagiri lifted the cup and drank it empty.

The moment the wine slid down her throat, Kagetora's hand closed violently around her wrist, but it was already too late. A heaviness bloomed in her chest. Strength fled her limbs with frightening speed. She sagged into Kagetora's arms, hearing her own breathing grow ragged and wild.

"Why did you not heed Fujiwara Kageharu?" Kagetora asked softly. "I had told him to stop you."

Asagiri wanted to say: because I wanted to see you. But her tongue had already gone numb, and not half a word would come. All she could do was seize his sleeve and look at him, as if she were looking at a long dream finally reaching its end.

Kagetora held her tighter. For the first time, close against her ear, he called her by her own name.

"Asagiri."

At once she smiled.

So he had remembered.

She wanted to see him smile in return. But she never got that far. Darkness closed over her completely.

Afterward the people of Echigo all said that the ruinous beauty Yukishiro, sent from Owari, had finally been put to death by Kagetora, and from then on the realm was clear and Echigo flourished. Storytellers told the tale with spittle flying, and everyone believed it, as if only that could count as a proper ending.

But the true ending was known only to Fujiwara Kageharu.

There had been no poison in that cup at all, only a secret medicine strong enough to cast a person into deep sleep for several days. Kagetora handed the unconscious Asagiri over to Fujiwara Kageharu and said only one thing:

"Take her away. The farther, the better."

Fujiwara Kageharu took her to Izumo.

When Asagiri awoke and heard everything, she was silent for a long time. Kageharu told her that if she wished it, he could help her vanish under another name and begin again. She nodded, but never again spoke of returning to Echigo.

She took with her the sword Kagetora had once given her.

In a mountain village of Izumo, there later lived a quiet woman. She had no name and no family name. She kept herself alive by mending and weaving. She was thin and sparing of words. In spring she would go alone into the hills to look at the camellias. Some said she must once have been very beautiful, or else eyes as calm as hers could not leave such a mark after a single glance.

Now and then a middle-aged man came and went around her house, carrying water for her, repairing her door, chopping the winter wood. The villagers assumed they were husband and wife, yet no one ever saw them show the nearness of husband and wife. Most of the time they only sat side by side beneath the eaves, watching the wind move over the mountains, neither speaking.

Many years later, that woman died of illness.

In accordance with her last wish, Fujiwara Kageharu buried the bronze sword together with her in the mountains of Izumo. She left no true name behind even in death. Only in her final moments did she look toward the camellias blooming outside the window and smile faintly.

No one knows whom she remembered in that instant.

Only later, when the old tomb was excavated and the bronze sword saw daylight once more, did the question arise again. Records were fragmentary and rumors too many. No one could explain why the sword known as "the blade personally made for Kagetora, Lord of Echigo" had come to lie in eternal sleep beside an unnamed woman in Izumo.

Only when the camellias flower over the mountains each spring, and the wind moves through that red sea of blossoms, does it still seem as if somewhere, long ago, someone stood beside a stream with a sword in hand, waiting for a homecoming she never once spoke aloud.