You know, I said this was going to wait until after the thesis was done.
.
I shouldn't have believed me either.
Title:Spires of Granite, Eyes of Black
Fandom: Twelve Kingdoms
Characters: Rakushun
Gen, very gen. Post-series by several years. There may be more where this came from, there may not. It was ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
canis_m's idea.
Summary: In which Rakushun makes a pilgrimage to Mount Hou. For research and enlightenment and, well, these things never turn out the way you plan...
Spires of Granite, Eyes of Black
twelve kingdoms
Mithrigil Galtirglin
at the behest of one canis_m
There’s a knot of scars on his pawpad from years of feeding silver to the seicho. It nips him there again, just a little, the curve of its beak more like a signal than anything else. The bird looks up at him with complacent, wet eyes, and a little warbly rumble in its throat as it swallows.
He begins:
“Well, I’ve reached Hoto Palace. I should say we, all the thousands of us after all. I hope this finds you well, Youko. I’ve missed your voice. I remember you telling me how beautiful this place is, how calm, and, well, it’s not particularly calm right now what with, well, everything, but it is beautiful. I had to squint to find the silver for the bird, the cliffs are so bright, and when the Nyosen opened the gates the sun was right behind them. Still shining now, in fact, right down onto the tops of all the tents.
“I’ve spent a lot of time talking with the aspirants, recording their testimonies…if you can call it that. There’s a few rotten eggs among this lot, I can tell you that true, and more than a few cracked ones but that’s the same anywhere. It’s like all of Kou poured itself through a colander and the biggest grains all got swept through the mountain gate. There’s not a person here who doesn’t want to be king, who doesn’t at least set himself a little above everyone else. And most of them do it rightly. Them, mayhap, well, us. I think I’m including myself in that now, a little, I mean, just getting through the shouzan proves that I’m ambitious, but not for the same thing the rest of the pilgrims are. But I’m still not going to offer incense or anything. It seems a mite cruel to say so, but this is just me taking advantage of my lifetime to see a place that only opens to those who want to see the kingdom healed. And I do, you know that, better than anyone. I do feel bad, though, taking advantage. Can’t stop thinking of it that way, though.
“It rubs off on you, I guess, being around people who are ambitious. I feel competitive, a bit, like I’m back at daigaku. There, though, I was racing myself. I suppose it’s the same here. Just a hanjyuu recording a shouzan.
“I think I’ll thank you again, Youko, for telling me how beautiful this place is.”
He pauses, glances at the shadows that are beginning to stretch from the slats of the tents that surround him. There’s as much sound as color now, a thousand voices scraping like a thousand tentpegs, echoing off the shining cliffs. The mountain’s of a jagged sort of rock, black—igneous? but where’d it bubble up from?—that shines with minerals like tiny crying stars. The pilgrims’ eyes are all like that, he thinks, black or red or blue but glittering with resolve. They pitch their camps around him, and the cloth stifles the glow of the mountains, rustling and spreading in the same slight wind that’s got his whiskers in a tizzy.
“You never did mention the smell, though,” he goes on, hoping the pause wasn’t too long, that the bird didn’t get distracted. “It’s starting to fade right now, thanks to all us people, but there’s this purity, not a natural one like what a Kirin smells like but a kind of forceful one, like—well, like if you could turn the sound of your mother wiping peach juice off your fur into a smell, that’d be it. I don’t know where that came from, sorry,” he laughs, “but if that humble little wordplay makes you smile, it’s done its life’s work.
“I’ll send the seicho to you now—you don’t have to send it back, I don’t know how long it’ll take for the Kirin to choose a king, hopefully not too long at all, but I’ll be taking good notes, so don’t you worry. Besides, it’ll give us something to talk about when I we see each other again. Take care,” he concludes, and plucks another chip of silver out of its pouch. The bird nips at him again, the same little welcome twinge.
The wind gets just a little stronger, rustling his whiskers and the seicho’s wings, and the bird takes that as its cue to hoist itself up and wheel over the cliffs and the gates, down the mountain path.
--
He’s filled quires of paper at this point, more than half of what blanks he brought with him. There won’t be a problem about finding someone who’ll sell him a few more, but carrying it down the mountain might be a chore, and he thinks there might be something wrong with leaving his spent ink-bottles here to make room in his pack.
But if the processional hadn’t been so—overwhelmingly powerful, well, he’d not have taken a quire and half to describe it.
It reads:
Again we assembled at dawn, at the grand gates. Black shadow climbed up them, for the sun was, as yesterday, behind; there are no breaches in that stone, and the darkness between the carvings was thick as flesh. I was permitted near, after the motorcade; the story that the stone tells grows in on itself like the twist of a riboku’s boughs. There is the tale of creation, and all the others that comprise it, chiseled meticulously into the veined stone of the gate as if by magic, and told in ridges as fine as my whiskers or as round as my bones, and everywhere between, and all at once.
Again, with the rays of the sun came the Nyosen in their finery. All of the Nyosen wore their abundance of hair in near-symmetry like the doors of the gate, peaks and beast-tails and knots, in colors that would seem rich beyond compare to me were it not for the company of Kei-ou Sekishi, but even if not beyond compare these maiden Nyosen were lovely and distant as the sight of wheeling birds, alighting from the land when one has long been at sea and only just neared port. Their robes were subdued and elegant but they festooned their hair with gems and flowers, as if to state that this, too, was for them an occasion.
Between their two neat rows walked the Kirin—Kourin, I should say, for that is what she is. Kourin struck me as very proud, not coldly so in the way of Keiki but self-assured, brash, and condescending in the same manner as the flash of a weapon. Her human form possessed the mien of a young woman, nearly of an age with the Nyosen flanking her but when the high winds came, rushing through the gates as to chill me past the fur and smear my ink, they flinched and slowed but Kourin did not. Her garments were dark near-silver like the stone walls, unadorned but for a train that carved a wake in the earth and dispelled her footfalls. Her mane was longer than my tail and smooth, in the manner of the Kourin who came before her. The murmurs of the people around me acknowledged this resemblance, and many even went so far as to express fear of her. A Kirin is a creature of mercy, but this Kourin was stern and martial, some said; does such a creature preclude another reign of slaughter and war, of famine and sickness and shoku?
I know this not to be so; the Kirin complements the ruler, and thus the ruler shall be one to balance the severity of this Kourin. I am relieved and thankful, but this sentiment does not infect those ambitious convened here.
Kourin’s pace was strident, faster than her Nyosen, impatient, and she darted her eyes among the people, ready and searching, eager. She did not look down upon me, but her glare lingered over my meager height at length. Her eyes were as the shadow that no longer gathered at the pillars’ bases but inked the ground in columns astride her procession; black, and thick as flesh. I understood then the trepidation of the crowd, for long enough to articulate it in my mind. Alas, I do not now recall the words, and will not risk wracking my humble brain to reacquire them.
When she addressed the crowd, her voice did not ring. It was smaller than her presence, higher in timbre but not nearly as sharp as her eyes. Upon her words, I was not the only one to fear her less.
“He is among you,” she said. “He is among you and it vexes me that I cannot see him.”
At that, she turned, wrapped in the panels of Nyosen and finery, the train of her robes like a waterfall unwinding, like the clock turning back on the flow of a man’s blood from his body. The shrine drew her in to its blackness, the horizontal strike of the sun unbreachable so that the brightness became the dark. And I could feel the chill and hear the shiver and shuffle of those ambitious convened, their hair on end and the steel of their eyes wet, tending toward rust.
There’s enough space in the second of the quires for his notes on an interview of the kind, one that pretty much confirms that last allegation. He’ll have to start another, though, this afternoon. A good thing, then, that ink doesn’t add altogether much weight to a blank book.
--
People have been offering incense and trying their luck since pretty soon after that display yesterday, but today’s the first chance he’s gotten to watch the people going in and out of the shrine. They enter, preening or resigned or some laughing parody of humble that makes him glad that he’s not in the running, that he’s not interested in becoming king, because that last type looks the worst when it exits, the most hypocritical in the end.
He sees:
A lower general, one who stayed loyal to Saku-ou, strides in with measured purpose and precision and would’ve walked out with his tail between his legs if he had one to speak of, which he didn’t.
A prominent shusei leader struts in and out confidently but trips on the last stair, not enough to fall but enough that the acting doesn’t puff out her chest any more.
Three young soldiers, each daring the other to go in first, like they’re trying to steal a pie cooling on a windowsill.
A servant skulks in after his master walked out dejectedly, and walks out just as dejectedly.
The same servant, later in the day, comes back and walks out with one of the Nyosen, and by walks out he means is being chased by, laughing, with one of the garish ornaments that had been in the maiden’s hair.
One of the former court ministers, one who had also been loyal to Saku-ou, waits in the sunset for what feels like an hour before creeping up the steps, and maybe he’s genuinely apologetic or afraid but it’s no better when he leaves.
Hundreds of others.
He leaves when he runs out of ink, mayhap an hour before sunset, but by the time he comes back the Kirin and the entourage have already left the shrine. He’ll make sure to catch that tomorrow, hopes it’s the same.
--
Not taking any chances this time, not in the least. It’s a bit early but he brings his supper, has to alternate between the chopsticks and the pen but he’s been doing that since daigaku, so it’s not just not bad, it takes him back. That peach-dripping smell from before is nagging at him, though, if imposed piety has a smell this would be it and there’s something just a little taboo about eating like a student in front of so important a shrine. The research, though, is probably more important than that. And even now he’s got extra paper, extra ink. At least five people have asked him if he’s setting up camp here instead, and more than that have sneered at him like it’s not bad enough he’s a hanjyuu trying to be king—which he isn’t, but it’s not like they know or care—like he’s doing something improper. And maybe he is, but there are some things he just has to see so he can describe them, so he can write them, and this is one of them.
She emerges—
“You,” she says, the exalting you, and the only reason that her voice didn’t cut through the air the day before yesterday was that the crowd was too thick for her voice to bounce off of the stone. Kourin shoves—shoves!—past the lines of Nyosen and he can see her feet poking through the hem of her robes, the train sputtering on the earth behind her, her hair against the wind.
—just wait a—what in the—
“Stop sitting so close,” she snarls, glowering down at him, eyes like ink. “You keep making me think that it’s someone else and it isn’t.”
—his pen rolls out of his paw. The metal band that holds the hairs of his pen pricks his finger like the seicho’s beak.
He hears so much, right then, the boiling fruity voices of the Nyosen, chattering, the hum of so many others, anger and indignance and the press of wind and scent and so much else into his ears, down to the net of veins, but what he sees, he can’t—describe any more, just narrate.
Kourin gets on her knees. She’s his height now, and there’s a smirk on her face that just spears into him. He can still see it when she bows her head too, when her face is hidden under a sprawl of flat gold hair that’s longer than his body. A hand curls around his ankle and yanks up the heel of his footpad and if it wasn’t for his tail he’d fall, and she’s—swearing never to desert her post before his throne, and he thinks of Youko, wonders if her heart stopped the way he’ll swear up down and sideways his just did.
“I—I—what?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Kourin scoffs up from the floor. “You’re king. Accept it.”
--
The seicho comes back a fortnight later at least—he’s lost count by now, there’s just—so much going on—and it’s night, black solid night when the bird raps at the window of the chambers they’ve put him in. He shifts down, leaves the robes that they’ve given him to wear in his human form stretched out behind him on the floor, and then remembers that it’s harder to get the window open when he’s short, and a rat. He does it anyway, draws the bird in and lets it perch on the rim of one of the desk lanterns, little talons scratching the glass. He fumbles through his pack and his books and feeds the bird a grain of silver, and his paws are shaking, tangling with the drawstring. The same scar gets scraped.
He hears:
“You’re right, Rakushun,” Youko says through the bird, “or should I say, Kou-ou. We will have something to talk about.”
---
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