Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 38 of 49

The old woman's eyes had gone empty. Kensei stayed on his knees. He would not push her again. Instead he turned to the door, where the gray-haired woman from the lower house had followed them up the slope. She stood watching, wrapped in wool. Kensei rose. "You said you know the sound of these words," he said. "Your mother spoke them. Then help me. Read what you can." The woman hesitated. She looked at the ancient one by the fire, then at Ha-ni against Jeon-min's chest. "Which part?" she asked. "The book is long." Kensei opened to the pages he cared about. "This," he said. "The blessing. The joining of two men. What the words say about love and the body." He turned a leaf. "And this. Their religion. The god they prayed to when they married. I want to know what they believed." The woman took the book. She sat on the low stool and held the page near the fire. Her finger moved under the marks. "These are marriage words," she said. "For two who share a bed. The kamayaki did not hide the body. They wrote it plain. The blessing asks the god to warm the two who lie together. To make their want holy. Not shameful. Warm." She looked up. "That is the sound my mother made when she said them." Jeon-min stepped closer. His voice was flat. "Say the god part. All of it." The woman turned back. "Their god was one god," she said. "A god of joining. When the outside faith came north, that faith called this joining sin. The new priests burned the marriage books. They told the kamayaki their god was false." She tapped the page. "This is why so few can read these words now. The faith that came after us said this love was wrong. So the language died with the people who spoke it." Kensei sat back on his heels. He had crossed a river, a closed border, a fever. He had wanted only to know if his love had a name before him. Now he knew. It had a god. It had a blessing that called the body warm and not shameful. And he knew what killed it. "Fire," Ha-ni said softly. "Warm." Kensei looked at his daughter. "Yes," he said. "Warm." The woman closed the book and held it out. "That is what I can give," she said. "The rest I cannot read." Kensei took it. He had the blessing now, in a tongue he understood. He would carry it home for Ha-ni. But the woman's last words stayed with him. The faith that killed this love still lived in the world below the slope. The blessing was real. The people who wrote it were gone, burned out by a church that ruled where his family now lived. Knowing the words was not the same as being safe to speak them. Jeon-min met his eyes. "We have it," he said. "Now we go home and teach her."