Session 7. (15/5/09)

Summer comes to the Year of the Goat (1463). Life is comparatively easy, fish are jumping and the barley is high. Out in the fields, the former Nipponese - and Kokuma - find the carcass of a dead fawn. They puzzle over how it died when an Ainu hunter comes out of the long barley and says, "Hey, that's my kill!" He carries a bow but, Miyoshi notices, neither arrows nor quiver. The man says he dropped them back at the edge of the wood when he shot the deer, but it doesn't ring true. Suspicious, Miyoshi and Mineo ask where he is from. "A little village up there", he says, indicating the hills. Miyoshi doesn't know of a village "up there". "Oh, it's a small place you've probably never heard of," the hunter explains. Meanwhile, Kokuma tracks the hunter's path back to the wood and finds no arrows - in fact, his footprints end abruptly. The hunter tries one last attempt to claim the deer but the hairless foreigners are adamant: this is their land, therefore their deer. The man suddenly bolts for the wood. Kachamaru reacts first and sets off in pursuit, but he is too slow, as is Miyoshi. Yoshi gets a good start and keeps up with the man; Mineo falls over his own feet. Kokuma tries to intercept but is just too slow. Haku takes a moment to cast Form of Bird and literally flies after him. The fleeing hunter ducks down into the tall barley and disappears. Yoshi loses him, but Haku can see from above as the man transforms into a red fox. The fox scampers into the wood and disappears down a hole. They all hear the mocking-but-frustrated yapping of the fox from the woods. Mineo is suddenly contrite: "Maybe this kill does belong to the fox." The others nod; only Kokuma is reluctant. The Wajin and the Ainu share the belief that foxes are tricksters, but the Ainu also believe they are actually evil. However, even Kokuma has to admit that he would rather be on the good side of an evil spirit than its bad side. Mineo takes the dead deer and leaves it next to the hole the fox disappeared down (though Haku thinks it isn't actually a foxes' burrow).

In some slack time before the harvest starts and before the salmon return to the rivers, Kachamaru is thinking ahead to the winter and what he will occupy himself with. Forging iron, that is. The problem is, they have very little iron or ore left. He talks the others into making a trading trip to the nearest Wajin village, Minamikayabe. To trade they take skins, furs, hair ropes, herbs and suchlike. A pair of carrying poles and several backpacks are taken to carry the iron ore back. On the way they pass through Usujiri, an Ainu village, but find it deserted. It seems that the villagers left in an orderly fashion - all possessions are gone and the place is clean and tidy - but there are also signs that there has been conflict here - and the former Wajin recognize the marks left by Wajin weapons. Usujiri was the village nearest the Matsumae territory: now their own village of Sawara is the closest.

They reach Minamikayabe by late morning and find the villagers as friendly as they have been in past times, but they have sobering news: the Matsumae have decreed that they may not trade with any Ainu. Haku argues persuasively that they are not Ainu, skirts eloquently around the fact that they are outlaws and traitors in Matsumae eyes, and appeals to common sense and avarice. The village head man, knowing all this anyway, agrees that life is had enough out here on the frontier and that furs and herbs and good relations with the neighbours are worth a little disobedience, and turns a blind eye to any trades. The rate of exchange is not great, but the Ainu party carries off 100lb of iron sand, about as much as they can manage.

A few miles into the return journey the party stops for a rest and lunch. While they are eating, and old man comes down the track, leaning heavily on a staff and leading a mule. Miyoshi whispers to the others to show respect to him, then offers him a share of their lunch. However, the old man instead asks for lots of iron to make a statue of Buddha. Miyoshi is taken aback by the old man's bluntness and immediately decides not to give him any iron, but temporises by asking why he wants so much iron. He replies, "Because the statue will be this big, ... no THIS big". Miyoshi says, "Well, I'm sorry, but we need this iron ... in fact, it isn't our iron at all ... it belongs to our people." The old man insists that he must have iron. "Where are you from?" inquires Miyoshi, and when when the old man tells him Osatsube, Miyoshi says, "Well, when we have spare iron we'll being it to Osatsube and see your statue." Miyoshi, Kachamaru and others turn their backs on the old man, dismissing him. He cusses them, calling them rude and telling them they should be kinder to old people. So Mineo, soft-hearted as he is, gives the old man his backpack with 3-lb of iron sand. The man says nothing, but wanders a little way away and uses his staff to dig a small hole, then he strikes his staff down into the hole and immediately pure iron flows out, solidifying into lumps of iron and earth before their very eyes. The old man picks up the iron, loads them onto his mule, which staggers under the weight, and taunts the young ingrates: "See what you could have had." Miyoshi and the others are over-awed: old man is clearly a god. But when they pick up their loads they find that the iron sand has turned into ordinary sand; all except Mineo, who can't lift his backpack because the iron sand has turned into almost pure iron; he is over-ored. The others are much chastened and somewhat dishonoured, but they have got enough iron for the winter months. They never see the old man again.

Late summer arrives: the salmon are swimming upriver and the catches are plentiful. It is time for the Ainu to salt and dry fish for the winter months. A spate of thefts of dried fish raises suspicions among the Ainu, but it turns out to be an opportunist fox. Yoshi spotted the fox while keeping watch over the fish drying on tables along the village street. He puts some fish out on a stone at the edge of the village so the foxes don't have to cause alarm in the village. Mineo also takes some fish to the bolt-hole in the wood.

Out on patrol one day, looking out for Wajin raiders, the shin-Ainu (shin- is a Japanese prefix meaning "new") sense a change in the weather - a typhoon is approaching. They hurry home and get everything under cover. Mineo checks the covers (i.e. the roofs of the houses).

It was a dark and stormy night. A typhoon was dumping colossal amounts of rain on southern Ezo. Amid the sound of the rain, wind and thunder there is an awful, prolonged noise that people living 500 years later would have likened to a freight train. The noise is coming from the narrow valley that reaches the coast next to the Ainu village. The river is already a torrent. Haku and Mineo work out that the noise is a flash flood that is coming and will arrive in not very many minutes. They raise the alarm and soon the villagers are out of their huts, trying to work out whether to save their possessions, children or selves. A great wall of water appears in the lightning flashes, headed straight for the village. Possessions forgotten, everyone immediately starts trying to get the women and children (and bears in Kokuma's case) to high ground. Miyoshi and Yoshi get their families to high ground quickest and go back to help others. Haku casts Castle of Wood to try to deflect the torrent away from the village (and another behind the village to trap the flotsam). Haku turns into a bird as the wave reaches the village, only to be blown a quarter-mile up the valley by the typhoon winds. However, instead of smashing through the village, the flood ploughs straight through the valley side and sea cliffs and cascades into the sea in a great waterfall. The disaster narrowly averted, the heroes relax, but not for long. An Ainu woman is heard screaming - she has been caught up in a rock slide where the water cut through. They go to help but find she is not really injured or trapped, but is screaming because her son was higher up the slope when it fell. There is the noise of scrabbling in the rocks further up. A flash of lightning reveals a small oni digging through the scree with his bare hands and pulling a boy out by his arm. Yoshi is first on the scene, wakizashi drawn, with Kokuma and Mineo close behind. The oni drops the boy and scrambles away. Yoshi decides to check the boy rather than chase the oni. The boy seems to have only scratches. Kachamaru arrives and heals the boy with his Ketchup spell. Then Haku arrives, breathless, and says that he could see that the oni was saving the boy, not getting a meal. The oni has disappeared among the scree.

The next day, while the villagers are checking for damage and mopping up, the oni comes to the edge of the village and craves a hearing.

Toruu is a young, and therefore short (3' tall), oni. He is the sole survivor from the clan that attacked the Wajin village last winter, and he has come to offer help to make up for what his clan did previously. The oni was only very young at the time, and survived because his mother hid him in a tree before the attack. He is now the only oni left on this side of the mountains and he is lonely, but doesn't want to associate with the villagers because of what he is. He tells them that he wishes to make amends for what his clan did to the wajin village a year ago. He prayed to the oni gods and was told he must come to this Ainu village and perform three tasks, which he must do before he dies to avoid being cast onto the mountain of needles in hell. The first one he has completed by saving the village (but not the boy, because that was his fault). For the second he offers to teach the few skills he knows: bojutsu and its okuden Smashing Blow; also some spells from the schools of Wood and Soil. However, he refuses to do any task that involves hurting people. If Wajin raiders come, the villagers are on their own.

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