L5r - scroll 03 - The Crane Read Online Free

Even the scalding water of the bath could not match the anger Hoturi felt when he remembered Satsume. His father had been killed during the treacherous coup of the Scorpion Clan, murdered by Bayushi Shoju as the Crane charged in the name of Emperor Hantei. Before that, Satsume had been the iron fist of the Crane, ruling the lands of the Doji, the Kakita, the Daidoji, and the Asahina from the palace of the Emerald Champion. He had two sons, Hoturi and his brother Kuwanan, and had adopted his only daughter after the death of Satsume's brother and wife, her true parents.
    Satsume was not a pleasant man, but he was honorable, and he fought like the bravest Lion. Satsume allowed no man to stand between him and his duty as a samurai. He did not know compromise, and he did not remember how to love. To him, Hoturi was weak, a child in a man's body.
    Hoturi's mother had been different. Of the three children of the Doji Champion, only Hoturi could truly remember her, and even those memories were few and scattered. Her name had been Teinko, Toshimoko's twin sister. She had been an artist of great renown, all but assumed by the Imperial Court to marry the lord of the Doji and bear his sons. Hoturi smiled as he fought to remember her face. Laughter on the beach as a child brought back flashes of it. Hoturi had loved her. After she had died, he had told Satsume he was going to be an artisan in her memory, to keep her alive in his heart.
    Hoturi still carried the scar of his father's anger, white and faint, above his lip. "My son will be a samurai," the Crane Champion had snarled. "A warrior. I will have no son that turns his back on that duty."
    Satsume would have killed him that day if he had not agreed to join the Kakita Dueling Academy. It had been a simple choice for the father: a dead son who had failed him, or a living son who obeyed his responsibility to the clan. The decision had been harder on the son. Although Hoturi was now one of the foremost students of the Crane style of iai-jutsu, he had never been able to satisfy his father's demand for perfection.
    At times, it seemed Satsume wished to burn all traces of Hoturi's mother from his soul, to crush all that was left of her gentleness. Satsume never remarried, never took a lover or a concubine, and never allowed Teinko's name to be spoken in the lands of the Doji. The only person exempt from that ban was Toshimoko, whose love for her had equaled Satsume's.
    Teinko's suicide had left Satsume a shattered man, with only duty to guide him. That sense of duty had been passed on to both of his sons.
    The bathwater rippled as Hoturi moved, trying to change the direction of his thoughts.
    This was the dawn of peace between the Crane and the Lion. Peace had been Hoturi's goal since the day his father burned on a pyre in the emperor's city. It would be Hoturi's legacy to the Crane. Toshimoko occasionally chided his student for it, and Satsume would never have settled for peace, but this was not his father's time. Satsume's ashes lay scattered over the battlefields of the empire. He was no longer Crane Champion.
    "I am," Hoturi said sharply, listening to the echoes on the water.
    Satsume's voice echoed in his mind: You will never prove yourself worthy. Not to me.
    Hoturi rose from the water, long white locks clinging to his shoulders. His gray eyes burned with resolve. Slipping on his kimono and reaching for his swords, he moved the shoji screens apart. As he touched the hilt of the ancestral sword of the Crane, it gave a faint, ethereal chime to welcome him.
    For more than nine hundred years, it had made the same noise whenever its true owner placed his hand on its hilt, recognizing the authority and honor of the Crane heir. The sound gave Hoturi pause. He looked with pride at its enameled saya. The sword had been his companion since his gem-puku, the day he became a man. It still served him well, as it had served his ancestors since the birth of the empire. One day, he would give it to