Tamuramaro chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Not so long ago, you would’ve come up with just one answer for a case like this.”
“…Now that you say it, that’s true. We just tracked down a large-scale case of fraud, and I don’t know what to do? Ha-ha.”
Sora burst out laughing, too. He couldn’t believe he’d said that. They dissolved into laughter for a while but suddenly fell silent.
“It’s completely beyond me, but do you think you can find a point of compromise in this case?” Sora asked.
“I don’t think Chairman Odajima can come out of this unscathed, but he also likely doesn’t want any dirt on the roadside station that’s about to open. So let’s look for a way there.”
Tamuramaro invited Sora to think of a solution together. Sora had never tried to look for a compromise, so nothing came to him. But he fully understood that if they were to censure this malpractice publicly, there would be a risk of extinguishing a light of hope that had finally flared up in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.
The protector and the protected, the right and the wrong.
In his mind, Sora repeated to himself the same words that had been wavering inside him.
“You saw it happen?”
Odajima’s quiet, gentle voice haunted his ears as if he’d only heard it a moment ago. It was the kind of voice that suggested the depth and breadth of the speaker’s experience.
Every time Sora heard an echo of that voice, it struck him. He hadn’t been seeing anything. No. Even if he could see, he had shut it out of his heart, never admitting to himself that he saw it.
He remembered standing at Awata-guchi 1,200 years ago, where he’d resolved never to forgive and witnessed the loss of all those lives.
He remembered the elderly woman who fell amid the roaring voices of idealists calling out for reform.
In truth, Sora had been watching all along. It was there in his world, too. But he had excluded from his view everything that didn’t match up with the justice he believed in. That was who he was.
“Before…Fuuka said he wasn’t thinking about anything when he killed.”
Sora had always sought justice, even when it meant blowing out the light of hope.
“When Fuuka killed people, the one who was doing the thinking was always me.”
There was no equal, no alternative to that justice, and Sora had clung to it in his belief. That justice itself would bring people happiness. It took him all the strength he could muster to admit that was the person he had been.
“It took me twelve hundred years.” Sora couldn’t breathe, but still, he faced Tamuramaro directly. “I am sorry for what happened to your soldiers.”
He bowed his head, but the lives that were lost that day, razed to the ground in a moment, would never come back.
“You said you’d trained some of those soldiers yourself. Knowing you, I suppose you regarded some among them as your own children, too.”
Sora could never forget the look on Tamuramaro’s face from 1,200 years ago, when he pushed his way through the soldiers. He chose to remember it, even if he hadn’t understood what it meant.
“Back then, I believed they needed to die. It was me, my thoughts. I am sorry, I really am.”
But he had never thought a day would come when he could bring himself to apologize.
“Finally…I can say it and truly mean it.”
There was no response from Tamuramaro, and Sora kept his head bowed.
A few moments passed in the chilly light of the moon.
“Whatever you might think—to me, you were just a child then. You couldn’t have understood,” Tamuramaro began in a reassuring tone. “They were my soldiers. I let them die, and I let you kill them out of my own carelessness.”
He touched Sora’s head lightly, like a caress, and lifted his face.
“I ordered them to erase from the records that Aterui’s eyes were blue,” said Tamuramaro, recalling his friend and the recent anniversary of his death.
“Right. It wasn’t written in Shoku Nihongi, and I’d wanted to ask you why sometime.” Sora had been thinking that Tamuramaro probably knew Aterui better than he himself did, since they had confronted each other over a long period of time, in different ways. They’d even spent his last hours together.
“I implored them to leave it out. Back then, I thought if people knew his eyes were blue, they wouldn’t realize what a brave and honest leader he’d been.”
But Sora was too scared to hear about Aterui from someone who had known him so well.
“Times change,” Tamuramaro went on. “Nowadays, he’d be an even more celebrated hero if they knew his eyes were blue. He was truly…a precious friend.”
Tamuramaro sighed, fixing his eyes on the air in front of him, seeing something out of his memory. “I couldn’t keep my promise to Aterui. I was watching him until the very last moment. His eyelids never closed. His eyes remained that clear, deep blue. They made the people of Yamato shrink in fear.”
Even though he hadn’t seen it himself, Sora had always loathed that day of execution more than he could say.
“But even now, I have no regrets. None,” said Tamuramaro.
Only the day before, Sora had thought to himself that there was no knowing what he would have done had he witnessed it himself. But now he merely listened quietly to Tamuramaro’s words.
“My friend spoke of the same thing that Miroku-bosatsu did. That a power that was too strong was born in the north. One that would become a leader who could destroy a whole nation by himself. Aterui asked me to protect his heart, and I promised I would. But…” Tamuramaro’s gentle eyes gazed at Sora with a worried look. “I had no idea how young he was. It was only after that incident at Awata-guchi that I realized who Aterui was talking about.”
“I want to turn Fuuka into a human,” said Sora.