by Lian Hearn
Jiro opened the saddlebags and brought out rice wrapped in kelp and flavored with pickled plums, and dried fish.
“I want to talk to you alone,” I said to the man. “Will you and the child sit down and eat with me?”
He swallowed hard, his gaze fixed on the food. The child smelled the fish and turned its head. It held out one hand toward Jiro.
The father nodded.
“Let him go,” I said to the men, and took the food from Jiro. Outside one of the hovels was an upturned boat. “We’ll sit there.”
I walked toward it and the man followed. I sat and he knelt at my feet, bowing his head. He placed the child on the sand and pushed its head down too. It had stopped sobbing but sniffed loudly from time to time.
I held out the food and whispered the first prayer of the Hidden over it, watching the man’s face all the time.
His mouth formed words. He did not take the food. The child reached out for it, beginning to wail again. The father said, “If you are trying to trap me, may the Secret One forgive you.” He said the second prayer and took the rice ball. Breaking it into pieces, he fed it to his son. “At least my child will have tasted rice before he dies.”
“I am not trying to trap you.” I handed him another rice ball, which he crammed into his mouth. “I am Otori Takeo, heir to the Otori clan. But I was raised among the Hidden and my childhood name was Tomasu.”
“May he bless and keep you,” he said, taking the fish from me. “How did you pick me?”
“When you said you should have killed yourself and your son, your eyes flickered upward as if you were praying.”
“I have prayed many times for the Secret One to take me to him. But you know it is forbidden for me to kill myself or my son.”
“Are you all Hidden here?”
“Yes, for generations, since the first teachers came from the mainland. We’ve never been persecuted for it as such. The lady of the domain who died last year used to protect us. But bandits and pirates grow bolder and more numerous all the time, and they know we cannot fight back.”
He broke off a piece of fish and gave it to the child. Holding it in his fist, the boy stared at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and sticky, his face filthy and streaked with tears. He suddenly gave me a small, wavering smile.
“As I told you, my wife inherited this domain from Lady Maruyama. I swear to you we will clear it of all bandits and make it safe for you. I knew Terada’s son in Hagi and I need to speak to him.”
“There’s one man who may help you. He has no children, and I’ve heard he’s been to Oshima. I’ll try to find him. Go to the shrine. The priests ran away, so there’s no one there, but you can use the buildings and leave your horses and men there. If he’s willing to take you, he’ll come to you tonight. It’s half a day’s sailing to Oshima, and you’ll need to leave on the high tide—morning or evening, I’ll leave that to him.”
“You won’t regret helping us,” I said.
For the first time a smile flickered across his face. “Your Lordship may regret it once you get to Oshima.”
I stood and began to walk away. I’d gone no more than ten paces when he called to me, “Sir! Lord Otori!”
When I turned he ran to me, the child toddling after him, still sucking on the fish. He said awkwardly, “You will kill, then?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have killed and I will kill again, even if I am damned for it.”
“May He have mercy on you,” he whispered.
The sun was setting in a blaze of vermilion, and long shadows lay across the black shingle. Seabirds called in harsh mournful voices like lost souls. The waves sucked and dragged at the stones with a heavy sighing.
The shrine buildings were decaying, the timbers coated in lichen, rotting away beneath the moss-covered trees, which had been twisted into grotesque shapes by the north winds of winter. Now, though, the night was windless, oppressive, and still, the sighing of the waves echoed by the shrill of cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes. We let the horses graze in the unkempt garden and drink from the ponds. These were empty of fish, which had all been eaten long since; a solitary frog croaked forlornly and occasionally owls hooted.
Jiro made a fire, burning green wood to keep the insects away, and we ate a little of the food we’d brought with us, rationing ourselves since we obviously would not find anything to eat here. I told the men to sleep first; we would wake them at midnight. I could hear their voices whispering for a while and then their breathing became even.
“If this man doesn’t show up tonight, what then?” Makoto asked.
“I believe he will come,” I replied.
Jiro was silent by the fire, his head rolling forward as he fought sleep.
“Lie down,” Makoto told him, and when the boy had fallen into the sudden slumber of his age, he said quietly to me, “What did you say to tame the fisherman?”
“I fed his child,” I replied. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
“It was more than that. He was listening to you as though you spoke the same language.”
I shrugged. “We’ll see if this other fellow turns up.”
Makoto said, “It is the same with the outcast. He dares approach you as if he has some claim on you, and speaks to you almost as an equal. I wanted to kill him for his insolence at the river, but you listened to him and he to you.”
“Jo-An saved my life on the road to Terayama.”
“You even know his name,” Makoto said. “I have never known an outcast by name in my entire life.”
My eyes were stinging from the smoky fire. I did not reply. I had never told Makoto that I’d been born into the Hidden and raised by them. I had told Kaede but no one else. It was something I’d been brought up never to speak of and maybe the only teaching I still obeyed.
“You’ve talked about your father,” Makoto said. “I know he was of mixed Tribe and Otori blood. But you never mention your mother. Who was she?”
“She was a peasant woman from Mino. It’s a tiny village in the mountains on the other side of Inuyama, almost on the borders of the Three Countries. No one’s ever heard of it. Perhaps that’s why I have a strong bond with outcasts and fishermen.”
I tried to speak lightly. I did not want to think about my mother. I had traveled so far from my life with her, and from the beliefs I had been raised in, that when I did think of her it made me uneasy. Not only had I survived when all my people had died, but I no longer believed in what they had died for. I had other goals now—other, far more pressing concerns.
“Was? She’s no longer alive?”
In the silent, neglected garden, the fire smoking, the sea sighing, a tension grew between us. He wanted to know my deepest secrets; I wanted to open my heart to him. Now that everyone else slept and only we were awake in this eerie place, maybe desire also crept in. I was always aware of his love for me; it was something I had come to count on, like the loyalty of the Miyoshi brothers, like my love for Kaede. Makoto was a constant in my world. I needed him. Our relationship might have changed since the night he had comforted me at Terayama, but at this moment I remembered how lonely and vulnerable I had been after Shigeru’s death, how I had felt I could tell him anything.
The fire had died down so I could barely see his face, but I was aware of his eyes on me. I wondered what he suspected; it seemed so obvious to me that I thought at any moment he would come out with it himself.
I said, “My mother was one of the Hidden. I was brought up in their beliefs. She and all my family, as far as I know, were massacred by the Tohan. Shigeru rescued me. Jo-An and this fisherman are also from the Hidden. We . . . recognize each other.”
He said nothing. I went on: “I’m trusting you to tell no one.”
“Did our abbot know?”
“He never mentioned it to me, but Shigeru may have told him. Anyway, I am no longer a believer. I’ve broken all the commandments, particularly the commandment not to kill.”
“Of course I will never repeat it. It woul
d do you irreparable harm among the warrior class. Most of them thought Iida was justified in his persecution of them, and not a few emulated him. It explains many things about you that I did not understand.”
“You, as a warrior and a monk, a follower of the Enlightened One, must hate the Hidden.”
“Not hate so much as feel baffled by their mysterious beliefs. I know so little about them, and what I do know is probably distorted. Maybe one day we’ll discuss it when we are at peace.”
I heard in his voice an effort to be rational, not to hurt me. “The main thing I learned from my mother was compassion,” I said. “Compassion and an aversion to cruelty. But my teaching since then has all been to eradicate compassion and reinforce ruthlessness.”
“These are the requirements of government and war,” he replied. “That is the path fate leads us along. At the temple we are also taught not to kill, but only saints at the end of their active life can aspire to that. To fight to defend yourself, to avenge your lord, or to bring justice and peace is no sin.”
“So Shigeru taught me.”
There was a moment of silence when I thought he would reach out to me. To be honest, I would not have recoiled. I felt a sudden longing to lie down and be held by someone. I might even have made the slightest of movements toward him. But he was the one who withdrew. Rising to his feet, he said, “Get some sleep. I’ll watch for a while and wake the men shortly.”
I stayed close to the fire to keep the mosquitoes away, but they still whined around my head. The sea continued its ceaseless surge and ebb on the shingle. I was uneasy about what I had revealed, about my own faithlessness, and about what Makoto would now think of me. Childishly, I would have liked him to reassure me that it made no difference. I wanted Kaede. I feared I would disappear into the dragon’s lair at Oshima and never see her again.
Sleep finally came. For the first time since my mother’s death I dreamed vividly of her. She stood in front of me, outside our house in Mino. I could smell food cooking and heard the chink of the ax as my stepfather cut firewood. In the dream I felt a rush of joy and relief that they were after all still alive. But there was a scrabbling noise at my feet and I could feel something crawling over me. My mother looked down with empty, surprised eyes. I wanted to see what she was looking at and followed her gaze. The ground was a black, heaving mass of crabs, their shells ripped from their backs. Then the screaming began, the sound I’d heard from another shrine, a lifetime away, as a man was torn apart by the Tohan.
I knew the crabs were going to tear me apart as I had torn the shells from them.
I woke up in horror, sweating. Makoto was kneeling beside me. “A man has come,” he said. “He will speak only to you.”
The feeling of dread was heavy on me. I did not want to go with this stranger to Oshima. I wanted to return at once to Maruyama, to Kaede. I wished I could send someone else on what was most likely a fool’s errand. But anyone else would probably be killed by the pirates before any message could be delivered. Having come this far, having been sent this man who would take me to Oshima and the Terada, I could not turn back.
The man was kneeling behind Makoto. I was unable to see much of him in the dark. He apologized for not coming earlier, but the tide was not right until the second half of the Hour of the Ox, and with the moon nearly full he thought I would prefer to go at night rather than wait for the afternoon tide. He seemed younger than the fisherman who’d sent him to me, and his speech was more refined and better educated, making him hard to place.
Makoto wanted to send at least one of the men with me, but my guide refused to take anyone else, saying his boat was too small. I offered to give him the silver before we left, but he laughed and said there was no point handing it over to the pirates so easily; he would take it when we returned, and if we did not return, someone else would come for it.
“If Lord Otori does not return, there will be no payment but the blade,” Makoto said grimly.
“But if I die, my dependents deserve some compensation,” he returned. “These are my conditions.”
I agreed to them, overriding Makoto’s misgivings. I wanted to get moving, to shake off the dread left by the dream. My horse, Shun, whickered to me as I left with the man. I’d charged Makoto to look after him with his life. I took Jato with me and, as usual, hidden under my clothes the weapons of the Tribe.
The boat was pulled up just above the high-water mark. We did not speak as we went to it. I helped him drag it into the water and jumped in. He pushed it farther out and then leaped in himself, sculling from the stern with the single oar. Later I took the oar while he hoisted a small square sail made of straw. It gleamed yellow in the moonlight, and amulets attached to the mast jingled in the offshore wind, which, together with the flow of the tide, would carry us to the island.
It was a brilliant night, the moon almost full throwing a silver track across the unruffled sea. The boat sang its song of wind and wave, the same song I remembered from the boats I’d been in with Fumio in Hagi. Something of the freedom and the illicit excitement of those nights came back to me now, dispelling the net of dread that the dream had caught me in.
Now I could see the young man standing at the end of the boat quite clearly. His features looked vaguely familiar; yet I did not think we had ever met before.
“What’s your name?”
“Ryoma, sir.”
“No other name?”
He shook his head and I thought he was not going to say any more. Well, he was taking me to Oshima; he did not have to talk to me as well. I yawned and pulled my robe closer round me. I thought I might as well sleep for a while.
Ryoma said, “If I had another name, it would be the same as yours.”
My eyes snapped open and my hand went to Jato, for my first thought was that he meant Kikuta—that he was another of their assassins. But he did not move from the stern of the boat and went on calmly but with a trace of bitterness. “By rights I should be able to call myself Otori, but I have never been recognized by my father.”
His story was a common enough one. His mother had been a maid at Hagi Castle, twenty years or so earlier. She had attracted the attention of the youngest Otori lord, Masahiro. When her pregnancy had been discovered, he claimed she was a prostitute and the child could be anyone’s. Her family had no alternative but to sell her into prostitution; she became what she had been called and lost all chance of her son ever being recognized. Masahiro had plenty of legitimate sons and had no interest in any others.
“Yet people say I resemble him,” he said. By now the stars had faded and the sky had paled. Day was breaking with a fiery sunrise as red as the previous night’s sunset. I realized, now that I could see him properly, why he’d looked familiar. He had the Otori stamp on his features just as I did, marred like his father’s by a slightly receding chin and cowed eyes.
“There is a likeness,” I said. “So we are cousins.”
I did not tell Ryoma, but I recalled all too clearly Masahiro’s voice when I had overheard him say If we were to adopt all our illegitimate children . . . His son intrigued me; he was what I would have been but for the slightest divergences in our paths. I had been claimed by both sides of my ancestry, he by neither.
“And look at us,” he said. “You are Lord Otori Takeo, adopted by Shigeru and rightful heir to the domain, and I am not much better than an outcast.”
“You know something of my history, then?”
“My mother knows everything about the Otori,” he said with a laugh. “Besides, you must know your own fame.”
His manner was strange, ingratiating and familiar at the same time. I imagined his mother had spoiled him, bringing him up with unrealistic expectations and false ideas about his status, telling him stories about his relatives, the Otori lords, leaving him proud and dissatisfied, ill-equipped to deal with the reality of his life.
“Is that why you agreed to help me?”
“Partly. I wanted to meet you. I’ve worked for the Terada;
I’ve been to Oshima many times. People call it the entrance to hell, but I’ve been there and survived.” His voice sounded almost boastful, but when he spoke again it was with a note of pleading. “I hoped you might help me in return.” He glanced at me. “Are you going to attack Hagi?”
I was not going to tell him too much in case he was a spy. “I think it’s general knowledge that your father and his older brother betrayed Lord Shigeru to Iida. I hold them responsible for his death.”
He grinned then. “That’s what I hoped. I have a score to settle with them too.”
“With your own father?”
“I hate him more than I would have thought it possible to hate any man,” he replied. “The Terada hate the Otori too. If you move against them, you may find allies at Oshima.”
This cousin of mine was no fool; he knew very well what my errand was. “I’m in your debt for taking me there,” I said. “I’ve incurred many debts in seeking to avenge Shigeru’s death fully, and when I hold Hagi I’ll repay them all.”
“Give me my name,” he said. “That’s all I want.”
As we approached the island he told me how he went there from time to time, taking messages and snippets of information about expeditions to the mainland or shipments of silver, silk, and other precious goods between the coastal towns.
“The Terada can do no more than irritate the Otori,” he said, “but between you maybe you can destroy them.”
I neither agreed nor disagreed with him but tried to change the subject, asking him about the fisherman and how he came to know him.
“If you mean, do I believe the nonsense he does, the answer is no!” he said. He caught my look and laughed. “But my mother does. It’s quite widespread among prostitutes. Perhaps it consoles them for their wretched lives. And besides, they should know if anyone does that all men are the same under their trappings. I don’t believe in any god or any life beyond this one. No one’s punished after death. That’s why I want to see them punished now.”
The sun had burned off the mist and the island’s cone shape was now clearly visible, looming up out of the ocean, smoke rising from it. The waves broke white against the gray-black cliffs. The wind had strengthened and drove us skimming over the swell. The tidal race past the island quickened. I felt my stomach heave as we sped down the face of a huge green billow and up the other side. I stared upward toward the craggy island and took a couple of deep breaths. I did not want to be seasick when I faced the pirates.
