Grass for His Pillow

by Lian Hearn

  I was slightly alarmed that the Tribe had caught up with me so quickly and had known where I would be going. Had Akio’s body been discovered, and messages sent already, by horse, from Hagi to Yamagata? Or was Akio still alive? I cursed myself for not taking the time to finish him off. Maybe the encounter should have frightened me more, should have made me realize what it would be like to be hunted by the Tribe for the rest of my life. I did realize it, but I was enraged that they should try to kill me like a dog in the forest and cheered by the fact that their first attempt had failed. The Tribe might have managed to kill my father, but Kenji himself had said no one would have been able to get near him if he had not taken a vow never to kill again. I knew I had all his talents, maybe even more. I would not let the Tribe near me. I would carry on Shigeru’s work and break their power.

  All these thoughts whirled through my mind as I slogged on through the snow. They gave me energy and sharpened my resolve to survive. After I’d finished with the Tribe, I turned my rage against the Otori lords, whose treachery seemed even greater to me. Warriors pretended that honor and loyalty were all-important to them; yet, their deceptions and betrayals were as deep and as self-serving as the Tribe’s. Shigeru’s uncles had sent him to his death and were now trying to dispossess me. They did not know what lay in store for them.

  If they could have seen me, knee-deep in drifts of snow, ill-clad, ill-equipped, with no men, money, or land, they would certainly have lost no sleep over any threat I posed them.

  I could not stop and rest. I had no alternative but to keep walking until I reached Terayama or dropped in my tracks from exhaustion, but every now and then I stepped off the path and listened for any sound of pursuit. I heard nothing except the moan of the wind and the soft hiss of the flakes as they fell, until, late in the day when the light was beginning to fade, I thought I could hear snatches of sound from below.

  It was the last thing I would have expected to hear out on the mountain as the forest filled with snow. It sounded like flute music, as lonely as the wind in the pines, as fleeting as the flakes. It sent shivers down my spine, not only from the usual effect music has on me, but from a deeper fear. I believed I had come too close to the edge of the world and was hearing spirits. I thought of the mountain goblins who lure humans and keep them captive below the ground for thousands of years. I wished I could form the prayers my mother taught me, but my lips were frozen, and anyway, I no longer believed in their power.

  The music grew louder. I was approaching its source, but I could not stop walking, as though it had enchanted me and was drawing me toward itself. I rounded the corner and saw the path fork. Immediately, I remembered what my guide had told me, and indeed, there was the little shrine, just visible, three oranges placed before it glowing bright beneath their caps of snow. Behind the shrine was a small hut with wooden walls and a thatched roof. My fears subsided at once and I almost laughed aloud. It was no goblin I’d heard but some monk or hermit who had retreated to the mountain to seek enlightenment.

  Now I could smell smoke. The warmth drew me irresistibly. I could imagine the coals drying my soaked feet, bringing them back from the blocks of ice they’d turned into. I could almost feel the heat on my face. The door of the hut was open to let light in and smoke out. The flute player had neither heard nor seen me. He was lost in the sorrowful, unearthly music.

  Even before I saw him, I knew who he was. I had heard the same music before, night after night as I grieved at Shigeru’s grave. It was Makoto, the young monk who had comforted me. He sat cross-legged, his eyes closed. He was playing the long bamboo flute, but a smaller transverse flute lay on the cushion beside him. A brazier burned smokily near the entrance. At the back of the hut was a raised sleeping area. A wooden fighting pole leaned against the wall, but no other weapons were visible. I stepped in—even with the brazier it was only slightly warmer than outside—and said quietly, “Makoto?”

  He did not open his eyes or stop playing.

  I said his name again. The music faltered and he took the flute from his lips. He spoke in a whisper, wearily: “Leave me alone. Stop tormenting me. I am sorry. I am sorry.” He still did not look up.

  As he took up the flute again I knelt before him and touched him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, looked at me, and, taking me completely by surprise, leaped to his feet, throwing the flute aside. He backed away from me, seized the pole, and held it out threateningly. His eyes were filled with suffering, his face gaunt, as though he had been fasting. “Stay away from me,” he said, his voice low and hoarse.

  I stood too. “Makoto,” I said gently, “it’s no enemy. It’s me: Otori Takeo.”

  I took a step toward him and he immediately swung the pole at my shoulder. I saw it coming and deflected it a little, and luckily in the small space he could not swing it hard or he would have broken my collarbone. As it was, he knocked me to the ground. The shock must have reverberated up to his hands, for he dropped the pole and looked at them in astonishment and then at me on the floor.

  “Takeo?” he said. “You’re real? It’s not your ghost?”

  “Real enough to half knock out,” I said, getting up and flexing my arm. Once I was sure nothing was broken, I reached inside my clothes for my knife. I felt safer with it in my hand.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I would never hurt you. It’s just that I have seen your apparition so often.” He looked as if he would reach out to touch me, then drew back. “I can’t believe it’s you! What strange fate brings you here at this hour?”

  “I am going to Terayama. Twice I’ve been offered refuge there. Now I need to accept that offer, until spring.”

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” he repeated. “You’re soaked. You must be freezing.” He looked round the tiny hut. “I have so little to offer you.” He turned toward the sleeping area, tripped over the pole, and bent to retrieve it. Placing it back against the wall, he took one of the thin hempen quilts from the bed. “Take off your clothes. We’ll dry them. Wrap yourself in this.”

  “I must keep going,” I said. “I’ll just sit by the fire for a while.”

  “You’ll never get to Terayama tonight. It will be dark in an hour, and it’s still five hours’ walk. Spend the night here; we’ll go together in the morning.”

  “The blizzard will have closed the path by then,” I said. “I want to be snowed in at the temple, not snowed out.”

  “This is the first fall of the year,” he replied. “It’s heavy on the mountain, but from here downward it is more sleet than snow.” He smiled and quoted the old poem: “ ‘On nights when, rain mixing in, the snow falls’. . . unfortunately, I am as poor as the poet and his family!”

  It was one of the first pieces Ichiro had taught me to write, and it brought him to my mind with piercing clarity. I was beginning to shiver violently. Now that I was no longer moving, I was indeed freezing. I began to peel off the wet clothes. Makoto took them and stretched them before the brazier, adding a little wood and blowing up the embers.

  “This looks like blood,” he said. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. Someone tried to kill me at the border.”

  “This blood is his, then?”

  I nodded, not sure how much to tell him, for his safety as well as my own.

  “Is anyone following you?” he said.

  “Either following me or lying in wait for me. That’s how it will be for the rest of my life.”

  “Will you tell me why?” He lit a taper from the fire and held it to the wick of an oil lamp. The lamp spluttered reluctantly into life. “There’s not much oil,” he apologized, and went to close the outer shutters.

  Night stretched before us. “Can I trust you?” I said.

  The question made him laugh. “I have no idea what you’ve been through since we last met, or what brings you to this place now. And you know nothing about me. If you did, you would not need to ask. I’ll tell you everything later. In the meantime, yes, you can trust me. If you trust no one else, trust me
.”

  A note of deep emotion had crept into his voice. He turned away. “I’ll warm some soup,” he said. “I’m sorry, I have neither wine nor tea.”

  I remembered how he had comforted me in my terrible grief after Shigeru’s death. He had reassured me while I was racked by remorse, and had held me until grief had given way to desire, and both had been assuaged.

  “I cannot stay with the Tribe,” I said. “I’ve left them, and they will pursue me until they execute me.”

  Makoto took a pot from the corner of the room and placed it carefully over the embers. He looked toward me again.

  “They wanted me to find the records Shigeru kept of them,” I said. “They sent me to Hagi. I was supposed to kill Ichiro, my teacher, and give the records to them. But of course they weren’t there.”

  Makoto smiled but still said nothing.

  “That is one of the reasons why I have to reach Terayama. Because that’s where they are. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “We would have told you if you had not already chosen to go with the Tribe,” he said. “But our duty to Lord Shigeru meant we could not take the risk. He entrusted the records to us, for he knew our temple is one of the few in the Three Countries that has not been infiltrated by Tribe members.”

  He poured the soup into a bowl and handed it to me. “I only have one bowl. I didn’t expect visitors. And the last person I expected was you!”

  “Why are you here?” I asked him. “Are you going to spend the winter here?” I didn’t voice the thought, but I doubted he would survive. Maybe he didn’t want to. I drank a mouthful of soup. It was hot and salty, but that was about all you could say for it. And this seemed to be the only food he had. What had happened to the energetic young man I’d first met at Terayama? What had driven him to this state of resignation, almost despair?

  I pulled the quilt around me and edged a little closer to the fire. As always I listened. The wind had strengthened and was whistling through the thatch. Every now and then a gust made the lamp flicker, throwing grotesque shadows onto the opposite wall. The noise of whatever was falling outside was not the soft, breathlike touch of snow but harder and more sleety.

  Now that the doors were closed the hut was warming up. My clothes were beginning to steam. I drained the bowl and passed it back to him. He filled it, took a sip, and placed it on the floor.

  “The winter, the rest of my life, whichever turns out to be the longer,” he said, looked at me, looked down. “It’s hard for me to talk to you, Takeo, since so much of it concerns you, but the Enlightened One has seen fit to bring you here, so I have to try. Your presence changes everything. I told you, your apparition has been constantly with me; you visit me at night in dreams. I have been striving to overcome this obsession.”

  He smiled self-mockingly. “Since I was a child I have tried to practice detachment from the world of the senses. My only desire was enlightenment. I craved holiness. I’m not saying I’d never had attachments: you know what it’s like when men live together without women. Terayama is no exception. But I never fell in love with anyone. I never became obsessed as I did with you.” Again the smile curved his lips. “I won’t go into why. It’s not important, and anyway, I’m not sure I even know. However, after Lord Shigeru’s death, you were out of your mind with grief. I was moved by your suffering. I wanted to comfort you.”

  “You did comfort me,” I said, in a low voice.

  “For me it went beyond comfort! I didn’t realize it would be so powerful. I loved the way I felt and was grateful for experiencing what I’d never felt before, and I loathed it. It made all my spiritual strivings seem like a hollow sham. I went to our abbot and told him I thought I should leave the temple and return to the world. He suggested I go away for a while to think about my decision. I have a boyhood friend in the West, Mamoru, who had been pleading with me to visit him. You know, I play the flute a little. I was invited to join Mamoru and others in presenting a drama, Atsumori.”

  He fell silent. The wind threw a flurry of sleet against the wall. The lamp guttered so violently, it almost went out. I had no idea what Makoto was going to say next, but my heart had picked up speed and I could feel the pulse quickening in my throat. Not with desire, though the memory of desire was there; it was more a fear of hearing what I did not want to hear.

  Makoto said, “My friend lives in the household of Lord Fujiwara.”

  I shook my head. I’d never heard of him.

  “He is a nobleman living in exile from the capital. His lands run alongside the Shirakawa.”

  Just to hear her name spoken was like being hit in the belly. “Did you see Lady Shirakawa?”

  He nodded.

  “I was told she was dying.” My heart was hammering so hard, I thought it would leap from my throat.

  “She was gravely ill but she recovered. Lord Fujiwara’s physician saved her life.”

  “She’s alive?” The dim lamp seemed to brighten until the hut was full of light. “Kaede is alive?”

  He studied my face, his own filled with pain. “Yes, and I am profoundly thankful, for if she had died it would have been me who dealt the fatal blow.”

  I was frowning, trying to puzzle out his words. “What happened?”

  “The Fujiwara household knew her as Lady Otori. It was believed that Lord Shigeru married her secretly at Terayama, on the day he came to his brother’s grave, the day we met. I had not expected to see her in Lord Fujiwara’s house; I had not been told of her marriage. I was completely taken aback when she was introduced to me. I assumed you had married her—that you were there yourself. I blurted out as much. Not only did I reveal to myself the strength and nature of my obsession with you, which I’d fooled myself I was recovering from, I destroyed her pretense in an instant, in the presence of her father.”

  “But why would she claim such a thing?”

  “Why does any woman claim to be married when she is not? She nearly died because she miscarried a child.”

  I could not speak.

  Makoto said, “Her father questioned me about the marriage. I knew it had not taken place at Terayama. I tried to avoid answering him directly, but he already had his own suspicions and I had said enough to confirm them. I did not know it then, but his mind was very unstable and he had often spoken of taking his own life. He slit his belly in her presence, and the shock must have caused the miscarriage.”

  I said, “The child was mine. She should have been my wife. She will be.”

  But as I heard my own words, my betrayal of Kaede seemed all the more enormous. Would she ever forgive me?

  “So I assumed,” he said. “But when? What were you thinking of? A woman of her rank and family?”

  “We were thinking of death. It was the night Shigeru died and Inuyama fell. We did not want to die without . . .” I was unable to continue.

  After a few moments Makoto went on, “I could not live with myself. My passion had led me deeply back into the world of suffering I thought I could escape. I felt I had done irreparable harm to another sentient being, even though only a woman, but at the same time some jealous part of me wanted her to die, because I knew that you loved her and that she must have loved you. You see, I am hiding nothing from you. I must tell you the worst about myself.”

  “I would be the last to condemn you. My own conduct has been far more cruel in its effects.”

  “But you belong to this world, Takeo; you live in the midst of it. I wanted to be different. Even that was revealed to me as the most hideous pride. I returned to Terayama and sought our abbot’s permission to retire to this small hut, where I would devote my flute playing and any passion that remained in me to serving the Enlightened One, though I no longer even hope for his enlightenment, for I am completely unworthy of it.”

  “We all live in the midst of the world,” I said. “Where else is there to live?” As I spoke I thought I heard Shigeru’s voice: Just as the river is always at the door, so is the world always outside. And it is in the world th
at we have to live.

  Makoto was staring at me, his face suddenly open, his eyes brighter. “Is that the message I am to hear? Is that why you were sent to me?”

  “I hardly know my plans for my own life,” I replied. “How can I fathom yours? But this was one of the first things I learned from Shigeru. It is in the world that we have to live.”

  “Then let’s take it as a command from him,” Makoto said, and I could see the energy beginning to flow back into him. He seemed to have been resigned to death, but now he was coming back to life before my eyes. “You intend now to carry out his wishes?”

  “Ichiro told me I must take revenge on Shigeru’s uncles and claim my inheritance, and so I mean to. But as to how I achieve it, I have no idea. And I must marry Lady Shirakawa. That was also Shigeru’s desire.”

  “Lord Fujiwara wishes to marry her,” Makoto said carefully.

  I wanted to brush this aside. I could not believe Kaede would marry anyone else. Her last words to me had been, “I will never love anyone but you.” And before that she had said, “I am only safe with you.” I knew the reputation she had acquired: that any man who touched her died. I had lain with her and lived. I had given her a child. And I had abandoned her, she had nearly died, she had lost our child. . . . Would she ever forgive me?

  Makoto went on: “Fujiwara prefers men to women. But he seems to have become obsessed with Lady Shirakawa. He proposes a marriage in name only, to give her his protection. Presumably he is also not indifferent to her inheritance. Shirakawa is pitifully run down, but there is always Maruyama.”

  When I made no comment he murmured, “He is a collector. She will become one of his possessions. His collection never sees the light of day. It is shown only to a few privileged friends.”

  “That cannot happen to her!”