Grass for His Pillow

by Lian Hearn

  We talked about our lives since we had been separated, especially about the child. We thought about its soul, launched again into the cycle of birth and death, and prayed for it. I told Kaede about my visit to Hagi and my flight through the snow. I did not tell her about Yuki, and she kept secrets from me, for though she told me a little about Lord Fujiwara, she did not go into details as to the pact they had made. I knew he had given her large amounts of money and food, and it worried me, for it made me think his views on the marriage were more fixed than hers. I felt a slight chill in my spine that may have been a premonition, but I put the thought away, for I wanted nothing to spoil my joy.

  I woke toward dawn to find her sleeping in my arms. Her skin was white, silky to my touch, both warm and cool at the same time. Her hair, so long and thick it covered us both like a shawl, smelled of jasmine. I had thought her like the flower on the high mountain, completely beyond my reach, but she was here, she was mine. The world stood still in the silent night as the realization sank in. The backs of my eyes stung as tears came. Heaven was benign. The gods loved me. They had given me Kaede.

  For a few days heaven continued to smile on us, giving us gentle spring weather, every day sunny. Everyone at the temple seemed happy for us—from Manami, who beamed with delight when she brought us tea the first morning, to the abbot, who resumed my lessons, teasing me unmercifully if he caught me yawning. Scores of people made the climb up the mountain to bring gifts and wish us well, just as the village people would have done in Mino.

  Only Makoto sounded a different note. “Make the most of your happiness,” he said to me. “I am happy for you, believe me, but I fear it will not last.”

  I already knew this: I had learned it from Shigeru. “Death comes suddenly and life is fragile and brief,” he had told me the day after he had saved my life in Mino. “No one can alter this either by prayers or spells.” It was the fragility of life that made it so precious. Our happiness was all the more intense for our awareness of how fleeting it might be.

  The cherry blossoms were already falling, the days lengthening as the season turned. The winter of preparation was over: Spring was giving way to summer, and summer was the season of war. Five battles lay ahead of us, four to win and one to lose.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Asialink Foundation and all my friends in Japan and Australia who have helped me in researching and writing Tales of the Otori.

  In Grass for His Pillow I particularly want to thank Ms. Sugiyama Kazuko for her calligraphy and Simon Higgins for his advice on martial arts.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com