The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2)

by K. Bird Lincoln

  My hands curled into fists at my sides. As I’d expected, Ashikaga didn’t take me seriously, didn’t take the old ways—or their power—seriously unless in the midst of a fight when my Jindo songs smoked out fox solders so Ashikaga could wield steel against them.

  Bitterness coated my tongue. I tried to swallow it down. I’d thought these Kyoto evenings and mornings had made my heart more real to my lordling—something other than Tiger Lily, the spinster crow of Ashikaga village.

  But the eyes glaring at me now saw only a poor excuse of a handmaiden intruding in noble business: an irritation. That wasn’t true! Answering anger tightened my chest. I should brush past and stalk out the door. Leave Ashikaga and that stupid pride to whatever fate had planned.

  My legs wouldn’t take me.

  Those mornings and evenings had done nothing to help Ashikaga believe in me, but they’d woven a snare of quiet moments and care for me. Inside that mocking lordling was such a fierce need that I could not walk away.

  Frustration vibrated in the fiercely thrown back shoulders and the tight line of Ashikaga’s jaw. A familiar ache started in my chest. Lord Ashikaga Yoshinori needed me, whether my lordling could admit it or not. All those months ago when I held that wounded body in my arms, hidden inside a hunter’s blind surrounded by General Norinaga’s fox soldiers, Whispering Brook had spoken in the cold, misted air.

  Another Tiger girl. You will need her strength.

  “Let me attend you, today,” I whispered. “I can be proper.” I bowed my head, and let my sleeves slide forward to hide my hands.

  My lordling sucked in a surprised breath between clenched teeth. Slowly, a finger traced the untidy line of my hair from temple to ear. Tension flowed out of us both, mingling, turning to a familiar heat. When the finger left my skin, I bit my lip at the wanting for it to return.

  “You continually challenge me,” said Ashikaga. “Very well, if you are with me, and not busy praying for a husband, I can keep an eye on you. Follow me.” It was the closest thing to an apology I’d ever heard from Ashikaga. I held my tongue and did as bid, scurrying to keep up with my lordling’s wide stride.

  At the room where I’d entered, my lordling gave me a stern glance, and then slid open the gold fusuma. A long line of naked backs sat in a row along an open verandah. Two had startling lines of welt-red on their shoulder-blades. Knees bent in formal seiza, hands open-palmed on their thighs, the penitents gazed over the famous dry landscape rock garden of Ryoan-ji.

  A sea of raked, white gravel swirled around larger rocks like pitted, craggy islands. It was absolutely still but for the even breathing of the men.

  In one corner, a shaven-headed priest in black sat near a brazier filling the wooden hall with fragrant cedar smoke. He had a bamboo rod in his hands. Ashikaga nodded to him, and then strode past the verandah.

  Smoke swirled. I coughed behind a cupped hand.

  One of the seated figures darted a glance my way at the sound of my cough. The man arose, and with a quick shrug, slipped his arms through the sleeves of the white kimono bunched around his waist. My cough wasn’t that abrupt. I’d stifled it behind my hand the way Little Turtle had taken so many pains to teach me. Why had the person stared so? That unadorned robe and wide, gray obi said it was a man. The smooth hair gathered into a tail that reached down the middle of the person’s back evoked a softness and femininity. The face was as white as Beautiful’s after a fresh application of her precious nightingale powder.

  I thought of an egret, long-limbed, and slender. The man navigated the narrow space behind the other penitents with the same innate elegance as an egret picking its way over river-rocks. Ashikaga’s single-minded focus sent my lordling down the adjacent corridor without noticing the man. I shuffled after my lordling.

  Not Norinaga, or his companion. A stranger.

  My back prickled. Whoever it was followed behind me, obviously intent on overtaking Ashikaga.

  “My Lord,” I said. Ashikaga stopped. Noticing the stranger, one hand went to the waist where the grip of a sword usually rested. A tense moment stretched the length of the corridor.

  Ashikaga finally bowed, low and long—a flagrant insult.

  The person returned the bow, but with the acute timing and carelessly perfect fold of sleeve that marked him a Kyoto native.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” said my lordling in a way that made it crystal clear it was no honor at all.

  A strange bubble of excitement formed in my belly. A man, but one who dressed without sword or crest or gauntlets. A man who wore his hair long and sleek like Lady Hisako’s and even plucked his eyebrows into thin arches high on the forehead.

  “My Lord Yoshinori,” said the man. He glanced in my direction. Heat spread down the back of my neck to the middle of my shoulders. That gaze. That knowing. Like he flayed open my skin and found the huddling girl from Ashikaga Village who walked alone in the woods.

  He knew. He somehow knew who I was; what I was. And when he turned that gaze, as sharp as Father’s best kitchen knife, on Ashikaga, it was clear he knew who—what—Ashikaga was.

  This stranger that made my lordling prickle like a hedgehog knew Ashikaga’s secret. Impossible. No one knew outside of the Ashikaga family and their most loyal retainers. Could this be Ashikaga’s brother, Lord Yoshikazu? I’d heard he was nothing like my lordling or the Daimyo, but I could find no resemblance. Under the rice powder, wrinkles gathered around his eyes and at the pit of his throat. He was as old as Father.

  Not Yoshikazu, then. Ashikaga stepped between me and those knife-eyes. “What do you want?” Bare-bones politeness in those words. Surely it was unwise to be insolent to someone who knew my lordling’s secret?

  “Forgive my intrusion,” said the man. His voice had old-fashioned, honeyed inflections I was used to hearing from aged nobles like Lady Kiku. “I have something I am supposed to give to you.” He brought out of the depths of his deep sleeve a square wrapped in a silk furoshiki patterned with chrysanthemums.

  Ashikaga recoiled as if the square were a venomous snake. “I want nothing from you.” Gone was the mocking lord I’d kept company with since we arrived in Kyo no Miyako. This was the dangerous warrior I’d seen on Hell Mountain when my lordling had fought General Norinaga, now poised on the brink of violent action, hands closed into trembling fists. If Ashikaga had been allowed swords within the temple grounds, this man in front of me would be feeling the bite of jewel steel.

  I raised a hand to tug my lordling’s sleeve, but the man bowed his head, rounded his shoulders, and narrowed his stance. The perfect, submissive demeanor of a handmaiden to her lord. A posture Little Turtle spent every day trying to drill into me.

  “Please do me the honor of setting down the past’s burden for a short while. I would not disturb you without vital cause. This small token comes to you from Lady Yasuko.”

  My lordling lunged forward and jerked the bundle from the man’s grasp. “How do you come to bear my mother’s possession?”

  “She gave it to me,” said the man. He never changed his submissive posture, but I saw a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes and the upward curve of his mouth. This one played one thing but was entirely another. It would be a mistake for my lordling to make him an enemy.

  “Liar.”

  I gasped. My lordling demolished any semblance this was a polite conversation. The man stepped back, turning to the side as if to present a smaller target. Not a noble, then, who surely would have stepped forward in answer to the insult.

  Recognition lit. I’d seen that profile before. This strange man had been deep in the heart of the Ashikaga palace. I’d caught a quick glimpse of the hawk-nose and powder-white face a few days ago behind a shoji sliding closed in the Daimyo’s inner rooms.

  Who was he, with access to the Daim
yo’s inner sanctum and mingling here with nobles at Ryoan-ji? Not a lord nor a warrior with that hair and face and manner. A commoner like me, for sure. His feminine elegance contrasting with the muscled shoulders made my cheeks heat and my insides squirm, but I couldn’t look away. A square chin and jutting throat-box framed by that cascade of smooth hair. Male features and female countenance. Eerily similar, and yet utterly unlike, my lordling. Ashikaga did not show one thing and act another. Ashikaga was a man, in all ways but one.

  No, this man made me uneasy because he was uncomfortably close to me—born into a role fate decreed more fitting for the opposite sex. He was unmistakably a man who moved like the picture of feminine grace. And I was his opposite, unmistakably female despite my large bones and coarse hair, yet moving like one of Ashikaga’s foot soldiers.

  “Would you,” said the man quietly, soothingly, a mother to an irate child, “have me be any more truthful? Would your father?”

  “The truth doesn’t scare me. Either my father’s or yours. What you call truth I call stirring up old ghosts.”

  “Yoshinori-sama,” said the man his voice huskier now, “we both took the clay fate gave us and shaped our own truth.” His shoulders straightened, his stance widened, and the corners of his mouth turned down. I blinked. A man stood before us, unmistakably taking up space in the narrow hall in the way of one long used to command. Twisting his features into the caricature of a lecherous soldier eyeing a serving girl, he spoke. “Your handmaiden paramour may fool most, but her presence in your room at night will not cover your deepest secret.”

  Ashikaga’s fingers gripped the bundle so tightly they turned white. “Even this? Does my father hold nothing back for his family?”

  “My lord, please,” I whispered. It would be an inexcusable act to attack this man, here in a temple. I tugged the edge of a sleeve.

  My lordling turned sideways, glaring holes in the wooden wall, trembling with the effort of not throttling the stranger. “Please be so kind as to excuse us.” The tones were archaically inflected, polite. “My father is ill and I must attend him.” Without a bow or slightest head tilt, Ashikaga strode away down the corridor.

  I gave an awkward court-bow, ready to run after.

  “Lily-of-the-valley,” said the man.

  He knew my name. His posture softened; again he was all female grace.

  “Your master will have questions once he sees the content of Lady Yasuko’s gift. Come to me in Kamishichiken district. Ask for Zeami at the Ichi tea house. I will help you as I am able.”

  Zeami. Even a hick like me had heard of Zeami Motokiyo. An onnagata of the Sarugaku Noh Theater whose special sponsor was the Ashikaga Daimyo himself. According to Beautiful, Sarugaku onnagata actors donned oval masks painted white as snow with blood-red lips. Their faces frozen in the most stylized female beauty, these male actors portrayed female grace even more beautifully than nobles like Lady Kiku or the Emperor’s Lady Eishi.

  There were also whispers about the particular nature of the relationship between the Daimyo and his favorite actor. I’d seen Zeami in the Ashikaga Palace last week.

  He called me handmaiden paramour. Paramour.

  There was an afternoon when I’d returned to my shared room to fetch a needle and found the Chamberlain laying a sprig of wisteria-vine on Beautiful’s rolled up bedroll. He’d coughed and grunted, but there was a softness about him in that moment I’d never seen before. The same softness I’d seen in Beautiful when she darted glances at him from under the thick fall of her hair as we passed him in the corridors. That softness never appeared in my lordling’s eyes. All sharp angles and eagle hauteur, my lordling showed determination and a kind of self-mocking pleasure. As if a heart chafed within that narrow ribcage, like a rabbit caught in one of my snares, trying to escape even as the slipknot tightened.

  Those times Ashikaga looked uncannily like the Daimyo. I couldn’t imagine the Daimyo ever looking less than fierce. Was that how it was with Zeami and the Daimyo? Zeami had used the word paramour on purpose, knowing exactly how ill-fitting it was for what I was to Ashikaga. My lordling clearly disdained Zeami, but I found myself wanting to trust this man who knew something of our secrets.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, dropping my demure pose.

  The corridor was empty. Zeami was gone, but so was Ashikaga.

  I hurried down the corridor, the slick fabric of my stockings sliding over polished wood. So many doors. Ashikaga was behind one set. Which one?

  I stopped in front of fusuma featuring ink drawings in the manner of the Middle Kingdom. More like pheasant scratches in snow than the craggy mountains they were supposed to be. The outline of a man with a long beard swept outside a hut perched on a precarious cliff. A slice of golden lamplight lit the dim hall from a crack between partition and wall. Dust motes swam lazily through the air. Male voices murmured within.

  I hesitated. What if this were the wrong room? I could mumble an apology and try to slip away. But if monks discovered an unescorted peasant in their sacred hall they’d surely beat me away as quick as Auntie Jay defending her plum tree from a crow.

  What if it was the right room? What if Norinaga was in there right now, with my lordling unprepared and swordless? Ashikaga’s sword tricks and torches defeated the fox soldiers on Hell Mountain, but he couldn’t lift a sword against the fox magic here in the temple.

  I held my breath and slid the panel open a crack. Over a small, black-lacquered tray Ashikaga and Uesugi-san leaned together, speaking harsh, quick words. My lordling waved me to sit against the wall without glancing up. Relief should have gripped me as soon as I saw Ashikaga. My heart still thudded wildly. General Norinaga was nearby, I knew it.

  I hurried to do my lordling’s bidding. As I folded myself as neatly as possible into a corner, another man staggered through the doorway. The sick-sweet smell of rice wine filled the air. Uesugi-san scuttled back, bowing like a warrior over crossed legs.

  It was Norinaga’s companion. He’d hastily tidied the stray hairs jutting from his topknot and smoothed over the wrinkled kimono. It now revealed the black-on-red embroidered paulownia blossom crest of the Ashikagas.

  “Dearest Brother,” he said.

  This round-faced sot was my lordling’s elder brother? Fleshy cheeks and a nose reddened like a tea-house geezer under thick, long-tufted eyebrows made him seem as old as the Chamberlain. His silk obi bulged over his paunch. Only the crest and his hands marked him as an Ashikaga. He had the same long-fingered, slender-strong wrists as my lordling. Only on this mochi ball of a man they were out of place, a dust brown pheasant parading an eagle’s snow-white feathers.

  Ashikaga nodded, carefully smiling.

  “How did you get roped into attending father in this tediously dour place?”

  “No tedium in doing one’s duty,” answered my lordling.

  Ashikaga Yoshikazu, the heir to the most powerful Northern Han of Yamato, eldest son of the Daimyo, and playmate of the Emperor, snorted. He slapped a knee with a fleshy palm and guffawed. “You’ve turned into Father’s spitting image,” he said. “But don’t tell me you’re sour wine all the time.”

  Ashikaga let the false smile wilt. “It wasn’t father who taught me that saying.”

  Lord Yoshikazu shook his head. He tumbled to a seat across from Ashikaga. “Then there’s hope for you, yet, little brother. If I can shake off the Northern doldrums, so can you!” He wrinkled his nose. “Don’t these monks ever eat anything except rice and greens?” He searched the room, spotted me, and jerked his chin at the corridor. “I need more than just tea to fortify me before facing the old hawk. Go fetch some refreshments.”

  Ashikaga put out a hand to stop me from rising. Uesugi-san lunge-walked over to the table and poured tea from a rough, clay-colored pot.

  “This is a mo
nastery, Eldest brother. The monks are unlikely to have dried abalone or cured jellyfish. Besides, Father has been waiting. He is quite impatient to see you.”

  “But not you, eh, little brother. Father couldn’t spare you one moment to visit me since you arrived? There was a time you stuck to me like a burr on silk.”

  “Every time I went to your residence you were . . . occupied. You never answered father’s summons to Ashikaga Palace.”

  “The last six months changed everything. I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy with carousing? Boar hunts?” said Ashikaga.

  Lord Yoshikazu pounded a fist on the lacquered table. The two tea cups rattled, spilling fragrant liquid. “Don’t overreach yourself!”

  “At least I stay sober for more than a handful of minutes at a time!” The siblings glared at each other. Uesugi-san cleared his throat. Ashikaga gave him a look that would have melted steel. After a deep breath, my lordling settled back onto the zabuton cushion. “Father forbade me from bringing Go-Daigo’s head myself to present to Emperor Chokei. Two months ago he suddenly summons me to join him in Kyoto. I hurry here as fast as I can, expecting some dire emergency and for my brother to walk me through court protocols, but Father lies abed most mornings and you, you won’t even . . .”

  “Little Brother,” said Lord Yoshikazu. His inflection was exactly the same weary-fond tone I used with my own little brother. “Since mother passed away, I’ve had to make nice with lots of powerful families. Father’s victory against Emperor Go-Daigo may make him the warlords’ darling, but the courtiers here in Kyoto are uneasy. Mother’s connections to the court mollified them somewhat. But now, with her sudden death . . .” Lord Yoshikazu deflated like a pricked blowfish bladder.

  Ashikaga looked up sharply. “What do you know of mother’s death? It wasn’t illness, was it? Were you there?”

  Lord Yoshikazu’s eyelids dipped close to the swollen pouches under his eyes. He rested a cheek on his fist.