Ashikaga was strong enough with a sword to prevail on the battlefield, but at heart my lordling was an eagle from the wild North and these were seasoned city dwellers.
That tense jaw and the forced stillness of the hands on those thighs showed my lordling also had misgivings about an official appearance. If only I could put a hand on those shoulders, or cover one fist with my own. An ache started, something that cost me to sit here next to Little Turtle without doing any of those things.
Lord Hojo and the Daimyo continued discussing the screens and the Barbarian physician. Ashikaga finally reached for wine and food, eating in big gulps, barely chewing the delicacies. Rushing, planning to withdraw soon. I should go, too. I reached in my obi to pull out Jiro’s treat, slipping it into Little Turtle’s delicate palm.
She leaned close and whispered. “You have to go with him tonight to the Sarugaku play.”
I shook my head. “Better you or Beautiful.”
“He needs you.”
Ashikaga stood up and asked the Daimyo for permission to leave. I jumped up, causing Little Turtle to give a last hiss of disapproval. As I slid the fusuma closed behind me, Lord Hojo paused with a fried chirimenjako at his mouth, giving me a smirk that promised me his attention at a later time.
I stumbled after my lordling, already halfway down the hall. When I reached the turn, Ashikaga whirled on me. “He sells Hisako too cheaply. She needs a husband closer to home. She’ll wilt at court.”
I stood silent, staring down at a robe lapel. Ashikaga didn’t need any challenge from me, but surely it was clear Lady Hisako would have to marry? That’s what nobles did. Children of a Daimyo had no say in their fate.
No say.
Oh. I hadn’t thought about what that meant for Ashikaga, who was also a Daimyo’s child. Ashikaga marry? Could the Daimyo ask this of my lordling? Would Ashikaga’s wife be told my lordling’s secret? Surely a wife would have to know. And then what?
Ashikaga made a frustrated sound deep in the back of the throat. “Lord Hojo is so . . . so . . .” Ashikaga leaned in close, placing hands on the wall at shoulder level on either side of me, closing me in.
“His lands are close,” I said desperately. “Lady Hisako could visit often.” I couldn’t stop my thoughts from running down this path, as if closing it off so long made it irresistible now. If Ashikaga married, would the wife live at the Great House? The Daimyo and his lady wife lived apart for so many years—maybe noble marriages worked that way.
“Some people are not meant for this,” said Ashikaga, spine straight as a board, seeming to blot out the entire hall with narrow, proud shoulders. Speaking of Lady Hisako? With an exasperated tongue-cluck, Ashikaga spun away, moving down the hall as if a Daimyo’s palace was too small to contain my lordling.
Chapter Nine
* * *
WHEN I REACHED the closed shoji of Ashikaga’s rooms, my hail was answered with a curt grunt that company wasn’t needed this night. Dropping to my knees, I put a hand on the oiled wood of a panel divider. The texture looked smooth, but the rough grain caught at my rough fingertips. Should I leave? Or should I barge in and endure the sulking?
Neither course of action seemed safe.
“Keeping the nightingales company tonight?” said a male voice. Uesugi-san stood behind me, hands linked behind his back. “I don’t mean to interrupt your vigil,” he said with grating condescension, “but is Lord Ashikaga inside?”
I nodded, unsure if his tone was meant to tease or hurt. We’d parted on such bitter words before. Uesugi-san stepped in front of me and knocked on the door. “Sir, I request a word.”
“Not now,” came the answer from inside.
Uesugi-san glared as if it were my fault Ashikaga wouldn’t let him in. He shook his head. “Sir, I humbly request a word.”
Something clattered behind the shoji. My heart beat a moment’s worth of taut silence, and then cloth rustled. The shoji slid open with a jerk.
“You never humbly request anything.” Ashikaga’s hair was loose about the shoulders, and the sleeping robe looked hastily thrown on. My lordling never appeared with so few layers of clothing. It made Ashikaga look young and vulnerable and too much like my sister May first thing in the morning.
Uesugi-san stepped inside.
Ashikaga spoke to a spot just over my head. “You might as well come, too.”
I slid myself inside the door. Uesugi-san knit hairy eyebrows into his darkest glower, but didn’t move from formal seiza.
“My Lord,” he said. His forehead came down to the perfect triangle of spread fingers on the tatami, a bow Uesugi-san usually reserved for the Daimyo himself.
“Don’t play games of formality with me tonight.” My lordling’s appearance was untidy, but the jumble of scrolls and bedclothes I’d left behind earlier that afternoon were gone, tatami bare of everything but us three, human bodies. Ashikaga must have cleared everything away just now. Imposing order on the outside was a sure sign of a troubled inside. The clean room did more to make me uneasy than the disheveled appearance.
“I request you give me leave to return home,” said Uesugi-san.
Ashikaga’s bleary gaze focused sharply on Uesugi-san’s face. “Go home?”
“You have no need of a captain of guards with your father’s men stationed here.”
“You plan to abandon your post?” Ashikaga was trying to be gruff, but it was too forced, too purposefully loud.
“My Lord, I beg you humbly not to press me on this point. There are reasons of a personal nature . . .”
“Brother,” said Ashikaga, dropping the gruffness for a curiously high-pitched tone. My lordling’s true, physical tone, I realized, the unguarded voice of the true body. Pity and a touch of melancholy came into Ashikaga’s manner. A soft strength flowed from my lordling to Uesugi-san in the slowly relaxing limbs and rounded shoulders of the two warriors.
Ashikaga leaned forward, dark eyes brimming with a fierce emotion.
Uesugi-san sat up, tall, sliding an emotional shutter closed. “Let me spend these last months at home,” he said. “Afterwards, I’ll never have reason to leave you again.”
What did he mean last months? Why was Ashikaga being so obviously gentle with Uesugi-san? The personal reason Uesugi-san had to go home . . .
Oh. Uesugi-san must have been in the welcoming party for Lord Hojo’s arrival. He’d heard of the engagement. Even I couldn’t miss all those times I’d seen him turn clumsy-worded and curt with Lady Hisako.
I thought of all Ashikaga faced in the capital. What did Uesugi-san hope to accomplish by going home? Say no, I willed. Keep your strong right arm with you.
My conscience twinged. What could Uesugi-san do against a yurei?
I’d been too cowardly to face a difficult truth. There was only one being I knew of who might know how to handle a yurei. The one in the whole world I feared the most—General Norinaga.
Just his name made my throat thicken. Uesugi-san might be Ashikaga’s right arm, but I was all that stood between Ashikaga and the choking, grief-stained power of the yurei. Even if Ashikaga was right, and the yurei didn’t want to harm the Ashikagas, the straw doll curse and the yurei’s power would hurt someone. What would the Emperor who sentenced innocent Jindo-practicing peasants to the direst punishments do to the family of his loyal Daimyo if he discovered Lady Ashikaga practiced a wara ningyo curse?
“Do not take advantage of her tender heart,” said Ashikaga.
“Your sister knows her duty. I just want to—” Uesugi-san gulped down the words as if they were one of Auntie Jay’s noxious cold remedies.
“Go the day after tomorrow then, Brother,” said Ashikaga. “Be with Hisako when I cannot. Make her last memories at the Great House lovely ones.”
Or the wanting. That relentless craving shining out from my lordling’s dark eyes that called to me, making my breath hitch; the sharp angle of bowed head and fiercely set shoulders. Like a cloak it settled over me from head to toe, encasing me in a familiar frustration. If Ashikaga let me reach out and fold that proud body into my arms like I did for Little Brother, if I could skip the colorless weak broth of soothing nothings that was all my words amounted to, maybe I could finally meet that wanting.
My heart measured out time in an erratic flutter. Ashikaga sat silent and stiff, like the thick paper used to bind lanterns, a brittle cover that let the burning wick of emotions shine through. Always it came to this, Ashikaga waiting, and me sitting bloated and heavy-limbed with my own worries and thoughts and stupid Tiger pride.
Ashikaga pushed away the tray-table with a clatter. “You’ll need time to change. My father will be displeased if you call attention to yourself by looking like a peasant.”
The cutting tone missed its mark. I was not ashamed of who I was, just disappointed I couldn’t be what Ashikaga needed.
“Yes, my lord,” I answered, rising to my feet. “Shall I go, then?”
“An hour,” said Ashikaga. “And then we’ll leave for the Kanze-za stage.”
“Do you wish to be attended in your preparations?”
Ashikaga looked at me sideways from under heavy eyelids. “You sound just like Little Turtle when you use those phrases. So quick you’ve learned your lines.”
“My lord?” The longing that Ashikaga had pulled out of me moments before dissipated. All that remained was a brisk impatience to get moving, go somewhere, and do something more practical than watch nobles tug each other’s strings.
“I will don my own costume. Mustn’t disappoint Lord Hojo or the other nobles. Or else how will we sit in the audience and pretend to admire each other without letting on we are more engrossed in our own dramas than that which plays upon the stage?”
I brushed away my first impulse to dig through the layered meaning in the words. I had enough to worry about. If Lord Yoshikazu was going to be at the Sarugaku play tonight, there was a chance his companion, Norinaga—no, Lord Hosokawa he was called now—might be there, too.
It would take me as long to prepare my robe and hair as it would to plan how to approach Lord Hosokawa. I gave a perfunctory bow and scooted out the doorway before Ashikaga could come up with more tangled words.
Beautiful was back in the handmaidens’ room, brushing her long hair with a tortoise-shell comb. I borrowed the comb and fought the tangles that my hair magically seemed to create despite my efforts morning and night to make my hair as straight and tidy as that of Little Turtle. Beautiful plucked my eyebrows with unabashed glee, her smile growing brighter each time I yelped. Little Turtle arrived behind a gaggle of the borrowed, local handmaidens. They congregated on the other side of the room. Kazue stared daggers whenever I happened to glance their way.
“What did I do now?” I whispered to Little Turtle.
“You had the effrontery to be chosen to accompany Lord Yoshinori to the performance.”
“I didn’t ask to go!”
“We know that,” said Beautiful, pulling a hunk of hair so tight it felt like my scalp was on fire. She stuck a plain, wooden comb in to hold the hair in place. “They will never forgive you for lowering their Kyoto elegance with your big-footed vulgarity.”
Oh no. “They’re coming, too?”
“Kazue’s attending the Daimyo,” said Little Turtle. She opened her black-lacquered cosmetics chest painted in gaudy peonies and chrysanthemum. A large pearlescent oyster shell nestled in one hand as she plucked a brush with the other from the depths of the chest.
Beautiful slapped at the fingers I’d lifted to pat my hair.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked Little Turtle.
“I’m needed here to pack.” She knelt in front of me. Dipping the brush into the safflower pigment smeared in the bowl of the shell, she carefully outlined my lips in sticky, bitter tasting red.
“You’re going with Uesugi-san?” I said.
“He can’t go alone.”
I’d pictured Uesugi-san riding back to Ashikaga Han on the highway as fast as an arrow. Of course he wouldn’t travel alone, not the Captain of the Guard.
“You know why he goes back?”
Little Turtle stepped back. “Yes,” she said. “But in six months’ time Lady Hisako will be married, and maybe then Uesugi-san will have eyes to see another.”
Beautiful dropped her hands, looking at me with satisfaction. “He’s blind not to see the beauty before him. It does no good to sigh after stars out of reach in the heavens.”
Little Turtle turned to place the shell and brush back in her chest. “I know my place,” she said quietly.
Kazue and the local handmaidens had stopped chattering. Little Turtle’s words sounded stark in the sudden silence. I glanced over at the girls, only to meet Kazue’s narrowed eyes. Did they understand our conversation? Why were they paying attention at all? Of course Kazue already looked spotlessly beautiful in a palest-pink robe layered over white.
I reached out to grasp Little Turtle’s hand, keeping her from moving away. “Take care of your heart,” I said. Startled, Little Turtle hesitated, then pressed her other hand down on mine. “You should heed your own warning.”
Somehow Beautiful got me stuffed into borrowed robes, made up so my face felt stiff as a mask, and to the front of the house in time to see Uesugi-san lead Ashikaga’s horse to the gate. Uesugi-san was in full armored vest of overlapping leather scales. The bib bore the Ashikaga paulownia three-leafed crest embroidered in gold. At his waist was an apron of interlocking metal scales the same dark color as the half-moon helmet tied under his chin. Battle-ready, as if he thought armed enemies lined the streets of Kyoto.
As he passed he nodded at Little Turtle. Hope flickered for my friend. It would be good for her to return home and comfort her mother, still mourning her husband’s death at the hands of the fox soldiers.
Thinking of Little Turtle’s mother twinged my conscience again. I should have asked Little Turtle to help me write a letter to Father. I should have sent some trinket for Little Brother, the comb for May. Maybe I would still have time tonight after the Sarugaku performance.
My lordling entered the courtyard on foot. Ashikaga’s winged helmet sat over an oil-combed club of hair down the back. Someone must have helped tie on the same style of lacquered leather light armor as Uesugi-san. Under a split apron of lacquered leather, Ashikaga wore rough linen hakama pants of a drab gray color. Common enough clothing for back home, but not clothing I thought to see worn to an event where courtiers would attend. Ashikaga mounted the horse lead by Uesugi-san, and gave orders for the retainers to bear the Daimyo’s palanquin behind.
It was a long dusty trip following behind the procession on awkwardly tall formal geta, trying to keep the hem of my robe from acquiring a grimy layer of dust. Kazue’s robe remained impossibly pristine.
At long last the entire procession stopped. I looked up. And then further up.
A triple-tiered free-standing gate with ornately carved, wing-shaped eaves barred the entrance to a temple.
If only Little Turtle were at my side instead of Kazue. She’d have explained the meaning of the characters on the flapping banners that lined the white-stone path. The procession started up again to the harsh grunts of house guards. We passed directly through the middle opening. I stared up at sinuous winged serpent
s, stags, and wild boars carved around the support beams under the eaves. The geta made me wobble as I stepped over the enormous cedar beam matching the lintel overhead.
Through the gate, a line of robed priests waited, bowing their shaved heads. Other guardsmen and outriders milled about the courtyard, leading horses away and helping nobles disembark from sedan chairs. Kazue hissed at me. I was being left behind. Ashikaga and the Daimyo were leading the procession up a flight of stone stairs. Uesugi-san stayed behind, still perched on his horse.
Up the stairs was another courtyard, this time bordered on three sides by temple buildings bearing wooden signs with more ornate foreign writing, banners, and carved posts. At least these buildings weren’t painted a garish red like the other I’d seen. The honest brown of wood was welcome.
Across the courtyard we skirted a pond dotted with river-pitted boulders and artfully grown moss, and then went up a gravelly slope that made my ankles burn with the effort of not slipping.
By the time I reached the top of this slope, the rest of the party had already stationed themselves in cushion-covered tatami mats bordering the front of a small building with winged eaves. It was open on three sides. A narrow covered bridge connected it to a smaller structure, behind and slightly to the left. A giant, verdant pine was painted in vivid colors on the back wall.
The two Ashikaga Lords sat on low stools, court ladies positioned around them with colorful robes artfully spread like petals of flowers. I moved toward Ashikaga, but Kazue hissed at me again, shaking her head. She moved toward lengths of linen tacked to the ground at the side of the stage. Other handmaidens, all milling around, seemed to be waiting on some signal. We weren’t supposed to sit yet? Kazue jerked her chin at a space next to her. As soon as I had gathered my robe layers and sat down, the other handmaidens surged forward to surround us.
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 11
