“Ha,” said Mitsusuke. “As if anyone would mistake her for the daughter of a noble clan. This is just chanting the lotus sutra into a horse’s ear.”
“Don’t need people to mistake her for a noble, fool.”
I let my aching shoulders slump, untucking my legs out from under me to a less formal cross-legged position. Mitsusuke was right. After hours of practice my hick inflections bled through the court tones no matter how many times he drilled me.
“Quiet your mind to listen to your body’s wisdom,” said the crone. “All that worrying and needing and wanting in a body’s head keeps you from feeling what your bones know. You look at her, boy, and you see a Northern hick. Just like people see a youth stuck on himself like sap on pine bark when they look at you. There’s more to it.”
The cart rolled to a halt. Mitsusuke and the crone exchanged a meaningful look. “We’re here,” he said. He swung himself down out of the cart, the open door revealing the last, orange-tinged flush of a setting sun against a sky like bruised persimmon. Rays burned right into my eyes, causing tears to well. I wiped at them with a sleeve. The crone put a hand on my shoulder.
“There, there. You’ll either pull it off or get eaten by the yurei. Either way, it’ll all be over soon.”
I swallowed. Kindly meant or not, the words were far from reassuring. I emerged from the cart. The rest of the troupe must have peeled off somewhere before. It was only Mitsusuke, the crone, and the two male cart-pullers. We were not, as I expected, in the courtyard of either the Ashikaga Residence or the Kanze-za.
Middle Kingdom characters were inscribed with red or black paint on tall stone pillars all around. On the low altars under each pillar, bowls of rice wine, flowers, and white-rice cakes glistened. Wooden sticks bordered the backside of each altar, also inscribed in writing I couldn’t read but knew to be names.
Death names. This was a Buddhist cemetery. I stumbled backwards until the yoke of the prop cart hit my knees.
Mitsusuke rolled his eyes. “Look at the little shamaness cowering. All because of some stone pillars and bone ashes.” He leaned casually against the nearest stone pillar. I shuddered, trying not to inhale the aura of unclean death.
The crone clucked in disapproval, jabbing me in the ribs with her elbow. “Don’t shame me in front of this puffed up robin. You won’t be defiled just breathing the air. The Ashikagas are up at the temple, spending the night in prayer for Lord Yoshikazu.” She jabbed me again. “Well, get going!”
Over the tops of the surrounding pine towered a red, ornate roof. I turned to the crone, feeling nothing like a crow or an eagle. Hollow, where there should be a solid rock of courage.
“Good luck,” said Mitsusuke, with a lazy wave. The crone disappeared back into the cart. I heard a soft cackle. No more delay. Nothing to do but put one foot in front of another.
Heart pounding, I crept over the soft pine-needle mulch towards one of the temple’s outbuildings. Oh for a water basin or spring or something to wash my face and hands. What was I going to do once I reached the temple? No monk would allow me inside still dressed in the threadbare yukata Mitsusuke had given me.
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
THE PINES CLEARED abruptly before a wide square of white gravel—easily as large as two rice fields set side by side. At the far end of the courtyard squatted two square buildings with the double curved-wing roof built in the style made popular by the foreign Middle Kingdom monks. Black tiles adorned the roof, ending at the tips with fanciful carved wooden beasts that looked like dragons. The eaves were curlicued with wooden carvings painted as gaudy-red as Ninna-ji. Banners, attached to poles flanking both buildings, hung limply—their foreign characters obscured even if I had been able to read them. Little Turtle probably could have told me what temple this was, but I had no idea.
I hesitated under the pines, trying to calm myself. Taking deep breaths didn’t help. I needed badly to feel that powerful centeredness I’d almost managed to achieve in the prop-cart, repeating phrases that made me sound like the Emperor’s handmaiden. Instead my insides sparked and prickled, like the popping of a fire built with too-green wood. This was no good. Maybe humming a few phrases of my mother’s favorite warding song might help. Did I dare?
Until Norinaga-Hosokawa had met me at Kiyomizu-dera, I thought the slightest hint of Jindo inside a Buddhist compound would provoke the foreign Buddhas into anger. But even calling up Otowa right under the chanting monks’ noses had provoked no reaction at all. Maybe the foreign gods were as placid as Jindo spirits?
It is for your sake,
that I walk, careless, the fields in spring,
my garment’s hanging sleeves sodden with falling rain.
The shadows under the pines were quiet when my voice died away. I risked singing again, this time trying to put all those sparks and prickles into the song, smoothing them over. The song swelled, starting a heat in my belly, taking over my tongue. A stinging heat prickled down my back. The feeling of a drawstring being pulled in my abdomen made me gasp, but the song still welled forth.
A kami was waking. I’d meant to calm myself, but gotten a spirit’s attention instead. Thoughts like wind-blown leaves scuttered over my blurring awareness. Was it true what Norinaga and the crone had said? Were the kami fading away? If so, how long had this kami I felt now as an otherness feathering over the inside of my skin been sleeping? Weighed down as it was by a foreign temple and bordered by death, was it fading? I imagined a thin shelf of winter ice slowly melting on the frog pond behind Auntie Jay’s house.
Little ones, little ones . . . singing.
The voice of the kami was as soft as its light presence. Not a mountain, not stone, not the biting chill of Otowa or Whispering Brook. The caress of the otherness found the hollow opening in my abdomen, and began to fill it as precisely and gently as Father layering new cabbage leaves in a pickling jar. Even this gentleness was too much. The drawstring purse inside me bulged with aching emptiness. Yearning for warmth, for something to appease an unbearable longing—for the indwelling of the kami—started me trembling. This was how it was meant to be, this filling and twining of kami and human, the song issuing from my lips underscored with an echoing, buzzing harmony like a summer-evening locust chorus. I took in a breath that traveled from belly to chest and felt deeply rooted, reaching up to the sky as I released the breath. Immovable, ancient, and sure.
Little ones.
The kami’s words finally cut through the hazy ecstasy of the kami’s indwelling. Ones? More than one? A prickling-heat flavor, not the kami’s nutty, clean warmth, bubbled up under my tongue. A flavor I knew.
He was here. Norinaga. And he was singing somewhere inside one of those squat temple-buildings. The kami awoke to both of us singing, not just my song alone. What was Norinaga doing at Lord Yoshikazu’s memorial service? This should have been a private, family affair.
I shook myself like a duck emerging from a pond, trying to slough off the languid satiation of the indwelling kami. Pleasure made me drowsy, droopily moving across the gravel. The hazy images around me finally resolved into the snarling, stone jaws of a pair of granite Fu dog statues guarding the middle of the courtyard. Not a good place to go all woozy. The tug of Norinaga’s song pulled at me from the building on the left. I hesitated. Should I go left? Or would the Ashikagas be in the other, grander building on the right?
Before I could think too deeply, my legs took me around back of the wooden steps ringing the left-hand building. A roofed gallery ran the length of the side and back of the building. Someone had left the inner sliding doors open. I grasped the railing and pulled myself up, swinging my legs over the rail. What was I doing? A peasant couldn’t just walk into the temple . . . could I? No one but Norinaga knew I was anything but a servant of the Ashikagas, no matter my clothing.
Trying on Mitsusuke’s arrogant chin-tilt, I stepped through the open doors—it felt as exposed as sticking a hand down a snake burrow. Shadows, pregnant with unfocused malice, pressed along the narrow corridor ahead of me. Three steps, toes-first in case this floor sang as loudly as the Ashikaga’s, took me past any hope of escape. The plaster against my palm was rough-planed and bumpy, a link to reality. Steady, now. Just breathe.
The murmuring rise and fall of a man’s singing voice sounded from the end of the corridor. Punctuated by the harsh sound of my own breathing, the song’s words sounded more clearly within my own mind.
It is for your sake,
that I walk, careless, the fields in spring,
Norinaga, singing the kami awake. The lazy pine-scented warmth of otherness seeped into my flesh, tempting me to rejoin that completeness—the twin strands of human and kami. Not now. Norinaga singing alone in a Buddhist temple where the Ashikagas gathered for a memorial could not be for anything but ill-intentioned purpose. I crept along the corridor, straining ears for any sign of who or what lay behind the secretive, papered panels of the sliding doors. Navigating by touch, I stopped outside the fourth door.
Norinaga was in there. I was sure of it. But what if monks were in there, too?
Monks, in a room with the fox-general singing a Jindo song?
My thoughts were as tangled as May’s hair on a rest-day morning. Ridiculous. I slid the door open a crack and gasped.
The sleepy warmth of the kami’s power wasn’t just affecting me. Norinaga sat on a raised platform placed in front of the alcove holding a thousand-armed, wooden statue of Kannon. He wore a white robe and forehead-band, the Kannon’s arms appearing to fan around his head like an elaborate head-dress. Six monks in ochre robes knelt on the floor around the platform, bald heads pressed to the floor in sleep. Norinaga didn’t so much as flinch at the sight of me. He must have felt me all along, as I had felt him, singing with the kami.
The kami.
Through the open verandah doors, a gnarled, twisted, double-trunked pine guarded a small enclosed courtyard. The buzzing locust feeling under my skin swelled stronger. Nutty, clean warmth with the bite of pine coated my tongue.
The kami of this pine.
Norinaga’s song wasn’t insistent, not exactly trying to wake the pine-kami, not like we had done together with Otowa or Higashi-yama. The fire-heat of his power was tamped down. Banked coals instead of flaming embers. What was he up to?
Norinaga arched his brows, the corners of his mouth quirking up for an instant. He did not stop his song.
Little one.
Tendrils of warmth coiled inside my belly, tugging, adamant. Words bubbled up on my tongue. The locusts buzzed up from my belly, vibrating in my mouth. So soothing, so warm. Norinaga and the pine-kami wove a heavy blanket of sound—so heavy that the monks had succumbed, falling asleep where they sat.
Standing in the room was an arduous task. My knees crumpled to the woven reeds of the mat. My eyelids fluttered, trying to close, trying to ease me into the promised, safe surrender of the pine-kami’s song. Underneath the soothing ache, the prickly-heat of Norinaga’s fox-power sparked for the barest instant.
I jolted awake like I’d been in a dream of falling and hit the ground.
“What . . . what are you doing?”
Norinaga smiled, dipping his chin.
A cold wash of unease diluted the heady lure of the song. Vague thoughts, stirred and muddied by the Jindo song, coalesced. Norinaga sang the monks to sleep. Somewhere else, the Ashikaga family sat ritual for Lord Yoshikazu’s memorial. Uesugi-san was far down the Oshu-Kaido. No one was here to protect Ashikaga but me.
I wrenched myself from the floor and stumbled into the corridor. Down the impossibly long hall, my lips firmly clamped shut. My voice would not be part of whatever plan Norinaga was hatching. I burst out the low door at the back of the hall and ran toward the other building, careless feet making long bald skids in the gravel.
Underneath the cedars bordering the courtyard, I heard the yipping of foxes. Dark shapes wove around massive trunks.
Fox soldiers.
An ice-shard of fear speared me down the middle. May, robe torn and streaked with leaf-grime under the bush; Flower, her eyes open and staring at the canopy of branches over head—never to see again. How could I have allowed any idea of peace between myself and the man who had ruined my sisters? Was I so desperate for a friend?
A spark of my own ignited. Foolish to think of Norinaga as anything other than my enemy. I wouldn’t extend that naiveté to his fox solders. They were brutish, brutal creatures. Their quarry was Ashikaga Yoshinori, the noble responsible for their defeat on Hell Mountain.
I reached the back door of the other building gasping for breath. Norinaga’s song intensified, grinding into my bones, making my limbs unbearably heavy. I breathed the images of my sisters into the spark in my breast and felt it grow a bit stronger, starting to consume the sleepy warmth that Norinaga sang.
I had to move. If I stood still, I would fall asleep like the monks. Keeping that spark of anger alive, I stepped inside the hall. It was decorated with slumped guards in robes bearing the triple paulownia-leaf crest. I picked my way over their motionless bodies toward the open doorway of an enormous room at the far end. Gold and vermilion gilded the door frames and posts.
This was the main sanctuary hall. Behind a wooden rail flanked by polished-metal mirrors and vases of chrysanthemums sat a life-sized statue of a foreign Buddha. It was a Buddha I’d never seen before, the face strangely gentle and leg crossed in a half-lotus position. Incense sticks smoldered in an iron pot of ash just in front of the rail, sending a choking cloud of sourness into the air, where it hovered despite the open verandah doors, adding to the murky oppression of the room.
A bald-shaven monk in a white robe knelt in front of the Buddha, intoning a chant that should have clashed with the continued singing of Norinaga and the pine-kami in my head, but had somehow become part of its underlying rhythm.
Somebody on the left moaned. I blinked. On a raised platform bordering the left railing were the Ashikagas. The Daimyo leaned an arm on a wooden stand, chin cupped in his hand, eyes closed. Arrayed behind him was a line of slumped forms; handmaidens, the Lord Steward, Lord Motofuji, and Ashikaga, all under the spell cast by Norinaga’s song.
Lord Motofuji was here. Where was his son, Ujimitsu? It was a grave slight if Ujimitsu were missing. My neck prickled, as if Auntie Jay had pierced me with a disapproving stare. I realized I had fallen to my knees in the doorway, the sleepy warmth of the song oozing inside me like a broken egg yolk.
Ujimitsu. Think. What did his absence mean?
But I couldn’t think.
Little one, clear-rushing one. Sing with me.
Clear-rushing one? Did the pine-kami somehow taste Whispering Brook in me—?
Think! I shook myself again. This was no good. Norinaga’s song called to that inner part of me, the Jindo secret heart. I couldn’t fight it. I didn’t want to fight.
Not by myself.
My eyes flickered over Lord Yoshinori. We’d fought the foxes together before. Crawling on hands and knees to the platform, I tugged at my lordling’s sleeve.
“My Lord,” I said, voice a harsh rasp. Ashikaga’s left eye opened, the whites a thin ring around a hugely distended pupil. I tugged again. “Wake up.”
The eye closed. No good. The yipping of foxes sounded closer, maybe even inside the temple. They were coming. Urgency lent strength to the flickering spark of anger. I jerked Ashikaga’s sleeve with all my might, and my lordling tumbled face-first onto the floor.
“Ouch!” Ashikaga sat up, rubbing a cheek marred by a fresh, red scratch. Those dilated pupils focused to normal size, and then froze as they found me. Hand
s clenched into fists. “This time, Lily, you’ve gone too far. What—”
A man burst through the open doorway, the darting shapes of foxes nipping at his heels.
Lord Ujimitsu, at last.
Ashikaga grabbed for the wakizashi usually stuck into the obi at the waist, but that I now saw stowed on a wooden stand in the corner along with the rest of the Ashikaga family’s weapons.
Norinaga’s song surged, the foxes settling on their haunches alongside the front railing facing out. Tongues lolled between sharp canines.
My lordling used my shoulder as a crutch to push up to a standing position. The instant that fierce grip touched my robe, the smothering blanket of Norinaga’s song muted to a soft caress.
“Come a bit late to pay your respects, Lord Ujimitsu,” said Ashikaga.
Ujimitsu shook his head, drawing his own wakizashi from a plain, black sheath. He stepped forward, plainly unwilling to join in polite pleasantries.
Plainly determined to end a life.
Ashikaga angled between Ujimitsu and the dozing Daimyo.
The foxes shifted. Excited whimpers came in bursts from the back of their throats. Lord Ujimitsu tracked Ashikaga’s movement and shifted his weight to his right leg, tip of his sword pointed not at the Daimyo, but at my lordling.
Ujimitsu wasn’t here for the Daimyo.
One fox sprang to its feet, gliding over to Lord Ujimitsu. With a burst of musky heat, the fox arched its back, muzzle elongating, blurring into the shape of a man on all fours who unbent himself to stand, robed in white.
Lord Ujimitsu never let his eyes stray from Ashikaga, but his lips turned a tight shade of pale.
“Not the sword,” said the fox-soldier.
“He is awake,” said Ujimitsu, a chin jerk indicating Ashikaga.
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 22
