Barefoot on the Wind

by Zoe Marriott

  In the back of my mind Kyo murmured: Perhaps it would be best if you never woke at all.

  “I cannot get better like this,” I told Itsuki that evening, over the cooking fire. It was an effort to keep the words from trembling. “You must let me go out.”

  “You think you know your body better than I do,” he said wearily, “but I understand more about how close you were to death. You must rest. You cannot not push yourself before you are ready.”

  “Who is to say I am ready if not me? It is my body, Itsuki-san. It is my own well-being, and I do know more about that than you can.”

  “Why won’t you listen to me?” he questioned, standing and pacing to the wall and then back to the fire. “What is this … this wandering spirit in you that cannot be content to be still even for a few days?”

  “I don’t have a wandering spirit. I have … I have…” I stopped, swallowed, as a memory of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with a square face, and a pitying expression swam though my mind. Shouta. The conversation suddenly felt miserably familiar.

  “Idleness is a poison to me,” I began, fumbling to find words.

  Itsuki broke in with the closest thing to impatience I’d yet heard from him. “That is admirable, I suppose, but—”

  “Let me speak!” I said abruptly, my voice sharp with trepidation. “Let me finish. I have … a hollowness inside me. I do not know what it is, but if I cannot move … it threatens to swallow me whole. I need occupation – or my emotions … fall into a kind of – of misery. Cruel thoughts torment me. I do not expect understanding, but at least believe me when I say that it is no kindness to force me to be idle. I must have work. Please.”

  I held my breath for his reaction, trembling a little with the force of the words which had torn out of me. There was a faint, soft noise, as if of a sigh let out very slowly. At last he spoke, low and serious, and almost – ashamed.

  “My apologies. I was wrong. I do … believe you. I do understand.”

  And it seemed – miraculously – that he did. For though he fashioned me a sling for my injured arm, and made me promise to tell him if ever I was in pain, he did not try any longer to stop me from doing things, even though I tired much more easily than I could have guessed, and needed the support of his arm often.

  I must have slowed him down terribly on those careful excursions. His long legs would have outpaced me easily even when I was at my fittest, and although I was determined to help him with his work wherever I could, I was wretchedly clumsy with my left hand, and unable to use the other at all as yet. However, he never implied he found my efforts tiresome, and gave every evidence – as much as a quiet man with a carefully concealed face could – of enjoying my company. In fact, he welcomed me into his daily life, and led me unerringly through the safe parts of the maze, always able to find his way, even though each curving thorn corridor looked exactly the same as any other to me.

  Every day, as I strove to get better faster, was different. One task took us to a garden of beautiful flowers – Itsuki called them roses – with an addictively sweet fragrance, and small, needle-sharp red thorns on their graceful stems. Itsuki harvested their petals and the orange-coloured berries left on the flower heads, from which he made a sweet paste to spread on his golden cakes. The next morning saw us picking flexible reeds from a garden that was mostly water, to weave into baskets. In another garden there was a rockery of glittering silver-black stones, nearly as tall as Itsuki’s ruined tower, covered in delicate ferns and mosses, many of which went into Itsuki’s healing remedies.

  A family of goats lived among those rocks. The animals were far prettier than the ones we kept in the valley. They had long, soft coats of dappled grey and orange and cream, and impressive curling horns, and seemed to consider Itsuki as a part of their extended family. The nannies came forwards instantly when he entered their domain, and ate rose petals from his cupped palms before letting themselves be milked into Itsuki’s battered black pot.

  My favourite outings were those where we visited animals. I had always liked them, but it was impossible ever to get attached: our life in the valley was too harsh for that. But Itsuki didn’t eat meat. He said he didn’t need to, that the maze gave him all the food he required without going to the trouble of having to catch or kill anything. I remembered what he had said about living on bitter herbs to stave off starvation in the beginning, and concluded that either he had never learned how to hunt, or – as seemed more likely the more I got to know him – that he was simply too soft-hearted to harm the creatures of the maze, which looked at him with no fear, and came to him like old friends.

  When I was with him, the animals treated me the same way. Birds would sit on the fingers of my outstretched hand and eat seeds from my palm. Goats and antelopes and deer shyly rubbed their faces against my knees and nibbled tufts of grass if I offered them. Golden tanuki and tiny red squirrels chattered eagerly and tugged at my robe with tiny paws until I fed them some of Itsuki’s store of dried nuts.

  One afternoon, over a week after I woke up, Itsuki was checking on a litter of “kits”, the babies of orange-coated, weasel-like creatures. I sat on a rounded stone, playing with the parents. They chased each other around and around on my lap, my laughter apparently only encouraging them to greater speed. Every now and again one or both of them would stop for me to scratch the snowy-white of their chins, or so that they could swarm up my arm to sit on my shoulder and check what Itsuki was doing to their babies.

  Itsuki looked up from gently tapping a powder for mites into a young weasel’s ear, and I could feel his gaze, even though I could not see his eyes. “Does that hurt?”

  At first I had no notion of what he meant. I looked down at my lap, where I was stroking the silky backs of my little friends with my injured hand.

  “Oh…” I breathed.

  I flexed my fingers with a sense of growing excitement. There was still a deep, itchy sort of throb at the movement, but it wasn’t a bad pain: more like the feeling you get when you stretch out a cramping muscle to its fullest extent. I hadn’t registered it at all. I hadn’t even noticed when I slipped my arm from its confinement in the sling. I was getting better. At last.

  Hurry! No time!

  “No,” I told him, as calmly as I could. “No pain at all. It feels fine.”

  He seemed to hesitate, then said, “In that case, how would you care for a proper bath?”

  “I might give my right arm for a proper bath,” I said, watching him as he stroked his last patient goodbye with the tip of his finger. “But how?”

  “Hot springs,” he said, a smile in his voice, as he reached to help me to my feet.

  “You – you have hot springs?” I demanded, torn between happiness and indignation. “And you kept them a secret from me? Why?”

  “It seemed kinder not to mention them until you were strong enough to go in on your own.”

  Something came together in my head. “That’s where you disappear to every morning before I’m awake, isn’t it? No wonder you always smell good.”

  He cleared his throat. “Mmm.”

  “And I stink like a pigpen in midsummer,” I said bitterly.

  “It’s not that bad.” He paused. “Yet.”

  I shot him a poisonous glare and he rewarded me with a nearly soundless huff of laughter. One corner of my own lips tugged reluctantly up.

  It was easier than usual to match my pace to his when we went back out into the confusing warren of thorn hedges. Itsuki was walking with a decided limp in his step that day, as if his hips or lower back were paining him. Since I had woken up last night to sing for him as his whole body twisted into knots, I didn’t have to wonder why.

  I would have liked to be allowed to ask him if he was sure he was well enough to be going about all his usual tasks, but I didn’t. In exactly the same way the question “Are you all right?” often made me snappish and short-tempered, nothing made him clam up so quickly, or turned his mood as dark, as my enquiring after his well-
being. For someone so solicitous of my health, he seemed to hate nothing more than being reminded of his own.

  We turned a corner and Itsuki stopped dead.

  My gaze shot up to his hooded face, fearing that he was about to have another of his terrifying attacks. But no. His shoulders and back were straight, and he made no sound of pain. I quickly looked around and saw nothing out of the ordinary except … one of those tall white-and-black birds, with the fan-like tails.

  The creature was slowly stalking into view ahead of us, its tail of feathers not dragging on the grass behind it today, but held stiffly spread-out behind its body, making the jagged patterns – like eyes – on the feathers even more striking. It seemed to see Itsuki. One of those strange, mournful cries rang out.

  Before I knew what was happening, Itsuki had shoved me almost violently behind him, hiding my smaller form from the beady black eyes of the bird with the bulk of his body. I could feel the tension vibrating through him as I leaned a little dizzily against his back, and could only guess that for some reason he was … staring the bird down? Warning it off?

  With another, longer call, the bird swept away, moving out of the corridor of thorns into a garden that lay near by. Itsuki let out a long sigh. His shoulders unhunched and most of the quivering rigidity ran out of him.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked warily.

  “Those birds – the white peacocks – are the Yuki-Onna’s eyes and ears in the maze. If she were to catch a glimpse of you here, with me … she might come to investigate.”

  I gnawed at my lip. “I saw one of those birds when I first woke up. And it saw me. I had no idea it was different to any other animal in this place. Is it very bad?”

  Taking my arm again, Itsuki quickly got us moving away from the garden where the white peacock had disappeared. “Maybe not.”

  He didn’t sound sure.

  “But that was days and days ago. Perhaps she wasn’t paying attention.” I tried not to let venom leak into my tone when I uttered the “she”. I had a grudge against her that I tried not to admit to myself was not entirely on my own behalf.

  “It could be. Or perhaps she has decided she has no particular interest in you, and is content to wait for you to seek her out. Or…”

  “Or?”

  His other hand came up to cover mine on his arm – an unconsciously protective gesture which warmed me against my will. “Or she is paying attention, and she is interested … and she wants to see what will happen if she leaves you here with me.”

  I blinked at that. “Other than the riveting spectacle of us eating, sleeping, and looking after the animals?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Other than that.”

  There was that odd inflection in his voice again, the one he only had when he was thinking about her. While I was still making my mind up on whether to break my vow not to pry at his mysteries, or to let it pass once again, Itsuki steered me through the hedge into a new garden.

  Tall, slender trees, with papery white trunks and vivid yellow-gold foliage, stood sentry around a raised mossy mound. There was a path of small white pebbles leading through the trees on its flank, and before we had reached its end, I could smell sulphur and wet rock, and see the thick clouds of steam rising up.

  A pool of opaque, storm-cloud-coloured water took up almost the entire top of the hill. It was clearly very deep, and was roughly oval in shape. The spring that fed it gushed down over red-streaked stones. A tiny frog with jewel-like red eyes croaked at us in greeting, then hopped off its perch by the spring and landed in the water with a soft plip.

  Itsuki drew a lidded reed basket from beneath one of the trees, and opened it to reveal clean, carefully rolled – if fraying – cloths of various sizes, bars of his gritty but sweet-smelling home-made soap, and a comb of bone, among other things.

  “Use what you wish. There is no hurry – I will stand guard outside and finish whittling this whistle,” he said, meaning the small wood flute he had been working on since yesterday evening.

  I nodded wordlessly, rendered completely speechless by my overwhelming desire to plunge into the water and get truly clean. It was only when he had gone that it occurred to me to wonder what exactly he would be standing guard against.

  There are beasts that roam the thorns…

  I swallowed a little nervously at the thought. My dreams of the nameless shining thing still troubled me, no matter how I reminded myself that such horror could not, could never exist – not even in this magical place. Better not to dwell on such dark fears. Besides, I knew as long as Itsuki was with me, I would be safe.

  Movement might have returned to my injured arm, but it was still clumsy and stiff, and much weaker than I would have liked it to be. Luckily there were plenty of flat ledges set into the edges of the pool to sit on, and it was no hardship to obey Itsuki and take my time in the water. The heat, almost scalding at first, relaxed parts of me that I had not even realized were tense. Washing and combing my hair was such a pleasure that I felt almost guilty.

  I worried at that thought, trying to make sense of it.

  My mind and my emotions were full of dark places, which ached like bruises when I tried to press into them. Every day I felt the compelling sense of urgency – no time, no time, hurry, hurry – that nagging awareness of an important task left undone, tugging at me more strongly. Every day I searched my own mind to try to make sense of what I was meant to do. But the more time I spent here with Itsuki the more I had to admit to myself that I half-dreaded the moment when I would finally fit the shattered pieces of my memory back into place.

  I loved my home, and I loved my family. I knew that without question. Yet I feared there was something lurking there, something dark, looming, awaiting my return … and I could not make myself eager to set that shadow free, even as I worked diligently to make it happen.

  Blissfully clean at last, I hitched myself up onto the edge of the hot springs and wrapped one large cloth around myself to ward off a faint chill, rubbing at the wet mass of my hair with the other. I rather envied Itsuki his short hair in that moment. It must dry in five minutes or less.

  “Are you well?” Itsuki called out, his tone making it clear that the query was habit, not real concern.

  “Entirely!” I called back. “Finish your whistle.”

  I plaited my damp hair with only a little difficulty, and draped the cloth over the branch of a tree to dry. Then I looked around for the robe I had discarded, and began to pull it back on with some reluctance, since it wanted washing just as badly as I had. As I hesitated, I caught sight of the horrible ruin of my scarred, twisted arm and side and hurriedly looked away.

  Something stopped me then. Regardless of Itsuki’s reassurances, I was sure that scars like those would never completely disappear. That meant I was going to have to live with them for a long time.

  Would I spend the rest of my life flinching from a part of myself – turning in revulsion from the evidence of my own survival?

  Taking one or two deep breaths to steady me, I tugged the grubby robe down off my shoulder and arm, and looked at my naked right side.

  The bright midday sun was a great deal less forgiving than the dappled firelight in Itsuki’s dim stone tower, and what I saw was not pretty. But perhaps I really was healing as prodigiously as Itsuki had said: the long, deep marks were a dark pink – the colour of half-healed flesh – rather than angry red. They were no longer wounds, but were indeed becoming scars, scars that would fade, at least a little, with time. And the skin between was taut and pale. I curled my arm up and down. The pain was still there, but bearable. I truly was getting better – and more quickly than any normal person had a right to. Itsuki was no ordinary healer, and his medicines were as extraordinary as he was.

  I had been lucky indeed.

  Behind me, a sweet musical note rose up, and a faint smile creased my lips. Itsuki had finished his wood flute. As I listened, I ran the fingers of my good hand over my injuries, testing for tender spots. I
had big hands for a woman, and long fingers, but the span of my palm did not cover the breadth of the wounds across my shoulder. What under the Moon’s light could have caused me such injuries? What implement of man or creation of nature would leave marks like these?

  I tried to imagine myself falling beneath a plough, or being scoured by splintering branches from a great tree as it fell, but none of my imaginings made sense. My wounds were like … almost like claw marks. Yet that was impossible. To create such wounds the beast would have to be immense, with paws the size of—

  A glowing white paw strikes out – the bristling pale claws rake my arm, tear my flesh apart – I scream—

  The image burned through my mind like a falling star. For a moment, it was more real to me than anything my eyes could see. Lost to all sense of where or when I was, I desperately tried to lurch away.

  The small white pebbles shifted underfoot. My ankle gave way beneath me.

  With a strangled yell, I fell back into the hot springs.

  Eleven

  The shock of the hot water closing over my head broke the trance of fear or panic or – or whatever it had been. Unthinkingly I tried to suck in a breath, and choked on water that burned my throat.

  My clumsy thrashing made my arm and side scream with pain, while the sodden, heavy robe dragged at me, but I kicked with everything I had. Up. Up. My head broke the surface – and a strong hand caught hold of the back of my robe and lifted me bodily from the pool.

  Itsuki laid me on my good side and patted with measured firmness between my shoulder blades as I flopped and squirmed like a landed fish, clutching my open robe together with my shaking good hand. Water gushed from my mouth. It felt like half the spring had ended up in my stomach.

  “Are you all right? Can you breathe?” he demanded, out of breath himself for perhaps the first time since I’d met him. “Hana?”

  I nodded mutely, still coughing. He patted my back a few more times, then helped ease me up into a sitting position. I rested my face on my knees. My head was swimming, my stomach churning as if it was still full of hot sulphurous spring water. Maybe it was. I groaned.