by Hearn, Lian
“Sir.” She acknowledged Shigeru casually. “What happened to his head?”
Her eyes ran over Shigeru and he felt she took in everything about him, including the sword.
“Just an accident,” the Fox, whose name was Kenji, replied.
“Cut yourself shaving, did you?” she said, glancing at Jato and then at Kenji’s long sword. Her eyebrows went up.
Kenji shook his head slightly. “Is there anything to eat?” he asked. “It’s been three days.”
“No wonder you both look half dead. There’s eggs and rice, fern shoots, mushrooms.”
“That’ll do. And bring tea now.”
“Wine too?”
“Good idea.” Kenji grunted. “And speaking of shaving—bring hot water and a sharp knife.” He addressed Shigeru. “We’ll take off your beard and find some other clothes. Anyone can see from your features that you are Otori, but it will make you a little less recognizable.”
They squatted down on their heels outside. A few hens were scratching in the dirt, and two children appeared and stared at them until Kenji addressed them teasingly and they giggled and ran away. The woman returned with a bowl of hot water, and Shigeru washed his face in it, then allowed the Fox to shave away the small beard with a knife blade of extreme sharpness. When they were finished, the woman brought rags—the remnants of old clothes—to wipe face and hands before they went inside.
It was dark and smoky within the cave, but there was a raised area for sleeping and sitting, and the straw matting was relatively clean. The woman brought bowls of tea; it was fresh and of surprisingly high quality for such a small, isolated village—but of course this was no ordinary village, Shigeru thought as he sipped the steaming liquid, grateful for the tea but apprehensive about the rest of the situation. He comforted himself with the fact that he still had his weapons. While he had them, he could defend himself or take his own life.
Kenji said suddenly, “How old are you?”
He used a familiar form of speech that took Shigeru by surprise, for he had never been so addressed in his life, not even by Kiyoshige. Don’t think of Kiyoshige now.
“I turned eighteen this year.” And Kiyoshige seventeen.
“Matsuda’s training obviously worked.”
“You remember our previous meeting, then?”
“Luckily, as it turns out. I knew who to deliver the sword to.”
The warmth from the tea, and from the fire, made sweat prickle again on Shigeru’s forehead and in his armpits.
“Did my father give it to you? Did you see him die?”
“Yes, I did. He fought bravely enough to the last, but he was outnumbered and surrounded.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know his name—one of Iida’s warriors.”
How strange if this man were indeed Shigemori’s son. “How old are you?” Shigeru questioned.
“I am twenty-six.”
Shigeru made the calculation silently: too young to be Shigemori’s son, too old to be his grandson—well, the coincidence would have been too great.
“Your name is Kenji?”
“Muto Kenji. My family are from Yamagata.”
Shigeru could feel the fever returning, bringing a strange lucidity to his thoughts. “And one of them is Muto Shizuka?” he said without expression.
“She is my niece, my older brother’s daughter. I believe you met her last year.”
“You know I did. I presume you know everything about those meetings and that Iida Sadamu does too.” Shigeru moved his hand closer to the sword’s hilt. “What are you playing at?”
“What makes you think I am playing?”
The woman returned with food and wine, and Shigeru did not want to say more in front of her.
“You are safe with me,” I swear it, Kenji said with apparent sincerity. “Eat. Drink.”
A starving man has no scruples: once Shigeru had smelled the food, it was impossible to resist it. Whatever lay before him, he would face it better on a full stomach. He drank wine, too, sparingly, watching Kenji closely, hoping it might loosen his tongue, but though the Fox drank two bowls to every one of Shigeru’s, the wine seemed to have little effect on him other than flushing his pale face red. When they had finished, the woman took away the dishes and returned to ask, “Will you rest now? I can spread out the beds?”
“Who is the god of the shrine?” Shigeru asked.
“Hachiman,” she replied. The god of war.
“I would like to have sutras said for the dead,” Shigeru continued. “And cleanse myself from pollution before sleeping.”
“I will go and tell the priest,” she said quietly.
“You do not need to come with me,” Shigeru said to Kenji. “You probably want to sleep.”
“Sleep can wait,” the other replied.
“It would be hypocritical to pray for the souls of the men you and the Tribe betrayed!”
“I did not betray anyone,” Kenji said calmly. “I knew Noguchi would turn, but I did not induce him to. Iida Sadamu did that by making him an offer no sane man would refuse. Iida was driven to such generosity by his fear of an alliance between the Otori and the Seishuu.”
“Which your niece informed him of, after swearing she would not! It must have been her!”
“You cannot be outraged when people act according to their natures. And in this case, everyone did. You should be angry with yourself for not recognizing those natures. This is what Sadamu is so good at, and why he prevailed against you and everyone else, and always will.”
Shigeru controlled his anger with almost visible effort as the returning fever set up a renewed throbbing in his veins. “Unless I learn to do the same?”
“Well, you are not yet old. There is some hope that you can still learn.”
Shigeru said, “In the meantime, I must pray for the dead.”
HE WALKED the few hundred paces to the shrine. Incense had been lit inside the gate, and he let the smoke waft across him, breathing in the heavy fragrance.
The priest met him at the cave’s entrance. He wore red and white robes and a small black hat, and he carried a stick crowned with tassels of pale white straw, but despite his religious garb, he had the same warrior-look as the guards at the gate. Shigeru followed him into the dark interior. A few lamps burned smokily inside before the statue of the god. Shigeru knelt, took Jato from his belt, and dedicated it silently to Hachiman. He began to pray. The Tribe maintain a shrine, he thought with fevered logic. They must also revere the gods and honor the dead.
“What is the name of the deceased?” the priest murmured.
“Not one, but many,” Shigeru replied. “Let them just be known as warriors of the Otori clan.” How many? he wondered. Four thousand? Five thousand? He shuddered again, wishing he had been one of them. The chanting started; the smoke stung his eyes and he let them water, the moisture running unchecked down his cheeks and his newly shaven chin.
When the ceremony was over and he rose from his knees, he realized many people had come silently into the cave and knelt or stood with bowed heads around him. He thought they did not know who he was, but it was clear they felt a certain sympathy for his sorrow, seeing him as a solitary warrior, masterless, now grieving for the deaths of companions and friends.
He did not think it was a pretence—if it was, it was both elaborate and cruel—and he was moved and puzzled, realizing that the character and customs of the Tribe had more depth and subtlety than their roles of spy and murderer would at first suggest.
He went back to the lodging place, Kenji a couple of paces behind him.
“It was good of so many to pray with me,” Shigeru said. “Please thank them for it. But why did they do it?”
“They are Otori, after a fashion,” Kenji said. “Their home is the Middle Country. They’ve heard of the battle by now. The losses are reported to be very heavy; maybe some of the dead were friends, even relatives. No one knows yet.”
“But to whom do they owe all
egiance? Whose land is this? To whom do they pay tax?”
“These are interesting questions,” Kenji replied smoothly and, yawning, changed the subject. “You may have been taught by Matsuda to survive without sleep indefinitely; I need sleep now. How’s your head, by the way? I can give you the same brew I gave you before, for Matsuda.”
Shigeru declined. They used the privy on the far side of the village, where the waste could be thrown directly down to the fields below. Back in the cave, he took off his outer garments and slipped beneath the hemp quilt, placing his weapons under the mattress. The quilt smelled of smoke and some herb that he could not identify. He fell asleep almost immediately but awoke burning and unbearably thirsty. It was light: he thought it must be the next morning, was seized by a terrible sense of urgency, and began to get up, groping for his sword.
Kenji woke instantly and groaned. “Go back to sleep.”
“We must get going,” Shigeru replied. “It must be long past daybreak.”
“No, it will be dark in an hour. You’ve hardly slept at all.” He called to the woman, who came after a little while with water and a cup of the willow bark tea the Fox had given Shigeru when they first met.
“Drink it, will you,” Kenji said with exasperation. “Then we can both get some sleep.”
Shigeru gulped the water, its sweet coolness slaking his parched mouth and throat. Then he drank the tea, more slowly. The willow bark dulled the pain and suppressed the fever for a while. When he woke again, it was dark. He could hear the others breathing deeply as they slept. He needed to urinate and got up to walk to the privy, but his legs would not obey him, buckling under him, pitching him forward.
He heard Kenji wake and tried to apologize, was sure that the woman was his mother’s old servant Chiyo, and began to explain something to her but forgot almost immediately what it was. The woman brought a pot and told him to piss in it, just as Chiyo had done when he was a child. She brought rags soaked in cold water, and she and Kenji took it in turns to cool his body as sweat poured from him. Later, the fever turned again to shivering; she lay next to him, giving her body’s warmth to him. He dozed and woke, thought she was Akane and that he was in the house beneath the pines in Hagi, before the battle, before the defeat.
Between them they would not let him die. The fever was intense but short-lived: as the head-wound healed, it burned itself out. Two days later he began to recover, desperate with anxiety to return to Hagi but more rational and able to accept that he needed to regain his strength before traveling on.
The woman, whose name he never knew—Kenji addressed her familiarly as “older sister,” but that was how he would speak to any woman the same age or a little older than himself—spent the day in various household chores, her hands never idle. In the lethargy left by the fever, Shigeru watched her, fascinated by the skill and frugality of her daily life. She told him a little about the organization of the village: it was made up of three families, who unlike the lowest class of peasants all had surnames: Kuroda, Imai, and Muto. Most decisions were taken cooperatively, but the headman was always from the Muto family—a relative of Kenji’s. In the East they would be Kikuta, she said, but in the Middle Country the Muto were the leading family.
Kikuta: the name was familiar. Surely his father had said the woman he had been infatuated with—or bewitched by—had been called Kikuta. The conversation came back clearly—all the griefs and disappointments of his father’s life.
“And if the headman dies without adult sons, his wife or his daughter takes over,” she added. “I can talk to you freely, even though you’re not one of us, since you’re an old friend of Kenji’s.”
“We are hardly old friends. Did he say so?”
“Not in so many words. I just assumed it. From the way he’s looked after you. He’s not usually such a caring person, believe me. He surprised me. He knows a lot about plants and herbs, but he doesn’t often use them to heal, if you know what I mean.” Shigeru stared at her, and she laughed. “Must be some bond between you from a former life.”
It was not a very satisfactory explanation, yet there seemed no other. He did not want to talk too much in front of the woman or, indeed, within the village. He did not want them to know his identity, and he suspected some of them might have the supernatural skills that he had heard about and that he had already seen in Muto Kenji. But when, a week later, they left together, they had more opportunity to talk.
The night before they left, Shigeru gave the clothes he had been wearing during the battle to the woman, who promised to wash and mend them and present them to the shrine. She gave him in return an old, unmarked, indigo-dyed robe, and Kenji put on a similar one. Kenji bound the hilts of both swords with strips of dark sharkskin, hiding the decoration. The woman also provided them with new straw sandals and sedge hats that she had woven during the winter. Shigeru’s hat concealed the half-healed slash across the side of his head.
“Now you look like brothers,” she said with satisfaction.
In the years to come, he would travel frequently in this way, crossing and recrossing the Three Countries through the vast tracts of forested mountains by little-known paths, his own strength and his sword’s power disguised, but this was the first time he had made such a journey, no longer recognizable as the heir to the Otori clan, a humble traveler with few needs and few expectations. His mood was heavy with memories of the dead, but the day was beautiful, the air clear, the southern breeze soft and warm. Bell frogs and tree frogs called along the stream, and toward noon the forest was filled with the strident music of early cicadas. Vetch, daisies, and wild orchids starred the grass, and insects hummed around the linden blossom.
They kept away from the high road, following instead a track that led over the mountain ranges; the climb was steep, the views from the top of the pass sublimely beautiful. To the north, beyond the white fringed coastline, the sea stretched away into the distance, fishing boats tiny specks on its surface and green islands rising up in it like mountains trapped by a vast blue flood.
They stayed the first night in an isolated farmhouse at the foot of the range. Here Kenji was known to the farmer, his sons, and their families. They did not seem to have heard of the battle, and neither Kenji nor Shigeru spoke of it. They were in awe of Kenji and treated both their visitors with such deference that no one spoke much at all.
The following morning Shigeru took advantage of the wider path and gentler slopes to engage Kenji in conversation. His father was never far from his mind: his betrayal and death would have to be avenged, but Shigeru was also preoccupied with thoughts of the lost son from the Tribe, from the Kikuta family. He wanted to question Kenji about him, but some caution held him back. First he would try to fathom the man’s true intentions, why he had helped him, what he expected in return.
“I suppose you will report my escape to Iida?” he said.
“I won’t need to. Once you are back in Hagi, it will be general knowledge. Iida will be disappointed. He’ll make some other move against you. Do you trust your uncles?”
“Far from it,” Shigeru replied.
“Very wise.”
“That’s why I am in a hurry to return. They will not wait for my death to be confirmed before they try to seize power.” After a few moments he said, “Of course, that may have been why you detained me for so many days in the mountains.”
“I did not detain you! Did it escape your notice that you were delirious for two days, and then too weak to travel? I saved your life! Truly, it’s said that the man whose life you save will always hate you,” he added with a trace of bitterness.
