Frail Human Heart

by Zoe Marriott

  “I’ve found you, little princess.”

  Resting my hand on the bark of the tree, I circled its trunk, expecting with each step to find the girl. But there was no sign of her. I circled the tree again in the opposite direction, still looking. Her laughter had fallen silent now.

  “Where did you go?” I whispered.

  Where did you go, little princess? The echo of a voice. The echo, not the sound. Deep inside, something stirred…

  I heard footsteps rustling in the grass and turned to see Shinobu walking up the hill towards me. The wind caught at his unbound hair and dark clothes, sending them billowing around him like black clouds. Cherry blossoms spiralled in the air around him, and I felt that strange echo again – as if I was seeing him for the first time. As if I saw him through new eyes.

  Shin-chan! Come and play, Shin-chan!

  The echo of forgotten voices, of familiar laughter, rang through me again. An echo of recognition – of memory.

  In my mind I could feel something unfolding, moving, coming to life. Dancing through my memories like the little girl had danced through the falling sakura. A dance I knew so well. One I had learned when I was a child and practised each day when I was grown. The kata for katana that my Ojiichan had taught me… No, that my father had taught us, taught us together…

  “The sword is a part of you. Part of your body. The edged extension of your own flesh. The blade is your will moving through the world. A true warrior reveals his own soul with every flash of his sword.”

  Remember.

  I remembered dancing with Shinobu in a room filled with sunlight, on bare wooden floors, in bare feet. Dancing the kata. We flowed together, our bodies tensing and shifting effortlessly in the rhythm that we knew as well as breathing. Turn. Extend. Left foot. Right. Forward. Back. Turn.

  Remember, little princess.

  Shin-chan! Come and play!

  I saw the little girl again, in my mind.

  She stood by the side of a tall woman with a kind face, beneath the spreading boughs of a cherry tree in bloom. A man, plainly dressed, his silver-streaked hair neatly drawn back into a topknot, approached. A little boy walked behind him. A little boy with golden skin and dark eyes filled with reflections of the cloudy blue sky above. He moved stiffly, his tense shoulders telegraphing both fear and pride.

  This is your new son, my dear. Mio, this is your new big brother. Shinobu, say hello.

  The little girl smiled. Shin-chan.

  Shinobu, the boy corrected gravely.

  The little girl shook her head, and strands of hair fell into her face. She brushed them back with an exasperated sound. No, you are Shin-chan, and we will be best friends.

  The little boy’s small hands clenched into fists. The little girl only smiled wider − a wicked, mischievous, irresistible grin. After a moment, as if he couldn’t help it, a shy smile twitched at the corners of the boy’s mouth. He reached out and tucked the little girl’s hair carefully behind her ear. Perhaps we will, Mio-dono.

  Shin-chan! Come and play!

  I saw the boy and girl running together through fields of long, waving grass, shrieking with laughter, collapsing in the shade of a red Japanese maple. Behind them, the brown thatch of a long, low house baked gently in the sun.

  I saw the girl and boy sparring with wooden swords under the watchful eye of the same older man – his hair was more silver than ever now, his beard almost completely white.

  I saw the boy and the girl kiss, for the very first time, in the garden under a cherry tree.

  I saw the girl stare at the boy as if she didn’t know him, heartbreak and betrayal on her face. I saw her fling her hand out towards him. Go then. Go without me. But don’t bother coming back – you are nothing to me any more. I hate you, and I never want to see you again.

  I saw the girl in the garden at dusk, alone, with a black-and-gold katana clutched to her chest. She slumped to her knees on the ground, her back and shoulders jerking with sobs that seemed hard enough to rip her apart, thin fingers turning yellow and red with strain around the saya of the sword. Shinobu… I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. I should never have let you go…

  Where was the little girl? Where had she gone?

  Who was she?

  But I was only asking myself those questions because the realization, the flood of memories, was so overwhelming, so impossible to absorb and believe. I knew the answer already.

  She is me.

  I was the little girl.

  I was the young woman.

  I was the one who Shinobu had loved and lost five hundred years ago.

  And I was the one he loved now.

  I am Mio.

  In my mind the dance of memories slowed and came to a halt. I found myself standing in the shelter of Shinobu’s body, my head resting on his chest. His hands were pressed into my back, holding me as if he was frightened I would fly away without their restraint. The sakura-scented wind sent pink petals fluttering around us. I opened my eyes, but kept them trained on the black fabric of his hakama.

  “How?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 16

  OUT OF THE PAST

  He didn’t reply. Beneath my hands the muscles of his body were rigid with tension.

  “How?” I repeated.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I do not know. I do not know, Mio-dono.”

  Mio-dono. The name – his pet name for me, the special name that only he ever used – set off a new cascade of remembrance. The little wooden doll he had carved for my birthday when I was eight. The first time he had sent me flying when we sparred, and his horrified, anxious face. The first time I had beaten him and how I had crowed and gloated. The first time he had whispered to me, Aishiteru zo, Mio-dono.

  I could feel that other Mio’s shape, like a new skeleton inside me that was slowly sinking into place. A different me. One who had been raised in a completely different time and place, in another culture. One who had been bolder and fiercer in some ways – quieter and more thoughtful in others. One whose temper flared at things mine didn’t, and whose humour lit at jokes I didn’t get. One who had loved and trusted and known Shinobu completely, because he had been the most beloved part of her whole life.

  A different me. But still me.

  “You knew,” I whispered.

  “Not at first,” he said. “I did not … did not dare to believe, at first. I felt something – recognition – the moment that you held the sword for the first time as a child. But you were so different. The Mio I knew before was … delicate. Frail. A summer cold could nearly kill you. Sometimes you couldn’t eat for days without being sick. You burned all the more brightly for that frailty. You fought to prove you were as fast, as strong as me. I feared that you would kill yourself trying to prove it.”

  “She was – I was beautiful, though.” I remembered the visions. That glowing girl-child blossoming into maturity. The lovely, sharp-boned little face.

  “You have always been beautiful to me.”

  I shook my head. “When did you know, Shinobu?”

  He hesitated. “I guessed that day at your parents’ house. When we danced the kata together. No one else could ever move with me, lead and follow me, the way she – you – could. Like being the two halves of one person. I was sure then it had to be you.”

  I stared up into his face. “You knew all the way back then? That was – that was the first day we met!”

  He looked away, his hands like stones pressed into my back. “You did not remember me.”

  “But from the second we met the connection was there. Sometimes I thought I was losing my mind – and you let me think it. Why?”

  He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. I could see a muscle jerking in his jaw, as if he was grinding his teeth.

  “You didn’t want me to remember, did you?” I shoved away from him, putting distance between us.

  Finally he looked at me, his eyes pleading and conflicted. “I could not tell you. I could not take the risk.”

&
nbsp; “What risk? You can’t lie to me, keep things from me, and then claim that it’s somehow for my own good. Tell me the truth. Why did you want to keep my other life − our other life, everything that we were to each other − a secret?”

  “Because you hated me,” he whispered.

  “I – what?” I stuttered. Out of all the things that he could have said, I’d never expected that one.

  “I lost you. You hated me then, and I knew that if you remembered you would hate me again.”

  Me hate Shinobu? That couldn’t be right! I would never – I would never… I searched the confusing jumble of memories, like turning out a box of mixed-up puzzle pieces, trying to make sense of what he’d said. There had been an argument. I had cried − I remembered that. I’d … I’d said that I hated him, yes. But I hadn’t meant it.

  Had I?

  “Explain,” I mumbled, my mouth suddenly dry. “What went wrong?”

  “I did.” He straightened, his shoulders jerking into that suddenly familiar stance of fearful defiant pride. “I betrayed you. You were onna bugeisha. You were everything. And I left you behind.”

  “I was – I was what? A geisha?” The term was familiar, but I couldn’t find the meaning among the splinters of remembrance in my head.

  He shook his head wearily. “Onna bugeisha. You know this – you know what you were. A woman of noble birth trained in the way of the sword so that she might defend her honour and her family’s honour. Your father taught us together, side by side, as soon as we were old enough to hold the practice swords. He said that as long as we fought together nothing could ever best us. We would always be safe, our family would always be safe, as long as we were together. Where you went, I would follow. Always.”

  He made a sudden choked sound between his teeth. His legs seemed to buckle, and he dropped to his knees, bowing his head in misery. His body shuddered as he dragged in a deep breath.

  “When the Nekomata came, and it was decided that we should fight it… Of course, you were to fight with me. That was the way of things, the way we were. The long sword and the short sword. A matched pair. Daishõ. We fought together or not at all. But I was a coward − I was frightened of losing you. I went to your father. I manipulated him. I reminded him of how frail and small you had always been. I made him swear that he would keep you from the battle and let me fight alone.”

  I froze. “You … left me behind?”

  “I would have hurt you less had I taken out my blade and stabbed you through the heart. You begged me not to do it. You, who had never begged anyone for anything your whole life, begged me…” His voice broke. “But I did not listen.”

  I backed away from Shinobu, struggling to keep my breathing even. A new flood of emotions – memories – broke inside me. I remembered this. I had needed to fight to protect those that I loved. To protect Shinobu and my family. Had needed it every bit as much as he had. It was my right, and what I had trained for since I was a child. And my father and my own beloved Shinobu – Shinobu, whom I had trusted completely – had turned against me. They had plotted behind my back to exclude me, as if my training and strength and courage counted for nothing.

  As if I was nothing.

  Shinobu looked up at me with dull resignation, like a man waiting for his execution. “You had given me your heart, your trust, your honour. I shattered it all. When you said you would never forgive me, I knew it was the truth. I left the house to go into the forest and face the beast – but before I went, I stole your blade. Your katana.”

  “Mine?” I whispered. “The katana was mine?”

  “The cherry blossom blade, we called it. It was a gift from your father. He had it made especially for you. You loved it, and I suppose … I wanted to bring a tiny part of you with me into that fight.”

  One of my hands went back to touch the hilt – that black-silk-wrapped hilt that had always felt so familiar and right in my hands. Strange to think that perhaps it wasn’t all magic and compulsion. To think that some of my love for the sword was just … love.

  “You remember now, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.” Without waiting for an answer, he climbed back to his feet, turning away from me. He stared out at the sea of dancing cherry blossoms with loathing. His hands knotted into fists, but he didn’t say anything else.

  I rubbed my hands over my face, pressing the heels of my palms against my forehead as I struggled to make sense of all that I now knew. I remembered the feelings of unbearable betrayal and heartbreak as if they had only happened yesterday. But I also remembered something else.

  I had let him go.

  My father had broken his promise. He couldn’t bear to lock me in as he had said he would, though he ordered me strictly to stay behind. He knew, after all, that there were no locks or bars that could have held me, had I been determined to get out.

  I could have gone after Shinobu. I could have refused to be left behind. But I had been too proud and too angry and too hurt. I had let Shinobu go without me.

  I had let him go.

  And he had died.

  I’d had to live with that. I lived with it for five years – five endless, terrible years without him – until a winter fever took me from the world. Then my soul had torn free of my withered body and tried to fly to Shinobu, but it couldn’t find him. Something – Izanagi, I now realized – had kept us apart. For five hundred years. Him trapped in the sword, in the dark and cold. Me trapped in some blank, empty space between life and death. Both of us waiting for the chance to be reunited. Reborn.

  Redeemed.

  That awful day, when I had seen Izanagi emerge from the forest carrying Shinobu’s sword, my sword, and had known he was gone, I would have done anything, given anything, to go back in time − to change my own choices, and run after Shinobu without pride hobbling my steps. To change the last words I spoke to him into words of love instead of hate. All that time I had floated, barely conscious − a disembodied soul yearning for existence, like a butterfly stifling behind dusty glass – hoping to see him again and put things right. And he, too, had been carrying that guilt all this time. It had been five hundred years since that fight, since pride and fear had torn us apart.

  My rebirth should have been impossible. I should have been impossible. But somehow I had escaped and found a new life as the descendant of one of my own younger brothers, and everything, everything that happened afterwards was … inevitable.

  We were meant to be together. Our bad choices back then couldn’t change that. Hundreds of years couldn’t change it. Even the gods couldn’t keep us apart, not forever. We were just human beings: fragile, flawed and finite. Yet our frail, human hearts had kept on beating for each other all this time.

  Where you go, I will follow. Always.

  It took more effort than it should have to take the two steps towards him. My arms were like lead weights as I lifted them. But the moment I wrapped them around him, the heaviness – the sorrow and regret that I had been carrying unknowingly all my life – fell away.

  I pressed myself into his back, feeling him tense up with surprise. “It’s all right,” I said, leaning my forehead between his shoulder blades. “It’s all right now. We’re together again.”

  One of his hands brushed mine tentatively. “But I – I lied to you. I hurt you so much. Then and now.”

  “You deserve a second chance,” I said softly. “We deserve a second chance. Shinobu, I forgive you.”

  His shoulders shook, and then his hands grasped mine and squeezed them desperately, painfully tight.

  The wind swept across the sakura blossoms, making the treetops toss like foam on the crests of a stormy ocean. The hill undulated under our feet.

  “What is—?” Shinobu began.

  Before he could finish his thought, there was no hill any more.

  We dropped with twin yells, forced to release each other as we hit the water. Our epic splash was drowned out by the boom and hiss of the waves as they rose up around us. The garden was gone. We we
re in the middle of a seething grey sea. The sky above us was low and leaden, almost black, streaked with veins of gold.

  The water threw us upward and then tumbled us down as if we were on a rollercoaster. Shinobu grabbed the arm of my hoodie and pointed with his other hand. “There! Dry land!”

  I saw it. A pale, sharp peak, wreathed in a veil of white clouds, standing up out of the water. It was shining silver-blue-grey, radiating light even in the stormy darkness. More ice? Or more bloody crystals? Was it huge and far away, or close and tiny? No way to tell. There was no way to judge perspective out here. No other options, either. I nodded, treading water.

  Shinobu let go of me and we struck out towards the pale mountain, riding the surging tide when it took us that way, fighting when it tried to turn us back. The salt water stung my eyes and plastered my hair to my face. Shivers of cold wracked my body as I forced it to find the rhythm of the front crawl, struggling to keep my head above the water. I longed to reach back and check on the sword, but I couldn’t stop swimming for long enough – a second’s hesitation and I would be left behind. The only points of reference I had were the shining shape of the mountain in front and Shinobu’s soaked otter-sleek hair to my left. I had to keep my eyes on one or the other.

  A wave buoyed me up and suddenly I could see a narrow strip of beach ahead of us, shadowed by a pale, glimmering cliff-face. “Almost there!” I shouted and saw one of Shinobu’s hands flash up in acknowledgement.

  The water shunted me forward. Two more mighty pulls with aching arms and my feet hit soft, sucking sand. I heaved myself out of the water, sagging as I took my weight and the weight of my sodden clothes. After a quick check of the sword, I turned to see Shinobu land behind me. He took my hand and helped me upright, and we trudged up the shallow slope as quickly as we could. I, for one, was afraid that the sea would change its mind and try to drag us back.

  When we reached the high-water mark where the sand was pale and dry, we both collapsed. Shinobu leaned against a glittering blue-grey rock. I pulled up my knees and rested my head on them. It was hot – almost uncomfortably hot to my clammy skin after the shocking cold of the water. Our clothes and hair were already steaming.