Risuko

by David Kudler

  —

  The next morning, Toumi looked quite pleased with herself, watching Fuyudori, Lady Chiyome and Masugu-san, and making nasty comments to me about finally getting my payback. She had clearly told on me—whether about talking with the lieutenant or sneaking out at night, I couldn’t be certain. I waited for punishment to fall.

  No one mentioned anything.

  Through the days that followed I found myself looking over my shoulder, sure that someone was going to take me to task for my activities that night, though Lady Chiyome certainly hadn’t seemed terribly upset.

  It became clear that I wasn’t going to get in any trouble. And it was entertaining watching Toumi’s frustration grow.

  A few nights later, as the other girls lay in their bedrolls, huddling against the cold and snoring, I woke Emi and told her about everything that had happened—everything but the bit about our fathers. She blinked at me, scowling. Then she broke into a rare grin. “Serves Fuyudori right, making you do her dirty work for her,” she whispered. “And I bet that’s why Toumi’s been sniffing around like a dog waiting for a rice cake to fall.”

  I nodded. “But no one seems to be itching to punish me.”

  “That must be awful for poor Toumi,” tittered Emi, before rolling over and going back to sleep. I finally managed to follow her not long after, but didn’t sleep soundly.

  Toumi remained in a foul mood for days.

  Somehow, though I was amused, I wasn’t relieved.

  —

  One afternoon, as we shuffled into Kee Sun’s kitchen to take up our evening duties, we were presented with a new challenge. Once again, each of us had a knife, laid with ritual precision across the bottom of a cutting board. Where we had always had piles of vegetables or butchered meats, however, each of us was presented with a trio of slaughtered chickens.

  Emi made a face, and Toumi grumbled, but I knew how to start at least—this much mother had taught us, on days when we were fortunate enough to catch a bird, or one of Irochi-san’s hens was no good for eggs any more: I began plucking the feathers from the flesh.

  “There yeh go, girlies!” laughed Kee Sun. “Bright-eyes’s got the idea! Can’t eat feathers, now can yeh?”

  We stripped our carcasses—Toumi never stopped grumbling, nor did her expression lose any of its edge. Emi, however, was so engrossed in the unpleasant, difficult job that her usual scowl faded. Her face seemed as blank and neutral as a Jizo-bosatsu’s statue.

  Once we had each stripped the carcasses of their feathers—the mess now filled baskets at our feet—Kee Sun called out happily, “Well, it’s about time, girlies! Now you’re going to learn the proper use of a blade.”

  With glee, he proceeded to instruct us in the technique for gutting, cleaning, skinning, and butchering a chicken.

  I won’t pretend that Emi and I didn’t throw up.

  Toumi did too. Twice.

  So it was that we—orphaned samurai girls not yet in our first womanhood—began to become master butchers. Over the next days, after our lessons in music, dance or calligraphy, we learned with great effort to reduce the bounteous meat, poultry and fish that graced Lady Chiyome’s dining table to edible portions. Chickens first, then ducks and geese; trout and boney carp; pigs, which were much heavier, obviously, and required us to work together; I took great care to keep an eye out for Toumi’s blade on those occasions.

  It was smelly, disgusting work, but soon enough the odors became as familiar as the scent of pine I so associate with my childhood home.

  —

  The amount of food that we prepared—that we and Chiyome-sama’s other servants consumed—was overwhelming. We ate three full meals a day, with some sort of meat served at least once a day, and often twice. Frequently, we were able to serve fresh vegetables as well—huge daikon radishes or soy beans that Kee Sun had carefully packed up in the storerooms by the Bull Pen, or that were brought up the muddy, icy road to the Full Moon by exceedingly respectful farmers.

  I had peered in the windows at Lord Imagawa’s castle often enough to know that, except for the occasional banquet, even they didn’t eat anywhere nearly as richly as Lady Chiyome and her household—even Lord Imagawa himself and the fancy ladies mostly ate rice and occasionally some bits of fish and poultry. It looked like much nicer rice and much finer flesh than what we were used to down in the village, and I know they’d occasionally buy one of old Naru’s pigs to slaughter, but I doubt they were eating meat anywhere nearly as often as the inhabitants of Lady Chiyome’s compound.

  When I asked Kee Sun about that, he just smirked. “Lady’s orders,” he said. “She says to feed yeh like my lord used to feed his troops before battle, and that’s the way yeh’re gonna be fed. Right, Smiley?” He threw the knucklebone of the pig we were cutting up at Emi, who looked up, blinking, and caught it on the fly. “It certainly agrees with the lot of yeh!”

  It was true. I was much less skinny than I had been when I met the others. Though the constant work kept the new muscle that was beginning to cling to my bones from ever growing soft, my ribs no longer stuck out of my chest like maple boughs in winter. Even Toumi had fleshed out a bit, so that it no longer looked as if you would cut your hand if you were to touch her. Not that I was ever tempted to touch her.

  Though at first it seemed as if Emi had changed the least—her face still in a perpetual frown, her hands and feet still bigger than her arms and legs could seem to carry—I realized that the hand that had caught that bone was now well clear of the sleeve of the jacket that she wore. Looking down at her feet, I realized that the cuffs of the pants didn’t reach anywhere near her ankles.

  Carefully placing the knuckle in the offal bucket, Emi looked at me—looked down at me—and scowled. She didn’t seem to know how to react to her growth. I certainly didn’t know either.

  —

  After every meal, we brought the unusable bits out to the rubbish pit out the back entrance of the Full Moon. As much as the pit itself stank, giving off steam even on the coldest days, I loved being out near the woods. Outside of the little world of the compound.

  One day, as Emi and I were coming back from dumping fish bones and scales in the pit, Emi stopped, her nose twitching. “Do you smell smoke?”

  Frowning I nodded. “Could be from the kitchen.”

  Emi shook her head. “Wind’s blowing the other way.” She pointed up at the the Full Moon’s wall, where the smoke from the kitchen fire was clearly blowing away from us. “Farmer?”

  “Don’t think so. They’re all too far away. Someone must be in the woods.” We both peered at the groves that choked either side of the ridge. The smoke certainly wasn’t coming down the cliff behind us.

  We looked at each other.

  “I don’t suppose,” Emi said, “that you could...?” She pointed at the thick woods that hemmed the Full Moon in on either side of the ridge.

  Nodding, I said, “Tell Kee Sun I’m, um, ‘visiting the King’ or whatever—I’ll be right back.”

  The trees were tangled oak and bay that weren’t easy to climb through, yet didn’t provide a much cover in the winter. I clambered carefully toward the faint smell of smoke—but stopped when I heard the faint whicker of a horse and a voice: a man’s voice. And then another, fainter in the wind, but higher. A woman. Who?

  Before I could get any closer, however, I heard Kee Sun’s voice calling my name. Quietly cursing, I made my way back to the back entrance.

  “Bring me any acorns, did yeh, Bright-eyes?” The cook’s arms were crossed and a scarred eyebrow raised.

  Chastened, I followed him back to the kitchen.

  —

  After days spent up to our elbows in fins and feathers and intestines, we entered the kitchen the next morning to find the entire space between the cooking fire and the pantry taken up with the carcass of a cow. Groaning at the size of the beast, we looked to
Kee Sun for instruction.

  The cook, who was sitting atop the barrel that held the brewing rice wine, simply laughed his peculiar laugh and gestured to the worktable. Knives were laid out as usual, gleaming.

  Toumi started to complain, but Emi shook her head. “No point,” she said, her voice matching her glum face for once. Squaring her shoulders, she walked to the cutting table and picked up the largest knife I had ever seen.

  Nervously, I looked over at Toumi. She seemed as overwhelmed as I felt, but when she saw me peering at her, she narrowed her eyes, grabbed a sword-sized cleaver and a thin blade for skinning, and strode over to where Emi was already starting the process of reducing the animal to food.

  I looked at Kee Sun and he looked back, unflinching. His face was blank and his eyes empty of their usual humor. Gulping quickly through my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to smell the animal, I picked up my knives and went to help out.

  And so that is how we spent the entire day, for Kee Sun told us with great glee that we would be spared from our usual lessons—as if that were a favor. He made breakfast and lunch, whistling and singing.

  Whatever lesson Mieko was teaching to the women in the great hall that day had them all howling with laughter, which didn’t brighten our moods in the kitchen. We worked away, butchering that enormous creature, carefully skinning it and laying aside the hide for tanning, cleaning the carcass, dividing it into workable portions, removing all of the edible bits—there are edible parts of a cow that you wouldn’t even want to begin to think about—and delivering them to Kee Sun in neat, evenly cut cubes and leaf-wrapped packages, all by the time that Kee Sun had begun to chop the vegetables and clean the rice for that evening’s meal. We were covered in blood, and the stench there in the kitchen was awful, but I think we all felt a certain amount of pride at having completed the gruesome chore.

  “Well done!” he called, and once again we received a portion of rice wine with our meal after everyone else had eaten.

  I enjoyed the meal. All but the beef. I couldn’t eat the beef.

  21—Lessons in Dance

  The day after we butchered the cow, we began a new set of morning lessons. As we cleared up the kitchen, Mai, who never entered the kitchen if she could help it, poked her head through the door and informed us that, for the first time, we would be taught by Mieko-san.

  As she withdrew, Kee Sun asked whether Mai had actually walked into the kitchen before delivering her message. When Toumi snarled that no, she hadn’t—making it clear that no one in their right mind would enter Kee Sun’s domain willingly—the cook gave a nod and a grunt, saying, “That’s good. ‘Cause I told her if she ever stepped a foot in here again, I’d cut it off.”

  It was always a bit difficult to know whether he was joking or not. To be honest, I was never quite able to work that out.

  Nonetheless, I was excited by Mai’s news; I had hoped that we would be able to study with Mieko, not only because she was kind and lovely but because the other women in Chiyome-sama’s service seemed to respect her so. Even the boisterous ones listened quietly when she spoke.

  As we finished cleaning up the kitchen and preparing it for the next meal, we all speculated in excited whispers. “Maybe we’ll learn Chinese for poetry and such,” Emi said.

  Toumi snorted. “I just want her to teach us about knives.”

  I remembered Mieko calmly wiping her blade as the bodies of her two attackers bled onto the floor of the Mount Fuji Inn beside her. Returning it calmly to its sheath.

  Instead of leading us down to the teahouse as usual for our lesson that morning, Fuyudori walked us very solemnly to the stables of all places. As we entered the low building, we saw that the central space had been swept clean and the stalls on one side removed, leaving a large and open area that had been covered in tatami mats. Masugu-san had apparently taken his horse out for a morning ride so that the remaining stalls were empty, the spare saddles and other gear were all stored away, and a small charcoal stove had been lit, so that the usually drafty room was warm. Clad in a miko’s red and white robes, Mieko knelt on a mat in the center of the room, head bowed, looking quite at peace—much as she had on that awful morning at the Mount Fuji Inn.

  All of the inhabitants of the Full Moon knelt around her, facing her—all but Masugu-san, Kee Sun, and Lady Chiyome herself, of course; like the lieutenant and the cook, the lady was absent.

  Toumi’s joke had infected my imagination. I felt a quiver of anxious anticipation. Was Mieko going to teach us how she had defended herself from those two soldiers? Would she be teaching us yet another use for the knives with which Kee Sun had made us so proficient?

  No harm, Murasaki, I heard Otō-san saying. Harm begets only harm. No fight; no blame. I tried to cleanse from my mind the image of lovely, graceful Mieko wiping the blood from her knife with as much poise as a samurai cleaning his katana.

  And yet, in some secret part of me, I did not care what our father had taught us about how our actions affect us in this life and those to come.

  Kneeling to the straw with the others, I shivered and lowered my eyes, waiting for Mieko to speak.

  After a long, still silence, she addressed us in her musical, quiet voice. “Many of you have already approached this lesson. Our three novices and the young brother, however, have not, and we are fortunate that this is so: we shall be pursuing an art in which all of us are forever novices, and studying it again with a novice’s unsullied eyes is the best way to continue to grow in it. I will, therefore, begin at the beginning.”

  Without saying another word, Mieko stood in that smooth, unfolding motion that always struck me as so breathtakingly impossible—as if the ground had lowered from her, rather than that Mieko had expended any effort to stand. She planted her feet at shoulder width and reached down without looking, pulling her red skirt up between her legs, tucking it into her sash as if she were one of the old grandmothers of the village getting ready to go and harvest rice.

  The rest of the women—as well as the men—stood, none as smoothly as Mieko, but nearly all without a sound.

  Beside me, Toumi was already springing to her feet, and Emi and I scrambled to join her. We, at least, had no robes to deal with and so we were able to fall into the oddly masculine stance at the same time as the rest of the women.

  Mieko looked at me—at us—and smiled. It seemed a very sad smile, and yet it filled me with a funny tickle of pleasure that she had smiled at me. At us.

  Her hands lifted slowly, so that it looked as if she were holding a ball immediately in front of her belly, and just as slowly she began to sway toward one foot and lift her hands above her head. “The Two Fields,” she whispered.

  The whole group mirrored her actions, and Emi and I tried to follow. Toumi jerked herself so that she reached Mieko’s final position before we did; I could see a smile on her lips too, and I was sure again that I was its cause, but this smile did not fill me with pleasure.

  When we had caught up to her, Mieko remained still for a breath, and then shifted to the opposite foot, stepping to the side on it and extending that invisible ball held in her hands over her head. “The Bamboo Bud.”

  We all mirrored Mieko, stepping to one side and bringing that invisible ball above our heads.

  Next, Mieko stepped toward us, lifting what had been her trailing leg, and then bringing it and her hands down. “The Key to Heaven.”

  Again we followed; again Toumi made sure to finish before us.

  Her smirk ceased to bother me soon enough, however. First, it became clear that moving quickly was not the point—the more Toumi rushed, the more Mieko seemed to slow down, flowing from one movement to the next so that you could not tell where one movement ended and the next began.

  Second, my mind was fully occupied. Between the movements themselves, which became slowly more challenging, though always as slow and flowing as if in a dream, and the fact tha
t there seemed no point to what we were doing, I had no room in my head to think of Toumi at all.

  Dance. It was a dance. We had learned other dances at the Full Moon—dances that I recognized as going along with some of the ceremonies and songs that we were learning. Yet this dance was so slow and so unlike any that I had ever seen that I was bewildered.

  I was bewildered too because as much as it didn’t seem like any dance that I had ever seen, nonetheless, after a time of following the ice-slow flow of arms and legs, I began to feel as if I knew the movements—as if I could anticipate them before Mieko began to lead us into the next step, the next sweep of the arms, the next gentle lunge.

  As the lesson went on, I found that, no matter how quickly Toumi raced, I had always anticipated the movement that Mieko was about to show us, and reached the next shape before Toumi could.

  Was I simply growing accustomed to this peculiar dance? In the moment I could only have told you that I felt as if I were remembering it from another lifetime, which made me think of Otō-san, and that it gave me a deep feeling of peace.

  As we moved, I found myself remembering the couple whose voices I’d heard outside in the woods. Masugu-san, perhaps? And who else?

  After a time, Mieko returned us to the first position—The Two Fields, feet wide, hands before our bellies. “Again,” she said, and lead us back into the flowing pattern of movements that felt as comfortable to me as walking or as climbing a tree.

  —

  She led the whole company through the dance eight more times, so that after a while even Emi and Toumi were beginning to move with the rest of us, rather than looking to see what the next movement might be. In the end, Mieko stood for a moment in the beginning posture, but instead of saying “Again” and continuing, she brought her feet together, placed her hands on the fronts of her thighs, and bowed. We all bowed with her, as if we were her mirror. It was a startling feeling—that some twenty people were moving, not as individuals, but as a single being. We straightened and stood.