Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Beagle, Peter S.

  When he was done he offered the water again, and this time the otter drank from the dish, cautiously, never taking its eyes from him, but deeply even so. Junko then lifted it in the old cloak and set all upon his own tatami mat, saying, “I cannot bind your wound properly, but healing in open air is best, anyway. And now you should sleep.” He covered the otter with his coat, then lay down near it on the tatami and quickly fell asleep himself. The otter was awake longer than he, its wide eyes darker than the darkness.

  In the morning the gash in the otter’s flank smelled far less of fever, and the little animal was clearly hungry. Knowing that otters eat mainly fish, along with such things as frogs and turtles, Junko dressed hurriedly and went to a river that was near the castle (the better for the daimyo to keep an eye on the boats that went up and down between the distant cities), and there he caught and cleaned several small fish and brought them back to his quarters. The otter devoured them all, groomed its fur with great care—spending half an hour on its exposed wound alone—and then fell back to sleep for the rest of the day, much of which Junko spent studying it, sitting crosslegged beside his tatami. He was completely captivated to learn that the otter snored—very daintily and delicately, through its diamond-shaped nose—and that it smelled only slightly of fish, even after its meal, and much more of spring-warmed earth, as deep in winter as they were. He touched its front claws and realized that they were almost as hard as armor.

  When a highly placed serving woman suggested through another servant that she might possibly enjoy his company for tea, Junko made the most courteous apology he could, and went on staring at the otter on his sleeping mat. Towards evening the little creature woke up and lay considering him in its turn, out of eyes much brighter and clearer than they had been. He spoke to it then, saying, “I am very sorry that I hurt you. I hope you are better today.” The otter licked its whiskers without taking its eyes from his.

  During the days that passed, Junko told no one about the otter: neither the Lord Kuroda nor his wife, the Lady Hara, nor even his closest friend, the horsemaster Akira Yamagata, who might have been expected to understand his fascination. He fed and cared for the otter every day, cleaned and aired out his quarters himself, and saw the arrow wound closing steadily from the inside, as every soldier knows is the proper way of healing. And the otter lay patiently under his hands as he tended it, and shared his tatami at night; and if it did not purr, or arch itself back against his hands, as a cat will, when he stroked its beautiful, rich fur, nevertheless it never drew away from the contact, but looked constantly into his eyes, as though it would have spoken to him if it could. He fell into the habit of talking to it himself, more and more, and he named it Sayuri, because men have to name things, and Sayuri was his sister’s name.

  One morning he told the otter, “My lord will have me guide a hunt meeting with the Lord Sugihara, down on holiday from Osaka. I am not looking forward to it, because neither trusts the other for an instant, and it could all become very wearying, though certainly educational. But when I return, however late it may be, I will take you back to your stream and release you there. You are fully recovered now, and a castle is no place for a wild creature like yourself. Stay well and warm until I come back.”

  The meeting between the two lords was indeed tiresome, and the hunt itself extremely unsatisfactory; but it had at least the virtue of taking less time than he would have expected, so the sun was still in the sky when Junko climbed the stair to his quarters. He went slowly, remembering his promise to the otter, and finding himself curiously reluctant to keep it. “It will be lonely,” he thought. “I will miss… what is it that I will miss?” He could not say, but he knew that it was a real thing. So he sighed and went on to his quarters and opened the door.

  The otter was gone.

  In its place there stood, waiting for him, the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. She stood barely higher than his heart, wearing a blue and white kimono, and her face was the dawn shade of a tea rose, and as perfectly boned and structured as the kites that children were competing with every spring even then. Junko stood gaping at her, not even trying to speak.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, smiling with small white teeth at his bewilderment.

  “I am indeed that otter you shot, and then nursed back to health so tenderly. I am quite well now, as you see.”

  “But,” said Junko. “But.”

  The young woman smiled more warmly as he stumbled among words, finding only that one. “This is my true form, but I take other shapes from time to time, as I choose. And it is so pleasant to be an otter—even as they hunt and mate, and raise their children, and struggle to survive, they seem to be having such a joyful time of it. Don’t you think so, my lord?”

  Junko said “But” again, that being the only word he was quite master of. The woman came toward him, her long, graceful fingers toying with the knot of the obi at her waist.

  “I could not return to my own form until today,” she explained to him, “because I was wounded, which always keeps me from changing. I might very well have died an otter, but for your devoted care. It is only proper that I make you some little recompense, surely?”

  She seemed so hesitant herself that the last words came out a shy question. But the obi had already fallen to the floor.

  Later, in the night, propped on her elbow and looking at him with eyes even darker than the otter’s eyes, she said, “You have never lain so with a woman, have you?”

  Junko blushed in the darkness. “Not exactly. I mean, of course there were… No.”

  The young woman was silent for a time. Then she said, “Well, I will tell you something, since you have been so honest with me. Nor will I lie to you—I have mated, made love, yes, but never in this form. Only as a deer, or a wildcat, or even as a snow monkey, in the northern mountains. Never as a human being, until now.”

  “And you are human?” Junko asked her. “Forgive me, but are you sure you are not an animal who can change into a woman?” For there are all sorts of legends in Japan about such creatures. Especially foxes.

  She chuckled against his shoulder. “I am altogether human, I promise you.” After a moment, she added, “You named me Sayuri. I like that name. I will keep it.”

  “But you must have a name of your own, surely? Everyone has a name.”

  “Not I, never.” She put a finger on his lips to forestall further questioning. “Sayuri will suit me very well.”

  And the beautiful young woman who had been an otter suited Junko very well herself. He presented her formally as his fiancée to the Lord Kuroda the next day, and then to the full court. He was awkward at it, certainly, never having been schooled in such regions of etiquette; but all were charmed by the young woman’s grace and modesty, even so, despite the fact that she could offer nothing in the way of family history or noble lineage. Indeed, Lord Kuroda’s wife, the Lady Hara, immediately requested her as one of her ladies-in-waiting. So all went well there, and Junko—still as dazed by his sudden fortune as the otter had been by his arrow—was proud and happy in a way that he had never known to be happy in all his life.

  He and Sayuri were married in short order by the Shinto priest Yukiyasa, the same who had married Lord Kuroda to Lady Hara, which everyone agreed was good luck, and were given new quarters in the castle—modest still, but more fitting for so singular a couple. More, his master, as a wedding gift, saw to it that Junko was given proper hunting equipment to replace the battered bow and homemade arrows with which he had first arrived at court. There were those present at the ceremony who bit their lips in envy of such favor to a commoner; but Junko, in his desire that everyone share in his joy, noticed none of this. The Lord Kuroda did.

  Early on the morning after their wedding, when few were yet awake, Junko and his bride walked in the castle garden, in the northeast corner, where the stream entered, and which was known as the Realm of the Blue Dragon. The days were cold still, but they walked close together and were content, saying very
little. But the stream made Junko think of the strange and nearly fatal way in which he had met his Sayuri, and he asked her then, “Beloved, do you think you would ever be likely to change into an otter again? For I hurt you by mischance, but there are many people who trap otters for their fur, and I would be afraid for you.”

  Sayuri’s laughter was like the sound of the water flowing beside them, as she answered him. “I think not, my lord. There are more risks involved with that form—including marriage—than I had bargained for.” Then she turned a serious face to her new husband, holding his arm tightly. “But I would grieve were I forbidden to change shape ever again. It is a part of whatever I am, you must know that.”

  “‘Whatever I am,’” Junko repeated slowly, and for a moment it seemed as though the back of his neck was colder than it should be, even on a winter morning. “But you assured me that you were altogether human. Those were your words.”

  “And I am, I am certain I am!” Sayuri stopped walking and turned him to face her. “But what else am I? No name but the one you gave me… no childhood that I can recall, except in flashes, like lightning, here and gone… no father or mother to present me at my own wedding… far more memories of the many animals I have been than of the woman I know I am. There must be more to me than I can see in your eyes, or in the jeweled hand mirror that was the Lady Hara’s gift. Do you understand, husband?”

  There were tears on her long black eyelashes, and though they did not fall, they reassured Junko in a curious way, since animals cannot weep. He put his arms around her to comfort her, saying, “Do as you will, as you need to do, my wife. I ask only that you protect yourself from all injury, since you cannot regain your human form then, and anything could happen to you. Will you promise me that?”

  Then Sayuri laughed, and shook her head so that the teardrops flew, and she said, “I swear that and more. You will never again share your sleeping mat with anything furred, or with any more than two legs.” And Junko joined in her laughter, and they went on with their walk, all the way across the garden to the southwest corner, which is still called the Realm of the White Tiger.

  So they lived quite happily together for some years at the court of the daimyo Lord Kuroda. Junko served his master with the same perfect loyalty as ever, and went on providing more game than any other huntsman for the castle kitchens; while Sayuri continued to be much favored by the Lady Hara, joining her in her favorite arts of music, brush painting, and especially ikebana, the spreading new discipline of flower arrangement. So skilled was she at this latter, in fact, that Lady Hara often sought her assistance in planning the decorations for a poetry recital in her own quarters, or even for a feast on the green summer island in the stream. Watching the two of them pacing slowly by the water together, the fringes of the great lady’s parasol touching his otter-wife’s thick and fragrant hair, Junko was so proud that it pained him, and made it hard to breathe.

  And if, now and then, he awoke in the night to find the space beside him still warm but empty, or heard a rustle in the trees outside, or a sigh of the grass, that he was huntsman enough to know was no bird, no doe teaching her fawn to strip bark from Lord Kuroda’s plum trees, he learned to turn over and go back to sleep, and ask no questions in the morning. For Sayuri was most often back by dawn, or very soon thereafter—always in human shape, as she had promised him—usually chilled beyond the bone and needing to be warmed. And Junko would warm her and never ask her to say where—and what—she had been.

  She did not always leave the castle: mouse and bat were among her favorite forms, and between those two she knew everything that was taking place within its walls. More than once she shocked Junko by informing him that this or that high-ranking retainer was slipping into dusty alcoves with this or that servant girl; he learned before Lord Kuroda that the Lady Hara was again with child, but that it would be best the daimyo not know, since this one too would not live to be born. Animals know these things. As an owl, she might glide silently over the forest at night, and tell him if the deer had shifted their grazing grounds, as they did from time to time, or were lying up in a new place. In fox-shape, she warned of an approaching forest fire without ever seeing a flame; Junko roused the castle and gained great praise and credit thereby. He wanted earnestly to explain that all honor was due to his wife Sayuri, but this was impossible, and she seemed more than content with his gratitude and their somewhat unlikely happiness. So they lived, and the time passed.

  One night it happened that she returned to their bed shivering, not with cold, nor with fear—there were several cats in the castle—but, as he slowly realized, with anger, which was not something he was used to from Sayuri. She might be by turns as calm and thoughtful as a fox, as playful as an otter, as gentle as a deer, fiercely passionate as any mink or marten, or as curious and mischievous as a red-faced snow monkey. All these moods and humors he had come in time to understand—but anger was a new thing entirely. He held her, and asked simply, “What is it, my love?”

  At first she would not speak, or could not; but by and by, when the trembling passed a little, she whispered, “I was in the kitchen,”—by this Junko knew that she had been in mouse-shape—“and the cooks were talking late over their own meal. And one said it was a shame that you had been passed over for the lord’s private guard in favor of Yasunari Saito, since you had surely earned promotion a dozen times over. But another cook said,”—the words were choking her again—“that it made no difference, because you were a commoner with no surname, and that it was miraculous that you were even in Lord Kuroda’s home, let alone his retinue. Miraculous—after all you have done for them!” The tears of rage came then.

  “Well, well,” Junko said, stroking her hair, “that must have been Aoki. He has never liked me, that one, and it wouldn’t matter to him if I had a dozen surnames. For the rest of it, things are the way they are, and that is… well, the way it is. Don’t cry, please, Sayuri. I am grateful for what I have, and most grateful for you. Don’t cry.”

  But later, when she had at last fallen asleep on his chest, he could not help brooding—only a little—about the unfairness of Saito’s promotion. Unfair was not a word Junko had allowed himself even to think since he was quite small, and still learning the way things were, but it seemed to slither in his mind, and he could not get to grips with it, or make it go away. It was long before he slept again.

  As has been said, the Lord Kuroda was a wise man, though not at all handsome, who saw more at a single dinner than many were likely to see in a week or a month. Riding out hunting one day, with Junko at his elbow, and they two having drawn a little apart from their companions, he said to him briefly and directly, “Saito is a fool, but his advancement was necessary, since I may well need his father’s two hundred and fifty samurai one day.” Junko bowed his head without answering. Lord Kuroda continued, “But it means nothing to me that you bring no warriors with you—nothing but your strength and your faithfulness. The next opening in my guard you shall fill.”

  With that he spurred ahead, doubtless to avoid Junko’s stammering thanks. Junko was too overcome to be much of a hand at the hunt that afternoon; but while the others teased and derided him for this, Lord Kuroda only winked gravely.

  Of course Sayuri was overjoyed at the news of the lord’s promise, and she and Junko celebrated it with nihonshu and love, and then shochu, which is brewed from rice and sweet potatoes and a few other things. And afterward it was her turn to lie awake in the night, with her husband in her arms, and her mind perhaps full of small-animal thoughts. And perhaps not; who knows? It was all so long ago.

  But it was at most a month before the horse of the samurai Daisuke Ikeda shied at a rabbit underfoot, reared, fell backwards and crushed his rider. There was much sorrow at court, for Ikeda was the oldest of the daimyo’s guard, and a well-liked man, but there was also a space in the guard to fill, and Lord Kuroda was as good as his word. Within days, Junko was wearing his master’s livery, for all the world as though he were as g
ood as Ikeda, or anyone else, and riding at his side on a fine, proud young stallion. And however many at court may have thought this highly unsuitable, no one said a word about it.

  Junko also grieved for Ikeda, who had been kind to him. But his delight in his new position was muted, more than he would have expected, by his odd disquiet concerning that rabbit. Riding in the rear, as befit a commoner (it had been a formal procession, meant to impress a neighboring lord), he had seen the animal shoot from its hole, seemingly as blindly as though red-eyed Death were on its heels; and he had never known Ikeda’s wise old horse to panic at an ambush, much less a rabbit. One worrisome thought led to another, and that to a third, until finally he brought them all to his wife. He had grown much in the habit of doing this.

  Sayuri sat crosslegged on the proper new bed that the Lord Kuroda had given them to replace their worn tatami, and she listened attentively to Junko’s fears, saying nothing until he was finished. Then she replied simply, “Husband, I was not the rabbit—I was the weasel just behind it, chasing it out of its burrow into the horse’s path. Can you look at your own new horse—at your beautiful new livery—at this bed of ours—and say I have done wrong?”

  “But Ikeda is dead!” Junko cried in horror. “Ask rather how I can look at his widow, at his children, at my master—at myself in the mirror now! Oh, I wish you had never told me this, Sayuri!”

  “Then you should not have asked me,” she answered him. “The weasel never meant for the good Ikeda to be killed—though he was old and should have retired from the guard long ago. The weasel only wanted the rabbit.” She beckoned Junko to sit beside her, saying, “But is a wife not supposed to concern herself with the advancement of her husband’s fortunes? I was told otherwise by the priest who married us.” She put her arms around Junko. “Come, my love, take the good luck with the regrettable, and say as many prayers for Ikeda’s repose as will comfort you.” She laughed then: the joyous childlike giggle that never failed to melt even the sternest heart. “Although I think that I am more skilled at that than any prayer.”