by Zoe Marriott
“My side,” she whispered. She was struggling to focus on me, her slender brows drawing together. “Please . . .”
“Your side is hurt?” I asked, still dizzy with the strangeness of finding such a person as this in the cramped little cell.
She panted through her teeth, as if bracing herself, and then rolled onto her back. Her right arm fell away from her side and I saw a wet, spreading stain just below the golden fabric of her obi, where her ribs ended.
Alarmed, I reached out, and then drew back again. I was not a doctor. I would be more likely to harm than help. And yet I desperately wanted to help. The intensity of that desire surprised me.
“There is — a lot of blood,” I said, my hands hovering over her. “I must call the guards.” They would not let a woman like this die. It must have been a mistake that she was here in the first place.
“No!” Alarm seemed to rouse her a little, and she shook her head. “It is only a graze, but . . . I have enemies. There is a price on my life. If those guards know of it and find me here, defenseless —” She made a jerky gesture toward the stain.
Which meant that it was up to me to do something. I did not think I could bear to watch anyone else die. She might be a stranger to me, but I was all that she had, and I knew I had to help her. I swallowed dryly, trying to remember any snippets of information that Aya had let fall about treating wounds.
“We must stop the bleeding by applying pressure. I am sorry: it is likely to cause you pain.”
“Thank you.” The words came out as a cough, and she jerked, then tried again. “Thank you for helping me.”
I bit my lip. What was the best way to get at the wound? Moving to sit behind her on the floor, I stretched my legs out on either side of her body.
“I am going to lift you now,” I said, trying to sound confident. “Try to help me as much as you can.”
“You speak keigo . . .” she said idly.
I stiffened as I realized my mistake. Drudges did not speak keigo. It was one of the reasons Rin had spoken so little. Why had I let my guard down so easily? But it was not important now. She was surely in too much pain to care, and was just trying to distract herself.
“Yes,” I replied shortly, and slid my hands beneath her, grasping her torso under the arms. She pushed up on her hands, adding her strength to mine, then made a muffled sound and went limp.
I cursed, wrestling with her weight, using every muscle I had gained while working in the kitchen. Finally I had her in place, and braced her on both sides with my knees to keep her there.
“Apply pressure,” I muttered to myself. Her obi was the obvious choice — it would have layers of fabric, including two padded obimakura to give it volume. I pushed my hands down between us and fumbled with the complex folds of fabric, unknotting the obi-jime belt and then pulling away the obi and tare — the outer wrapping cloth — and the first obimakura. They gave me plenty of fabric to use on the wound.
The fat, padded center of the obimakura went over the wet stain on her side. I pressed it down, hard, and kept it in place with my knee as I pulled the long ties around her body and knotted them, making the wrapping as tight as I could. I checked her face for signs that I was hurting her. Her head was lolling on my shoulder, and her eyelashes did not flicker.
I put the thin, fine cloth of the tare on top of the first makeshift bandage, wrapped it around her body twice, and knotted it again. The outer obi cloth went last. It was long enough to wrap around her body twice and still have a lot of material left over, but it was too stiff to knot. I made a simple obi fold on top of the wound, hoping that the extra layer would create more pressure.
I checked that the binding was tight and secure and then, letting her settle sideways against my knee, slumped against the wall.
It felt like forever before she breathed in sharply and then groaned. “Oh . . . tight . . .”
“I am sorry,” I said. “It must be tight to work.”
“I fainted? I apologize for burdening you. Thank you for your efforts.”
“Onee-sama,” I said, having been thinking hard while I was waiting for her to wake. “You asked me not to call the guards, but they are the only ones who could have put you in this cell. They must already know you are here. Will you please explain?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “What of you? There must be some strange tale behind your being here. Your appearance does not match your voice.”
I refused to be distracted. “Onee-sama . . .”
“Please. I need to think, and your voice is soothing. Talk to me for a while, and then . . . I will try to explain.”
I hesitated. She did not say anything else. Her silence had a peaceful quality, which reminded me a little of Youta, and the way he always waited for me to talk. They could not have been more different, and yet something about this woman called to me in the same way that Youta had. No matter how ridiculous it was, I felt as if she was a friend.
And after all, what did it matter now? Tomorrow would be the end of me anyway.
Softly, awkwardly, I began to speak of what had happened to me. I did not describe things in great detail. I merely said that my family had been destroyed, and that I had found out later my stepfather had been responsible, and my mother complicit. I told her about Youta and my shadow-weaving, though I expected her to think me mad, and even about Otieno.
I did not mention my real name or Terayama-san’s name. And I did not tell her about the awful thing I had done before I left my stepfather’s house. I did not want her to condemn me, as even Youta had done. Instead I said that my mother had died from an illness.
“I had no idea how horribly unprepared I was for life outside the kitchen,” I said bitterly. “Now I can wish only for a swift execution. My father and cousin will never have justice, and our name will die with me. . . .”
I fell silent at last, and the silence lasted for several minutes. I wondered if she had fainted again. When she eventually spoke it made me jump.
“What is it that your cinderman called you, child? Rin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Rin, I believe that you and I were brought together by the Moon. You have said that you only want to die now. Is that really true?”
I sighed into the darkness. “It is. You might think me a coward, but I dread any more suffering in this place.”
“What if the choice was not between death and prison, but between death and life? A new life? What if there was a way to escape this cell?”
“I . . . do not know,” I said, then frowned. “There is no way to escape, so it does not matter.”
She laughed, a hoarse little sound. “Very well, then. I shall show you. Look.”
She lifted her left hand. She had very long fingers. I was looking at them, wondering if she was going to produce a set of keys or if the delirium had set in — for both of us — when suddenly there was no longer a hand extending from the end of her sleeve, but a furry golden paw. The wicked black claws extended and then disappeared as the paw flexed.
The golden fur slowly melted back into pale skin, and I gasped. “You were the fat man in the corner, weren’t you?”
“I was walking in the market, alone. It was stupid of me. A man tried to rob me and stabbed me when I resisted. That was stupid of me, too. I managed to get away and flung an illusion over myself — the fat man that you saw. But the pain made me dizzy, and I stumbled into a guardsman. My third episode of idiocy. Taking me for a drunk, the guardsman threw me in here.”
“Is this shadow-weaving?” I asked, awed. “I could see every hair on that cat’s paw. I did not look at the fat man twice. I did not sense anything.”
“You need further instruction,” she said. “From what you have said, you know only the basics of the craft. The one who taught me to shadow-weave was a very learned man. He said that there is some force in the world — whether it is fate or the Moon or even an instinct of our own — that brings people like us together in times of need. We have both found that
to be true in the past: you with your cinderman and your foreign friend on the ship, and me with others. Now you and I have found each other, and we must help each other as best we can.”
“Onee-sama, I agree that it is strange and wonderful that we should meet in such a way, but I still do not see how we are to leave this cell. We cannot shadow-weave the door open.”
“We will not need to. The guards will open it for us,” she said, a smile in her voice. Then she told me what we would do. She finished by saying, “I must have your help for this. Though I am skilled at complex weavings, I am not used to maintaining such a large cloak of shadows for so long, and I am very tired and weak.”
“I can do it,” I promised. “But will you be able to run, or even walk, when the time comes?”
“I have no choice,” she said. “Besides, I will have you to lean on.”
I helped her to rise, and we moved to stand against the wall next to the bamboo bars. This would be where the guards would come in, and, we hoped, where we would shortly go out. The light was stronger there. I would have to compensate for that, but, just as she had said, I had no choice.
“How are we to attract their attention?” I asked.
She settled heavily against me, one arm across my shoulders so that I could support her, the other clutching at the makeshift binding of her wound. “Leave that to me. First of all we must make the shadow-weaving.”
It was a peculiar sensation, working with a shadow weaver who was not Youta. Her style felt very different. She pulled threads of darkness into being sharply, creating hard lines and folding them around us as efficiently as a good maid folds cloth. My weaving seemed soft and insubstantial by comparison. It drifted around her boundaries like cobwebs — but cobwebs that blocked out the light and filled every gap she had left, until my own vision began to dim. The hardest part was to prevent the illusion from becoming too shadowy, to preserve the impression of rough mud walls and flickering torchlight while at the same time completely obscuring our shapes. I knew it was working when she faded completely from my sight.
“Very good,” she murmured. “Subtle. You are talented.”
I could not remember the last time someone had praised me, and it made me glow.
“Now you must take it and hold the whole together by yourself. We cannot chance it falling apart at a crucial moment if the pain becomes too much for me.” Her voice seemed to speak straight from the wall.
I felt the weight of the illusion pushing down on me. It was a heavy, even pressure that made me sag, like wearing a woolen cloak that was utterly soaked with water. My ribs chose that moment to jab at me sharply.
“Wait,” I managed to gasp. It was strange how something I knew to be purely illusion could affect me physically, but I remembered that I had clutched at my blanket of ashes for warmth, and supposed it must always be that way. Another layer of illusion: my mind tricking my body.
I took a firm hold on the illusion, and, visualizing those hard and sturdy lines that she had laid out, used them to haul myself upright again. The illusion would support me instead of weighing me down. It resettled around us, and she made a surprised and approving sound.
“Do you have it?”
“Yes.”
I both felt and heard her take a deep breath. Then the cell was filled with an unearthly, high-pitched wailing. It sounded like a demon rising up from the depths to claim its prey, and even though I knew where the sound was coming from, it still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She interspaced the wailing with occasional, more human-sounding screams of “No, no, save me!” and “What is it? Moon, preserve me!” that made me want to look around and check that nothing really was attacking her.
Soon I could make out voices outside, and then running footsteps. The wailing stopped abruptly.
With a rattle and a creak, the bamboo bars slid to one side, making a gap large enough for someone to step through. The woman beside me was shaking with tension. I planted my feet firmly, determined to be ready.
One of the guards stepped cautiously into the gap, bending so that his head would not hit the low ceiling of the cell. He held a lamp out before him — close enough to make me squint. I pressed back farther.
As the light showed him the empty corners of the room, he grunted. The lamp shook in his hand.
“Well? What’s going on in there? Did they kill each other?”
The bamboo slid back still farther and the other guard peered in. The gap was now wide enough for two people.
Her fingers dug warningly into my shoulder, and I forced myself not to move. The first guard was still too close, and the second one was blocking most of the entrance.
“There’s nothing here,” the first guard said.
“What —?” The second guard broke off as his gaze, too, traveled over the bare room. “There were two prisoners in here. Two. A drunk and a thief. I put them in here myself.” He took another step forward, the keys jangling in his hand, and left the doorway empty.
But I could not move. Both men were now abreast of us, filling up the cell with their burly shoulders and muscular arms. There was not a hair’s-breadth of room. If we tried to pass them, we would collide with the one holding the lamp and be trapped between him and the wall. I held desperately still.
If only he would move forward — just a little. One step closer to his friend . . . Just one step forward, and we could slip past. One step forward . . .
He stepped back.
My breath seemed to choke me as I watched him shake his head. “I don’t like this,” he said, inching closer to the door. “Something’s not right. Let’s —”
Beside me, the woman shifted. What was she . . . ? Was she leaning forward?
She screamed, a bloodcurdlingly shrill shriek of terror.
I started so violently that I bit my tongue. The guard nearest us jerked away from the sound that must have come almost in his ear. He stumbled, knocking the other guard into the wall and sending the keys flying out of his hand.
I did not need her hissed “Now!” to make me move. I was already moving, clutching at her kimono to keep her with me as I plunged toward the door.
There was a jangle and a strangled shout. I glanced back as I crossed the threshold and saw both men plastered against the wall, their faces blanched with fear. The thick bunch of keys was hovering in the air.
She had caught them.
I held in a crow of triumph as I wrenched her past the bamboo gate and grabbed the closest bar, slamming it shut behind us. The keys jingled about, jumping in and out of the lock one at a time until I was in a fever of impatience, and then one of them turned with a click. The gate was locked, and we were outside it. Through the small gaps in the bars, I could see that both men were still pressed motionless against the wall, apparently frozen in disbelief.
A handful of flickering tapers fixed in a sconce in the wall showed me that we were in a tiny space, not even big enough to be called a corridor. A step to our left was an open doorway through which yellow lamplight glowed.
“Onward,” came the whisper in my ear, and I felt the woman take a firmer hold on my shoulder. The keys still hung conspicuously outside the weaving, but we did not have time to do anything about that now. The caged guards were starting to call, albeit in choked whispers, for help. If there was someone else in the end room, he would be coming soon.
We entered a tiny room with a low table on which there was a sake gourd and cups and evidence of a dice game in progress. A lamp burned on the deeply recessed windowsill of the one window, which also had bamboo bars. There was no one in the room.
“Nearly there,” she whispered. We limped toward the door. It swung open when I kicked it. My bare foot left a dirty print on the wood.
And just like that we were outside in the fresh warm summer night air, under a lightening sky. A daylight moon hung almost overhead, its horns seeming as delicate as an ivory hair comb. The sounds of the guards yelling, in earnest now, could be heard behind us. With a s
igh of relief, I let the weaving go, and the woman rippled into view next to me, her form swimming and then firming as if she were rising up out of dark water.
“Wait here,” I said, helping her to lean against the wall. She complied, panting a little. I took the keys from her and closed and locked the door, muffling the sounds from inside, and then I walked around the little building until I found that deep window. It was far too small for anyone to climb through, and too high. I smiled grimly as I forced the keys through a gap between the bars. That would keep everyone busy for a while.
I went back to the woman, and we stared at each other, dazed, I think, by the speed of our escape.
“Did you see that guard’s face?” I said slowly. “When you screamed in his ear?”
She nodded equally gravely. “His eyes . . . they did this. . . .” She opened her own eyes wide and pulled a horrified expression.
A snort escaped me, and abruptly we were both helpless with laughter, clutching at each other and the wall. Gasping with pain — I from my ribs and she from the stab wound — we were barely able to stand but equally unable to stop.
“Like this . . .” she repeated. “Just . . . like . . . a fish!”
“Carp!” I sniggered, setting us both off again.
“Oh! Ow, ow, ow.” She grimaced, her laughter fading as she wiped tears from her face with one hand and held on to her injured side with the other. “Oh, that hurt.”
The lanterns planted nearby gave a steady light, and I sobered as I saw that her skin was chalky pale and her eyes were lidded with tiredness and overly bright, as if with fever. She was older than I had first thought, too. Fine lines at her eyes and mouth told of a life filled with both laughter and pain.
“I have no idea where we are or where we should go,” I said, steadying her as she stepped away from the wall.
“Do not worry. This is the Perfumed District. I know it well. Let us go now, though. I am near the end of my strength.”
