by Lian Hearn
There was a gasp from the crowd, a collective drawing of breath. The men who lifted the stone—Wataru, the stonemason’s right-hand man, and Naizo the apprentice—stood with white faces and rigid jaws; Wataru’s eyes were bright with tears; Akane could see muscles in Naizo’s neck twitching from the strain, his face contorted in a grin of fear and pity. The masons moved backward until they no longer stood on the bridge. Her father was alone on it—the only living thing, entombed in stone.
The stone would never be removed. Her father was behind it in the dark. He would never see daylight again, never feel the spring breeze on his face or see the cherry blossom drift down onto the green waters of the river, never hear the river’s changing song as it ebbed and flowed with the tide. Would he sit with the same calm that he had displayed till now, while the air was slowly exhausted? Or would he panic now that there was no one to see his shame and despair?
She had lived by the river all her life. Mori Yuta was not the first person she had seen drowned; she knew how hands grasped and clung and scrabbled for life. Were her father’s hands scrabbling like that now? Looking for chinks in the stones he knew fitted perfectly, his strong flexible hands where his gift was contained—the hands she knew so well and had watched so often, holding adze and chisel or curved around a tea bowl at night, the stone dust still embedded in the lines around the joints of knuckle and wrist and across the palms. He smelled of dust and sometimes came back at night looking as if he had been hewn from stone, gray from head to foot. He had been admired and respected, had built wonderful constructions, but the obsession with the bridge had undone all that. He neglected his family. His wife bore no more children—the neighbors joked maliciously that she would have needed a body of stone to attract her husband. Their only daughter ran wild, a thin strange child who could swim like a cormorant and handle a boat like a man. When she turned fourteen, not a single family would consider her for marriage to their sons, even though the sons themselves were not averse to her lithe body, slender neck and wrists, and beautifully shaped eyes. But the family was obviously deeply unlucky if not actually cursed, and Akane had a bold look about her that drove away future mothers-in-law. It was obvious to everyone except her father that the girl would become a prostitute. Even as a child, she’d had that look, they said knowingly.
And brow-beaten girls, not much older than Akane and already married, envied her silently, for they could imagine no life worse than their own drudgery.
Akane had overheard plans for her future being discussed by her father and the brothel owner; her father was shocked by the man’s suggestion; Akane was more shocked by how low a price was being offered. She went immediately to a rival establishment, run by a widow, and bargained for over twice the sum, half of which she gave to her parents and half she kept for herself. Her parents were moved by her decisiveness and filial devotion and relieved that she would not become a burden to them but, on the contrary, would be able to support them in their old age—particularly her mother, since her father’s obsession seemed all too likely to lead to penury. And her mother hoped that eventually Akane would attract a long-term protector who might even want to have children with her.
For the lack of grandchildren was their greatest disappointment in Akane’s new arrangement. All her attentions and dutiful behavior could not make up for the fact that there were no grandchildren. The stonemason’s line would die out: he had no sons or nephews, and now no grandsons to tend his grave and pray for his spirit.
He did not know then that his grave would be both public and anonymous: that hundreds would walk past it every day, that his stone would declaim the Otori challenge to those who entered their city, and that his voice would be heard forever, as he talked endlessly with the river.
AKANE WAS BARELY fifteen when she moved to the widow Haruna’s establishment and worked as a maid to the girls there. Men came to drink wine and eat Aunt Haruna’s legendary fried octopus and sea urchin. The girls sat with them, their company as highly valued as the other services they provided, and Akane learned how a quick wit was as attractive as a shapely body, long silky hair, or a flawless nape. Some of the girls sang; they danced like children and often played childhood games with an added sexual edge. Aunt Haruna’s establishment was fairly exclusive, visited by richer merchants and even the sons of the warrior class.
In an attempt to control prostitution, Lord Shigemori had decreed that all brothels should be confined to one district, in the new town across the river from the port. It was on the opposite side to the stone bridge; at the back of Haruna’s place was a natural hot spring, and behind it rose a small volcano on whose slopes grew a variety of shrubs and flowers warmed by the mountain itself: camellias, azaleas, and other more exotic plants that grew nowhere else in the Middle Country. The priest who served at the shrine of the god of the mountain loved plants more than people, it was said. He hardly spoke to pilgrims to the shrine—the mountain was supposed to protect and increase the virility of men—but spent most of his time tending and talking to his plants.
The southern slope of the volcano, then, was a fine place for a pleasure house. Haruna’s was named the House of the Camellias, and she was in her way an artist—of pleasure. Akane, who had grown up absorbing the elements of beauty and design from her father, found herself responding with her whole being to her surroundings. She was spoiled and petted by the older women and became a favorite with the men, though Haruna did not allow any of them to take her with them into the private rooms. She guarded Akane jealously, and Akane did not resist it; the rooms were called private, but with their flimsy walls and fragile screens they were hardly that. Akane grew accustomed to the sounds and smells of desire. She was interested in men’s enslavement, as it seemed to her, to the pleasures of the flesh, how desperately they sought release within the body of a woman. She found their need, their desire, both pitiable and arousing—it seemed so easy to satisfy them and so pleasurable—and so much more comprehensible than her father’s desperate obsession with the unforgiving stone.
She had a way of thinking that was all her own—the same characteristic that had made her seem bold and uncontrollable as a child. She studied the world around her with detachment, even irony. Haruna perceived this and admired it, for it drove men wild. Akane, she thought, liked men but would never fall in love with one. She would be safe from the infatuations that destroyed so many women when they fancied themselves passionately in love with her clients. The men were flattered at first but usually quickly tired of the demands and the jealousy. But women like Akane, whom they knew they could never own, drew them back, got under their skin and made them itch, made them offer any price to be allowed to be her only lover, after which they drove themselves mad with jealousy. Women like Akane were all too rare. Haruna would choose her clients herself and make sure they paid a good price for her. She had high ambitions for Akane—maybe even the highest, a plan that would ensure her influence and prosperity in her old age—but she shared these with no one.
She delayed Akane’s deflowerment until the girl was almost seventeen, not wanting to have her damaged physically or emotionally, and she chose one of her favorite clients—Hayato, younger son of a middle-rank warrior family, a good-looking man, not too old, who adored women but was not possessive and was adept in the art of love. Others had offered more money for Akane’s virginity, but Haruna disqualified them for various reasons: too old, too selfish; drank too much; could often not perform.
Akane enjoyed sex as much as she had thought she would. She had other clients besides Hayato, though he remained her favorite and she was grateful to him for all he taught her, but she regarded them all with the same amused detachment, and as Haruna predicted, it made her all the more desirable. By the time she was nineteen, her fame had spread throughout the city. People came to the house on the side of the mountain hoping for a glimpse of her. Haruna had to employ extra guards to dissuade rowdy hopefuls who turned up drunk and amorous. Akane rarely went outside, other than to walk
in the shrine garden and look out over the bay with its steep-cliffed islands fringed with white in the indigo sea. From the top of the volcano, where sulfurous steam issued from the old crater, she could see the whole city: the castle rising opposite from the sheer seawall that her grandfather had built, its white walls gleaming against the dark forest behind it; the huddle of houses in the narrow streets, the roofs glistening after rain in the morning sun; the fishing boats at the port; the canals and the rivers. She could even see the stone bridge rising from between its bristles of scaffolding.
The bridge was finished in the spring, just as new green leaves were bursting from willow and alder by the river, beech and maple on the mountain, poplar and ginkgo in the temple gardens. Akane had gone with Hayato to look at the cherry blossoms around the shrine, and when they returned, Haruna drew the man aside and whispered to him.
Akane walked slowly ahead to her room and called to the maid to bring wine, feeling the anticipation of pleasure that Hayato always aroused in her. He made her laugh; his mind and tongue were as quick as hers. The air was soft and warm, full of the sounds and scents of spring. She gazed at the white arch of her foot and could already feel his tongue there. They would spend the rest of the afternoon together and then bathe in the hot spring, and she would see no one else after him but eat and sleep alone.
However, when Hayato came into the room, his face was somber and full of pity.
“What is it?” she said at once. “What’s happened?”
“Akane.” He sat down next to her. “Your father is to be sealed within the stones of his bridge. Lord Otori has ordered it.” He did not attempt to allay or soften the news but told her carefully and clearly. Yet she still did not understand.
“Sealed? His body?”
He took her hands then. “He is to be buried alive.”
Shock closed her eyes and momentarily wiped all thoughts from her mind; a bush warbler called piercingly from the mountain. In another room someone was singing of love. A fleeting regret came for the pleasures she had expected, which now had to be laid aside, which would be smothered by grief.
“When?”
“The ceremony will be held in three days’ time,” Hayato replied.
“I must go to my parents,” she said.
“Of course. Ask Haruna to order a palanquin. Let my men escort you.”
He touched her gently on the side of her face, meaning only to comfort her, but his sympathy and the feel of his hand combined to ignite her passion. She pulled at his clothes, feeling for his skin, needing his closeness. Normally their lovemaking was slow, controlled, and restrained, but the collision with grief had stripped her of everything but the blind need for him. She wanted him to cover her, to obliterate her, to reduce her to the basic drive of life in the face of brutality and death. Her urgency fueled his, and he responded with a new roughness, which was just what her body craved.
Afterward she wept with long, gasping sobs while he held her, wiped her face, and held the wine bowl to her lips so she could drink. The depths of her grief, the ferocity of the passion, and his tenderness all undermined her. She felt on the verge of wanting to cling to him forever.
“Akane,” he said. “I love you. I will speak to Haruna about you. I will buy your freedom from her. I want you to be my own. I will do anything for you. We will have children together.”
She allowed herself to reflect, once, How pleasant that would be, while at the same time she thought coldly, That will never happen, but she did not reply.
When she finally spoke, it was to say, “I want to be alone now. I must go to my mother before the end of the day.”
“I will arrange the escort.”
“No,” she said. “You are very kind, but I prefer to go alone.”
Everyone would recognize whose men were with her. It would be as good as announcing she was his mistress already. Haruna had not been consulted, and anyway she would not let any man own her. She would not fall in love with Hayato, though she knew she had been on the edge of love earlier, when her body had known such gratitude for the intensity of both his passion and his tenderness. She drew back from the crater where love’s fires burned and steamed; she would never allow herself to plunge into it.
AKANE STOOD WITHOUT moving; she would not weep. Her mother was doing all the weeping at home, had been prostrate with grief for days.
“Don’t make it harder than it has to be,” her father had said, just once, and Akane had resolved then that she would save her tears for when he was dead, when he would be beyond all suffering and fear and would not be weakened or shamed by her sorrow.
The priest was shaking a white-tasseled stick over the parapet that had become a tomb. The stone bridge, completed after six years, was festooned with new straw ropes and white streamers tied to fresh young willow wands. Chanting rose from the crowd, and drums were beating sonorously and rhythmically. From the far side of the bridge, the young boys who served at the shrine to the river god came, dancing the heron dance.
They were dressed in yellow and white, with tassels like feathers bound around wrists and ankles. Each held a talisman in his right hand, with a design made of bronze metal that reminded her of a heron’s skull—the small brain pan and the huge beak, the empty eye-sockets.
Did he hear the drums and the chanting? Did any sound penetrate into his grave? Did he regret the obsession that had driven him to build this beautiful thing that now spanned the river with its four perfect arches and had brought him to this end, sacrificed to placate the river god and to prevent him from ever building anything to rival it?
People said it was built by sorcery. Many still poled across the river in ferry boats rather than use it. It changed the song of the river. More than fifteen workers had died during its construction, as though the river had already extracted payment for the arrogance and effrontery of man. Yet the head of the clan, Lord Otori himself, had ordered its building; and the same Lord Otori had ordered her father’s death to quieten the fears and suspicions of the people, and maybe also to placate the river god who had so nearly taken his younger son, Takeshi, and had taken Mori Yuta, the oldest son of the horsebreaker.
The dancers came from the southern end of the bridge, their feet almost soundless on the smooth stone. On the northern side, a small wooden platform had been erected, matted like an outdoor room, the sides swathed in silk cloth, the roof a canopy. On either side, banners rippled in the soft breeze, so the Otori heron seemed to fly.
Lord Otori sat in the center of the platform, flanked by his brothers on his right, and his two sons, Shigeru and Takeshi, on his left.
Akane remembered how she had helped one brother pull the other from the water, and she wondered if they knew who she was. Yuta’s little brother had been given to the shrine: he would become a priest, but now he was still a child, and danced the heron dance with the other boys crossing the bridge, passing by her father’s tomb.
Was he dead yet?
The silence of the crowd, the insistent pulse of the drums, the graceful movements of the dancers, full of controlled energy and power, ancient beyond words, moved her unbearably. Despite herself, a cry of emotion forced itself from her throat, a cry like a seabird’s that pierced the souls of those who heard it.
Her father did not hear it and would never hear anything again.
THE OTORI LORDS were escorted away and the crowd mainly dispersed, though a handful of people remained, Wataru and Naizo among them. There was nothing they could do for their master, but they could not bring themselves to leave him either. It was unthinkable that they would return to their homes, to their ordinary lives, while he, no longer alive but not yet dead, crouched in the dark among the stones.
Akane had not thought her legs would obey her, but they did, taking her with hesitant steps toward the center of the bridge. Here she knelt and prayed for her father’s swift death, for his soul’s safe passage.
Wataru came and knelt beside her. He was like an uncle to her; she had known him al
l her life.
“He made it perfectly,” he said quietly. “There will be no air. It will be quick.”
She did not dare to ask how long.
