The Harsh Cry of the Heron

by Lian Hearn

  Takeo sat as if frozen into ice. His ears had heard the words, but his mind could not comprehend them. Kaede had left Hagi? She had gone to Kumamoto, put herself into the hands of the man who was conspiring against him? Why would she do such a thing? Leave him to ally herself with her sister’s husband? He could not believe it of her.

  But some part of his body felt riven, as if his entire arm had been wrenched off. He felt his spirit teeter toward darkness, and saw the darkness about to swallow the whole country.

  “I must go to her,” he said. “Gemba, prepare horses. Where will they be by now? When did they leave?”

  “I left about two weeks ago,” Ishida replied. “They were to go a few days later, by way of Tsuwano and Yamagata.”

  “Can I intercept them at Yamagata?” Takeo asked Gemba.

  “It is a week’s ride away.”

  “I will get there in three days.”

  “They are traveling slowly,” Ishida said. “Their departure was delayed because Lady Kaede is taking as many men with her as possible.”

  “But why? Is it grief at the child’s death? Has it truly driven her out of her mind?”

  “I can think of no other reason,” Ishida said. “Nothing I said would comfort her or dissuade her. I could only think of seeking Ai’s help, so I left Hagi secretly, hoping also to meet you on your way home.”

  He did not look at Takeo; his manner was both guilty and confused. “Lord Takeo,” he went on, but Takeo did not allow him to continue. His mind had suddenly started racing, looking for answers, arguing and pleading, promising anything to any god, if only she had not left him.

  “Hiroshi is badly wounded, Shigeko slightly,” Takeo said. “The kirin also probably needs your attention. Tend them as best you can, and as soon as they are able to travel, bring them to Yamagata. I will go there immediately and find out for myself what has happened. Minoru, send messages at once to Miyoshi Kahei; inform him of my departure.” He broke off and stared at Gemba, desolate.

  “I must prepare to fight Zenko. But how can I fight against my wife?”

  48

  In Hofu, high tide at the start of the fifth month, the opening of summer, came after noon, in the Hour of the Horse. The port was at its most active, with ships leaving and arriving in a steady flow, taking advantage of the mild west wind that would drive them to Akashi, laden with the produce of the Three Countries. Eating houses and inns were crammed with the newly disembarked, drinking, exchanging news and travelers’ tales, voicing their shock and regret at Muto Taku’s death and marveling at the miracle of his mother, who was fed by birds in Daifukuji, resentful of Arai Zenko, who showed such a lack of filial duty and such contempt for the gods and would surely be punished for it. The townspeople of Hofu were bold and opinionated. They had loathed their enslavement under the Tohan and the Noguchi; they had no desire to return to those days under the Arai. Zenko’s departure from the town was accompanied by jeers and other manifestations of ill-will; his guards at the end of his long train were even pelted with refuse, and in some cases stones.

  Miki and Maya saw little of this; they ran blindly and unseen through the narrow streets, intent only on distancing themselves from Hisao and Akio. It was stiflingly hot away from the sea; the town smelled of fish and rotting seaweed, and the dark shadows alternating with brilliant sunshine disoriented them. Maya was already exhausted from the sleepless night, the encounter with Hisao, the conversation with the ghost woman. She kept looking nervously behind her as they ran, sure that Hisao would pursue her; he would never let her go. And Akio would have learned by now about the cat. Hisao will be punished, she thought, but did not know if the idea pleased or pained her.

  She felt invisibility leave her as she tired; she slowed to catch her breath, and saw Miki reappear beside her. The street here was quiet; most people were indoors eating the midday meal. Immediately next to them, outside a small shop, a man was squatting on the ground, sharpening knives with a grindstone, using water from the little canal that ran past each house. He jumped in surprise at their sudden appearance and dropped the knife he was holding. Maya felt frantic, defenseless. Almost without thinking she seized the knife and jabbed it into the man’s hand.

  “What are you doing?” Miki cried.

  “We need weapons, and food, and money,” Maya answered. “He will give them to us.”

  The man was staring in disbelief at his own blood. Maya split herself and came behind him, cutting him again, this time on the neck.

  “Get us food and money, or you die,” she said. “Sister, get a knife too.”

  Miki picked up a small knife from where it lay on a cloth spread out on the ground. She seized the man by the unwounded hand and led him into the shop. His eyes bulging with terror, he showed them where he kept a few coins, and pressed the rice cakes his wife had prepared for him into Maya’s hand.

  “Don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “I hate Lord Arai’s wickedness. I know he has stirred up the gods against him, but I had no part in it. I’m just a poor craftsman.”

  “The gods punish the people for the wickedness of the ruler,” Maya intoned. If this fool thought they were demons or ghosts, she would make the most of it.

  “What was all that about?” Miki asked when they had left the shop, now both armed with knives hidden inside their clothes.

  “I’ll tell you later. Let’s find somewhere to hide for a bit, somewhere where there’s water.”

  They followed the canal until, on the road leading out of town toward the north, they came upon a roadside shrine, a small grove of trees around a spring-fed pool. Here they drank deeply, and found a secluded spot behind bushes, where they sat down and shared the rice cakes. Crows were cawing high in the cedars, and cicadas were rasping monotonously. Sweat trickled down the girls’ faces, and under their clothes their bodies, on the cusp between child and woman, were damp and itchy.

  Maya said, “Our uncle is preparing an army against Father. We have to go to Hagi and warn Mother. Aunt Hana is on her way there. Mother must not trust her.”

  “But Maya, you used your Tribe skills against an innocent man. Father’s told us we must never do that.”

  “Listen, Miki, you don’t know what I’ve been through. I saw Taku and Sada murdered in front of my eyes. I’ve been kept prisoner by Kikuta Akio.” For a moment she thought she was going to cry, but the feeling passed. “And that boy, who was calling out to me, is Kikuta Hisao; he’s Kenji’s grandson. You must have heard about him in Kagemura. His mother, Yuki, was married to Akio, but after the boy was born the Kikuta made her kill herself. It’s the reason why Kenji brought the Tribe back to Father.”

  Miki nodded. She had heard all these Tribe stories since childhood.

  “Anyway, no one’s innocent in the long run,” Maya said. “It was that man’s fate to be there when he was.” She was staring moodily at the surface of the pool. The branches of the cedars and the clouds behind them were reflected in its still surface. “Hisao is our brother,” she said abruptly. “Everyone thinks he’s Akio’s son, but he’s not. He’s Father’s.”

  “It cannot be true,” Miki said in a faint voice.

  “It is true. And there was some prophecy that said Father would only be killed by his own son. So Hisao is going to kill Father, unless we stop him.”

  “What about our baby brother?” Miki whispered.

  Maya stared at her. She had almost forgotten the existence of the new child, as if by not recognizing his birth she could make him unreal. She had never seen him; nor had she even thought about him. A mosquito settled on her arm and she slapped it.

  Miki said, “Father must know all this too.”

  “If he does, why has he done nothing about it?” Maya replied, wondering why this made her so angry.

  “If he chooses to do nothing, we should too. Anyway, what can he do?”

  “He should have Hisao put to death. Hisao deserves it anyway. He is evil, the most evil person I’ve ever met, worse than Akio.”

  �
�But what about our little brother?” Miki said again.

  “Stop making it all so complicated, Miki!” Maya stood and brushed the dust off her clothes. “I need to piss,” she said, using men’s language, and went a little farther into the grove. Here there were tombstones, mossy and neglected. Maya thought she should not defile them, so she climbed the side wall and relieved herself in its shelter. As she clambered back over the wall, the earth shook, and she felt the stones slide sideways beneath her hands. She half-fell onto the ground, made dizzy for a moment. The tops of the cedars were still quivering. At that moment she felt an intense longing to be the cat, along with an emotion she did not recognize, but which unsettled her and nagged at her.

  When she saw Miki still sitting by the pool, she was struck by how thin her sister had become. This also irritated her. She did not want to have to worry about Miki—she wanted things to be as they always had been, when the twins seemed to share one mind. She did not want Miki disagreeing with her.

  “Come on,” she said. “We have to get going.”

  “What’s our plan?” Miki said as she stood up.

  “To go home, of course.”

  “Are we going to walk all the way?”

  “Do you have any better ideas?”

  “We could get help from someone. A man called Bunta came with Shizuka and me. He would help us.”

  “Is he Muto?”

  “Imai.”

  “None of them can be trusted anymore,” Maya said in disgust. “We’ve got to go alone.”

  “It’s a long way,” Miki said. “It took us a week from Yamagata on horseback, riding openly with two men to help us. From Yamagata to Hagi is ten days, by the road. If we’re on foot, and hiding, it will take three times as long. And how will we get food?”

  “Like we did before,” Maya said, touching the hidden knife. “We’ll steal it.”

  “All right,” Miki said, not looking happy about it. “Are we to follow the high road?” She gestured at the dusty road that wound through the rice fields, still bright green, toward the forest-covered mountains. Maya peered at the usual travelers moving along it in both directions: warriors on horseback, women wearing large hats and veils against the sun, monks walking with staffs and begging bowls, peddlers, merchants, pilgrims. Any one of them might try to detain them, at worst, at best ask difficult questions. Or they might be members of the Tribe, already warned to look out for them. She looked back toward the city, half-expecting to see Hisao and Akio pursuing them. Her heart lurched and she realized she missed Hisao and longed to see him again.

  But I hate him! How can I want to see him?

  Trying to hide this from Miki, she said, “Even though I’m in boy’s clothes, anyone can see we’re twins. We don’t want people looking at us, gossiping about us. We’ll go through the mountains.”

  “We’ll starve,” Miki protested, “or get lost. Let’s go back to the town. Let’s go and find Shizuka.”

  “She’s in Daifukuji,” Maya said, recalling the servant girl’s words. “Fasting and praying. We can’t go back. Akio is probably there waiting for us.”

  The tension within her was growing by the moment; she could feel the pull on her, feel him looking for her. She jumped suddenly, hearing his voice.

  Come to me.

  It echoed like a whisper through the shadowy grove.

  “Did you hear that?” She grabbed Miki by the arm.

  “What?”

  “That voice. It’s him.”

  Miki stood, listened intently. “I can’t hear anyone.”

  “Let’s go,” Maya said. She looked up at the sky. The sun had moved from its zenith toward the west. The high road was almost due north, through some of the most fertile land in the Three Countries, following the bed of the river all the way to Tsuwano. Rice fields lay on either side of the valley, farmhouses and huts dotted here and there among them. The road ran along the western side until the bridge at Kibi. There was also a new bridge, just before the confluence of the Yamagata River. The river often flooded over the coastal plain, but a day’s journey north of Hofu it became shallow, white water rushing in rapids over a rocky bed.

  Both girls had traveled this road frequently; Miki the most recently, just a few days before, Maya the previous autumn with Taku and Sada.

  “I wonder where the mares are,” she said to Miki as they left the shelter of the trees and stepped out into the afternoon heat. “I lost them, you know.”

  “What mares?”

  “The ones Shigeko gave us to ride from Maruyama.”

  As they began to climb up the slope into the bamboo groves, Maya told her sister briefly about the attack, and the deaths of Taku and Sada. By the time she was finished, Miki was crying silently, but Maya’s eyes were dry.

  “I dreamed about you,” Miki said, wiping her eyes with her hand. “I dreamed you were the cat, and I was its shadow. I knew something terrible was happening to you.”

  She was silent for a while, and then said, “Did Akio hurt you?”

  “He nearly throttled me to shut me up, and then he hit me a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “What about Hisao?”

  Maya began to walk faster, until she was almost jogging through the silver-green trunks. An adder slid across the path in front of them, disappearing into the tangled undergrowth, and somewhere to their left a small bird was piping. The relentless droning of cicadas seemed to intensify.

  Miki was running too. They slipped easily between the shafts of bamboo, as surefooted as deer, and more silent.

  “Hisao is a ghostmaster,” Maya said, when finally the steepening slope forced her to slow down.

  “A Tribe ghostmaster?”

  “Yes. He could be terribly powerful, except he doesn’t know how to deal with it. No one’s ever taught him anything much, other than how to be cruel. And he knows how to make firearms. I suppose someone taught him that.”

  The sun had slipped behind the high peaks of the mountains on their left. There would be no moon, and already low clouds were spreading across the sky from the south; there would be no starlight either. It seemed a long time since they had eaten the rice cakes at the shrine. As they walked, the girls now began instinctively to look for food—early mushrooms beneath pine trees, wineberries, the tender shoots of bamboo, the last of the fern heads, though these were becoming hard to find. Since childhood they had been taught by the Tribe to live off the land, to gather its leaves, roots, and fruits as both sustenance and poison. They followed the sound of trickling water and drank from a small stream, where they also found small crabs, which they ate raw and living, sucking the muddy flesh from the fragile shells. So they went through the long twilight until it was too dark to see. They were now in the deep forest, and there were many craggy outcrops and fallen trees to provide shelter.

  They came upon a huge beech that had been half uprooted by an earth tremor or a storm. Its leaves had fallen year after year to provide a soft bed, and its massive trunk and roots formed a cave. There was even some mast still edible among the leaves. The girls lay down, curled together like animals. In her sister’s embrace Maya felt her body at last begin to relax, as if she were becoming whole again.

  She was not sure if she spoke the words or only thought them.

  Hisao loves the cat and is its master.

  Miki stirred slightly against her. “I think I knew that. I felt it outside the house in Hofu. I cut through the bond between the boy who was calling to you and the cat, and you changed into your real self.”

  “Moreover, his mother is always with him. When Hisao is with the cat, he can talk to her spirit.”

  A small shiver ran through Miki’s thin frame. “Have you seen her?”

  “Yes.”

  An owl hooted in the trees above them, making them both jump, and in the distance a vixen screamed.

  “Were you afraid?” Miki whispered.

  “No.” Maya thought about it. “No,” she repeated. “I feel sorry for her. She was made to die b
efore her time, and she’s had to watch her son being turned into someone evil.”

  “It’s so easy to become evil,” Miki said in a small voice.

  There was a slight cool change in the quality of the air, and a light pattering on the ground.

  “It’s raining,” Maya said. Under the first drops, a moist smell began to rise from the earth. It filled her nostrils with both life and decay.

  “Are you running away from him? As well as going home, I mean.”

  “He is looking for me, calling to me.”

  “He’s following us?”

  Maya did not answer directly. Her limbs twitched restlessly. “I know Father and Shigeko will still be away, but Mother will protect us, won’t she? Once we are in Hagi, I will feel safe from him.”

  But even as the words left her lips, she was not sure they were true. Part of her feared him and wanted to flee. Part of her was drawn back to him, longing to be with him and to walk with him between the worlds.

  Am I becoming evil? Maya recalled the knife grinder, whom she had wounded and robbed without thinking twice. Father would be angry with me, she thought. She felt guilty and did not like it, so she poured her own anger over it to extinguish it. Father made me; it is his fault I am how I am. He should not have sent me away. He should not have left me so much when I was little. He should have told me he had a son. He should not have had a son!

  Miki seemed to have fallen asleep. Her breathing was quiet and even. Her elbow was digging into Maya, and Maya shifted slightly. The owl hooted again. Mosquitoes had scented their sweat and were whining in Maya’s ear. The rain was making her cold. Almost without thinking, she let the cat come, with its thick warm pelt.

  Immediately she heard his voice. Come to me.

  And she felt his gaze turn toward her, as though he could see across the tracts of forest and through the darkness, right into the cat’s golden eyes, as its head swiveled in his direction. The cat stretched, flattened its ears, and purred.