by Lian Hearn
My training was designed to encourage cruelty, and I embraced it at the time wholeheartedly, glad for the skills it was giving me, delighted at how they enhanced those I had learned with the Otori warriors’ sons back when Shigeru was still alive. My father’s Kikuta blood came to life in me. My mother’s compassion drained away, along with all the teachings of my childhood. I no longer prayed; neither the Secret God, nor the Enlightened One, nor the old spirits meant anything to me. I did not believe in their existence and I saw no evidence that they favored those who did. Sometimes in the night I would wake suddenly and catch an unprotected glimpse of myself, and shudder at what I was becoming, and then I would rise silently and, if I could, go and find Yuki, lie down with her, and lose myself in her.
We never spent the whole night together. Our encounters were always short and usually silent. But one afternoon we found ourselves alone in the house, apart from the servants who were occupied in the shop. Akio and Hajime had taken the younger boys to the shrine for some dedication ceremony, and I had been told to copy some documents for Gosaburo. I was grateful for the task. I rarely held a brush in my hands, and because I had learned to write so late, I was always afraid the characters would desert me. The merchant had a few books and, as Shigeru had instructed me, I read whenever I could, but I had lost my inkstone and brushes at Inuyama and had hardly written since.
I diligently copied the documents—records from the shop, accounts of the amount of soybeans and rice purchased from local farmers—but my fingers were itching to draw. I was reminded of my first visit to Terayama, the brilliance of the summer day, the beauty of the paintings, the little mountain bird I had drawn and given to Kaede.
As always, when I was thinking of the past, my heart unguarded, she came to me and took possession of me all over again. I could feel her presence, smell the fragrance of her hair, hear her voice. So strongly was she with me, I had a moment of fear, as if her ghost had slipped into the room. Her ghost would be angry with me, filled with resentment and rage for abandoning her. Her words rang in my ears: I’m afraid of myself. I only feel safe with you.
It was cold in the room and already growing dark, with all the threat of the winter to come. I shivered, full of remorse and regret. My hands were numb with cold.
I could hear Yuki’s footsteps approaching from the back of the building. I started writing again. She crossed the courtyard and stepped out of her sandals onto the veranda of the records room. I could smell burning charcoal. She had brought a small brazier, which she placed on the floor next to me.
“You look cold,” she said. “Shall I bring tea?”
“Later, maybe.” I laid down the brush and held my hands out to the warmth. She took them and rubbed them between her own.
“I’ll close the shutters,” she said.
“Then you’ll have to bring a lamp. I can’t see to write.”
She laughed quietly. The wooden shutters slid into place, one after another. The room went dim, lit only by the faint glow of the charcoal. When Yuki came back to me she had already loosened her robe. Soon we were both warm. But after the act of love, as wonderful as ever, my unease returned. Kaede’s spirit had been in the room with me. Was I causing her anguish and arousing her jealousy and spite?
Curled against me, the heat radiating from her, Yuki said, “A message came from your cousin.”
“Which cousin?” I had dozens of them now.
“Muto Shizuka.”
I eased myself away from Yuki so she would not hear the quickened beating of my heart. “What did she say?”
“Lady Shirakawa is dying. Shizuka said she feared the end was very near.” Yuki added in her indolent, sated voice, “Poor thing.”
She was glowing with life and pleasure. But the only thing I was aware of in the room was Kaede, her frailty, her intensity, her supernatural beauty. I called out to her in my soul: You cannot die. I must see you again. I will come for you. Don’t die before I see you again!
Her spirit gazed on me, her eyes dark with reproach and sorrow.
Yuki turned and looked up at me, surprised by my silence. “Shizuka thought you should know: Was there something between you? My father hinted as much, but he said it was just green love. He said everyone who saw her became infatuated with her.”
I did not answer. Yuki sat up, pulling her robe around her. “It was more than that, wasn’t it? You loved her.” She seized my hands and turned me to face her. “You loved her,” she repeated, the jealousy beginning to show in her voice. “Is it over?”
“It will never be over,” I said. “Even if she dies I can never stop loving her.” Now that it was too late to tell Kaede, I knew that it was true.
“That part of your life is finished,” Yuki said quietly but fiercely. “All of it. Forget her! You will never see her again.” I could hear the anger and frustration in her voice.
“I would never have told you if you had not mentioned her.” I pulled my hands away from her and dressed again. The warmth had gone from me as swiftly as it had come. The brazier was cooling.
“Bring some more charcoal,” I told Yuki. “And lamps. I must finish the work.”
“Takeo—” she began, and then broke off abruptly. “I’ll send the maid,” she said, getting to her feet. She touched the back of my neck as she left, but I made no response. Physically we had been deeply involved: Her hands had massaged me, and struck me in punishment. We had killed side by side; we had made love. But she had barely brushed the surface of my heart, and at that moment we both knew it.
I made no sign of my grief, but I wept inwardly for Kaede and for the life that we might have had together. No further word came from Shizuka, though I never stopped listening for messengers. Yuki did not mention the subject again. I could not believe Kaede was dead, and in the daytime I clung to that belief, but the nights were different.
The last of the color faded as leaves fell from maple and willow. Strings of wild geese flew southward across the sullen sky. Messengers became less frequent as the town began to close down for winter. But they still came from time to time, bringing news of Tribe activities and of the fighting in the Three Countries, and, always, bringing new orders for our trade.
For that was how we described our work of spying and killing: trade, with human lives measured out as so many units. I copied records of these, too, often sitting till late into the night with Gosaburo, the merchant, moving from the soybean harvest to the other, deadlier one. Both showed a fine profit, though the soybeans had been affected by the storms while the murders had not, though one candidate for assassination had drowned before the Tribe could get to him and there was an ongoing dispute about payment.
The Kikuta, being more ruthless, were supposed to be more skilled at assassination than the Muto, who were traditionally the most effective spies. These two families were the aristocracy of the Tribe; the other three, Kuroda, Kudo, and Imai, worked at more menial and humdrum tasks, being servants, petty thieves, informants, and so on. Because the traditional skills were so valued, there were many marriages between Muto and Kikuta, fewer between them and the other families, though the exceptions often threw up geniuses like the assassin Shintaro.
After dealing with the accounts, Kikuta Gosaburo would give me lessons in genealogy, explaining the intricate relationships of the Tribe that spread like an autumn spider’s web across the Three Countries, into the North and beyond. He was a fat man with a double chin like a woman’s and a smooth, plump face, deceptively gentle-looking. The smell of fermentation clung to his clothes and skin. If he was in a good mood he would call for wine and move from genealogy into history—the Tribe history of my ancestors. Little had changed in hundreds of years. Warlords might rise and fall, clans flourish and disappear, but the trade of the Tribe in all the essentials of life went on forever. Except now Arai wanted to bring about change. All other powerful warlords worked with the Tribe. Only Arai wanted to destroy them.
Gosaburo’s chins wobbled with laughter at the idea.
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At first I was called on only as a spy, sent to overhear conversations in taverns and teahouses, ordered to climb over walls and roofs at night and listen to men confiding in their sons or their wives. I heard the townspeople’s secrets and fears, the Yoshida clan’s strategies for spring, the concerns at the castle about Arai’s intentions beyond the borders and about peasant uprisings close to home. I went into the mountain villages, listened to those peasants, and identified the ringleaders.
One night Gosaburo clicked his tongue in disapproval at a long-overdue account. Not only had no payments been made, more goods had been ordered. The man’s name was Furoda, a low-ranking warrior who had turned to farming to support his large family and his liking for the good things in life. Beneath his name I read the symbols that indicated the rising level of intimidation already used against him: A barn had been set alight, one of his daughters abducted, a son beaten up, dogs and horses killed. Yet, he still sank ever more deeply into the Kikuta’s debt.
“This could be one for the Dog,” the merchant said to Akio, who had joined us for a glass of wine. Like everyone except Yuki, he used Akio’s nickname for me.
Akio took the scroll and ran his eyes over Furoda’s sad history. “He’s had a lot of leeway.”
“Well, he’s a likable fellow. I’ve known him since we were boys. I can’t go on making allowances for him, though.”
“Uncle, if you don’t deal with him, isn’t everyone going to expect the same leniency?” Akio said.
“That’s the trouble: No one’s paying on time at the moment. They all think they can get away with it because Furoda has.” Gosaburo sighed deeply, his eyes almost disappearing in the folds of his cheeks. “I’m too softhearted. That’s my problem. My brothers are always telling me.”
“The Dog is softhearted,” Akio said. “But we’re training him not to be. He can take care of Furoda for you. It will be good for him.”
“If you kill him he can never pay his debts,” I said.
“But everyone else will.” Akio spoke as if pointing out an obvious truth to a simpleton.
“It’s often easier to claim from a dead man than a live one,” Gosaburo added apologetically.
I did not know this easygoing, pleasure-loving, irresponsible man, and I did not want to kill him. But I did. A few days later I went at night to his house on the outskirts of town, silenced the dogs, went invisible, and slipped past the guards. The house was well barred but I waited for him outside the privy. I had been watching the house and I knew he always rose in the early hours to relieve himself. He was a large, fleshy man who’d long since given up any training and who had handed over the heavy work on the land to his sons. He’d grown soft. He died with hardly a sound.
When I untwisted the garrote, rain had started to fall. The tiles of the walls were slippery. The night was at its darkest. The rain could almost be sleet. I returned to the Kikuta house silenced by the darkness and the cold as if they had crept inside me and left a shadow on my soul.
Furoda’s sons paid his debts, and Gosaburo was pleased with me. I let no one see how much the murder had disturbed me, but the next one was worse. It was on the orders of the Yoshida family. Determined to put a stop to the unrest among the villagers before winter, they put in a request for the leader to be eradicated. I knew the man, knew his secret fields, though I had not yet revealed them to anyone. Now I told Gosaburo and Akio where he could be found alone every evening, and they sent me to meet him there.
He had rice and sweet potatoes concealed in a small cave, cut into the side of the mountain and covered with stones and brushwood. He was working on the banks of the field when I came silently up the slope. I’d misjudged him: He was stronger than I thought, and he fought back with his hoe. As we struggled together, my hood slipped back and he saw my face. Recognition came into his eyes, mixed with a sort of horror. In that moment I used my second self, came behind him, and cut his throat, but I’d heard him call out to my image.
“Lord Shigeru!”
I was covered with blood, his and mine, and dizzy from the blow I’d not quite avoided. The hoe had glanced against my scalp and the scrape was bleeding freely. His words disturbed me deeply. Had he been calling to Shigeru’s spirit for help, or had he seen my likeness and mistaken me for him? I wanted to question him, but his eyes stared blankly up at the twilight sky. He was beyond speech forever.
I went invisible and stayed so until I was nearly back at the Kikuta house, the longest period I had ever used it for. I would have stayed like that forever if I could. I could not forget the man’s last words, and then I remembered what Shigeru had said, so long ago, in Hagi: I have never killed an unarmed man, nor killed for pleasure.
The clan lords were highly satisfied. The man’s death had taken the heart out of the unrest. The villagers promptly became docile and obedient. Many of them would die of starvation before the end of winter. It was an excellent result, Gosaburo said.
But I began to dream of Shigeru every night. He entered the room and stood before me as if he had just come out of the river, blood and water streaming from him, saying nothing, his eyes fixed on me as if he were waiting for me—the same way he had waited with the patience of the heron for me to speak again.
Slowly it began to dawn on me that I could not bear the life I was living, but I did not know how to escape it. I had made a bargain with the Kikuta that I was now finding impossible to keep. I’d made the bargain in the heat of passion, not expecting to live beyond that night, and with no understanding of my own self. I’d thought the Kikuta master, who seemed to know me, would help me resolve the deep divisions and contradictions of my nature, but he had sent me away to Matsue with Akio, where my life with the Tribe might be teaching me how to hide these contradictions but was doing nothing to solve them; they were merely being driven deeper inside me.
My black mood worsened when Yuki went away. She said nothing to me about it, just vanished one day. In the morning I heard her voice and her tread while we were at training. I heard her go to the front door and leave without bidding anyone farewell. I listened all day for her return, but she did not come back. I tried asking casually where she was; the replies were evasive and I did not want to question Akio or Gosaburo directly. I missed her deeply but was also relieved that I no longer had to face the question of whether to sleep with her or not. Every day since she had told me about Kaede I’d resolved I would not, and every night I did.
Two days later, while I was thinking about her during the meditation period at the end of the morning exercises, I heard one of the servants come to the door and call softly to Akio. He opened his eyes slowly and, with the air of calm composure that he always assumed after meditating (and which I was convinced was only assumed), he rose and went to the door.
“The master is here,” the girl said. “He is waiting for you.”
“Hey, Dog,” Akio called to me. The others sat without moving a muscle, without looking up, as I stood. Akio jerked his head and I followed him to the main room of the house, where Kikuta Kotaro was drinking tea with Gosaburo.
We entered the room and bowed to the floor before him.
“Sit up,” he said, and studied me for a few moments. Then he addressed Akio. “Have there been any problems?”
“Not really,” Akio said, implying there had been quite a few.
“What about attitude? You have no complaints?”
Akio shook his head slowly.
“Yet, before you left Yamagata . . . ?”
I felt that Kotaro was letting me know he knew everything about me.
“It was dealt with,” Akio replied briefly.
“He’s been quite useful to me,” Gosaburo put in.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Kotaro said dryly.
His brother got to his feet and excused himself—the pressures of business, the need to be in the shop. When he had left the master said, “I spoke to Yuki last night.”
“Where is she?”
“That doesn’t matt
er. But she told me something that disturbs me a little. We did not know that Shigeru went to Mino expressly to find you. He let Muto Kenji believe the encounter happened by chance.”
He paused but I said nothing. I remembered the day Yuki had found this out, while she was cutting my hair. She had thought it important information, important enough to pass on to the master. No doubt she had told him everything else about me.
“It makes me suspect Shigeru had a greater knowledge of the Tribe than we realized,” Kotaro said. “Is that true?”
“It’s true that he knew who I was,” I replied. “He had been friends with the Muto master for many years. That’s all I know of his relationship with the Tribe.”
“He never spoke to you of anything more?”
“No.” I was lying. In fact Shigeru had told me more, the night we had talked in Tsuwano—that he had made it his business to find out about the Tribe and that he probably knew more about them than any other outsider. I had never shared this information with Kenji and I saw no reason to pass it on to Kotaro. Shigeru was dead, I was now bound to the Tribe, but I was not going to betray his secrets.
I tried to make my voice and face guileless and said, “Yuki asked me the same thing. What does it matter now?”
“We thought we knew Shigeru, knew his life,” Kotaro answered. “He keeps surprising us, even after his death. He kept things hidden even from Kenji—the affair with Maruyama Naomi, for example. What else was he hiding?”
I shrugged slightly. I thought of Shigeru, nicknamed the Farmer, with his openhearted smile, his seeming frankness and simplicity. Everyone had misjudged him, especially the Tribe. He had been so much more than any of them had suspected.
“Is it possible that he kept records of what he knew about the Tribe?”
“He kept many records of all sorts of things,” I said, sounding puzzled. “The seasons, his farming experiments, the land and crops, his retainers. Ichiro, his former teacher, helped him with them, but he often wrote himself.”