Grass for His Pillow

by Lian Hearn

  I could see him, writing late into the night, the lamp flickering, the cold penetrating, his face alert and intelligent, quite different from its usual bland expression.

  “The journeys he made—did you go with him?”

  “No, apart from our flight from Mino.”

  “How often did he travel?”

  “I’m not sure; while I was in Hagi he did not leave the city.”

  Kotaro grunted. Silence crept into the room. I could barely hear the others’ breathing. From beyond came the noon sounds of shop and house, the click of the abacus, the voices of customers, peddlers crying in the street outside. The wind was rising, whistling under the eaves, shaking the screens. Already its breath held the hint of snow.

  The master spoke finally. “It seems most likely that he did keep records, in which case they must be recovered. If they should fall into Arai’s hands at this moment, it would be a disaster. You will have to go to Hagi. Find out if the records exist and bring them back here.”

  I could hardly believe it. I had thought I would never go there again. Now I was to be sent back to the house I loved so much.

  “It’s a matter of the nightingale floor,” Kotaro said. “I believe Shigeru had one built around his house and you mastered it.”

  It seemed I was back there: I felt the heavy night air of the sixth month, saw myself run as silently as a ghost, heard Shigeru’s voice:

  Can you do it again?

  I tried to keep my face under control, but I felt a flicker in the smile muscles.

  “You must leave at once,” Kotaro went on. “You have to get there and back before the snows begin. It’s nearly the end of the year. By the middle of the first month both Hagi and Matsue will be closed by snow.”

  He had not sounded angry before, but now I realized he was—profoundly. Perhaps he had sensed my smile.

  “Why did you never tell anyone this?” he demanded. “Why did you keep it from Kenji?”

  I felt my own anger rise in response. “Lord Shigeru did so and I followed his lead. My first allegiance was to him. I would never have revealed something he wanted kept secret. I was one of the Otori then, after all.”

  “And still thinks he is,” Akio put in. “It’s a question of loyalties. It always will be with him.” He added under his breath, “A dog only knows one master.”

  I turned my gaze on him, willing him to look at me so I could shut him up, put him to sleep, but after one swift, contemptuous glance, he stared at the floor again.

  “Well, that will be proved one way or the other,” Kotaro replied. “I think this mission will test your loyalties to the full. If this Ichiro knows of the existence and contents of the records, he’ll have to be removed, of course.”

  I bowed without saying anything, wondering if my heart had been hardened to the extent where I could kill Ichiro, the old man who had been Shigeru’s teacher and then mine: I’d thought I wanted to often enough when he was chastising me and forcing me to learn, but he was one of the Otori, one of Shigeru’s household. I was bound to him by duty and loyalty as well as by my own grudging respect and, I realized now, affection.

  At the same time I was exploring the master’s anger, feeling its taste in my mouth. It had a quality to it that was like Akio’s more or less permanent state of rage against me, as if they both hated and feared me. “The Kikuta were delighted to discover Isamu had left a son,” Kenji’s wife had said. If they were so delighted why were they so angry with me? But hadn’t she also said, “We all were”? And then Yuki had told me of her mother’s old feelings for Shintaro. Could his death really have delighted her?

  She had seemed at that moment like a garrulous old woman, and I had taken her words at face value. But moments later she’d allowed me a glimpse of her skills. She’d been flattering me, stroking my vanity in the same way she’d stroked my temples with her phantom hands. The reaction of the Kikuta to my sudden appearance was darker and more complex than they would have me believe: Maybe they were delighted with my skills, but there was also something about me that alarmed them, and I still did not understand what it was.

  The anger that should have cowed me into obedience instead made me more stubborn—indeed, struck fire on that stubbornness and gave me energy. I felt it coiled inside me as I wondered at the fate that was sending me back to Hagi.

  “We are entering a dangerous time,” the master said, studying me as if he could read my thoughts. “The Muto house in Yamagata was searched and ransacked. Someone suspected you had been there. However, Arai has returned to Inuyama now, and Hagi is a long way from there. It’s a risk for you to return, but the risk of records coming into anyone else’s hands is far greater.”

  “What if they aren’t in Lord Shigeru’s house? They could be hidden anywhere.”

  “Presumably, Ichiro will know. Question him, and bring them back from wherever they are.”

  “Am I to leave immediately?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “As an actor?”

  “No actors travel at this time of year,” Akio said scornfully. “Besides, we will go alone.”

  I’d been offering a silent prayer that he would not be coming with me. The master said, “Akio will accompany you. His grandfather—your grandfather—has died, and you are returning to Hagi for the memorial service.”

  “I would prefer not to travel with Akio,” I said.

  Akio drew his breath in sharply. Kotaro said, “There are no preferences for you. Only obedience.”

  I felt the stubbornness spark, and looked directly at him. He was staring into my eyes as he had once before: He had put me to sleep immediately then. But this time I could meet his gaze without giving into it. There was something behind his eyes that made him flinch slightly from me. I searched his look and a suspicion leaped into my mind.

  This is the man who killed my father.

  I felt a moment of terror at what I was doing, then my own gaze steadied and held. I bared my teeth, though I was far from smiling. I saw the master’s look of astonishment and saw his vision cloud. Then Akio was on his feet, striking me in the face, almost knocking me to the ground.

  “How dare you do that to the master? You have no respect, you scum.”

  Kotaro said, “Sit down, Akio.”

  My eyes snapped back to him, but he was not looking at me.

  “I’m sorry, master,” I said softly. “Forgive me.”

  We both knew my apology was hollow. He stood swiftly and covered the moment with anger.

  “Ever since we located you we have been trying to protect you from yourself.” He did not raise his voice but there was no mistaking his fury. “Not only for your own sake, of course. You know what your talents are and how useful they could be to us. But your upbringing, your mixed blood, your own character, all work against you. I thought training here would help, but we don’t have time to continue it. Akio will go with you to Hagi and you will continue to obey him in all things. He is far more experienced than you; he knows where the safe houses are, whom to contact and who can be trusted.”

  He paused while I bowed in acceptance, and then went on, “You and I made a bargain at Inuyama. You chose to disobey my orders then and return to the castle. The results of Iida’s death have not been good for us. We were far better off under him than under Arai. Apart from our own laws of obedience that any child learns before they turn seven, your life is already forfeit to me by your own promise.”

  I did not reply. I felt he was close to giving up on me, that his patience with me, the understanding of my nature that had calmed and soothed me, was running dry. As was my trust in him. The terrible suspicion lay in my mind; once it had arisen there was no eradicating it: My father had died at the hands of the Tribe, maybe even killed by Kotaro himself, because he had tried to leave them. Later I would realize that this explained many things about the Kikuta’s dealings with me—their insistence on my obedience, their ambivalent attitude to my skills, their contempt of my loyalty to Shigeru—but
at that time it only increased my depression. Akio hated me, I had insulted and offended the Kikuta master, Yuki had left me, Kaede was probably dead . . . I did not want to go on with the list. I gazed with unseeing eyes at the floor while Kikuta and Akio discussed details of the journey.

  WE LEFT THE following morning. There were many travelers on the road, taking advantage of the last weeks before the snow fell, going home for the New Year Festival. We mingled with them, two brothers returning to our hometown for a funeral. It was no hardship to pretend to be overcome by grief. It seemed to have become my natural state. The only thing that lightened the blackness that enveloped me was the thought of seeing the house in Hagi and hearing for one last time its winter song.

  My training partner, Hajime, traveled with us for the first day; he was on his way to join a wrestling stable for the winter to prepare for the spring tournaments. We stayed that night with the wrestlers and ate the evening meal with them. They consumed huge stews of vegetables and chicken, a meat they considered lucky because the chicken’s hands never touch the ground, with noodles made of rice and buckwheat, more for each one than most families would eat in a week. Hajime, with his large bulk and calm face, resembled them already. He had been connected with this stable, which was run by the Kikuta, since he was a child, and the wrestlers treated him with teasing affection.

  Before the meal we bathed with them in the vast steamy bathhouse, built across a scalding, sulfurous spring. Masseurs and trainers mingled among them, rubbing and scrubbing the massive limbs and torsos. It was like being among a race of giants. They all knew Akio, of course, and treated him with ironic deference, because he was the boss’s family, mixed with kindly scorn, because he was not a wrestler. Nothing was said about me, and nobody paid me any attention. They were absorbed in their own world. I obviously had only the slightest connection to it and therefore was of no interest to them.

  So I said nothing, but listened. I overheard plans for the spring tournament, the hopes and desires of the wrestlers, the jokes whispered by the masseurs, the propositions made, spurned, or accepted. And much later, when Akio had ordered me to bed and I was already lying on a mat in the communal hall, I heard him and Hajime in the room below. They had decided to sit up for a while and drink together before they parted the next day.

  I tuned out the snores of the wrestlers and concentrated on the voices below. I could hear them clearly through the floor. It always amazed me that Akio seemed to forget how acute my hearing was. I supposed he did not want to acknowledge my gifts, and this made him underestimate me. At first I thought it was a weakness in him, almost the only one; later it occurred to me that there were some things he might have wanted me to hear.

  The conversation was commonplace—the training Hajime would undergo, the friends they’d caught up with—until the wine began to loosen their tongues.

  “You’ll go to Yamagata, presumably?” Hajime asked.

  “Probably not. The Muto master is still in the mountains, and the house is empty.”

  “I assumed Yuki had gone back to her family.”

  “No, she’s gone to the Kikuta village, north of Matsue. She’ll stay there until the child is born.”

  “The child?” Hajime sounded as dumbfounded as I was.

  There was a long silence. I heard Akio drink and swallow. When he spoke again his voice was much quieter. “She is carrying the Dog’s child.”

  Hajime hissed through his teeth. “Sorry, Cousin, I don’t want to upset you, but was that part of the plan?”

  “Why should it not have been?”

  “I always thought, you and she . . . that you would marry eventually.”

  “We have been promised to each other since we were children,” Akio said. “We may still marry. The masters wanted her to sleep with him, to keep him quiet, to distract him, to get a child if possible.”

  If he felt pain he was not showing it. “I was to pretend suspicion and jealousy,” he said flatly. “If the Dog knew he was being manipulated, he might never have gone with her. Well, I did not have to pretend it: I did not realize she would enjoy it so much. I could not believe how she was with him, seeking him out day and night like a bitch in heat—” His voice broke off. I heard him gulp down a cup of wine and heard the clink and gurgle of the flask as more was poured.

  “Good must come of it, though,” Hajime suggested, his voice regaining some of its cheerfulness. “The child will inherit a rare combination of talents.”

  “So the Kikuta master thinks. And this child will be with us from birth. It will be raised properly, with none of the Dog’s deficiencies.”

  “It’s astonishing news,” Hajime said. “No wonder you’ve been preoccupied.”

  “Most of the time I’m thinking about how I’ll kill him,” Akio confessed, drinking deeply again.

  “You’ve been ordered to?” Hajime said bleakly.

  “It all depends on what happens at Hagi. You might say he’s on his last chance.”

  “Does he know that? That he’s being tested?”

  “If he doesn’t, he’ll soon find out,” Akio said. After another long pause he said, “If the Kikuta had known of his existence, they would have claimed him as a child and brought him up. But he was ruined first by his upbringing and then by his association with the Otori.”

  “His father died before he was born. Do you know who killed him?”

  “They drew lots,” Akio whispered. “No one knows who actually did it, but it was decided by the whole family. The master told me this in Inuyama.”

  “Sad,” Hajime murmured. “So much talent wasted.”

  “It comes from mixing the blood,” Akio said. “It’s true that it sometimes throws up rare talents, but they seem to come with stupidity. And the only cure for stupidity is death.”

  Shortly afterward they came to bed. I lay still, feigning sleep, until daybreak, my mind gnawing uselessly at the news. I was sure that no matter what I did or failed to do in Hagi, Akio would seize on any excuse to kill me there.

  As we bade farewell to Hajime the next morning, he would not look me in the eye. His voice held a false cheerfulness, and he stared after us, his expression glum. I imagine he thought he would never see me again.

  We traveled for three days, barely speaking to each other, until we came to the barrier that marked the beginning of the Otori lands. It presented no problem to us, Akio having been supplied with the necessary tablets of identification. He made all the decisions on our journey: where we should eat, where we should stop for the night, which road we should take. I followed passively. I knew he would not kill me before we got to Hagi; he needed me to get into Shigeru’s house, across the nightingale floor. After a while I began to feel a sort of regret that we weren’t good friends, traveling together. It seemed a waste of a journey. I longed for a companion, someone like Makoto or my old friend from Hagi, Fumio, with whom I could talk on the road and share the confusion of my thoughts.

  Once we were in Otori land I expected the countryside to look as prosperous as it had when I had first traveled through it with Shigeru, but everywhere bore signs of the ravages of the storms and the famine that followed them. Many villages seemed to be deserted, damaged houses stood unrepaired, starving people begged at the side of the road. I overheard snatches of conversation: how the Otori lords were now demanding sixty percent of the rice harvest, instead of the forty percent they had taken previously, to pay for the army they were raising to fight Arai, and how men might as well kill themselves and their children rather than starve slowly to death when winter came.

  Earlier in the year we might have made the journey more swiftly by boat, but the winter gales were already lashing the coast, driving foaming gray waves onto the black shore. The fishermen’s boats were moored in such shelter as they could find, or pulled high onto the shingle, lived in by families until spring. Throughout winter the fishing families burned fires to get salt from the seawater. Once or twice we stopped to warm ourselves and eat with them, Akio paying t
hem a few small coins. The food was meager: salt fish, soup made from kelp, sea urchins, and small shellfish.

  One man begged us to buy his daughter, take her with us to Hagi, and use her ourselves or sell her to a brothel. She could not have been more than thirteen years old, barely into womanhood. She was not pretty, but I can still recall her face, her eyes both frightened and pleading, her tears, the look of relief when Akio politely declined, the despair in her father’s attitude as he turned away.

  That night Akio grumbled about the cold, regretting his decision. “She’d have kept me warm,” he said more than once.

  I thought of her sleeping next to her mother, faced with the choice between starvation and what would have been no more than slavery. I thought about Furoda’s family, turned out of their shabby, comfortable house, and I thought of the man I’d killed in his secret field, and the village that would die because of me.

  These things did not bother anyone else—it was the way the world was—but they haunted me. And of course, as I did every night, I took out the thoughts that had lain within me all day and examined them.

  Yuki was carrying my child. It was to be raised by the Tribe. I would probably never even set eyes on it.

  The Kikuta had killed my father because he had broken the rules of the Tribe, and they would not hesitate to kill me.

  I made no decisions and came to no conclusions. I simply lay awake for long hours of the night, holding the thoughts as I would hold black pebbles in my hand, and looking at them.

  THE MOUNTAINS FELL directly to the sea around Hagi, and we had to turn inland and climb steeply before we crossed the last pass and began the descent toward the town.

  My heart was full of emotion, though I said nothing and gave nothing away. The town lay as it always had, in the cradle of the bay, encircled by its twin rivers and the sea. It was late afternoon on the day of the winter solstice, and a pale sun was struggling through gray clouds. The trees were bare, fallen leaves thick underfoot. Smoke from the burning of the last rice stalks spread a blue haze that hung above the rivers, level with the stone bridge.