Grass for His Pillow

by Lian Hearn

  The tea settled my stomach. Jo-An brought out two more small millet balls, but I had no appetite and made the boatman eat my share. Jo-An did not eat, either, but put the second ball away again. I saw the other man’s eyes follow it and gave him some coins before he left. He did not want to take them, but I pressed them into his hand.

  Jo-An mumbled the blessing of departure over him and then pulled aside the hides so I could take his place under them. The warmth of the tea stayed with me. The hides stank, but they kept out the cold and muffled sound. I thought briefly how any one of those starving men might betray me for a bowl of soup, but I had no alternative now: I had to trust Jo-An. I let the darkness fall over me and take me down into sleep.

  He woke me a few hours later. It was well after noon. He gave me tea, hardly more than hot water, and apologized for having no food to offer me.

  “We should leave now,” he said, “if we are to get to the charcoal burners before dark.”

  “The charcoal burners?” I usually woke swiftly, but this day I was groggy with sleep.

  “They are still on the mountain. They have paths they use through the forest that will take you over the border. But they will leave with the first snow.” He paused for a moment and then said, “We have to speak to someone on the way.”

  “Who?”

  “It won’t take long.” He gave me one of his slight smiles. We went outside and I knelt by the riverbank and splashed water on my face. It was icy; as Jo-An had predicted, the temperature had dropped and the air was drier. It was too cold and too dry to snow.

  I shook the water from my hands while he spoke to the men. Their eyes flickered toward me. When we left, they stopped work and knelt with bowed heads as I walked past.

  “They know who I am?” I asked Jo-An in a low voice. Again, I feared betrayal from these men who had so little.

  “They know you are Otori Takeo,” he replied, “the angel of Yamagata who will bring justice and peace. That’s what the prophecy says.”

  “What prophecy?” I asked again.

  He said, “You will hear it for yourself.”

  I was filled with misgivings. What was I doing, entrusting my life to this lunatic? I felt every extra moment wasted would keep me from reaching Terayama before either the snow or the Tribe caught up with me. But I realized now that my only hope was to go over the mountain. I had to follow Jo-An.

  We crossed the smaller river a little way upstream by a fish weir. We passed few people, a couple of fishermen, and some girls taking food to the men who were burning rice stalks and spreading dung on the empty fields. The girls climbed up the bank rather than cross our path, and one of the fisherman spat at us. The other cursed Jo-An for blighting the water. I kept my head low and my face averted, but they paid no attention to me. In fact they avoided looking at us directly, as though even that contact would bring pollution and bad luck.

  Jo-An seemed to take no notice of the hostility, retreating into himself as if into a dark cloak, but when we had passed them he said, “They would not allow us to use the wooden bridge to take the hides across. That’s why we had to learn to build our own. Now the other bridge is destroyed, but they still refuse to use ours.” He shook his head and whispered, “If only they knew the Secret One.”

  On the other bank we followed the river for another mile and then turned off toward the northeast and began to climb. The bare-branched maples and beeches gave way to pines and cedars. As the forest deepened, the path darkened and grew steeper and steeper until we were clambering over rocks and boulders, going as often on all fours as upright. The sleep had refreshed me and I could feel strength returning. Jo-An climbed tirelessly, hardly even panting. It was hard to guess his age. Poverty and suffering had hollowed him out so he looked like an old man, but he might have been no more than thirty. There was something unearthly about him, as though he had indeed returned from the dead.

  We finally came over a crest and stood on a small plateau. A huge rock lay across it, fallen from the crag above. Below us I could see the glint of the river, almost as far as Tsuwano. Smoke and mist drifted across the valley. The clouds were low, hiding the mountain range on the opposite side. The climb had warmed us, even made us sweat, but when we stopped our breath came white on the raw air. A few late berries still glowed red on leafless bushes; otherwise there was no color anywhere. Even the evergreen trees were muted almost to black. I could hear water trickling, and two crows were calling to each other from the crag. When they fell silent I heard someone breathing.

  The sound came, slow and measured, from the rock itself. I slowed my own breathing, touched Jo-An on the arm, and made a gesture with my head toward it.

  He gave me a smile and spoke quietly: “It’s all right. This is who we have come to see.”

  The crows cawed again, their voices harsh and ominous. I began to shiver. The cold was creeping up on me, surrounding me. The fears of the previous night threatened to surface again. I wanted to keep moving. I did not want to meet whoever was concealed behind the rock, breathing so slowly they could hardly be human.

  “Come,” Jo-An said, and I followed him round the edge of the rock, keeping my eyes away from the drop below. Behind, a cave was hollowed out of the side of the mountain. Water dripped from its roof. Over the centuries it had formed spears and columns and worn out a channel on the ground that led to a small deep pool, its sides as regular as a cistern and limestone-white. The water itself was black.

  The roof of the cave sloped, following the shape of the mountain, and in the upper, drier side sat a figure that I would have thought was a statue if I had not heard its breathing. It was grayish white, like the limestone, as though it had sat there so long it had started to calcify. It was hard to tell if it was male or female; I recognized it as one of those ancient people, a hermit, a monk or nun, who had gone beyond sex and gender and grown so close to the next world he or she was almost pure spirit. The hair fell like a white shawl, the face and hands gray like old paper.

  The figure sat in meditation on the floor of the cave with no sign of strain or discomfort. In front of it was a kind of stone altar bearing fading flowers, the last of the autumn lilies, and other offerings: two bitter oranges, their skins wrinkling, a small piece of fabric, and some coins of little value. It was like any other shrine to the god of the mountain, except carved into the stone was the sign the Hidden use, the one Lady Maruyama had traced on my hand in Chigawa so long ago.

  Jo-An untied his cloth and took out the last millet cake. He knelt and placed it carefully on the altar, then bowed his head to the ground. The figure opened its eyes and gazed on us—gazed but did not see. The eyes were clouded with blindness. An expression came over the face that made me drop to my knees and bow before it—a look of profound tenderness and compassion, blended with complete knowledge. I had no doubt I was in the presence of a holy being.

  “Tomasu,” it said, and I thought its voice a woman’s rather than a man’s. It was so long since anyone had called me by the water name my mother gave me that the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and when I shivered it was not only from cold.

  “Sit up,” she said. “I have words to say that you are to hear. You are Tomasu of Mino, but you have become both Otori and Kikuta. Three bloods are mixed in you. You were born into the Hidden, but your life has been brought into the open and is no longer your own. Earth will deliver what heaven desires.”

  She fell silent. The minutes passed. The cold entered my bones. I wondered if she would say anything else. At first I was amazed that she knew who I was; then I thought Jo-An must have told her about me. If this was the prophecy, it was so obscure that it meant nothing to me. If I knelt there much longer I thought I would freeze to death, but I was held by the force of the blind woman’s eyes.

  I listened to the breath of the three of us and to the sounds of the mountain, the crows still cawing in their harsh voices, the cedars restless in the northeast wind, the trickle and drip of water, the groaning of the mountain its
elf as the temperature dropped and the rocks shrank.

  “Your lands will stretch from sea to sea,” she said finally. “But peace comes at the price of bloodshed. Five battles will buy you peace, four to win and one to lose. Many must die, but you yourself are safe from death, except at the hands of your own son.”

  Another long silence followed. With every second the light darkened toward evening and the air chilled. My gaze wandered round the cave. At the holy woman’s side stood a prayer wheel on a small wooden block carved with lotus leaves around its edge. I was puzzled. I knew many mountain shrines were forbidden to women, and none I had ever seen had contained such a mixture of symbols, as though the Secret God, the Enlightened One, and the spirits of the mountain all dwelled here together.

  She spoke as if she saw my thoughts; her voice held a kind of laughter mixed with wonder. “It is all one. Keep this in your heart. It is all one.”

  She touched the prayer wheel and set it turning. Its rhythm seemed to steal into my veins to join my blood. She began to chant softly, words I had never heard before and did not understand. They flowed over and around us, eventually fading into the wind. When we heard them again they had become the farewell blessing of the Hidden. She handed us a bowl and told us to drink from the pool before we left.

  A thin layer of ice was already forming on the surface, and the water was so cold it bit into my teeth. Jo-An wasted no time but led me quickly away, glancing anxiously toward the north. Before we went back over the crest I took one last look at the holy woman. She sat motionless; from this distance she seemed like part of the rock. I could not believe she would stay out here alone all night.

  “How does she survive?” I questioned Jo-An. “She’ll die of cold.”

  He frowned. “She is sustained by God. It does not matter to her if she dies.”

  “She is like you, then?”

  “She is a holy person. Once I thought she was an angel, but she is a human being, transformed by the power of God.”

  He did not want to talk more. He seemed to have caught my urgency. We descended at a rapid pace until we came to a small rockfall, which we clambered over. On the other side was a narrow path made by men walking single file into the dark forest. Once on the path we began to climb again.

  Fallen leaves and pine needles muffled our footsteps. Beneath the trees it was almost night. Jo-An went faster still. The pace warmed me a little, but my feet and legs seemed to be slowly turning to stone, as if the limy water I’d drunk were calcifying me. And my heart was chilled, too, by the old woman’s baffling words and all that they implied for my future. I had never fought in a battle: Was I really to wage five of them? If bloodshed was the price of peace, in five battles it would be a heavy cost indeed. And the idea that my own son, not yet even born, would be the one to kill me filled me with unbearable sadness.

  I caught up with Jo-An and touched him on the arm. “What does it mean?”

  “It means what it says,” he replied, slowing a little to catch his breath.

  “Did she say the same words to you earlier?”

  “The same.”

  “When was it?”

  “After I died and came back to life. I wanted to live like her, a hermit on the mountain. I thought I might be her servant, her disciple. But she said my work in the world was not yet finished, and she spoke the words about you.”

  “You told her who I was, my past life and everything?”

  “No,” he said patiently. “There was no need to tell her, for she already knew. She said I must serve you, because only you will bring peace.”

  “Peace?” I repeated. Was this what she meant by heaven’s desire? I wasn’t even sure what the word signified. The very idea of peace seemed like one of the fantasies of the Hidden, the stories of the kingdom that my mother would whisper to me at night. Would it ever be possible to stop the clans from fighting? The whole warrior class fought: It was what they were bred and trained and lived for. Apart from their traditions and personal sense of honor, there was the constant need for land to maintain armies to gain more land, the military codes and shifting webs of alliances, the overweening ambition of warlords like Iida Sadamu, and now, more than likely, Arai Daiichi. “Peace through war?”

  “Is there any other way?” Jo-An replied. “There will be battles.”

  Four to win, one to lose. . . .

  “That is why we are preparing now. You noticed the men at the tannery, saw their eyes. Ever since your merciful actions at Yamagata Castle, when you put an end to the sufferings of the tortured Hidden, you have been a hero to these people. Then your service to Lord Shigeru at Inuyama . . . even without the prophecy they would have been ready to fight for you. Now they know God is with you.”

  “She sits in a mountain shrine and uses a prayer wheel,” I said. “Yet, she blessed us after the fashion of your people.”

  “Our people,” he corrected me.

  I shook my head. “I no longer follow those teachings. I have killed many times. Do you really believe she speaks the words of your god?”

  For the Hidden teach that the Secret God is the only true one, and the spirits that everyone else worships are delusions.

  “I don’t know why God tells me to listen to her,” he admitted. “But he does, and so I do.”

  He is mad, I thought. The torture and the fear have driven him out of his mind. “She said, ‘It is all one.’ But you don’t believe that, surely?”

  He whispered, “I believe all the teachings of the Secret One. I have followed them since childhood. I know them to be true. But it seems to me there is a place beyond the teachings, a place beyond words, where that could be the truth, where all the beliefs are seen to issue from the one source. My brother was a priest; he would have said this was heresy. I have not been to this place yet, but it is where she dwells.”

  I was silent, thinking about how his words applied to myself. I could feel the three elements that made up my nature coiled within me like three separate snakes, each one deadly to the others if it were allowed to strike. I could never live one life without denying two-thirds of myself. My only way was to go forward, to transcend the divisions and find a means of uniting them.

  “And you also,” Jo-An added, reading my thoughts.

  “It is what I would like to believe,” I said finally. “But whereas for her it is a place of deepest spirituality, I am perhaps more practical. To me it just seems to make sense.”

  “So you are the one who will bring peace.”

  I did not want to believe this prophecy. It was both far more and far less than I wanted for my own life. But the old woman’s words had fallen into my inner being, and I could not get rid of them.

  “The men at the tannery, your men, they won’t fight, will they?”

  “Some will,” Jo-An said.

  “Do they know how to?”

  “They can be taught. And there are many other things they can do: building, transport, guiding you over secret paths.”

  “Like this one?”

  “Yes, the charcoal burners made this one. They conceal the entrances with rock piles. They have ways over the whole mountain.”

  Farmers, outcasts, charcoal burners—none of them was supposed to carry weapons or join in the wars of the clans. I wondered how many others were like the farmer I had killed at Matsue, or Jo-An. What a waste of their courage and intelligence not to use men like that. If I were to train and arm them, I would have all the men I needed. But would warriors fight alongside them? Or would they just consider me an outcast too?

  I was occupied with these thoughts when I caught the whiff of burning and a few moments later heard the distant sound of voices, and other noises of human activity, the thud of an ax, the crackle of fire. Jo-An noticed as I swung my head.

  “You hear them already?”

  I nodded, listening, counting how many there were. Four from the voices, I thought; maybe another who did not speak but who moved with a distinctive tread; no dogs, which seemed unusual. �
�You know I am half Kikuta, from the Tribe. I have many of their talents.”

  He couldn’t help flinching slightly. These talents seem like witchcraft to the Hidden. My own father had renounced all his Tribe skills when he had converted to the beliefs of the Hidden; he had died because he had taken their vow never to kill again.

  “I know it,” Jo-An replied.

  “I’ll need all of them if I’m to do what you expect of me.”

  “The Tribe are children of the Devil,” he muttered, adding quickly as he had once before, “But your case is different, lord.”

  It made me realize the risks he was taking for me, not only from human forces, but from supernatural ones. My Tribe blood must have made me as dangerous in his mind as a goblin or a river spirit. I was amazed again at the strength of the convictions that drove him and at how completely he had placed himself in my hands.

  The smell of burning grew stronger. Flecks of ash were settling on our clothes and skin, reminding me ominously of snow. The ground took on a grayish look. The path led into a clearing between the trees where there were several charcoal ovens, banked over with damp soil and turf. Only one still burned, patches of red glowing from its crevices. Three men were engaged in dismantling the cold ovens and bundling the charcoal. Another knelt by a cooking fire where a kettle hung steaming from a three-legged stand. Four, yet I still felt there had been five. I heard a heavy footfall behind me, and the involuntary intake of breath that precedes an attack. I pushed Jo-An aside and leaped round to face whoever it was trying to ambush us.

  He was the largest man I had ever seen, arms already stretched out to seize us. One huge hand, one stump. Because of the stump I hesitated to wound him more. Leaving my image on the path, I slipped behind him and called to him to turn round, holding the knife where he could see the blade clearly and threatening to cut his throat.

  Jo-An was shouting, “It’s me, you blockhead! It’s Jo-An!”

  The man by the fire let out a great shout of laughter and the charcoal burners came running.