Across the Nightingale Floor

by Lian Hearn

  When I heard the temple bells toll at midnight, I got up and went to the privy. The sound of my own piss was like a waterfall. I poured water over my hands from the cistern in the courtyard and stood for a moment, listening.

  It was a still, mild night, coming up to the full moon of the eighth month. The inn was silent: Everyone was in bed and asleep. Frogs were croaking from the river and the rice fields, and once or twice I heard an owl hoot. As I stepped quietly onto the veranda I heard Lord Otori’s voice. For a moment I thought he must have returned to the room and was speaking to me, but a woman’s voice answered him. It was Lady Maruyama.

  I knew I should not listen. It was a whispered conversation that no one could hear but me. I went into the room, slid the door shut, and lay down on the mattress, willing myself to fall asleep. But my ears had a longing for sound that I could not deny, and every word dropped clearly into them.

  They spoke of their love for each other, their few meetings, their plans for the future. Much of what they said was guarded and brief, and much of it I did not understand then. I learned that Lady Maruyama was on her way to the capital to see her daughter, and that she feared Iida would again insist on marriage. His own wife was unwell and not expected to live. The only son she had borne him, also sickly, was a disappointment to him.

  “You will marry no one but me,” he whispered, and she replied, “It is my only desire. You know it.” He then swore to her he would never take a wife, nor lie with any woman, unless it were she, and he spoke of some strategy he had, but did not spell it out. I heard my own name and conceived that it involved me in some way. I realized there was a long-existing enmity between him and Iida that went all the way back to the battle of Yaegahara.

  “We will die on the same day,” he said. “I cannot live in a world that does not include you.”

  Then the whispering turned to other sounds, those of passion between a man and a woman. I put my fingers in my ears. I knew about desire, had satisfied my own with the other boys of my village, or with girls in the brothel, but I knew nothing of love. Whatever I heard, I vowed to myself I would never speak of it. I would keep these secrets as close as the Hidden keep theirs. I was thankful I had no voice.

  I did not see the lady again. We left early the next morning, an hour or so after sunrise. It was already warm; monks were sprinkling water in the temple cloisters and the air smelled of dust. The maids at the inn had brought us tea, rice, and soup before we left, one of them stifling a yawn as she set the dishes before me, and then apologizing to me and laughing. It was the girl who had patted me on the arm the day before, and when we left she came out to cry, “Good luck, little lord! Good journey! Don’t forget us here!”

  I wished I was staying another night. The lord laughed at it, teasing me and saying he would have to protect me from the girls in Hagi. He could hardly have slept the previous night, yet his high spirits were still evident. He strode along the highway with more energy than usual. I thought we would take the post road to Yamagata, but instead we went through the town, following a river smaller than the wide one that flowed alongside the main road. We crossed it where it ran fast and narrow between boulders, and headed once more up the side of a mountain.

  We had brought food with us from the inn for the day’s walk, for once we were beyond the small villages along the river, we saw no one. It was a narrow, lonely path, and a steep climb. When we reached the top we stopped and ate. It was late afternoon, and the sun sent slanting shadows across the plain below us. Beyond it, towards the East, lay range after range of mountains turning indigo and steel-gray.

  “That is where the capital is,” Lord Otori said, following my gaze.

  I thought he meant Inuyama, and I was puzzled.

  He saw it and went on, “No, the real capital, of the whole country—where the Emperor lives. Way beyond the farthest mountain range. Inuyama lies to the southeast.” He pointed back in the direction we had come. “It’s because we are so far from the capital, and the Emperor is so weak, that war lords like Iida can do as they please.” His mood was turning somber again. “And below us is the scene of the Otori’s worst defeat, where my father was killed. That is Yaegahara. The Otori were betrayed by the Noguchi, who changed sides and joined Iida. More than ten thousand died.” He looked at me and said, “I know what it is like to see those closest to you slaughtered. I was not much older than you are now.”

  I stared out at the empty plain. I could not imagine what a battle was like. I thought of the blood of ten thousand men soaking into the earth of Yaegahara. In the moist haze the sun was turning red, as if it had drawn up the blood from the land. Kites wheeled below us, calling mournfully.

  “I did not want to go to Yamagata,” Lord Otori said as we began to descend the path. “Partly because I am too well known there, and for other reasons. One day I will tell them to you. But it means we will have to sleep outside tonight, grass for our pillow, for there is no town near enough to stay in. We will cross the fief border by a secret route I know, and then we will be in Otori territory, safely out of reach of Sadamu.”

  I did not want to spend the night on the lonely plain. I was afraid of ten thousand ghosts, and of the ogres and goblins that dwelled in the forest around it. The murmur of a stream sounded to me like the voice of the water spirit, and every time a fox barked or an owl hooted I came awake, my pulse racing. At one stage the earth itself shook, in a slight tremor, making the trees rustle and dislodging stones somewhere in the distance. I thought I could hear the voices of the dead, calling for revenge, and I tried to pray, but all I could feel was a vast emptiness. The secret god, whom the Hidden worship, had been dispersed with my family. Away from them, I had no contact with him.

  Next to me Lord Otori slept as peacefully as if he had been in the guest room of the inn. Yet, I knew that, even more than I was, he would have been aware of the demands of the dead. I thought with trepidation about the world I was entering—a world that I knew nothing about, the world of the clans, with their strict rules and harsh codes. I was entering it on the whim of this lord, whose sword had beheaded a man in front of my eyes, who as good as owned me. I shivered in the damp night air.

  We rose before dawn and, as the sky was turning gray, crossed the river that marked the boundary to the Otori domain.

  After Yaegahara the Otori, who had formerly ruled the whole of the Middle Country, were pushed back by the Tohan into a narrow strip of land between the last range of mountains and the northern sea. On the main post road the barrier was guarded by Iida’s men, but in this wild isolated country there were many places where it was possible to slip across the border, and most of the peasants and farmers still considered themselves Otori and had no love for the Tohan. Lord Otori told me all this as we walked that day, the sea now always on our right-hand side. He also told me about the countryside, pointed out the farming methods used, the dikes built for irrigation, the nets the fishermen wove, the way they extracted salt from the sea. He was interested in everything and knew about everything. Gradually the path became a road and grew busier. Now there were farmers going to market at the next village, carrying yams and greens, eggs and dried mushrooms, lotus root and bamboo. We stopped at the market and bought new straw sandals, for ours were falling to pieces.

  That night, when we came to the inn, everyone there knew Lord Otori. They ran out to greet him with exclamations of delight, and flattened themselves to the ground in front of him. The best rooms were prepared, and at the evening meal course after course of delicious food appeared. He seemed to change before my eyes. Of course I had known he was of high birth, of the warrior class, but I still had no idea exactly who he was or what part he played in the hierarchy of the clan. However, it was dawning on me that it must be exalted. I became even more shy in his presence. I felt that everyone was looking at me sideways, wondering what I was doing, longing to send me packing with a cuff on the ear.

  The next morning he was wearing clothes befitting his station; horses were waiting
for us, and four or five retainers. They grinned at each other a bit when they saw I knew nothing about horses, and they seemed surprised when Lord Otori told one of them to take me on the back of his horse, although of course none of them dared say anything. On the journey they tried to talk to me—they asked me where I’d come from and what my name was—but when they found I was mute, they decided I was stupid, and deaf too. They talked loudly to me in simple words, using sign language.

  I didn’t care much for jogging along on the back of the horse. The only horse I’d ever been close to was Iida’s, and I thought all horses might bear me a grudge for the pain I’d caused that one. And I kept wondering what I would do when we got to Hagi. I imagined I would be some kind of servant, in the garden or the stables. But it turned out Lord Otori had other plans for me.

  On the afternoon of the third day since the night we had spent on the edge of Yaegahara, we came to the city of Hagi, the castle town of the Otori. It was built on an island flanked by two rivers and the sea. From a spit of land to the town itself ran the longest stone bridge I had ever seen. It had four arches, through which the ebbing tide raced, and walls of perfectly fitted stone. I thought it must have been made by sorcery, and when the horses stepped onto it I couldn’t help closing my eyes. The roar of the river was like thunder in my ears, but beneath it I could hear something else—a kind of low keening that made me shiver.

  At the center of the bridge Lord Otori called to me. I slipped from the horse’s back and went to where he had halted. A large boulder had been set into the parapet. It was engraved with characters.

  “Can you read, Takeo?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bad luck for you. You will have to learn!” He laughed. “And I think your teacher will make you suffer! You’ll be sorry you left your wild life in the mountains.”

  He read aloud to me: “ ‘The Otori clan welcomes the just and the loyal. Let the unjust and the disloyal beware.’ ” Beneath the characters was the crest of the heron.

  I walked alongside his horse to the end of the bridge. “They buried the stonemason alive beneath the boulder,” Lord Otori remarked offhandedly, “so he would never build another bridge to rival this one, and so he could guard his work forever. You can hear his ghost at night talking to the river.”

  Not only at night. It chilled me, thinking of the sad ghost imprisoned within the beautiful thing he had made, but then we were in the town itself, and the sounds of the living drowned out the dead.

  Hagi was the first city I had ever been in, and it seemed vast and overwhelmingly confusing. My head rang with sounds: cries of street sellers, the clack of looms from within the narrow houses, the sharp blows of stonemasons, the snarling bite of saws, and many that I’d never heard before and could not identify. One street was full of potters, and the smell of the clay and the kiln hit my nostrils. I’d never heard a potter’s wheel before, or the roar of the furnace. And lying beneath all the other sounds were the chatter, cries, curses, and laughter of human beings, just as beneath the smells lay the ever-present stench of their waste.

  Above the houses loomed the castle, built with its back to the sea. For a moment I thought that was where we were heading, and my heart sank, so grim and foreboding did it look, but we turned to the east, following the Nishigawa river to where it joined the Higashigawa. To our left lay an area of winding streets and canals where tiled-roofed walls surrounded many large houses, just visible through the trees.

  The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds, and the air smelled of rain. The horses quickened their step, knowing they were nearly home. At the end of the street a wide gate stood open. The guards had come out from the guardhouse next to it and dropped to their knees, heads bowed, as we went past.

  Lord Otori’s horse lowered its head and rubbed it roughly against me. It whinnied and another horse answered from the stables. I held the bridle, and the lord dismounted. The retainers took the horses and led them away.

  He strode through the garden toward the house. I stood for a moment, hesitant, not knowing whether to follow him or go with the men, but he turned and called my name, beckoning to me.

  The garden was full of trees and bushes that grew, not like the wild trees of the mountain, dense and pressed together, but each in its own place, sedate and well trained. And yet, every now and then I thought I caught a glimpse of the mountain as if it had been captured and brought here in miniature.

  It was full of sound, too—the sound of water flowing over rocks, trickling from pipes. We stopped to wash our hands at the cistern, and the water ran away tinkling like a bell, as though it were enchanted.

  The house servants were already waiting on the veranda to greet their master. I was surprised there were so few, but I learned later that Lord Otori lived in great simplicity. There were three young girls, an older woman, and a man of about fifty years. After the bows the girls withdrew and the two old people gazed at me in barely disguised amazement.

  “He is so like . . . !” the woman whispered.

  “Uncanny!” the man agreed, shaking his head.

  Lord Otori was smiling as he stepped out of his sandals and entered the house. “I met him in the dark! I had no idea till the following morning. It’s just a passing likeness.”

  “No, far more than that,” the old woman said, leading me inside. “He is the very image.” The man followed, gazing at me with lips pressed together as though he had just bitten on a pickled plum—as though he foresaw nothing but trouble would spring from my introduction into the house.

  “Anyway, I’ve called him Takeo,” the lord said over his shoulder. “Heat the bath and find clothes for him.”

  The old man grunted in surprise.

  “Takeo!” the woman exclaimed. “But what’s your real name?”

  When I said nothing, just shrugged and smiled, the man snapped, “He’s a half-wit!”

  “No, he can talk perfectly well,” Lord Otori returned impatiently. “I’ve heard him talk. But he saw some terrible things that silenced him. When the shock has faded he’ll speak again.”

  “Of course he will,” said the old woman, smiling and nodding at me. “You come with Chiyo. I’ll look after you.”

  “Forgive me, Lord Shigeru,” the old man said stubbornly—I guessed these two had known the lord since he was a child, and had brought him up—“but what are your plans for the boy? Is he to be found work in the kitchen or the garden? Is he to be apprenticed? Has he any skills?”

  “I intend to adopt him,” Lord Otori replied. “You can start the procedures tomorrow, Ichiro.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Ichiro looked stunned, but he could not have been more flabbergasted than I was. Chiyo seemed to be trying not to smile. Then they both spoke together. She murmured an apology and let the old man speak first.

  “It’s very unexpected,” he said huffily. “Did you plan this before you left on your journey?”

  “No, it happened by chance. You know my grief after my brother’s death and how I’ve sought relief in travel. I found this boy, and since then somehow every day the grief seems more bearable.”

  Chiyo clasped her hands together. “Fate sent him to you. As soon as I set eyes on you, I knew you were changed—healed in some way. Of course no one can ever replace Lord Takeshi. . . .”

  Takeshi! So Lord Otori had given me a name like that of his dead brother. And he would adopt me into the family. The Hidden speak of being reborn through water. I had been reborn through the sword.

  “Lord Shigeru, you are making a terrible mistake,” Ichiro said bluntly. “The boy is a nobody, a commoner. . . . What will the clan think? Your uncles will never allow it. Even to make the request is an insult.”

  “Look at him,” Lord Otori said. “Whoever his parents were, someone in his past was not a commoner. Anyway, I rescued him from the Tohan. Iida wanted him killed. Since I saved his life, he belongs to me, and so I must adopt him. To be safe from the Tohan he must have the protection of the clan. I kille
d a man for him, possibly two.”

  “A high price. Let’s hope it goes no higher,” Ichiro snapped. “What had he done to attract Iida’s attention?”

  “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing more. There’s no need to go into his history. He can be a distant relative of my mother’s. Make something up.”

  “The Tohan have been persecuting the Hidden,” Ichiro said astutely. “Tell me he’s not one of them.”

  “If he was, he is no longer,” Lord Otori replied with a sigh. “All that is in the past. It’s no use arguing, Ichiro. I have given my word to protect this boy, and nothing will make me change my mind. Besides, I have grown fond of him.”

  “No good will come of it,” Ichiro said.

  The old man and the younger one stared at each other for a moment. Lord Otori made an impatient movement with his hand, and Ichiro lowered his eyes and bowed reluctantly. I thought how useful it would be to be a lord—to know that you would always get your own way in the end.

  There was a sudden gust of wind, the shutters creaked, and with the sound the world became unreal for me again. It was as if a voice spoke inside my head: This is what you are to become. I wanted desperately to turn back time to the day before I went mushrooming on the mountain—back to my old life with my mother and my people. But I knew my childhood lay behind me, done with, out of reach forever. I had to become a man and endure whatever was sent me.

  With these noble thoughts in my mind I followed Chiyo to the bathhouse. She obviously had no idea of the decision I’d come to: She treated me like a child, making me take off my clothes and scrubbing me all over before leaving me to soak in the scalding water. Later, she came back with a light cotton robe and told me to put it on. I did exactly as I was told. What else could I do? She rubbed my hair with a towel, and combed it back, tying it in a top knot.