The crone grinned, still singing.
. . . my garment’s hanging sleeves sodden with falling rain.
Along my forearms little hairs prickled. A whiff of the ash-sour smell of the tree grove caressed my cheek and was gone. A small flame leapt to life inside my belly, sparked by the song. Tears blurred at the corner of my eyes. Deep inside, that flame licked all along my ribs, startling brushes of pain. A presence seeped into the prop cart, filling the air between the crone and I, soft as cotton, piercing as the crone’s needle, pressing my skin.
Otherness. The otherness of kami. This crone sang Jindo and the kami of the tree-grove responded, waking, shaking drowsiness from itself like fall leaves in a high wind. Besides my mother, only Norinaga and the Pretender Emperor had ever sang the kami awake in my presence. My heart leaped. This crone was a peasant, like me. I’d spent so long alone with the kami since mother’s disappearance, how wondrous it would be if there was another like me! I stopped fighting the pull of the song. My voice joined hers.
In the peaceful light of the ever-shining sun,
Let the spring grasses cushion the tender soles of weary feet.
Our voices twined together, filling the room, chasing the prickles up and down my back, goading the otherness to swirl and rush through the piled boxes, around the crone’s embroidery, tugging at the trailing thread. A feeling like the long sigh and trembling pleasure of a stretch after rising from a long hot bath filled my body. Into every nook and cranny the song twined strands of the crone, myself, and the tree-grove kami. Skin stretched to accommodate the lovely, full feeling, and for an instant I had a sense of the completeness of myself—every limb, every hair, every stray thought—with an undercurrent of open-hearted appreciation, the blessing of the tree-grove kami.
The crone made a series of gestures in the air with her needle, sang a final verse, and the tree-grove kami flowed out of the cart. The spell broke.
I gasped for breath, ribs heaving like I’d run up the thousand stairs of Hell Mountain. The crone cackled again, apparently amused by my puzzled expression.
“Not quite the croak you’d expect of a toad like me. Well, then, you’re no crow, either. More like a bush warbler, aren’t you?”
My throat was thick, the flame still ember-warm in my belly. “How?”
“Are you stone dumb, girl? I’m a Jindo singer, same as you.”
“Shamaness.”
The crone threw down her embroidery. “No need to gussy it up with names like that. You and I ain’t no kind of hoity-toity magic users, no matter what my boy thinks. Or the Emperor fears. Leave that to the foxes. I’m just an old lady singing to the trees.”
“You called the tree-grove kami and then . . . what . . . dismissed the spirit?”
“Master tells me you done the same thing before, put some spirits to sleep that were fixin’ to explode.”
Hell Mountain. When the crone said “my boy” and “master,” she meant Zeami? Was this his mother?
The cart shook. Somebody outside had picked up the yoke. With a jolt, we began to move. Zeami had done it. We were headed back to the capital. I made to peer outside the door curtain, but the crone, moving faster than I thought possible for her age, moved to stop me. “You stay safe inside here with me, little warbler. They’re blind and deaf to the kami out there, all busy with breaking camp, but if you stick that big nose out, that’ll catch their attention for sure.”
“How did you do that?”
The crone held up the embroidery. “A long week’s work, I can tell you, with a needle so dull you could—”
“No,” I interrupted. “How did you sing the kami away so quickly?”
“Poor warbler. Thought you were the only one, did you? Well, we are quieter these days. Or dead!” The cackle came back. “Dead quiet! That’s a good one.”
Could Norinaga-Hosokawa have fooled me? Did he and the Pretender Emperor conceal the existence of other Jindo singers? Maybe he’d made me feel special just to manipulate a clueless, peasant girl. Gullible, I’d fallen right into the trap.
“Will you teach me that hand movement you made?”
The crone stopped cackling. “Master put you in here for that very reason, now, didn’t he? So you can learn how to ask the kami’s help? Need to do something about that straw doll curse.”
If she’d spun me around like a top I couldn’t have been dizzier. Zeami. How long had he known of the curse and my Jindo singing? Had he known ever since the first time I saw him at the temple? I had a dawning sense of how long a game this actually was, and Zeami the deeper player. He meant to aid the Ashikagas; I had to trust that. If he meant ill, I was playing entirely into his hands. He’d put the best bait in this trap: the crone.
I wanted to leap on her and drink down her song like the men gulping cold wheat tea after a day spent bent hunched over rice seedlings in the hot sun.
“I’ve been taught the ofuda,” I said
“By that sly fox?” said the crone. “You’re just wide-eyed enough to believe he taught you everything you need to banish an evil spirit.”
Sly fox? No surprise Zeami and the crone knew about Hosokawa-Norinaga. He wasn’t exactly a quiet presence even in his Hosokawa disguise. I could sing the kami like Norinaga had shown me with the spirit of Otowa waterfall. That wasn’t enough?
I met the crone’s laughing gaze. Here was a human, like me, and all of a sudden I could think of no earthly reason to trust a fox. A feeling like cobwebs shredding, letting in the light of day touched my face. I felt a hot blush creep down the back of my neck. How could I have ever trusted Norinaga? I was a foolish crow. He was the enemy. He tried to kill Ashikaga on Hell Mountain. His men had killed my sister, Flower, and hurt May. His smooth words lulled me into believing his motivations had changed with the Pretender Emperor’s death—but how could they? Was I so starved for attention that I truly thought myself worthy of the fox general’s special attention?
I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, needing the clarity of the small pain. I’d believed because I’d wanted to. So desperate for a Jindo ally here in Kyoto, feeling the sharp bite of the other handmaiden’s disdain, that I’d allowed Ashikaga’s enemy to entangle me in his plots. I’d come so close to agreeing to Norinaga’s plan to use the yurei to “discredit” Ashikaga in front of the court. Would Norinaga have even left my lordling alive?
It was just as foolish to blindly trust another. My heart needed badly to believe this crone, surrounded by air that still felt a touch bruised by the passing of the tree-grove kami. Her song was a hook with a curved tine stuck deep in me.
“Do you think he meant me ill?”
The crone gave another cackle. I was heartily sick of that laugh. “You’re like a peeping chick hiding under its own wing. That fox will gobble you right up in one bite!”
Old crone or no, my patience was stretched thin. “This is what he taught me.” I repeated the last verse of the song we’d sung together, reaching for the verdant, slim presence of the tree-grove kami I could feel still hovering not too far behind us. My palms formed straight, tense flats. I chopped the air as Norinaga had shown me; five horizontal, four vertical. “Rin, pyo, zai, zen—”
“Enough,” said the crone, shaking with her laughter. “You’ll make me burst a lung with your flailing about. A peeping chick? No, a strutting pheasant more like it!”
I rocked back on my heels. “You think you know so much!”
The crone drew herself up, unkinking her back, brushing tangled bangs out of her face. Something hard glittered in her eyes. In high-court inflection she spoke words in a modulated voice with no hint of rasp. “It is you who mistakenly thinks she understands. Think you a peasant hick from the North woods can best me? Let alone the dead spirit of the Daimyo’s wife?”
And like that she bent over, huddled in on herself, the regal tone and aura erased. She cackled. “No strutting pheasant can use that ofuda.” She sighed. “Work, work, work, that’s all my boy wants now. It’s sew this button on here, make me a warrior’s crest, cook this, and go there. I should be sitting by a brazier drinking cloud mist tea, but he and his schemes give me no rest.” Her sharp gaze raked my face. “And now he wants me to make an eagle from a chick?” She threw her hand up in defeat. “I’m no bodhisattva.”
“What do you mean an eagle?” I said carefully, not sure what tone to take with the crone now. She’d shown me a glimpse of something more than the old biddy she appeared to be. If she was Zeami’s mother, than she was certainly a higher station than the daughter of a Daimyo’s cook. I’d thought her a woman born in the Goat Year—bossy and touchy. Now I revised my estimation back. She was Ox through and through. Eccentric and stubborn and sure of her own way. The subtlety hard won in Kyoto was useless on an Ox. “I can sing the kami.”
“It’ll take more than that for the yurei, missy.”
If I had hackles, her tone would have raised them. Be patient, I told myself firmly. Don’t let Tiger pride get in the way of learning from this crone. My tongue foolishly ignored my head’s wisdom. “Hell Mountain was exploding and I bore the kami’s anger and sang it back to rest.”
“There’s a spark! Maybe this won’t be back-breaking work after all. Listen, warbler. You go about with that earnest heart shining in your breast, singing words the kami round these parts haven’t heard in a decade, and sure enough they sit upright and take notice. But that yurei, it won’t be wooed with a pretty tune and an open heart.”
“I’m not afraid of the yurei.” My words didn’t banish a cold shudder. So hungry. So tired. So alone. The yurei’s despair had seeped into me, and those terrible benihana-painted lips and eyes all-over black had terrified me as surely as lightning in the night made Little Brother shriek.
“You must hold yourself like you be the Emperor himself, and you must believe it.”
“The Emperor?” I was who I was. A peasant from a Northern Village, a hick. “I am closer to the kami then that silk-wrapped court could ever be. How will putting on courtier airs make a difference?”
The crone jabbed a raggedy-nailed heart finger into the tender spot where my chest joined my shoulder. “You’re not listening. Settle in and open those abalone-shell-sized ears of yours. Putting on airs, indeed. Fat lot of good that’d do you. I am no tanuki stuck in a teapot, warbler. You have to hold yourself like you are the son of heaven, expect obedience as if the whole world down to the thinnest blade of grass and speckled grain of sand are yours to command. Otherwise you call the kami and all that spiritual essence just gonna feed the yurei’s hunger. Make it blow up bigger and sharper than a blowfish.”
I rubbed my shoulder. “I am not noble.”
The crone put the back of her hand to her forehead. “I am talking to a wall, here. Of course you are no noble. It doesn’t matter. You stand there as a hick and the yurei will gobble you up with that young Ashikaga for sauce! You have to become noble, make it real, and then those fancy hand gestures the fox taught you will stop the yurei in its tracks.”
“How?”
“How did my boy make himself into an old woman? Or a young Lord’s daughter? By pretending. Pretend so hard and long that it didn’t matter anymore what folks knew was under his robe or under the mask. He became what he acted to be. You act like one thing long enough, does it matter what you started out as?”
I thought of long, slender fingers on elegant, strong hands. The corded muscles across Ashikaga’s back from bow and tumbling practice with the guards. That was truth. As well as what my lordling was—both to the world and under a robe. A firmness gathered around my ribs. I could do this thing. For my lordling. For me.
“Teach me.”
“Simmer down. Not much we can do in this old cart. We got a heap of work to do and only this morning and an afternoon to teach you what took my boy years of practice. Let me think on it.”
The crone thought on it all morning as we rattled along together back to Kyo no Miyako. Urgency joined the firmness in my chest, but all the crone did was eye me sidelong and mutter when she wasn’t sewing on her crest. At our stop for the midday meal, they finally let me out of the cart. I tried to lend a hand, but the crone slapped at me every time I reached for kindling or a pot handle.
The rest of the troupe was male—youths and grown-ups. They didn’t have the look of the Kanze-za actors. No well-oiled queues or silk fabric here. Just the look of the scrappy, itinerant actors such as occasionally found their way to Ashikaga village. I returned their curious stares, wondering if this troupe was just another disguise.
The arrogant youth gracefully folded himself beside me on the grass, balancing two bowls of gruel dotted with chopped mizuna leaves. He set one on the ground and pushed it towards me with his littlest finger.
His rudeness didn’t blunt my hunger. I picked up the bowl. “Thanks,” I said.
The youth help up a hand, palm out, as if to stop any more words. “Zeami tasked me with your care until we reach Kyoto,” he said to the air in general. “But don’t mistake that for desire to get chummy.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied, slurping salty gruel into a stomach still all knotted up from the cart ride. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The youth bent his head over the bowl, but not before I glimpsed the side of his mouth quirking up.
Once the meal was cleared away, the youth followed me back to the prop-cart. I climbed in and crawled all the way to the back, shifting aside boxes and reed baskets to make a comfortable perch. Settling myself down with a grunt, I was surprised to see the youth piling folded robes into cushion. He sniffed with distaste.
“Ah!” said the crone, poking her head through the door. “All the sweetfish are in the weir. Now we can get cooking.” She sat down heavily next to the youth. “This boy,” she said without a trace of rasp or country inflection, “started life as an Eta—piss and blood and excrement.”
The youth choked, spluttering and coughing with a horrified look in his eyes.
Eta? I cupped a palm over my mouth to hide a shocked smile. The boy too high and mighty to wait on a hick country peasant was an untouchable? What had been his family’s duty, I wondered. Tanners? Night-waste folk? Or maybe butcher. It didn’t matter. Once an Eta, always an Eta. Unless his mother had been a prostitute from a peasant or merchant family fallen on hard times. But the crone had called him “Eta,” not “Hinin.”
“This woman doesn’t have water boiling in her kettle,” said the youth.
“Mitsusuke, hold that inflated tongue,” said the crone. “Your secret is safe. This girl keeps Ashikaga family secrets. You think she’d trouble herself over a nobody like you?”
Mitsusuke turned up his nose, mouth settling into a thin, hard line. I met the crone’s eyes briefly, trying to gauge her motives. How much did she know? It was possible Zeami had let slip something of my lordling to this woman.
Mitsusuke must not have held the crone in the same awe I did, as he didn’t stay silenced for more than an instant. “She’s a lost cause,” he said. “You can’t possibly expect me to—”
“No expectations of you other than sneering,” said the crone. And then to me, “Mostly what I need him for is to help you believe.”
“You can’t turn a crow into a snowy egret. My case was obviously a mistake—a spirit born into the wrong body on the wheel of fate. This one . . .” Mitsusuke trailed off as if it was clear to all present the futility of the crone’s plans.
You can’t turn a crow into a snowy egret. I’d said those words to Little Turtle not so long ago. Hearing them from Mitsusuke made my teeth grit.
“She doesn’t need to fool the Emp
eror’s court. Just a spirit.”
Mitsusuke let out a disbelieving snort. “Look at those hunched shoulders. Her face is browner than an acorn.” Each word stung, but the pain spurred on the little flame of anger that merrily burned now inside me. I would show him. Stupid Eta. At least I got this body through honest work; not prancing about on a stage with—
The crone wrenched my shoulders back with her gnarled hands. “Boy,” she said. “Say those last lines the shite-role speaks as Atsumori from my boy’s latest play—the ones where he commands the monk waki-role to say prayers.”
Mitsusuke blinked. In the space of a few breaths, his entire demeanor changed. He straightened into the ramrod posture of a warrior, dipping his chin and arranging an expression of weariness that added years to his look. “This world is more transient than dewdrops on the leaves of grass, or the moon reflected in the water. Once they are given life from the Pure One, there is no being that will not perish. Human life is but fifty years.” He went on intoning the lines of a battle-scarred warrior, asking a monk for prayers to release him from emotional ties to the mortal world.
The Crone made me repeat the lines word-for-word eight times using Mitsusuke’s exact inflections. She even forced Mitsusuke to chant “Rin, pyo, zai, zen,” while making slashes in the air so I could copy his every move. It was no use. His words and movements were as graceful and powerful as the wing movement of an egret, while I still flapped about like a crow pouncing on a dead snake. But every time a burst of exasperated air came out of Mitsusuke’s teeth, my resolve hardened.
I would do this. Just to wipe that arrogant look off his face. Well into the evening hour of the dog I started to hear occasional voices of passing travelers outside the prop cart’s walls. The constant jarring of wooden wheels on the Oshu-Kaido’s ruts settled into occasional bumps. We were entering the packed-dirt roads of Kyoto’s outskirts.
“You’re no Zeami,” muttered the crone when I accidentally used the peasant inflection for “go” for the hundredth time. “But you’re at least as believable as this Eta boy a month after he came to us.”
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 21