by India Millar
4
They say there are lands
Beyond the sea where wonders
Happen. I agree.
I thought I really had died. Suddenly, there was no pressure. No terror. I was floating on top of the water, and all around me there was noise. Not a loud noise, rather it was something like the hum of a busy workshop, where everybody knew what they were doing, and were getting on with it.
“Mineko, get out of the way. Get to the steps.”
The voice was right in my ear, and I obeyed automatically, half wallowing, half staggering to where I vaguely thought the steps might be. My groping hands found the side of the bath and I flopped on the steps, coughing and spitting up hot bath water. When I could see, I gasped with disbelief, and called out loud, “No! Be careful! Geisha, be careful!” Even at the time, I knew what I was saying was ridiculous. But I meant it. With all my heart.
At first sight, I thought Bigger had been transformed into some sort of sea dragon, all coils and limbs. Then I realized I was wrong.
The geisha had finally had enough.
Masaki must have launched herself at him. She had her arms wrapped tightly around Bigger’s neck and was dragging his head back. Her teeth were biting deeply into his ear, her lips drawn back so she looked like a snarling vixen. Each twin had hold of an arm, and from their expressions they would have been very happy to have torn him in two. Naruko appeared to be simply standing in front of Bigger at first glance, then I saw the snarl on her pretty face and realized her hands were very, very busy underneath the water, and from the expression of horror on Bigger’s face I guessed she was inflicting far more damage than I had managed.
His mouth was open in a silent scream, his teeth bared. Was he actually frightened? Either that or deeply shocked. As I watched, he thumped Naruko hard on her breasts, forcing her to let go. When she was loose, he shook the other geisha off and barged past me, practically running out of the bathhouse. We all watched him go, and then I realized poor Masaki was thrashing about in the water yet again, and we all grabbed for her at once.
None of us could be bothered calling for the maids. We hopped out of the bath water and into fresh robes, piling down to my room and collapsing on the tatami. I think it was Naruko who started laughing first, and then all of us were laughing together, wiping our streaming eyes and giggling.
“Thank you,” I managed to say eventually. “Thank you, all of you. Another few seconds, and he would have killed me.”
“And me,” Masaki piped up. “It was awful. I really did think my last day had come.”
Sobered, we all nodded.
“Do you think he’ll tell Akira?” Naruko asked.
“I doubt it,” I said without even thinking. “He wouldn’t dare. Bigger, made to look a fool by a few silly women? Akira would have him out of here in no time. Bigger would suddenly find himself working in one of the lattice houses, looking after the women that anybody can buy for a small coin. But I think we need to be careful from now on, geisha. Bigger isn’t going to forget today, and if he can get his revenge on us, he will.”
Each of them nodded and sighed.
“It was worth it, though.”
We all started back as if we had been stung. One of the twins had actually spoken. On her own. In Japanese.
“Thank you,” I said again, although awkwardly. We were all—apart from the twins, I suppose—thinking the same thing. Would they go running to Akira with the tale? They were his creatures, we all knew.
And if Bigger wouldn’t punish us, then Akira certainly would.
There was an awkward silence. The twins looked at each other, and again we could see that unspoken words were passing between the two. They were holding hands, as usual, but suddenly let go and folded their hands in their laps.
The twin nearest to me spoke with a distinctly aristocratic tone to her voice. Truly, today was a day of wonders!
“My name is Hoshimi. My sister’s name is Sayo.”
Starlight and Evening—beautiful names. All the other geisha were looking at me, their eyes wide. I nodded encouragingly.
“If you would like it, from now on Sayo will wear her hair parted to the right and I will part mine to the left so you can tell us apart.”
“Thank you.” I cleared my throat awkwardly. I could feel the other geisha silently urging me along, but there was no way at all that I could ask the question we were all wondering about. I had no need to bother. I got my answer anyway.
“We are very sorry.” Sayo was speaking now, her voice so like her sister’s that it was impossible to tell the difference. “We have wronged you all. We have taken the tale to Akira-san, we have told him everything that we have seen and heard here. But perhaps if you hear our story, you will forgive us?”
We all stared at them in fascination. I had obviously been appointed spokesman, as Naruko and Masaki both raised their eyebrows at me, their eyes wide with interest.
“Yes, please,” I said simply.
Both twins bowed their heads as Hoshimi began to speak. She leaned forward slightly, as if to emphasize her words. Sayo nodded along at intervals.
“We are well born.” It was a statement of fact, without snobbery or vanity. I bit back a smile and nodded seriously. “Our father is a middle ranking official at the emperor’s court.”
I raised my eyebrows. The twins were well born indeed. What in the name of all the gods were they doing here, in the Hidden House? As if reading my mind, Hoshimi raised her hand in a gesture that said, clearly, wait.
“Father had a wife, and a number of concubines. We were his only children to his wife, and only one of his concubines had a child. A son called Kosuke.” The name meant Rising Sun. An excellent name for an only boy. “Kosuke was born a long time after us, and we adored him. We looked after him and played with him as if he was our own child. We expected that father would divorce mother if she couldn’t have a boy child herself, but he didn’t. But mother was sickly, and father let us know that he would not put her aside as he was too fond of her. We guessed he meant he was willing to wait until some sickness claimed her life, but he didn’t have to wait that long. She died giving birth to her next child, a boy.”
Both twins bowed their heads. I resisted giving Hoshimi a shake, to make her carry on. Let her tell the tale in her own way, in her own time. Masaki was less patient.
“And the boy? What happened to him? Did he die as well?”
“No.” Sayo, this time. “He lived. Father found a good wet nurse for him, and he thrived for months. We were delighted to have a new brother, and father was ecstatic. But then, quite suddenly, the baby began to be ill. Just a cough and cold at first. Then his breathing became bad, and eventually it seemed that he just couldn’t breathe at all. Father sent for the best doctors, of course, and he was given all sorts of medicine, but he got no better. We tried to help, we really did. We took turns to sit with him, turned him on his side when we thought it might help, gave him his medicine. But nothing did any good. Then one day he yawned really widely to try and get some air, and we saw that his poor little throat was stuffed with what looked like fine spun silk.”
Hoshimi continued the tale as Sayo fell silent.
“We ran and told father about it, told him that the baby had been eating something strange, and it had grown in his throat and was choking him. He came and had a look, and sent a servant running for the doctor again. This time, the doctor said the baby wasn’t ill at all. Somebody had cursed him, and the magic had gone too far and there was nothing anybody could do. He was a brave man, that doctor. Father could have had his head off for that. But he didn’t. He sent him away, but nothing else. We thought he must be too upset about our little brother to care greatly about the doctor.”
We all nodded in sympathy for the poor, doomed baby. Both twins nodded their thanks.
“He did die, very soon after. We were all plunged into mourning, of course. We wondered if father might take his favorite concubine for his new wife, but she laughed at
us when we talked to her about it.
“‘I am not high enough class to marry into your family,’ she said. ‘My family is middle class, but not noble. Your father would never consider marriage with me, not for a minute. Anyway, I prefer life as his mistress. I have had his son. Even if he gets tired of me and puts me aside, he will give me an excellent present as a parting gift and make sure I never want for anything. If he went mad and married me, he would soon regret it and divorce me, and then where would I be? Probably out on the street with nothing more than the clothes on my back. Anyway, he’s been to see a fortune teller. The man read his palm and told your father that he isn’t going to have any more sons, so he’s going to adopt my Kosuke as his legal son, and everything will be fine.’”
Sayo took up the tale eagerly. “Father did adopt Kosuke, and for a long time, everything was very good. He grew into a fine, handsome boy, and we loved him. Even though Father put him first, of course, we still had a very good life. We got anything we wanted—clothes, jewelry, a little dog each. We didn’t have to lift a finger, there was a servant for everything. We didn’t have many friends, as Father was too important to be close to many people. That’s why we started to make up our own language, one that only we could understand. That way, we weren’t just sisters, we were best friends as well. Father used to laugh at us and say we were his special girls. And he promised that when the time came for us to marry, he would try and make sure that we were promised to brothers, so we could carry on living in the same house. We were very happy.”
Masaki, Naruko, and I stared at the twins stonily. Such a life as they had led, we couldn’t even begin to imagine. I thought of poor Carpi, abandoned at birth and exhibited in a cage in exchange for small coins by the burakumin—the dregs of Japanese society, the beggars and slaughterers of flesh, the people who emptied night soil for a living—who had saved her from certain death. All of us in the Hidden House had known hunger and fear, yet here was Sayo telling us casually about how rich she and her sister had been! The twins obviously understood our silence, as Sayo went on quickly.
“Please, understand that we are not telling you this to make us seem special. It is part of our story, that’s all.”
We geisha glanced at each other, and I shrugged. Whatever their past, the twins were here, the same as the rest of us. I was fascinated and wanted to know more. Bad as the Hidden House was for us geisha who had never been rich and pampered, it must be a very hell for the twins.
“Go on. What happened?” I asked.
Sayo took a deep breath and looked down at the tatami as she continued. “Kosuke died,” she said simply. “We were playing hide and seek with him. It was his turn to hide, and we spent a long, long time looking for him but couldn’t find him anywhere. We called out and told him how clever he was and that he could come out now, but he didn’t. After a while, we got bored trying to find him and decided that we would leave him alone to come out in his own good time. But he didn’t.”
Hoshimi carried on as her sister fell silent. We all held our breath, wondering what was to come next.
“When he didn’t appear for the evening meal, we started to get very worried. We set the servants looking for him, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. By next morning, we were frantic. Had somebody stolen him? we wondered. He was a handsome boy, it wouldn’t have been surprising. When nobody could find him by midday, we sent a servant to tell Father. He came home almost immediately, with a face set like stone. He stood us in front of him and demanded to know everything. When had we last seen Kosuke? What were we doing? Why hadn’t we sent for him sooner? We couldn’t tell him that we were too frightened to tell him Kosuke had disappeared and had just gone on hoping he would turn up, so we said nothing. He became very angry and shouted at us. Said we were jealous of the boy and had harmed him in some way. Father had never raised his voice to us before. We were so shocked we just stared at him.”
She trailed off. I leaned forward, urging her on silently. Masaki lost her patience first.
“What happened to him?” she asked bluntly.
“Father told the servants to search the house again, everywhere. Starting with the room where we had been playing hide and seek. To look everywhere, no matter how impossible it might seem that Kosuke could be there. We tried to tell him we had already asked the servants to do that, and that it hadn’t taken long as there weren’t many places where he could have hidden. Ours was a traditional house, you understand, with little furniture and all the closets just hidden behind sliding screens. But he didn’t listen. He sat himself down and stared out of the window, leaving us standing in front of him. We didn’t dare say a word, we just stood there, praying our brother would turn up safe. But he didn’t. Even though we had told the servants to look everywhere, they had obviously ignored places they thought were unlikely. It didn’t take them five minutes to come back, and one of the men had Kosuke’s body in his arms.”
We all gave a collective sigh. The twins were both blinking back tears and we waited politely until they felt up to going on.
“He looked as though he was just asleep,” Sayo said softly. “At first, we thought he really was sleeping, then Father started shouting at us. He said we had killed him. Murdered him in cold blood. Before we could answer him, he turned to the servant and demanded to know where he had found him. In the room we had been playing in, he said. In the large chest. The lid was down, and the catch was firmly caught in its hasp. We both started trying to talk to Father at once. We had been playing hide and seek, we explained. Kosuke must have climbed into the chest and managed to pull the lid down and then hadn’t been able to lift it again because the catch had fallen into place.
“‘Yes?” Father asked. ‘And I suppose your brother made no noise, when he found he was trapped? Didn’t knock and shout to try and get your attention?’
“We had gone out of the room to let him hide, we explained to him. The chest had been closed when we left him, and it never occurred to us that he might be inside it. There was hardly anywhere to hide in that room, so when we started to try and find him we just glanced around and then went outside to look for him. We thought he must have gone into the garden.”
We all felt the little boy’s pain and panic as he shouted for the help that never came until his air ran out and he suffocated. I thought of how I had felt that morning in the bath, drowning and frantic for air, and I winced and closed my eyes. That poor, poor child, dying alone with his family so near.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Father simply stood up and took Kosuke from the servant. He was almost out of the room when he turned back and glared at us.
“‘You have killed both my sons,’ he said. ‘I should have known that it was you two who put the curse on the baby. And now poor Kosuke is gone as well. I have no children now.’
“We both ran to him and threw ourselves at his feet. We tried to hang on to his robe, to make him stay, but he kicked us away. He trod on my hand when he walked out and he never even noticed,” Sayo added sadly. “That was the last time we saw Father. We tried to go to him, to talk to him and explain it was an accident, but he had given the servants orders that we were not to be admitted to him. We no longer existed for him.”
Hoshimi shrugged and took up the story. “Nobody in the house spoke to us. We were given no food or drink. None of the servants helped us to dress or looked after us in the bath. It was as if we were ghosts. We were bewildered and frightened. The next day, a strange man walked into our room and told us we were to go with him. We didn’t like the look of him at all. He was quite well dressed, but he spoke with a very rough accent and he looked at us as if we were goods on a market stall. In spite of the fact that it wouldn’t have been polite, we would have refused to follow him if he hadn’t said that our father had told him to take us with him.”
“And you ended up here?” Naruko asked breathlessly.
The twins shook their heads.
“No,” Sayo said. “We followed
the man outside and he bundled us into a large norimono. It wasn’t as luxurious as the palanquin we usually used, but it reassured us a little. Perhaps Father had decided that we should leave the house until his pain healed a little. We thought that was likely, so we stayed quiet. The rough man walked alongside the norimono, shouting orders to the bearers. He had closed the curtains, so we had no idea where we were going. It seemed to us that we traveled for the best part of a day. In any event, we were soon very hungry and very thirsty. And even worse, as we hadn’t had a bath for over a day, we were sure we stank. And with every minute that passed, we were more and more frantic with fear. When we eventually stopped, the man called to us to get out. We did as we were told, but nearly died of terror when we looked around. We tried to run away, but the man must have been expecting it as he grabbed each of us by the wrist and shouted to the bearers to grab us. Next thing we knew, the bearers had their arms around our waists and were hauling us into the building we had stopped in front of.”
“Where were you, then?” I asked.
“In the Floating World,” Sayo said simply. “We didn’t know it at the time, of course. Then, we had never heard of it. But we knew we were in a nasty, dirty side street, full of smelly low-class people. And we were on our own, without so much as a maid between us! We were bewildered and lost. We had no idea what was happening, why we were there. We both burst into tears, and the man laughed at us.”
We geisha glanced at each other. In spite of the fact that we had never known the kind of privileged life the twins had enjoyed, we could understand their fear. We had all felt something similar at some time in the Hidden House.
Naruko reached out and patted Sayo’s hand gently. “Go on.”
Sayo pulled a face, her thoughts obviously back on that terrible day, but then she continued. “The men bundled us into the house. We screamed our heads off, but nobody took any notice. No, I lie. A few of the men in the street laughed and pointed at us, but that was all. We were left in a bare little room for hours, and finally an old woman came in. She pinched and poked at us both, and then ordered us to take our kimonos and our underthings off. We were too frightened to do anything at all, so we just looked at her. She hit us, with her cane. Nobody had ever raised their hand to us in our entire life, and we were horrified. She said if we didn’t strip, then one of the men would do it for us, so we took our clothes off. When we were naked, she walked around us and had a good look at us. That was bad enough, but then she ordered us to squat, and she pushed her hand into our black moss and nipped us. We thought we were going to die of shame, but she seemed pleased. She took our lovely kimonos away and gave us some rags in exchange that a burakumin wouldn’t have worn. When we were dressed, she called for a servant and we were given some rice to eat. It was disgusting stuff that tasted as if it had been cooked days ago, but we were so hungry we scraped the bowl.