by Jeff Strand
* * * * *
Her father’s business partner took over the tea shop and, with it, Hikari, but he treated her as a servant rather than as a daughter. He made her sleep on a mat in the tea shop at night, rather than take her into his home as a true daughter. She had no other relatives on this side of the ocean to notice or protest.
He sold her family’s house, and all their fine things, and kept the money for himself. What he could not sell, he stuffed in a box and stored in the attic above the tea shop.
She watched the attic door, cut into the ceiling of the tea shop, as she worked all day and all night cleaning behind the customers, an endless series of chores that took her far longer than she could recall ever requiring from either of her parents.
She knew that he used a special long pole with a hook at its end to unlock the attic door, which then swung open, releasing a retractable wooden ladder that slid all the way to the floor.
Everything left that could remind her of her parents, that might even still smell of her parents, would be in that box, accessible to her, if she could only get the hooked pole. But, he brought it with him to work in the morning, and took it home with him at night, never letting it out of his sight.
He would forget some time, she kept telling herself, if only she watched and waited. When the opportunity came, she would take it.
* * * * *
At last, one night, he did forget.
She fumbled with the heavy pole and its hook until she found that she could anchor it against her stomach, to help keep it at the right angle to connect the hook with the latch. The door swung down, and the ladder clattered all the way to the floor.
She set the pole down, and climbed up the wooden ladder into the dark space of the attic. She felt along the walls and in the air above her head for some kind of string or switch to trigger a light, but found nothing.
She crawled between the boxes, felt for openings, and slid her hand in trying to determine which might contain her parents’ things. She felt papers, fabrics, and something slick and flat that might have been a tintype plate. Everything smelled musty. There were many boxes. Which was the one she wanted?
Cold ceramic, round, like the circle of her fist. A shock of hair. Fabric. A doll? She traced thin arms to a cup. Her mother’s doll! Her Chahakobi Ningyo, or tea-serving doll.
Her mother was much too old for conventional dolls, but this was something that had been in her family.
Hikari’s mother had told her before she died that it was very precious, and that Hikari should keep it with her always. She said the doll provided greatest comfort with a private cup of koicha—the thickest, strongest tea.
This was the right box. She lifted out the doll and then sifted through the other contents with her blind fingers. She pulled out what felt like photographs and tintypes. He could not sell those, and she wanted pictures of her parents more than anything.
She tucked the doll and pictures into the crook of her arm and climbed back down the ladder into the tea shop. By the light of the shop, she could see the pictures. Her mother and father. The three of them together. Portraits of each of her parents separately. She could hide them under her sleeping mat, and look at them at night when she was most lonely and frightened. It had been worth it to brave the attic.
She lifted the doll to her face and buried her nose in its fabric gown, that hid its clockwork springs. She thought she could catch the faintest hint of her mother’s perfume. She cradled it in her arms, grateful that he had not sold it. She supposed it was too well associated with her mother and the tea shop, and would have raised questions about how he was handling their property.
The tea-serving doll had been a clockwork marvel in her mother’s family for a century, and was still a conversation piece when her mother had demonstrated its use and spoken with pride about its history at the tea house.
When a tea cup was placed on its tray, the weight of a full cup triggered a mechanism so that it would roll forward towards the person being served, nodding its head in an oddly human rhythm. When the recipient picked up the tea cup, the doll stopped. If the guest set their empty cup on its tray, that weight triggered the doll to turn around completely and return to the hostess, who could stop the doll’s motion by lifting the empty cup off the tray to refill it. She traced the lid of the cup, grateful too that it had not been broken, crammed into that box. How could she hide it so that he would not see that she had rescued it from the attic?
She looked reluctantly back at the stairs and the open attic door. She would not put the doll back. Who knew how long it would be before he forgot the pole again. She’d have to get the ladder back in place and the door closed, or he would know what she’d done and take the pictures and doll back, and probably beat her.
She’d seen how he used the pole to force the ladder back into its retracted position, until it clicked into place, and then used the pole to close the door and re-latch it. But, she hadn’t realized how much harder it was. The wooden ladder was heavy. After six failed attempts, she began to wonder if she was strong enough to do it at all.
Disaster. Now she’d be caught for sure.
She rubbed her wet eyes, and sat back on the floor, trying to memorize the pictures through her tear-blurred vision. She had one night to make the most of these gifts before they’d be taken from her.
* * * * *
She carried the doll over to the tea service area, and knelt at the charcoal burner embedded in the floor. She suspended a cast iron pot above the charcoal and wet ash, to heat the water. She pressed some matcha—powdered tea—through a sieve, and then put three heaping teaspoons into the cup. Koicha used twice the powder and half the water as the usual thin tea, usucha. She ladled hot water over the matcha, and stirred it using a bamboo tea whisk.
With the ritual complete, she took a sip of the koicha, and savored the warm thick taste of it. She set the doll facing her, in the approximate position where a guest might be sitting, and then set the cup on the tea-serving doll’s tray, expecting it to carry it back to her.
But it did not.
Instead, the doll lifted the cup of koicha to its ceramic face, for all the world like it was sipping deeply from a barrel. The doll’s ceramic features seemed to warm and ease, transformed to flesh, and its eyes shone like fireflies. The handsome miniature man gave her a bow. “Daughter of the many daughters I have served, how may I help?”
Hikari gasped, and choked back an astonished sob. If the doll could come alive, that meant that the world was as strange and magical as her mother had believed.
This offered her help and hope, but also a sharp stab of guilt. It was the first time she had fully allowed herself to accept that she had killed her parents with her disrespectful gesture. She closed her eyes, willing it to be a dream. Better that she was trapped now without hope, than accept that.
The doll came over and placed its tiny hand in hers. “Don’t cry. The night can be cruel, but the morning is kind. Tell me what you need, and then sleep, and see what the morning brings.”
She should never have disobeyed her mother. It was all her fault. She pointed sadly at the attic ladder. “Unless you can get the ladder retracted, and the door latched, it doesn’t matter. He will take you and the pictures from me, and I’ll be alone again.”
The doll bowed to her, and then grew to the size of a man, and easily pushed the ladder back into place, and re-sealed the latch. “Done.”
Hikari laughed through her tears. “Did you clean the shop for her? She never worked as hard as I have these last few months.”
The doll nodded. “It was our secret.” He began to clean the shop, moving so quickly that she could barely see him.
Hikari watched for several minutes, and then lay down on her mat, with the pictures tucked beneath. Her chest ached from grief and fear and the physical exertion of crying. It would feel good to sleep, even as she wondered if this was only a dream, and she would wake to an unmagical but less guilt-haunted world, and the chores that
she should have been completing during her search of the attic.
* * * * *
In the morning, the chores were still done, and more perfectly than she had ever managed. The doll lay dormant beside her, and she just had time to hide him within the roll of her sleeping mat before her master returned.
Maybe it was better for the world to be as strange as her mother had believed. By the third day of Hayao’s help, she was more rested than she had been in weeks, and, as a consequence, lovelier.
This proved less advantageous than she might have thought.
Her master, her father’s old partner, spoke with such careless exuberance about her tireless and exacting skills as a servant, and her charm and grace as a young woman, that a passer-by became obsessed with the idea of buying her for himself.
* * * * *
The man who wanted to buy Hikari from her guardian was Mihails Ozols. He was a Russian-educated Lett, a Latvian, who had been an officer in the Russo-Japanese war. He had shared first in the humiliation of his empire at the Japanese triumph in 1904, and had shared second in the humiliation of his peers at having their manor houses burned by Latvian peasants in the uprising in 1905. His way of life and empire were dying. He fled to the Northwest with his witch of a mother, as a homesteader, determined to rebuild in a wild isolated frontier enclave, where he could be undisturbed by the headlong race to a chaotic future where Russia and nobility itself passed out of relevancy.
He’d claimed his 160 acres, and picked the densest and remotest forest that he could find, far to the north and east of the city.
He hated the Japanese for the defeat in the war. He’d not expected to find them here in Seattle where he had come to buy supplies, and it pleased him to imagine one of their daughters waiting on him hand and foot.
The two men found Hikari together to tell her the news, and gave her only a few minutes to pack her things, as Mihails was eager to return to his forest home.
* * * * *
When Hikari heard the news, she gathered up the pictures, and the doll, and as much matcha and tea-making supplies as she could fit in the small knapsack given to her by her new master.
They traveled for many days deeper and deeper into the forest. Mihails Ozols, who had instructed her to call him “Master Ozols,” rode his horse, and she walked beside.
At last they reached their destination. She saw that her new master had apparently built a peculiarly isolated manor house in the middle of his forest.
“This is my home, where you will be my servant. Mine and my mother’s. Do not make any noise that will draw my mother’s attention before I’ve had a chance to explain what I’ve done to her. Even I fear her.”
She tried to stay quiet then, stunned by how quickly her captor had become an ally to obey because she had been given something even worse to fear, but the hideous fact that her situation might be even worse than she had imagined on the long trudge through the forest bubbled up in her throat and behind her eyes, and she let out a sob, and then began to cry in earnest, choking herself with the effort to not cry, but unable to stop.
An old woman on a black horse burst from the tree line, and rode up to them. “What is this?” the old woman asked Master Ozols, looking towards Hikari.
“I have bought a servant for the house,” he answered quickly.
“Ha!” she shrieked. “I do not believe you. She lacks the wit even to stop crying like a baby. You have bought a play-thing, when we needed a servant.”
“Test her, then. I have her master’s word she works quickly and well.”
The old woman turned to Hikari. “Tomorrow, while I am out and my son is sleeping, look in the fifty old sugar bags stacked in the kitchen pantry. I have packed many dried herbs, mostly Linden flower from the old country, in those bags. Count and clean each dried leaf before I return tomorrow, and also make us a fine supper, or I will kill you, and grind your bones in my mortar to add to my tea.”
The next morning, Hikari fetched water from the well, and made koicha to wake Hayao. She studied her supply of matcha nervously. She had enough for at least a week more. She considered making the koicha slightly weaker so that the supply would last longer, but she quickly rejected the idea. Her mother had told her that strong tea brought a new friend, and weak tea cost one. She couldn’t risk losing Hayao.
Hikari and Hayao were able to complete the old woman’s task, but only through Hayao’s magic.
When the old woman returned, she ate the supper greedily, bones and all, giving Master Ozols only scraps and Hikari nothing. She appeared angry that Hikari had not failed her test, but agreed that she had done all that was asked.
“I am still not convinced,” the old woman warned. “The dried herbs are ready, but in the hall closet, you will find 50 bags of caraway seeds. Each seed must be individually counted, cleaned, and crushed before I return, or I will kill you, and grind your bones in my mortar to add to my tea. And I am still expecting you to make a fine supper.”
* * * * *
This time, however, the old woman found her son where Hikari could not hear, and instructed him to wake early and watch the girl through a secret hole in the kitchen wall, and learn by what means she was doing the impossible tasks so quickly. “I will learn her magic,” the old woman explained, “and take it from her before I kill her.” The old woman knew something of magic herself, having learned herb-lore and other tricks from her own mother in Latvia.
* * * * *
Hikari waited until the appointed time, and began to prepare a cup of koicha, unaware that Master Ozols watched and listened from behind the wall.
She talked to herself as she worked, deliberating. “Strong tea will bring the help I need. But, should I make it stronger, since we must do so much? Hayao will try to help me, regardless of whether his aid will be enough, since I am the one who makes the tea. No, I won’t change my mother’s recipe. It will suffice to make him strong enough and fast enough to succeed at this.”
She gave the doll a cup of koicha, and Hayao awoke and responded, “Daughter of the many daughters I have served, how may I help?” as he always did. She explained the task, and showed him the tools that she had gathered. They began to work.
* * * * *
Master Ozols hurried to the stable and mounted his horse, and rode out into the forest towards a meeting place he had established with his mother.
“The girl has a doll. She makes tea for it, Japanese-style, and it wakes a demon inside that grows to the shape of a man, and helps her do the work. He moves so fast that you can barely see what he is doing.”
The old woman cackled. “So now I know her secret. We shall take her doll from her, and make it work for us. I’ll take the doll, and you throw her in the oven, and we’ll bake her for our supper.”
Master Ozols did not like the sound of that, but said nothing. He knew better than to argue with his mother.
* * * * *
When the old woman and Master Ozols returned together, the old woman appeared again angry that Hikari had not failed her test, but agreed that she had done all that was asked.
“I am convinced,” the old woman said, while eating all of the food that had been prepared for supper. “You shall be our servant, as my son wanted. Go, kneel beside my son who is your master, and has pleaded so earnestly for your life.”
Hikari was surprised and relieved. She went to kneel in front of Master Ozols, and thanked him genuinely for protecting her from his mother.
But then he seized her in his arms and held her captive.
The old woman recovered the tea-serving doll from Hikari’s belongings. “Foolish child. You thought to trick me with your magic, but now I have taken yours.”
Hikari wept, and appealed to Master Ozols to spare her life, but he shook his head and shoved her into the oven, and locked her within. But, he did not yet heat the oven, moved by her innocent pleas, so she was simply trapped.
“Should I fetch you water from the well?” he asked his mother.
&nbs
p; When Master Ozols returned with the water, the old woman heated the water in the kitchen samovar, and used the herbs that Hikari and the doll had ground to make a cup of tea following her own recipe. These were the strongest herbs and seeds, picked and gathered when the fields were in bloom in the old country on Midsummer’s Eve, solstice night, when herbs are strongest and most potent. She added ground human bone from her private supply, from past victims.
“Now this is tea,” she thought. Latvian tea. Linden flower strengthened the heart, and caraway seeds strengthened the stomach. The old woman knew that the stolen doll servant would be even stronger, faster, braver, and more powerful when he drank this. She filled a cup and placed it on the doll’s tray.
The doll took a sip of the tea, and then several more draughts, and grew to human size, and then even bigger, taller and broader than a man could be, a giant. “You who are not the daughter of the many daughters I have served, why have you summoned me?”
The old woman began to rattle off the many chores that she could imagine having a strong and fast servant such as him complete.
Hayao laughed. “Did you think I would serve you because you can make a stronger and more bone-magical tea than pretty Hikari? I serve where there is strength of heart, and bonds of loyalty forged over generations. But, I thank you for the power that you have lent me.” He pushed Master Ozols out of the way with the slightest of effort, tossing him off his feet and into the corner where he slumped unconscious, and then freed Hikari from the oven.
The old woman grabbed the stone pestle from the counter top and brandished it at Hayao. “Stay back!”
“You have been cruel to Hikari, and thought to enslave us both. Why should I spare you?”
The old woman hesitated, and then lowered the pestle. “Spare me and my son, and in exchange I will give you the power to have a son of your own. I know a curse that will take your power—it will make me as strong as you are now, and it will leave you as weak as I am now, but you will be human, and able to do all that a man can do.”