Lord of the Darkwood

by Lian Hearn

  I won them over! he thought with pride, for he knew it was he they stayed to watch. The music and the monkeys caught their attention, but it was his performance that kept them spellbound. Saru had always been popular and had taught Yoshi everything he knew, but now Yoshi’s leaps, somersaults, and back flips had more daring and assurance, looked more dangerous, yet never failed. The monkeys were inspired by him, would do anything he asked of them, and watched him with devoted eyes.

  He was not sure of his exact age but knew he was at the height of his ability. He had seen the older men age suddenly before they were thirty. Their life was physically hard and the demands they made on their bodies huge. He himself probably did not have many years left, but at the moment he was the shining star, the sun, the moon, of the troupe.

  Saru called, “We’re going back to the boat to eat.”

  The villagers had been generous in the end, but they had little to share: a basket with four eggs, a handful of early greens, little cakes of millet and dried seaweed. The acrobats were always hungry. Performing and traveling used up so much energy, and none of them ate meat or fish, having taken vows since childhood to take no life, not animal or insect, and certainly not human.

  Yoshi made a gesture to show he’d heard him. No doubt Saru would be annoyed, but Yoshi was going to speak to Kai and make sure she came with them. Nothing else made Saru jealous, but this would. Yoshi knew Saru loved him as much as the monkeys did. They had grown up together and shared everything in life. But Kai had known Yoshi in his other life, which no one else knew about, and which he never talked about. She was as close to him and as essential as one of his own limbs.

  He studied her as he went toward her. The torchlight fell on her face, which was flushed with the thrill of performing, and reflected in her shining eyes. A piece of material wound around her head held her hair back and hid her ears, but she pulled it away as he approached and let her hair fall around her. He was still half-drunk with the applause and the excitement and a wave of desire for her swept over him.

  Lady Fuji had tried to keep Kai away from the acrobats, telling her she must stay with the family of musicians who had adopted her, but no one could stop Kai doing what she wanted, especially once she turned sixteen and came of age. She scorned any suggestion that she might marry one of the boys she had grown up with, and while she still played on the pleasure boats with the musicians, she joined the acrobats whenever she could and beat her drum for them. She had no fear of water, and she followed them around the lake in her own boat. A fisherman from Aomizu had vanished from this vessel one night. The next day it could be seen bobbing about on the waves. Sometimes it seemed there was a figure in it; sometimes it looked empty. No one dared go near it in case it had become possessed by the spirit who had pulled the unfortunate man into the water and who might drown them, too. But Kai swam out to it and brought it back to shore, had it blessed by the old priest with whom the acrobats worshipped, and from then on navigated it skillfully from shore to shore, followed by flocks of blue-and-white herons with whom she seemed to have a deep connection, calling to them and imitating their harsh cries. Often Yoshi would find himself thinking of her and would soon after hear the splash of the single oar and see her shape outlined against the evening sky and feel his heart expand with sheer joy.

  About a year before, on another spring evening, they had become lovers. He had seen her out on the lake and had waited for her after the others had packed up and left to find shelter for the night. She had jumped out of the boat straight into his arms as though the moment had been preordained by the gods. He had pushed her hair back and kissed her tiny, unformed ears. The boat had drifted off into deep water and Kai had broken away from him to swim after it and pull it back to shore. They were both laughing with happiness as she took off her wet clothes and he pulled her close to warm her, feeling all the curves and planes of her body and marveling at how he fitted perfectly against them, then within them.

  Now he held her again, remembering that time, recapturing its thrill and ecstasy. She was trembling and her eyes were full of longing as she led him to a deserted part of the beach and they lay down together under the stars.

  Afterward as he rested, spent, against her, caressing her silky skin, there was a sharp call and he heard the beat of wings as Kon settled on a rock nearby.

  “He never leaves you,” Kai said. “I would worry more about you if Kon were not always watching over you.”

  “He doesn’t actually do anything,” Yoshi replied, “except irritate me. He hides for a while among other birds, and I think he’s gone, but he always reappears again.”

  “Kon bears witness to who you are,” Kai said quietly. “I think I would have forgotten if it weren’t for him.”

  “Better if we all forget it.” Yoshi eased himself away from her a little.

  “How much do you remember?” They had never spoken about their past, their childhood in the palace, their flight from the burning city. “Do you remember the day the werehawk came? It was after that that everything began to change. It knew you, then. It bowed to you. Was that Kon, or another one?”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Yoshi muttered.

  “We need to.” She took his hand and laid it on her belly. “Your child is growing inside me. Can you feel how my body is changing?” She guided his hand to her breasts. “See how they are heavier and fuller. It will be born in the winter of this year.”

  He wanted to make love to her again, but she hesitated. “If you are the true emperor,” she whispered in a tiny voice, “you cannot be kept from the Lotus Throne. Who are we to try to defy the will of Heaven? But then we will be separated. What will become of our child?”

  “I am just Yoshimaru, the monkey boy,” he whispered back. “We have kept it secret for so long, we will continue to do so. We will be a family. You are my wife. It’s what I’ve always wanted ever since we were children. You must know that.”

  “I do,” she replied. “I remember being told all the time that I would never be suitable for you because of my ears, and I used to cry myself to sleep at the thought of you marrying someone else.”

  “We had the luck to end up together in a world where these things don’t matter,” Yoshi said. “If your ears were not misshapen, Fuji would have taken you for her own trade.” He kissed first one, then the other. “We should be thankful to them.”

  “It’s only that when Akihime saved your life and we fled from the palace, you said, ‘If I am to reign I cannot die now.’ Do you remember that?”

  “I was just a child,” Yoshi said. “I didn’t understand anything. After Saru and the others found me in the forest, for a long time I expected Akihime to come back for me. I dreaded it. When I heard she was dead I grieved for her, but then I realized she had died without giving me away, and I was profoundly grateful, but most of all relieved. I’ve never wanted to be anything else but an acrobat, to be with you, to follow the teachings of the Secret One, and now to have our child. If anyone finds out about me I’ll be put to death. The Miboshi have their own emperor, my uncle Daigen. My death would legitimize him.”

  Kai pulled him close. “Then we will never breathe a word, and we will pray that Heaven continues to ignore us. No one else knows, do they?”

  He did not answer her, but he was thinking of the girl pulled from the lake, the girl who had the lute, Genzo, who was now one of Lady Fuji’s most popular pleasure women. She had never spoken of his secret to him and she had kept the lute hidden away. But she had known who he was in that moment on the boat, for Genzo had told her. And then there was Shikanoko. Yoshi did not know if he was alive or dead, and had never mentioned him to Kai. But he still relived that moment on the edge of the stream when he had thought he would die, and Shikanoko still strode through his dreams with his antlered mask and drawn sword.

  10

  HINA (YAYOI)

  Lake Kasumi was drying up. Villages that had been on the water’s edge were now half a mile away, and often boats ran ag
round as the channels became shallow. This was not the only way life had become harder for the riverbank people. For years they had escaped scrutiny, living and working as they did between the worlds, on thresholds, in the spaces between high and low water, which are neither inside nor outside, neither land nor sea. They considered themselves different from ordinary people and therefore not subject to the same laws. Everything they did had a kind of magic to it: they created wares that had not existed before and transformed them into other things by way of exchange and barter, increasingly for coins, which were themselves a numinous creation. They trained animals for entertainment and lived alongside them. They controlled and dispensed the ephemeral ecstasies of music and sex, both inexhaustible, given away freely and constantly renewed, never drying up.

  These gifts were not paid for, as such, but were reciprocated with other gifts, silken robes, bolts of cloth, the finest teas and wines, ceramic bowls, carvings, parasols, prayer beads. Eventually, this came to the attention of Lord Aritomo, who could not rest unless every part of his realm was brought under his control. He made a law that all entertainers and traders should be licensed. His own officials would issue permits, in return for a share in the gifts, which suddenly turned, in a quite unmagical way, into taxable produce, providing income for Aritomo’s armies, his roads, and his fortifications.

  Because Yayoi could not only read and write but also calculate, and because her charm was famous, it fell to her to deal with these officials. Lady Fuji, who had built up a floating empire of pleasure boats, and who was most reluctant to share the results of her good fortune and business skills with anyone, relied on her more and more.

  “I wish I could come upon some scheme to stop them bothering us,” she said after one difficult encounter, when they had finally managed to make an official forget why he had paid them a visit. “I don’t know what I would do without you. Truly, it must have been Heaven that sent you. Wasn’t it a miracle how the wind drove the acrobats’ boat across the lake to gather you up, you and Takemaru, and then changed to bring you to me?”

  They had often talked about that day, twelve or more years earlier, when Yayoi had fled from Nishimi, a baby in her arms, along with the lute and the Kudzu Vine Treasure Store. It was almost like a ritual or a ballad. Yayoi gave the expected response, hardly needing to take her attention away from her calculations, thinking fleetingly of the child she had been, when her name had been Hina.

  “You and the gods saved my life that day.”

  “It was surely our fate, for now you are as close to me as the daughter I never had.”

  “I will always look after you, as if you were my own mother,” Yayoi replied.

  “You were not the only young girl I rescued,” Fuji mused.

  “I know, you have helped many who would otherwise have died.”

  The girls Yayoi had known at the convent had grown up like her to become the women on the pleasure boats: Asagao, still her dearest friend, Yuri, Sada, Sen, and Teru, and all the others selling their songs and smiles.

  “One came like you, with a boy and a younger girl.”

  Yayoi marked her place with her finger and began to pay attention. Fuji was a woman of many secrets and divulged them only when it served her purpose.

  “She said he was her brother. He was about six or seven, a proper little princeling. I remember explaining the sacred and the profane to him. He was afraid of pollution. And now look at him—he has lived with the monkeys for so many years, he has almost become one of them. And the little girl is Kai, the drummer.”

  “Which boy is that?” Yayoi said striving for calm. “I can hardly tell them apart.”

  “Yoshimaru. His older sister carried a lute just like yours, though she did not have your talent. I don’t believe she could really play at all, yet the lute played itself, the sweetest music you’ve ever heard. I suppose it was enchanted in some way. Which reminds me, I haven’t seen your lute for years. Do you keep it hidden away?”

  Yayoi said nothing until Fuji had fallen silent for so long it seemed unnatural not to respond. “What happened to her?” Yayoi asked, though she knew better than Fuji.

  “Kai was too ill to travel when the other two left us to go to Rinrakuji. We heard the temple burned down around the same time. Yoshimaru turned up with Sarumaru, and the monkeys, a few months later, but there was no sign of his sister and he’s never mentioned her. I often wondered what became of her. She was not as beautiful as you, but she had a sort of wild charm, like a young boy. Her father had laid a condition of purity on her, which I would have respected. It suited her. She was to be a shrine maiden.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Yayoi looked out across the lake. The mountain ranges beyond were beginning to turn hazy and mauve as the sun passed over them toward the west. It would have been a perfect spring afternoon were it not for the turbid water and the exposed stretches of mud.

  Fuji said, “A few months later I heard of a young girl who rode a white stallion on the roads around the lake, fighting off men, with a sword that had itself become famous. I thought it might be her, but then no more was heard of her. I suppose she is dead now. Like the Autumn Princess.”

  Yayoi said nothing.

  “I have been thinking about her a lot, lately,” Fuji said, leaning closer and dropping her voice. “Yoshimaru has become such a fine young man. And you see, dear Yayoi, if he is who I think he is, some very important people might be interested—interested enough to stop persecuting us with their demands for licenses and fees. I see you are astonished. You would never have guessed, would you, that Yoshimaru, our monkey boy, who is rather fond of the little drummer, is the missing emperor?”

  “It cannot be true,” Yayoi said, though she knew it was, had known ever since the lute, Genzo, had burst into melody in his presence when she had escaped from Nishimi. The ancient lute knew the true emperor. For years she had said nothing, had simply prayed for his safety, as she watched him grow from a child of eight to a young man of about twenty.

  Like all the acrobats, he dressed and wore his hair in the style of childhood and still carried his childish name. He and Saru were inseparable, both handsome, lively young men. Take, the baby she had brought from Nishimi, adored them both, having been brought up by them, among the monkeys. And lately she along with everyone else had noticed that Yoshi and Kai were in love.

  “Does he know?” she wondered aloud.

  Fuji said, “He has never given the slightest sign. He must have forgotten. He was only six years old when we first saw him.”

  “We should leave things as they are,” Yayoi said. “He will have a far happier life here.”

  “But if he is restored to the throne, maybe the drought will stop and the lake will go back to how it used to be. And we would gain considerable rewards.”

  “Restored to the throne? You are dreaming if you think that will happen! The Miboshi will put him to death, and probably everyone who knows of his existence!”

  “You are always so pessimistic, Yayoi! You always expect the worst!” Fuji turned away, biting a hangnail in exasperation.

  Isn’t that how my life has turned out? Yayoi thought. My mother passed away when I was a child, my father died at the side of the Crown Prince in the Ninpei rebellion, my little brother was killed by mistake after he had been kidnapped. My own life has been spared only through Fuji’s discretion.

  Fuji spat out the nail and said in a malicious voice, “It happened when you were away at the temple so I don’t believe you ever heard of it, but Lord Aritomo forced his favorite, Yukikuni no Takaakira, to commit suicide.”

  “I did not know,” Yayoi said. “But what has it to do with me?”

  “He was accused of harboring a Kakizuki girl, Kiyoyori’s daughter in fact, first in Miyako and then at Nishimi.” She looked up at Yayoi, her usual charming smile on her face. “Aritomo saw it as unpardonable treachery. Takaakira ripped his belly. They say it took him hours to die. Nobody knows Kiyoyori’s daughter survived, exce
pt me. And you, of course.”

  Yayoi had not known he was dead, the man who had saved her life when the capital fell to the Miboshi. He had, undoubtedly, had his own motives, of which she had been vaguely aware as a child; he would have made her his wife, once she was old enough. But he had been kind to her; he had taught her to read and write, and so many other things. Deep grief assailed her and then she turned cold with sudden fear, hearing the threat, knowing that Fuji would not hesitate to sacrifice Yoshi to gain some advantage for herself. And that Yayoi and Take were no more than pawns in Fuji’s game. The safety of all three of them depended on Fuji’s silence. But how could she be prevented from betraying them?

  * * *

  Yayoi did not have time to reflect more on this disturbing conversation, for her first guest arrived, and then she was kept busy for the rest of the day. Her last visitor was one of her favorites, a merchant from Kitakami. He was no longer young, but not quite middle-aged, the son of an influential family whose specialty was fermentation—soybean products, rice wine, and so on. Their name was Unagi, or Eel, and they guarded carefully both their secret recipes and the contracts they made with farmers all around Lake Kasumi, in which the promise of beans at harvest was exchanged for tools necessary in the planting season, lengths of cloth for summer weddings and festivals, drums for local temples, cord ropes and bamboo baskets.

  He lived up to his family name, Yayoi thought, being intelligent, strong, and enterprising, as well as able to slither out of any unpleasant situation. She enjoyed his company as much as his gifts, and the wholehearted pleasure he took in lovemaking reminded her of grilled eel—rich, tasty, good for the health.