by Zoe Marriott
Staring blankly at the figurehead, I didn’t notice at first when my vision began to cloud. I blinked rapidly. My eyes felt dry but – could I be crying? I tugged off one of the mittens Itsuki had given me and raised my hand to my cheek. No. It was not tears that blurred my sight.
Snow. It was snow.
The sky was a vivid cloudless blue, and yet flakes of snow as tiny as flecks of dust drifted down from it, falling perfectly straight, like beads running into place on the silk thread of a lady’s necklace. Faster and faster the snow fell, thicker and thicker, and I could not help but stare in astonishment. The bottom of the boat was full already. The snow had covered my feet and lap and arms, and I could no longer see the lake, the path of dark water, or even the boat’s icy figurehead.
The world was still, and silent, and cold, cold, cold.
My hands clutched at each other as my eyes searched the blankness around me. Was I still on the lake? Still in the maze? Had the Yuki-Onna broken her word and banished me to some new prison?
Gradually my ears began to perceive a sort of distant roaring. I thought perhaps my mind sought to fill the unnatural silence with sounds that I knew, to save me from going mad, for the noise that I heard was that of wind moving restlessly through trees. Of a forest bending and moving in the gale’s embrace, like a dance. The music of leaves, whispering and singing.
Hana.
Hana.
Hana.
Welcome home…
The boat lurched beneath me, as if it had hit a rock. Then it jumped, tipping forwards, capsizing into the flurrying snow. I closed my eyes tight and flung my hands out before me, bracing for the fall into icy water.
I landed on my knees, on solid ground, as softly as if I had simply sunk down into that position of my own accord.
At once I felt a change in the light and the air. The warmth of the sun on my face, and also the absence of that biting chill which I had felt everywhere in the Moon maze. I found myself peering blearily at late afternoon sunlight, dappling red and yellow and orange through fiery autumn leaves, and green and brown moss, and brown tree bark, and splotchy yellow lichen, and soggy lumps of leaf mould, and mottled grey stones.
Nothing like a garden.
Nothing like a maze.
The very disorder, the natural chaos of it, was like a balm to eyes that had grown too used to staring at artificial, fearsome beauty. Sitting very still on a branch not far above my head was an ordinary, common robin – not even obliging enough to sing – and I could have kissed it for being little and brown and every day, with its drab orange head, instead of bright or extraordinary or magical.
The trees shifted and sighed around me again, with relief or sadness, I could not tell.
Hana.
Home, Hana.
Welcome. Welcome. Home.
Feeling as wobbly as a newborn foal, I got to my feet, and took a couple of testing steps forwards, and then a couple more, patting trees as I passed them, hanging onto branches where I needed to. It was enough to bring me to the edge of the trees, to the ridge. I looked down.
Spread out before me was the valley. The rice terraces, edged in vivid green, reflecting a cloudy afternoon sky, and beyond that the river, like a strip of liquid amber in the last brilliance of the sun’s rays. And there, as if cradled gently in our valley’s cupped hands, was the irregular wood and thatched-roof jumble of the village.
Smoke trailed upwards in lazy white ribbons. A cow lowed. A door closed somewhere, and someone shouted a greeting or a goodbye. Pigs stirred in the mud, and a grey goose flapped its wings on the peak of Hideki’s house. In the river, a trio of children laughed and splashed in the shallows, long brown legs drawn up to their chins like the frogs that they hunted.
“Home.” This time the voice that spoke the word was my own.
I let out a long, shuddering sigh.
It was all just as it had ever been. It was as if I had never left. Yet somehow everything seemed strange and new, and my eyes traced the lines of these well-known things with the curiosity and incomprehension of a stranger. I had returned, and everything was the same. Except me.
“Your father will live…” the Yuki-Onna had said.
I drew my shaken breath back to me – it tasted of crisp autumn leaves, and musky mushroom spores, and wood fires – and began my descent from the ridge.
No one noticed my return. There was no shout of recognition or disbelief, no rush to greet me. It was like any other day, sturdy Hana-san trudging home from the wood, weighed down by her day’s work. By the time I reached my house, nestled in the curve of the hill on the edge of the settlement, I felt I was drifting, borne up on a cloud of dreamlike normality that seemed too real to be real. My geta were waiting for me under the step of the porch, as always. The smooth wood was cold against my weathered soles as I slipped them on.
I stepped up onto the porch and drew back the screen, looking in without stepping over the threshold. The kitchen was empty. The table was scrubbed clean, the floors swept, the fires out and the ovens cold. A thin layer of dust, sparkling gold in the rays of sunlight that spilled in through the gaps in the shutters, lay over everything. I did not have to call out, or search the house, to know that my mother was not here.
Reluctantly – part of me wished to keep the last things Itsuki had given me close – I stripped off my cap and the furs. I spread them out under the porch roof, just as I had always done with whatever prize I dragged home from the forest for my parents.
For the first time I really noticed the deep, misty blue and glossy black of the furs, finer by far than any pelt I had ever seen before. A prince’s ransom in furs, though we had no prince to buy them. Itsuki would not have killed any animal for these, I knew. He must have taken the pelts from creatures he knew in the maze that had died of old age, or he had been unable to heal. That made them all the more precious. Yet he had given them to me so carelessly – no, not carelessly, not that, but – gladly, as if their value had meant nothing to him.
Or as if their value, no matter how great, was not equal to yours.
My fingers clenched tightly in the soft fur they had been stroking. I felt my face crumple, and my shoulders heaved with the desire to fling myself down and weep. I had left him. I had left him there in that cage, alone, while the Yuki-Onna laughed.
He told me to go, I reminded myself, clinging to the thought as I clung to the furs. He wanted me to go. He promised it would be all right.
I forced my fingers to unknot. Straightening up, I mechanically brushed down the wrinkles in my clothes, and drew the kitchen screen and door carefully shut. Then I left my parents’ home and stepped down onto the stone path that would lead me to the centre of the village. To Kaede’s house. To my mother.
And my father.
The first person I saw on the walk to the healer’s house was the village tanner and leatherworker. He was heading in the opposite direction with a barrel under one burly arm and a satchel of tools over the other. He looked at me in passing, blinked as he took in the glowing finery of the kimono that Itsuki had made for me, returned his gaze to my face – and walked straight into the wall of a house.
I did not pause as the tools clattered to the ground and the barrel rolled away, although on a normal afternoon I would have rushed to help. There was more important work for me to do today. Head held high, I strode past him.
A garbled shout went up behind me. Near by, a shutter slammed back as someone came out to see what the commotion was. On the smaller path that branched off to the left, one of the pig-keepers, driving a couple of his charges down towards the river, turned to look at me and went stock-still. The fat, speckled pair of sows escaped and ran past me, squealing. A housewife who had been beating a rug on her porch peered around its frayed edge, dropped the beater with a muffled yelp, and then screeched for her husband. I moved on.
More doors and shutters opened. More voices rang out, questioning, fearful, and then disbelieving. Like a tide sweeping away from my footstep
s, the news spread.
“Hana-san! It is Hana-san!”
“The girl’s come back! Ichiro-san’s girl!”
“What? Returned? Alive? From the Dark Wood?”
“She’s alive? By the Moon, she’s alive!”
So, I thought, with a hint of bitter humour, they told themselves I was dead, did they? A fair enough assumption, I suppose. But will my unexpected resurrection be seen as a blessing – or a curse?
I saw Hideki and his wife, and Goro, and Shouta amongst the faces of those who lined the path to gawp and point, but I did not slow, even to nod in acknowledgement. In my quick, determined march and refusal to lower my eyes, some message must have been clear, for no one tried to stay me. No one put out a hand, and no one stepped in my way. In fact, any preoccupied souls so unobservant as to stumble onto the path ahead of me were seized by the others and hauled off so that they did not impede my progress.
By the time I reached the sensei’s house, practically the entire village must have been following me, muttering and exclaiming and sounding like nothing so much as a gaggle of geese. It was annoying, but I had no time to turn and remonstrate with them. The few persons that I really wished to see were in that low, quiet house ahead of me – and trails of blue, pine-scented smoke were spiralling up from the incense holders on either side of the door. I am in time, then. I must be. Surely I must have made it in time.
Before I could even reach out to knock, the door flew open and Kaede herself was there. Her face was more deeply lined than ever, and her stance showed a great weariness. Yet her eyes, meeting mine, brimmed with warm brilliance that I recognized with a sharp pang of hope. It was the look of a healer whose patient has turned a corner.
“Hana-san,” she breathed, and her hand reached out to clasp my arm and shake it a little, as if she was a doting grandmother and I the long-lost child for whom she had prayed each day. Perhaps she had.
“My father?”
“He is well, he is well, Hana-san. You are returned to us by the glory of the Moon, and whatever you did, however you did it, it worked. He woke this morning as the sun rose, and he is himself. He will recover.”
The last anxiety as to the truth of the Yuki-Onna’s words fell away from my shoulders like a robe whose pockets had been filled with stones. The fact that she had somehow freed him before I ever spoke to her I did not allow to trouble me, for Itsuki had said that time passed strangely, or differently, within the maze. All that mattered was that it had worked. I lifted my face up to stare at the sky for a long quiet heartbeat, and then looked back at Kaede and smiled. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t do much.” She jerked her head uncomfortably. “I didn’t do anything, really.”
I put my hand over hers on my arm and squeezed it. “You kept him alive long after almost anyone else would have given up, and you gave me the time I needed to do … what I must. Thank you, Sensei. I will not forget. Not ever.”
She stared into my face, her expression arrested. “Well. My goodness. If ever there was a story that was begging to be told, my girl … but for now, come inside, come in. There are some people who will be even more impatient than I to hear you tell it, once they know you are here.”
Staying only to take off my wooden sandals, I stepped up and into the house, and Kaede shut the door in the faces of the gawping onlookers with an air of some satisfaction. There was no sign of the healer’s apprentice. The inner door to the great room was closed. Unable to restrain my impatience any longer, I rudely reached out to open it for myself. The healer waved off my look of apology and gestured me through, then wordlessly pulled the door shut between us.
And then it was just me. Just me, and the two who laid there in the quiet light-filled room beyond.
My mother was sleeping, curled on her side with her pale, sad face pillowed on both her hands and a light blanket pulled up over her. Beside her, propped up in a half-reclining position by stacks of pillows, was my father. He did not move at the click of the door, but continued to stare down at my mother. There was a strange expression on his face. As sad as hers, but not at all as peaceful.
The sight of him, eyes open, mostly upright, and with colour in his face, was enough to strike me dumb with wonder and relief. I had not realized until then how deeply the memory of his waxy stillness had haunted me. All I had done, everything I had endured, each hour of suffering and each moment of doubt and fear, was worth it to me. I knew then that no matter what had happened, I still loved him, and always would.
Smiling a little nervously, I stepped forwards. Father’s head lifted, without much interest, I thought, to look at who had come in. His gaze fixed upon me without recognition at first, and almost I allowed it to wound me, to cut that still vulnerable place in my heart. Then his eyes seemed to focus. They widened, and every bit of colour in his face fled – then rushed back all at once.
The cup that he had held absently in his left hand dropped to the tatami mat with a soft thud and he jerked forwards off the pillows, both his hands lifting up towards me. His fingers grasped at the air without dignity, like a child’s, until I rushed to his side, and knelt there to take them in my own. His hands were icy cold. They closed around mine painfully tightly.
“Hana, Hana, Hana,” he whispered. “Please tell me it wasn’t true, what they said. Where have you been? How could you – how dared you – do such a crazy thing?”
I ignored the second part. “You know where I’ve been.”
“I prayed against reason that you had more sense, you reckless unthinking child!”
“Sense?” I repeated. “What would you have had me do then, Father? Fling the chance aside like trash, simply because it was small and fragile? Someone had to do something. Someone had to save you.”
He shook his head. Opened his mouth. Closed it again. Then he buried his face in the back of my hands. His shoulders shook, and I felt warm droplets running over my fingers. I stared down at him, speechless and disbelieving. I had never seen him cry.
His tears were not as silent as Itsuki’s had been. Beside him, my mother murmured, and stirred, and opened her eyes. For a moment she stared, wide-eyed, as she slowly pushed the blanket away and sat up. Then her arms were around both of us, her slim strong hands clutching like bands of iron.
“If I am dreaming, do not let me wake. Do not let me wake,” she murmured.
“In a dream, dearest, I would be shaved,” my father said, rubbing his face self-consciously – pretending that it was his patchy beard and not the evidence of his tears that discomfited him.
My mother and I both laughed much more heartily than such a feeble joke deserved. After a blink of surprise, Father’s laughter, dry and rusty with disuse, joined ours. We embraced one another as we had not done in years, not since Kyo had vanished into the Dark Wood, and if none of the three of us were really sure by now if we were laughing, or crying, or both, well, what did it matter?
Nineteen
Kaede, despite her occasional irascibility, really was a patient woman. Perhaps all healers must have, or learn, such vast and stolid patience in the course of their profession. In any case, she left us alone there long after anyone else would have been battering down the door in curiosity, and gave us enough time to talk through many things that needed to be talked of, though not quite everything that we might have wished.
Both my parents took me to task for recklessness and disobedience, and for scaring them half to death by running off into the Dark Wood alone on such an impossible quest. Given the happy outcome, the scolding was not as harsh as it might have been, but it was stern enough. I apologized for scaring them, but I did not make any promise to refrain from such behaviour in future. I couldn’t have promised that, not even at that moment, not even for them – and I thought my father at least guessed this.
Father then horrified us by revealing that he had heard all, or nearly all, that was said near him while he had lain paralysed in what had only seemed to be sleep. Although he had not been able to twitch so
much as an eyelash, he had been aware the entire time, vainly straining every fibre he had. So he had known when I ran away that night all those weeks before, because Kaede had broken the news to my mother at his bedside.
“I wished I had died,” he confessed lowly. “Died there in the forest like the rest, rather than send you out to face the beast for my sake. You can have no idea how I railed and cursed and wept, all without ever making a sound.”
He sounded devastated by the experience. I understood that very well. And yet … yet for all that, for all that he had lost too much weight from his already rangy frame, and was rumpled and unshaved, there was an odd lightness about him, I thought. His hair might be straggling and in need of a wash and his eyes sunken into grey bruises, but he seemed … younger. Somehow. Or at least, not as weighed down by age.
The thing I could not get used to was how he looked at me. He met my eyes straight-on, without turning his face away in that gesture I had come to know and hate, and not once did I suspect him of gazing wistfully over my shoulder for a boy who was not there.
I wanted my father’s love, but I did not need his forgiveness any more. Or rather, I had come to accept that I had never needed it. But I had an odd sense that he had somehow shed a similar burden of his own during the course of his “sleep”. I longed to know just what it had been, and how this had come to pass.
Hoping a little wistfully that the change was not some effect of his recent healing that would wear off with time, I told them, “The beast was not the one I had to face in the end. The beast … was not truly a beast at all.”
Father gave me a look that searched for answers at the same time as it offered understanding. He reached out to me as he had not reached out since I was a child, and touched my face. “I know, I think. For I dreamed … such strange dreams, while I lay here under that dark magic, Hana. And now that I see you again, I think at least some of them must have been true.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed, while my whole body went hot and cold with the implications of this. Mother exclaimed with surprise, and demanded to be told what he had dreamed, what he knew, exactly where I had been and what I had done. “Oh, everything, tell me everything! What in the world can all this mean?”