Barefoot on the Wind

by Zoe Marriott

  “Don’t you think it might be wiser to wait? Not long, perhaps, only to rest and recover before returning? Tonight is—”

  “The first night of the dark of the Moon.” I twitched my shoulder and, perhaps in response to that new look I had seen upon his face, felt my own face reorder itself in some unfamiliar way. “I survived the last time, and I was less prepared then. At least this time, if what you have seen is true, she has not set him loose to wander the Dark Wood and play cat and mouse with me.”

  “I distrust that smile,” he said, eyeing me with brows wrinkled. “You look exactly as my mother once used to, when she had some labyrinthine scheme in mind.”

  I let the smile, now that I realized what it was, stretch my lips wider. “That I will take as a compliment.”

  Rising, I began to roll up my bedding and the futon. There was no sign of the clothes Itsuki had made, which I had left neatly folded near the bed last night, and so I assumed my mother had taken them with her to hang up or wash, or simply to marvel over. Kaede had loaned me a worn pink yukata to sleep in, and though it was a little wrinkled, it would do to walk home. I needed to look out some supplies, and … I needed to talk to my mother.

  “Follow the sensei’s instructions, and rest,” I told my father as I went to the door. “You still have much healing to do. I am glad you are well, Father.”

  “Wait.” The urgency of the word turned me back. “Come here for a minute.”

  I moved swiftly to his side, worried by his tone, and knelt there as I had the day before. And, just as he had the day before, he took both my hands in his – but today he kissed the back of each one, and then cradled them gently between his.

  “I wish you all the good fortune of your ancestors and all the strength of our house,” he said formally. “Where you go, you will carry the Moon’s grace, for your errand is good, your heart is virtuous, and your intentions are pure.” His lofty tone deserted him as he finished. “Come back to us, Hana. I … cannot lose another child to the Dark Wood.”

  Gravely, I said, “I will.”

  But although I spoke the words like a vow, they were not a promise. Any promise would have been empty. It was obvious by his face that he knew it.

  He drew in a long breath, and I heard it catch in his throat. “I must ask this. Will you – can you forgive me? I am sorry. So very sorry.”

  The apology carried a nearly unbearable weight: years of words left unsaid, and silent, festering unhappiness. A burden of anger and guilt that he, perhaps, had not known how to shed any more than I had, until Itsuki had shown me the way.

  “That is all forgotten now,” I whispered. “It is behind us. We need never speak or think of it again. There is nothing to forgive, Father.”

  I leaned in and kissed him on one whiskery cheek, and smiled, and kept smiling as I left him. But as I closed the door to the great room behind me, my smile faded. I slipped on my sandals and stepped out of the healer’s house, determination straightening my shoulders.

  My father had been rescued from the Yuki-Onna’s grip – but it had never been more than petty cruelty that had made her toy with him, and her grasp had been careless. Itsuki was the true focus of all her madness and anger and grief, and like my father for all those years, she did not know how to set that burden down. And I did not know how to make her. I had no idea how to free Itsuki. All I knew was that I could not leave him there at her mercy. I had to try.

  Even if trying was the death of me.

  I had fully intended to take the central path through the village and head directly home. But once there I must face my mother, and explain to her what I planned to do – and I did not expect her to take it with anything like the calm acceptance my father had displayed.

  And so, exactly as the last time that I had walked out of the healer’s house, I found myself lured away by the peaceful murmuring call of the river.

  Unlike last time, all those I met on my short walk went out of their way to catch my eye, to exchange short nods or more formal bows, or even to stop me and pass a few polite words. Some of them stared uneasily at my right side, where the beast’s dramatic scars were now safely hidden again, and some just as conspicuously kept their eyes away. The general attitude was a mixture of admiration and apology, and, perhaps, a trace of fear. There was no pity. I had not known, until then, how used I was to seeing and accepting pity from everyone. Without it, it was as if they hardly knew me. Or I them.

  Hideki stayed me briefly to ask after my father – did I think Kaede would permit visitors soon? – and to let me know that he had butchered and hung the serow I had caught so many weeks ago, at my mother’s request, and nothing had been wasted.

  “A fine pelt,” he said, a slightly nervous edge to his heartiness. “I have hardly ever seen the like. You did well.”

  I thanked him, and puzzled as I walked away on how I would have treasured these words of praise once – not so very long ago – and yet now, although they brought me pleasure, they altered nothing within me at all. Always, I had felt as if I must prove that I was worthy, as if my very right to exist hung over me like an unanswered question. But no matter how hard I worked to gain the respect of others, true confidence had remained just out of my reach, for I had believed that whatever place I had won for myself within the village hierarchy could be snatched away at any moment. Perhaps I had been right.

  I was different now. The difference was not that I no longer cared, but that I no longer cared enough to let it affect my own decisions or actions. It felt like a kind of victory.

  With all this stopping and bowing and smiling, it took me twice as long to reach the river as I had expected – and once I arrived, there was no stillness to be found, for a group of women whose family houses clustered over the river shallows on wooden stilts had brought their children out to play together while they worked on their mending. The little ones’ screams of laughter and shrieks as they chased up and down the low bank and splashed each other nearly drowned out the water’s music entirely. I moved upstream, climbing over a green hump of land and then down onto a tumble of large stones. It might even have been the very same bend of the river where I had hidden from Kyo to hunt frogs all those years ago; it looked too different now to know.

  The footing was not good, and the inflexible wooden soles of my geta made it hard to navigate the smooth, rounded boulders. Since I was not wearing socks I tugged my footwear off, letting them dangle from one finger by the cloth thongs as I scrambled down to the water’s edge. There must have been a hard rain in the past few days. The river’s mood today was tumultuous, and it was a pale cloudy green, like jade, topped with creamy foam crests.

  The autumn colours of the sloping hillside and the peaks above were even more glorious now than they had been the last time I came to the river. Soon, within only a few days maybe, the leaves would turn crisp, and begin to fall in earnest, and then there would be a windy night, and in the morning all the branches would be startlingly bare. The delicate autumn frosts would turn to thick ice, and winter would stalk into the valley again.

  I wondered if trees ever felt wistful about their changing nature. Did they mourn for the bright spring greens when they deepened into gold, or sigh over the loss of their golden beauty when the snow coated their black empty branches? Humans would. But human changes were not so swift, or so easy to perceive.

  After kneeling to drink, I turned to look at the village again. It was a very different vantage point than my usual one up on the ridge, among the trees. Here I stood at the heart of the settlement, close enough to pick out not only individual homes but individual people.

  In the distance I could hear the lady whose rug-beating I had interrupted the day before getting back to work: whack, thwap, thud. There was Goro’s father, stumping determinedly at the ground with his polished ash stick and limping on the bad knee that always told him when the weather was about to change. His married daughter, Goro’s sister, walked beside him, smiling wryly down at the wisps of white hair on h
is shining head. And there was poor sad Misaki, carrying her new baby – clutching him really, as if she could somehow preserve him from sharing his sister’s fate by holding him close enough.

  I could not see her face, for she walked with her head down.

  There, on the lowest rice terrace, Shouta and two of his brothers were arguing instead of working. One of them shoved him. He shoved back. Sturdy old Yuu, on the terrace above, shouted something at them and shook her fist, and they shuffled apart, sheepish.

  Nothing had changed here for a very long time. We had grown less, and more fearful, and we had dug more terraces and built different homes, but in all important parts the village was just as it had been one hundred years ago when Oyuki and Ren had sought sanctuary here, and when our villagers had first allowed themselves to be made monsters by fear. They had turned from Oyuki when she needed help – as they had turned from my mother and me – disguising their cowardice as common sense, and in the process, they had created a worse fate for themselves than any they could have known was possible.

  But my people were not truly monstrous. They were only ordinary families, ordinary men and women, who loved and hated and cried and laughed, and had the capacity to be kind – so very kind – or terribly, unbearably cruel, given the right circumstances.

  Fear is contagious.

  But perhaps bravery can be too.

  The villagers had found the courage to face me this morning when less than one month ago they had diligently avoided me instead. Like the trees and their seasons, like me – and like Itsuki himself – people could change, given the chance. They could become better.

  One hundred years was long enough for any place to be held in stagnation and in fear.

  The time had come for us to be free.

  When I went into the woods again, into the maze, into the toils of the Yuki-Onna, I would fight to save Itsuki if I could, but I would fight to free this village too. And I would carry their clumsy, well-meaning greetings this morning in my heart like a blessing.

  That same heart lifted at the thought. Even if I did not succeed, perhaps I would not be the last to try. Perhaps somehow, inadvertent as it might have been, I had begun the process of teaching my people how to be brave again.

  When at last I arrived at the house, I found my mother caught up in a cleaning frenzy, scouring every inch of our little home of dust, raking out the fireplaces, polishing the wood, turning out and relining the drawers, reorganizing the pantry. I had much that I needed to say to her, things to explain, even if I was unsure of my ability to do so adequately. But Mother did not seem to be in a talking mood.

  She swept me into her whirlwind of activity, relentlessly setting me to work at all the small fiddling tasks which could be accomplished sitting down, and disappeared whenever I tried to engage her in conversation. When the time came for the midday meal, I was firmly pushed into the kitchen to kneel at the low table, and became involuntarily speechless at the feast she produced. Half the contents of her store cupboards seemed to have been emptied for this one meal.

  “Mother, how can we eat all this?” I asked, after staring for at least two minutes at the tray.

  “I will not. You will,” she said, arranging a large bowl of stewed pheasant udon with dried mushrooms and steamed pork dumplings at one of my elbows, a bowl of rice fried with egg at the other, and a plate of crispy gyoza and preserved plum onigiri before me, along with a small bowl of wilted river greens. “And it will get cold if you sit there gaping, so close your mouth, please.”

  In the event, she had judged my appetite better than I did. I had eaten only one meal yesterday and none so far today, and the moment I began to chew my stomach played the same trick on me that it had in Itsuki’s tree-home and began growling as if a wild creature were trapped inside.

  My mother let out a faint grunt of satisfaction, but when I swallowed and opened my mouth to try to broach the subject that I most needed to discuss, she only pushed seared cutlets of the serow at me and left the room. I eyed the path of the sun’s shifting light, which was now a little past its zenith, and devoured the cutlets. Perhaps once every plate was clean, she would let me speak.

  Yet when Mother finally returned, my voice died in my throat. In her arms were a bow, and a quiver of arrows, and a small hatchet with a gleaming quartz blade.

  My bow and arrows. Our wood axe. The ones I had borne into the Dark Wood and sacrificed to the battle with the beast. I had given them up for lost. Never had I imagined I would see them again.

  “How – where—?”

  “Shouta-kun found them in the woods – on the ridge, where you found your father – the morning after you went. He brought them back here to me. He thought I would like to have them.”

  Her work-roughened fingers ran gently over the leather of the quiver, and tilted it towards me so that I could see the dark splatters and streaks of dried blood that stained much of the surface. “Shouta-kun tried to scrub these away before he returned them, but they wouldn’t come out. He really did think you were dead. I think he blamed himself for driving you into the woods. Don’t judge him too harshly, Daughter.”

  I reached out to take the precious things from her, and laid them across my lap. “I won’t. But, Mother … why do you give me these things now?” Now, when I need them more than ever, although you cannot know it.

  She smiled down at me, and though the lines around her eyes were tight and worried, and her lips thin with tension, her eyes were as warm and as understanding as they had always been. She touched my hair fleetingly with one hand.

  “Because you still have work to do. You never needed to tell me that. Your father may have seen you in his dreams, my little flower, but I have always seen you in my heart.”

  Twenty-one

  The Yuki-Onna had said: “If you leave, you shall never be able to return. You will never see your beast again.” She had said: “The moment that you leave this place, the maze will close to you, and the Dark Wood will hide it.” She had also said: “You should never have come here. My maze is not for such as you.”

  That meant something. It meant that the forest had brought me to Itsuki the first time without her permission or her knowledge. The Dark Wood had chosen to save me that night. It must, in fact, have been the Dark Wood that had brought my father home and left him at the edge of the treeline to be rescued, just as somehow it had saved the bow and quiver and the quartz axe which I had lost, and deposited them where Shouta could find them.

  I had been used to thinking of the woods as two distinct entities – believing that the friendly forest of non-magical trees was my forest, because I knew its voices as well as I knew the voices of my mother and father, and that the Dark Wood was foreign, wicked, even evil. But when I had first wandered into the Dark Wood, the voices of the trees had been so similar to the ones I knew that I had not been able to tell the difference. The Dark Wood was as alive as my forest was, and it had a mind of its own and magic of its own, too – even if it had been brought into being by the Yuki-Onna.

  Perhaps the Yuki-Onna did not know that.

  The Dark Wood had been willing to defy the Yuki-Onna all those times. I hoped it would be willing to do so once more, to help me again. To help me find my beast – and to save him, this time.

  It was mid-afternoon, and the light was clear and golden when I walked into the trees at last. This time I had made no hurried, fugitive escape from my house. In fact, my mother had insisted on helping me to prepare – and it showed.

  I wore my shabby down-stuffed jacket over the thickest winter kimono I owned, and my winter leather leggings. We had folded the gown up around my waist and tucked it into my obi, but I would let it down when I needed to, for extra warmth. A pair of my father’s rough old boots, made snug to my smaller feet with the addition of two pairs of socks, were laced up to my knees. Rolled small together in a pack on my back were the mittens and cap, and one of the furs that I had carried home with me from the maze, ready to be donned when the time came.
I had not forgotten the biting, near-fatal chill of the Moon maze.

  Also in the pack were flints and tinder, a full leather waterskin, and a quantity of dried meat and fruit. My quiver hung next to these, the strap crossing my breast, with the bow inside it. The wood axe I carried in my hand. The weight and heft of it was reassuring. The weight and heft of everything else I carried would likely make my back ache before very long. But mother had been firm, and I wanted her to have the comfort of knowing, this time, that she had done the best she could to arm me for what was to come.

  I halted at the treeline, turning back to look down at the village one last time before I left, just in case I did not see it again. But my eyes would not focus. In my heart, I had already said my farewell to this place.

  My eyes strayed away of their own accord, back to the shifting yellow and red-gold of the wood.

  There is a monster in the forest, a spiny sugi tree, one of the few evergreens in this part of the forest, murmured softly.

  “I know,” I began, as I often did – and then it struck me, for the first time, what the trees were trying to tell me – what they had always been trying to tell me, and all of us.

  “You don’t mean Itsuki at all, do you?” I breathed. “He isn’t a monster. He earned the right to be called a man long ago. You’re talking about her. The Yuki-Onna. She’s the one who must be defeated to end the curse. And you knew it. You knew it all along – you were always trying to warn us. The monster in the forest is Oyuki.”

  Monster! the sugi said again, as if in agreement.

  “I understand you,” I told it. “I finally understand what all of you have been trying to say. But I still need your help, my friends. I must find the Dark Wood, and within the Dark Wood, the maze. Will you guide me as you did before?”

  A gentle shudder moved through the trees, scraping the dry leaves together overhead with a soft lonely sound, and it was only then that I noticed how quiet, how unusually still the forest had been since I had stepped onto the ridge.