Emperor of the Eight Islands: Book 1 in the Tale of Shikanoko (The Tale of Shikanoko series)

by Lian Hearn

  “Where are you going, little sister?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Our parents are dead and we are fleeing from the fighting. Maybe we will go to Rinrakuji, maybe as far as Kitakami.” Aki remembered the name of the port on the Northern Sea, even though she had never been there. “Where is this boat going?”

  “To the fifteenth-day market at the Rainbow Bridge. We are entertainers. They call me Fuji.”

  She said it as though Aki should know her name, but it meant nothing to her nor had she ever heard of the market or the bridge. They sounded otherworldy and she wondered if she had been rescued by spirit beings or if she and the children had in fact fallen under the boat and drowned, and were now on one of the streams of the river of death.

  Father, Mother, I will be with you soon!

  There were several canopies on the boat covering soft-matted platforms, which could be made private behind bamboo blinds. Fuji led Aki onto one of these and the other women lifted Yoshi and laid him down beside her. His eyes closed, but he still gripped Kai’s hand. She climbed awkwardly up next to him, putting the box close to his head. Fuji lowered the blind on the eastern side against the sun’s rays. The shadows fell, striped and dappled, against their faces. Fuji leaned toward Aki and unwound the cowl that covered her head.

  “What happened to your hair?” she exclaimed.

  “My mother cut it.”

  “Did she intend you to be a nun? Is that why you are going to Rinrakuji?”

  Aki nodded. “I am dedicated to the shrine of Kannon there.”

  “That explains the box.” Fuji made a gesture toward it. “I thought it must be a ritual box.”

  “It’s mine, Kai was just carrying it for me.”

  “How old are you?” Fuji said.

  “Sixteen.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He turned six this year.”

  Fuji narrowed her eyes. “From a different womb?”

  “Yes, but the same father.” Ten years was a long gap between siblings, two mothers was more plausible. So, had her mother died? Or been put aside for a younger woman? Suddenly there was a host of stories she might tell, but she had to remember what she said and to whom. And then her sister came into her mind, the child born the same day as Yoshi, who had died at birth, leaving her mother with milk for an infant prince.

  “What about the little girl?” Fuji said. “Surely they are not twins?”

  “No, the child of another woman. My stepmother took pity on her and raised her with her son.”

  “Come here, little one.” Fuji reached out to Kai and tried to pull her toward her, but Yoshi tightened his grip.

  Kai shook her head. “If I let go he’ll scream. I always stay with him like this until he falls asleep.”

  Fuji stood and went closer. Kai shrank back as the woman took the scarf from her head. “What beautiful hair,” she murmured, and then swept it back, revealing Kai’s half-formed ears.

  “Ah!” she cried in surprise. “That’s too bad.”

  Kai stared back at her with her usual steady expression.

  “What are we going to do with you?” Fuji said.

  She sat down next to Aki, ran her hand over Aki’s cropped head, and said nothing more for a few moments. Aki thought she looked disappointed. Fuji drew the dagger from Aki’s belt and laid it down on the mat beside them, staring at it. Then she said, “What do you carry in the cloth? Is it an instrument?”

  “Yes, a lute. And my catalpa bow.”

  “I can understand the bow, for it is part of your vocation, but the lute? It must be precious to you. You must play for us later.”

  “I am not at all skilled,” she admitted.

  “That’s a pity, if it is true, for we need a lute player. Our last one was seduced away by a rich widow who fell in love with him and offered him a life of ease in Akashi.”

  She had been removing Aki’s clothing while she spoke, until the girl sat in her underclothes, shivering a little.

  Fuji studied her appraisingly. “It is a shame about your hair,” she murmured. “You are well formed, even though your face lacks true beauty. Why don’t you stay with us while it grows back, and then you can become one of us?”

  “What would I have to do, apart from the music?” Aki said.

  “We entertain men, soothe away their troubles, bring a smile to their faces, sing to them as their nurses or their mothers once did.”

  “I am already dedicated to the shrine,” Aki said. “I must go to Rinrakuji. I should not entertain men.”

  “Nothing crude would be expected of you,” Fuji said with a smile. “Your purity would not be compromised. Men come to us not in power but in supplication. They do not command, they entreat. Sex has a power of its own, which I know how to wield. This boat is my realm, my sisters and brothers are my subjects. Men visit us as ambassadors from a foreign country bringing tribute, seeking favors. But purity also has power. Your presence will strengthen us and bring us blessings. I already feel I love you like my own daughter. In return we will protect you and your little brother, and the other girl. Say you will at least come with us as far as Aomizu. It is only a day’s walk to Rinrakuji from there. You can try life as a shrine maiden and if you don’t like it you can come back to us.”

  “Thank you,” Aki said, though she did not think there was any going back from the life that had been ordained for her. Fuji dressed her again with tender fingers like a mother’s.

  Aki lay down next to Yoshi and stroked his head. He was asleep now and stirred only very slightly at her touch. Kai had fallen asleep next to him. She listened to the noises of the boat, the musicians practicing, a woman singing. Then suddenly dream images began to form, the Princess, her father’s face; they dissolved and she was asleep.

  When she awoke the boat had come to a halt. Fuji was brushing her hair with her gentle fingers. Yoshi still slept beside her.

  “Little sister, we need to get ready for our guests.”

  Aki looked around. She had no idea where she was, but the narrow river had widened into a vast lake, its surface as smooth and dark as steel. The boat, transformed with glowing red lanterns, was moored against a wooden pier that stretched out into the water. It was twilight and a thin gray mist rose from the lake, blurring the reflection of the lights and making the boat look as if it were suspended in the air. The musicians were warming up and the notes echoed in a random pattern that sounded enchanted.

  “You will play with them?” Fuji said. It was only partly a question.

  “Really, I have no skill,” Aki said. She had thought the older woman kind before in the way she expected women to be, in the way, all her life, servants and waiting-women had been to her, but now she felt Fuji’s strength and her dominance. No wonder she was the empress of her realm. Aki’s flight had been driven by a mixture of excitement and desperation. Exhaustion had felled her. These emotions had given way to fear. She had entrusted Yoshi, Kai, and herself to these people—and what else could she have done?—but the enormity of what her father had asked of her began to sink in. The Emperor of the Eight Islands slept beside her. The sacred lute of the Lotus Throne lay on her other side. How was she going to keep them hidden, when the lute would reveal itself by its gold and pearl inlay, its rosewood frame?

  Yet she could not refuse to unwrap it when Fuji told her to. Aki stared at the shabby old instrument, not recognizing it. It had changed its appearance completely. What could have happened? Did her father pick up the wrong instrument in the dark and confusion? Had someone stolen Genzo while she slept and replaced it with this ordinary, plain lute? Was the imperial treasure, preserved through the ages, lost through her fault, while in her hands? Then Yoshi would never be emperor and she had failed when she had hardly even begun.

  She took it up with shaking hands, aware that Fuji was watching her intently. She knew how to hold the instrument, how to move her fingers over the strings, but she had no gift for music and, as a child and young girl, had always preferred her father
’s teaching and pursuits to her mother’s. Now, using her nail as she had no plectrum, she began to pick out the notes to a children’s song her mother used to sing. She made a face; even she could tell the lute was out of tune.

  Yoshi awoke, rubbing his eyes. He began to sing in his high childish voice. After a few lines Kai sat up and joined in.

  Aki felt Genzo come alive. She felt its surprise, as though no one had actually played it for hundreds of years, and then its joy and delight as it found its tune and the notes began to pour from it.

  “Astonishing,” Fuji exclaimed. “Really, the three of you are quite enchanting.”

  Quickly they were dressed in red-and-white robes and placed among the musicians in the prow.

  “Do you know this song?” the players asked, singing a few lines or picking out the notes, and Aki shook her head, only to feel Genzo vibrate beneath her fingers. There was no tune the lute did not know. So she played all night, watching the men—the guests, the ambassadors—come to visit the women and retire behind the bamboo blinds, to be entertained by them.

  The moon rose and set, and it was almost dawn when the last guest departed. Gifts had been delivered in tribute: lengths of cloth, casks of rice, embroidery, sweet bean paste, fans, ceramic dishes. An early meal was prepared and then the women lay down and slept while the mooring ropes were cast off and the sail was raised. A single helmsman steered the boat along the coast toward the Rainbow Bridge.

  Aki rewrapped Genzo in the carrying cloth and placed it next to Yoshi and Kai, bowing her head and thanking it. Before she slept she lifted a corner of the cloth to check it and saw the gleam of gold and pearl.

  * * *

  At one time, the island, Majima, had been part of the mainland, home to a lakeside village, but in the past fifty or so years the weather had changed, with long, heavy rains in summer and huge snowfalls in winter, so the water level in the lake had risen and several villages had been submerged. Now Majima was a three-cornered island, its rocky western point thrusting out into the lake, a pine-shaded beach on its eastern side. On its highest spot stood a shrine to Inari, the fox god, from which a row of vermilion gates led down to the curved wooden bridge, the Rainbow Bridge, that joined the island to the mainland.

  Fuji told Aki that the local lord dreamed he should have a market at the end of the rainbow and the next day he saw one fall on Majima, so he had the bridge built.

  “Why didn’t he have the market on this side and save himself the trouble?” Aki said.

  “Men love to build bridges,” Fuji replied. “They love to join things together. The bridge is beautiful and sacred and, you know, markets are best held on islands, or riverbanks, places that are thresholds, removed from the everyday world. For there is a sort of magic going on at markets. Goods are bartered, one thing transformed into another. Craftsmen create something from nothing. Men trade the work of their hands and muscles. Everyone is equal, there are no masters and servants, no lords and retainers.”

  Kai was listening intently. Yoshi shrank close to Aki and pulled her head down so he could whisper in her ear.

  Fuji seemed to divine what he was saying. “You are afraid of pollution? What a little prince you are! Some would think your little friend a source of pollution with her shell ears. Where were you brought up? In the Imperial Palace? Let me guess, your father was a nobleman who either stayed to face the Miboshi and died in the capital or fled west with Lord Keita.”

  Aki did not know how to respond. Fuji pressed her. “Am I right?”

  “Not really,” Aki said, creating a story rapidly. “My parents were employed in a nobleman’s palace. My mother cleaned and my father was a painter.”

  “A cleaner’s daughter does not have such soft hands, a painter’s son has sulfur and cinnabar under his nails!” Fuji laughed. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone where you come from.”

  Aki felt the older woman believed she now knew a secret that gave her power over them and brought them under her control.

  “We are considered a source of pollution, like many here at the market,” Fuji said. “Wandering women who present puppet plays, men who build gardens and dig wells, changing the face of the earth, those who deal with death and decay, who bury corpses and demolish buildings, children who train animals and perform acrobatics. But don’t you see, little lord, we, being their opposite, are closer to the divine and the sacred than is the everyday world where most people live. Your mother may have been a lady or a cleaner, but she still went to the threshold of death to bring you into the world, and the afterbirth that nourished you had to be buried, like everyone else’s, in the gateway. You began life in blood and excrement and you will end it the same way. What you call pollution is not defilement; rather it is the essence of life, dangerous and dirty, maybe, but full of deep pleasure and power.”

  Yoshi gazed at her, not comprehending but impressed by her serious intensity.

  “One day you will understand,” Fuji said, and stroked his cheek with her slender fingers.

  The blinds were lowered, the silk cushions spread out, and the women prepared to receive their guests. Aki again sat with the musicians with the lute. She made Yoshi sit next to her, Kai on the other side, and he sang with them; she could tell he was becoming bored, but she was afraid to let him out of her sight. When the musicians took a rest and Fuji was occupied behind the blinds, she let the children go to the side of the boat and they hung over the railing, gazing at everything going on around.

  “Can we go ashore?” Yoshi said.

  “I’d like to, but I don’t know how to get there,” Aki replied.

  The boat was moored along with several others between the two shores. The visitors arrived in little vessels, hardly bigger than tubs, or were carried on the shoulders of porters, clambering on board with their feet wet and the hems of their robes soaked, making jokes about it that Aki blushed at, though she only half-understood them.

  They asked for girls by name; they knew them well. Their eyes were bright with anticipation and excitement. They aroused in Aki a curious mixture of interest and scorn.

  “Look!” Yoshi said. “Monkeys! Children with monkeys!”

  A strange troupe was making its way along the island shore. Not all of them were children, though they all wore children’s clothes, in every shade of red, and all had the same wild, free look as though they were part child and part animal. They stopped opposite the boat and waved. Even the monkeys, tethered by long silken cords and braided collars, raised their little paws.

  Yoshi waved back eagerly. One of the men started beating rhythmically on a small drum. A boy of about eight threw himself in the air, turning and tumbling. Two monkeys watched gravely and when he had finished imitated his routine in a bored, offhand way that the onlookers found most amusing. The boy became angry, the monkeys pretended to be scared and when he turned his back imitated his anger perfectly. The crowd roared with laughter.

  A competition ensued, boy against monkeys, leaping ever higher, turning more and more somersaults. The monkeys won effortlessly.

  The boy fell to the ground, discouraged and miserable. The monkeys looked anxious, conferred with each other, chattered pleadingly at the crowd as though seeking advice. They approached him silently and wrapped their arms around him. He leaped to his feet, grinning, while the monkeys clung around his neck and kissed his face.

  “Oh!” Yoshi sighed. “I wish I were him!”

  The acrobats were followed by a traveling physician selling herbs, oils, and potions with long, complicated anecdotes that made the crowd laugh, though Aki hardly understood a word, and then an old man made his way through the throng, stood on the shore, and waved to the musicians.

  They waved back excitedly and quickly arranged for one of the porters to carry him over to the boat. When he was on board, one of them dried his feet reverently with a towel and the others gathered in a circle around him, bowing their heads as he spoke a blessing.

  Aki had never seen anyone like him, nor did sh
e recognize the prayer. It was the time of the midday meal and food was served, prepared by the market women, carried across to the boat in baskets: rice with eggs stirred through it, fresh fern heads and burdock root, grilled sweet fish from the lake lying on young oak leaves, sweet bean paste in many different flavors and forms.

  The old man ate sparingly. At the end of the meal he took the last of the rice and formed it into balls with his fingers, spoke a blessing over them, and handed them around. When Aki took one, his gaze fell on her, and on Yoshi sitting on her lap.

  “They are like the Lady and her Child,” he said. “Call on the name of the Secret One, and he will save you and take you into Paradise.”

  The musicians all murmured a prayer.

  Aki divided the rice ball with Yoshi and Kai and put a fragment in her mouth. She shivered as she swallowed it. All the tastes in the world seemed embodied in its sticky grains, blood and bone, bitterness, salt and sweetness.

  * * *

  Slowly the boat made its way along the eastern coast of the lake until they came to the small town of Aomizu. Kai became something of a favorite with the musicians. They gave her a drum—she was sensitive to vibration and rhythm and she played with a natural talent. She began spending more time with the musicians, leaving Yoshi bored and restless. When he tried to order her around, the musicians teased him, calling him princeling and little lord. Several times Aki thought he was on the point of telling them who he was and she became even more eager to get him away. As she was getting ready to leave, one of the female drummers came to her and said, “We will miss you and your lute—we’ve never heard anything like it, any of us—and we hope you will come back one day. But we have a favor to ask: leave the little girl here. If you are dedicated to the shrine and your brother is to become a monk, what will happen to her? Rinrakuji will not accept her since she is blemished, nor will Lady Fuji take her on. But we accept her, we already love her. She has a divine gift. Heaven must have sent her to us.”

  “I would gladly,” Aki said. “But my little brother is devoted to her. I don’t think he’ll leave without her.”