Risuko

by David Kudler

  “What have you done with your hair, child?”

  I winced, still focusing on the mat and the table legs. “There was... an accident in the kitchen.”

  Lady Chiyome gave a husky sigh. “I suppose when I pluck urchins from treetops in the morning, it’s too much to expect them to be ladies in the evening.”

  One of the Little Brothers gave a grunt that might have been a chuckle.

  “Look up, child.” The lady was either scowling at me, or smirking. She wiggled a thin finger at the writing implements before her.

  The bowl that held the ink was eggshell thin, glazed a rich, deep blue that seemed to soak in the flickering light of the small fire and the candles that lit the room. A worn black ink stone lay beside it.

  “I would like to see how well your father taught you, Risuko.” She cocked her head to one side, like someone who was trying to look sly. “Write something.”

  Still barely lifting my head, I reached out and took a sheet of the rice paper. It was so thin I could barely feel it between my fingers. As I placed it before me, I imagined I could almost see the grain of the table through the paper.

  “What should I write?” I asked.

  “Whatever you like,” she answered, dismissively waving her hand.

  I chewed on the inside of my bottom lip for a second. I couldn’t think of a thing. Then I remembered sitting next to Father, copying one of his poems, trying to match his flowing brushstrokes.

  I reached out to pick up the brush, but my fingers were shaking. “The ink is really good.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Of course.” She clearly thought it was the stupidest thing she had heard me say.

  I took a deep breath, trying to gain time and steady my hand. I tried to visualize the words flowing from our father’s brush, the three lines of Otō-san’s favorite poem. Without even realizing that I had done it, I picked up the brush, wetted it in the ink, and let the tip flow black over the ice-white paper.

  Soldiers falling fast

  Battle of white and scarlet

  Blossoms on the ground

  Again, Lady Chiyome smirked, looking down at my calligraphy. This time, however, the smirk was definitely not disgust, but what I was beginning to recognize as the lady’s sour amusement.

  “Very nice,” she said, eyebrows arched.

  It was. Father would have been proud. It wasn’t as good as his, but the lines flowed cleanly, evenly and easily.

  “It’s one of my father’s poems.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  I was about to ask how she could possibly know that, but she held up a small, thin finger. Her face was still on the surface, but looked as if it were twisting underneath. “Poetry is very nice, but anyone can learn a bag full of haiku before breakfast. Show me something longer. Show me some prose.”

  I took a deep breath, and I immediately thought of that passage that Otō-san used to have us practice night after night. Again, I took out a clean sheet and picked up the brush. This time, I was calmer. With my left hand, I held back the cuff of my right sleeve.

  “Keep your tongue in your mouth, child,” tisked Lady Chiyome.

  I sucked my tongue in. I hadn’t even noticed that I was sticking it out. I could feel my fingers begin to shake again.

  I took another deep breath, carefully wetted the brush once more, and began to write.

  In the reign of a certain emperor there was a certain lady of the lower ranks whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The great, amibtious ladies gazed on her resentfully. Because of this...

  My concentration was broken by an odd sound—a wheezing, rolling, rasping sound. Alarmed, I looked up.

  Lady Chiyome looked furious—her white-painted face was darkening and twisted. Then she let out the sound again, fuller and deeper, and I realized that she was laughing. Tears began to stream from her eyes and she was weeping, screaming, howling with laughter.

  I knelt there, ink drying on my brush, afraid to move. I had no idea why she was laughing, and was afraid that anything I might do could turn her frightening good humor to anger.

  She reached a hand out to Mieko, and from the look on the maid’s face I realized that she was as shocked as I was. Mieko’s perfect black eyebrows were arched so high they looked as if they might snap.

  Lady Chiyome took a silk handkerchief from Mieko’s sleeve, and began to wipe her eyes. I noticed that even the two bodyguards seemed astonished.

  “Well, Mieko,” the lady said to her maid, “there you are. I look up at the top of the most forsaken pine tree in forsaken Serenity Province, and I find the last great enthusiast of The Tales of Genji.” She gave another rumbling laugh, and Mieko smiled, at least in sympathy if not in understanding. The old woman turned her streaked face to me again. “So, my little romance novelist. Your father did indeed teach you well.” She blew her nose loudly.

  “Here, Kuniko.” She handed the wet silk rag to the other maid, whose face was a mask, and then turned back to me. “Now let me see how you can read.”

  Smoothly and so quickly that I didn’t even see it happening, she plucked the brush from my hand. Holding it like a knife between her middle finger and thumb, she picked up fresh ink and poised to write on yet another sheet of beautiful, clean rice paper. She looked up, catching me with her gaze, as if to say, Are you watching carefully?

  Like me, she pulled her sleeve back, but where my action had been a simple grab to keep my sleeve from trawling through the ink, hers was precise and elegant, like the motion of a dancer.

  Her hand barely moved, but the brush slashed a character onto the paper—the phonetic hiragana, ku (く). Then came a sinuous curve—the phonetic katakana, no (ノ). Finally, another, horizontal slash—the Chinese kanji ideogram ichi (一).

  She placed the brush down with the same deadly elegance, and looked up at me again. “Well?” she asked, indicating what she had written.

  I was perplexed. I understood all of the pieces, but they made no sense. Otō-san said you weren’t ever supposed to write katakana, hiragana and kanji in a single word. I turned my head, thinking perhaps that if I looked at it upside down I might understand it.

  “Well,” I said, “the first mark is ku, which means nine. And then there’s no, which is... of? Or on, or sometimes from. And then that line looks like the kanji character meaning one.” Then I sat back a bit, and the word came into focus, like an offshore island appearing through clearing fog. “But the whole thing... If you put the three strokes together it could be the kanji character for woman (女).”

  Lady Chiyome smiled again, the frightening smile. “Yes, my squirrel, yes. A kunoichi is a very special kind of woman indeed.” She looked to her two maids, and then back at me. “Perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will be such a woman yourself some day.”

  I stared at her.

  “I have one last question for you, child.”

  “Yes, my lady?”

  She picked up the brush and swirled it in a small bowl of water to clean it. Taking out yet another sheet of paper she said, “This morning, you told me that you could see the paper that Lord Imagawa and his commander were looking at.”

  I nodded.

  She fixed me with a skeptical stare. “To have seen it from that distance, you’d have had to be a falcon, not a squirrel.”

  “But... I saw it, my lady.”

  “Hmmph. So you say. Do you think you could reproduce what you saw?”

  Now it was my turn to frown once more. In my mind’s eye the image was clear—the large blocks of green, with the smaller blocks of red and blue surrounding them. Lines like arrows sticking out of them. I nodded again.

  She pushed the box of colored inks toward me and held out the brush once more. “Keep your tongue in, this time.”

  I sucked my tongue in. “Yes, Chiyome-sama.” Then I reproduced the draw
ing I had seen as best I could.

  When I looked up, Lady Chiyome’s eyes were wide. “Are you sure this is what you saw?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  She grunted and turned to Kuniko. “We’ll need to get out of here as quickly as possible tomorrow, Kuniko.” Then she waved a hand at me. “Go to bed, girl. We will be traveling again in the morning.” She favored me with a grin in which there was very little of lightness. “Pleasant dreams, Risuko.”

  My dreams that night were anything but.

  6—Tea and Cakes

  A rumble woke us all the next morning. It sounded like a peal of distant thunder. But Mieko and Kuniko were already on their feet before I could sit up and wipe the sleep from my eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked Emi, who was rubbing her eyes next to me. “It’s awfully cold for thunder and lightening, isn’t it? And it doesn’t feel like an earthquake....”

  Emi shook her head and scowled. We both listened carefully as we pulled on our clothes—mine still slightly damp from the night before, smelling faintly of stale shoyu and burnt rice.

  Another low rumble shook the morning silence. From where I had been sleeping near the kitchen, I could see a grey, thin light leaking beneath the outer kitchen door.

  We began to fold away our bedding with a sense of uncertain urgency. I was about to ask again what that rumble might have been, when a new sound broke the silence and explained everything. It was a sharp, high crack. Musket fire. And not very far away, from the sound of it.

  My legs went cold and I dropped my bedroll.

  The battle had come to us.

  Kuniko appeared at the front door, her face as stony as ever. To the younger Little Brother, she barked, “Go guard the rear gate.” To the older one, she said, “Come with me to guard the lady.” Then she and Mieko exchanged a look. It said: the lady’s maid and the four children would have to fend for ourselves.

  I caught Emi’s eye, and I could see she shared the dry panic that was squeezing the breath out of me. Even Toumi looked pale and shaken.

  There were several more gunshots, and the deep rumble sounded again—cannon fire.

  Mieko turned to us, standing there in her thin robe as if she were waiting to sit for a portrait and not waiting for a battle. “Aimaru,” she said, a hoarseness to her voice the only sign that she was nervous, “Aimaru, you take these young ladies to the kitchen. I will guard this door. You should be safe enough in there.”

  We all began to stumble toward the kitchen doorway.

  “Aimaru!” Mieko called, her voice betraying more emotion than I had ever yet heard, “they are your responsibility, do you understand?”

  He snapped a stiff, almost soldier-like bow, and led us into the kitchen.

  There was another rumbling sound in the distance, longer and higher than the cannon’s thunder. Horses were galloping in our direction.

  Aimaru grabbed a curved chef’s knife from the shelf next to the pots we had cleaned the night before. Its edge was nicked and scarred, but its point still looked lethal. He gave it a practice slash or two, and then looked up at the three of us. I realized that he was as terrified as we were. “There’s a small pantry there. Can you three fit in it?”

  I started to object, but he cut me off with uncharacteristic impatience. “Have you been trained to fight?” We all stood, silent. “Can you face a grown soldier?” Our shoulders sagged. He opened the door and pushed us in.

  “Does he know how to fight?” Toumi muttered. Her shoulder pressed against my nose. I couldn’t breathe.

  The pantry was tiny. The shelves were bare except for a few cobwebs that fluttered as we squirmed to stay quiet.

  Emi grunted and turned her head to try to get it away from Toumi’s hair. “I was there when Lady Chiyome picked him up on Mount Hiei, rock-head. He was training to be a warrior-monk.”

  Toumi looked as though she might bite Emi, but a loud yell from the front of the inn snapped her to attention. “Who was that?”

  There was an answering shout—“Get away from here!”—from a voice that I thought I recognized as Kuniko’s.

  “I think that’s coming from the front gate,” I whispered. I could hear our horses braying loudly. Then there was an explosion of noise: the shouting of many more voices, the sharp ring of steel meeting steel, and a wrenching snap that made the whole rickety inn tremble.

  I heard the Little Brother outside the back door yell, “Come here, come here! It is a good day to die!” Several angry voices answered his.

  There was no escape from the inn.

  Now I was panicked—furious—at being trapped in the airless closet. If I could only climb to the roof, I thought, I might jump to the next building... Desperate to find some way out, I looked up.

  Above, a crescent-moon sliver of light shone through the thatch roof. Before I had even considered, I had used Toumi’s shoulder to push me up onto the flimsy shelves.

  “Hey!” barked Toumi.

  “Murasaki,” Emi hissed, “come back down!”

  “I just want to see,” I whispered back, feeling a twinge of guilt at leaving them behind. “I’ll be right back.”

  I could feel the brisk morning air blowing in through the sliver of space between the wall and the singed thatch, could smell the smoke of a thousand meals that had been cooked in the kitchen below. I pushed up, widening the opening by pressing between the straw and the wall.

  As I squeezed up into the smoke hole, I heard Aimaru gasp below. “What are you doing?”

  “Uh, just taking a look.”

  “Get down!”

  “I will, I...” I didn’t want to abandon him or Emi—it didn’t seem fair. But I couldn’t just sit there, locked up. I wriggled against the wall, pushing up into the smoke hole.

  Looking up, all that I could see was the charred roof that covered the chimney, keeping rain out. Like all else in the inn, the cover had a moth-eaten look. The supports were charred and spindly, and it looked as if a stiff breeze might have blown it away like the ash from the previous night’s fire.

  But the sky beyond was blue—the bright, silver-blue of early morning—and I could just smell the distant tang of the sea through the thick odor of stale smoke. As I pushed up through the chimney, I was so feverish with relief at my soon-to-be-certain escape that I almost missed another scent, one that made the hair on my forearms stand up.

  Gunpowder. Close by.

  As soon as I raised my head through the smoke hole in the thatch, a thunderstorm of sounds burst over my ears. Gun shots. The ping of steel on steel. Screams.

  As I peered around, looking for a nearby roof that I could escape to, I could see knots of dust, with occasional silver flashes. I tried to see any of our party, but the chimney was on the far side of the roof from the inn yard. I could hear the younger of the Little Brothers howling like an angry bear, but I could not see him; he must have been just out of sight, hidden by the edge of the roof. Which way to go? I wondered.

  A puff of hay suddenly flew into my face. I couldn’t imagine why—it wasn’t windy, and so there was no reason for the roof to be blowing apart, ramshackle as it was.

  I turned toward where the thatch had come from and saw a bright flash of red from the dust-filled street.

  I did not hear the gunshot until the bullet had splintered the smoke-lathed support a hand’s width from my ear. The support gave way, and the roof above me squealed as it began to lean and fall.

  As I scampered back down into the pantry with a squeak, I could see relief and concern on Aimaru’s round face.

  “Well?” snapped Toumi.

  “I... couldn’t see anything,” I murmured as I stood once again between them, trying not to tremble.

  There was noise now in the corridor of the inn. The older Little Brother must have been fighting like a demon to protect Chiyome-sama.

  I thought
with terror of poor Mieko, standing frail and alone out in the dining room. Why hadn’t she come back into the kitchen with us, or gone off with Kuniko? She made a dreadful sacrifice for us, I thought, and made it with the quiet dignity of a samurai woman, just as our father had always hoped that my sister and I would conduct ourselves. I was ready to call out to Mieko, to tell her to come in and hide with us, when I heard, through the clamor, two men entering the dining room.

  Through the thin wall behind me, I heard one say, “Hey, Juro, look what we’ve found!”

  “The pretty lady from the group at the crossroads, yesterday. Hey, pretty lady. Give a soldier a kiss?” I thought I recognized the voice of the samurai who had stopped us the previous evening.

  I heard Mieko say, with that same polite tone that she seemed to use no matter what the occasion, “Please, gentlemen, go elsewhere. I do not wish to harm you.”

  I do not wish to harm you?

  The two soldiers laughed grimly and we could hear the sound of tables being knocked aside. One thumped into the wall against which my back was pressed. I could feel Toumi, Emi and myself all try to take a sympathetic gasp of terror for Mieko, but the space was too confined—we simply pressed up against each other even more tightly.

  From the dining hall, we heard the sound of a high shriek, and then what sounded like a sigh. There were two thuds, and then the room beyond the wall was silent.

  Battle raged elsewhere. Grunts, shouts, the clang of metal—it was too much sound to give me a picture of what was going on outside.

  Then a new sound drowned out all the others. It roared like a huge wave breaking on the shore, but instead of crashing and retreating, it kept thundering toward us from the same direction that the cannon fire had come from.

  It was the sound of hundreds of galloping horses.

  Otō-san told me once—only once—about witnessing the charge of the Takeda cavalry at Midriver Island. He said the thunder of their hooves was both the most beautiful and most terrifying thing he had ever witnessed—except for the births of my sister and me.