Risuko

by David Kudler

  There was no sound but the hiss of the wood burning in the little stove.

  Without a word, Mieko left, followed by the Little Brothers, with Aimaru trailing behind them, blinking.

  The rest of us stayed to return the stable to its normal, cluttered state. We had just finished when Masugu-san rode in, his horse sweaty and covered in mud, his eyes bright as I had not seen them in weeks.

  —

  As soon as we left the stable, Toumi snarled, “What kind of idiotic nonsense was that?”

  Mai and Shino pulled her aside, whispering urgently—clearly trying to help Toumi avoid one of the older women overhearing—but they needn’t have bothered. One of the older kunoichi made a sour face and clicked her tongue before turning toward the great hall. Looking like a dog that’s just been hit, Toumi ran toward her least favorite spot in the Full Moon, the kitchen.

  “Well,” whispered Emi as we followed in Toumi’s wake, “I guess she could have found a more polite way to ask, but I have to say I’m just as confused. You knew the moves. Do you know what that was about?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even know that I really knew the dance, or whatever it was. It just felt... as if I just knew what she meant us to do.”

  Emi stopped and looked at me, frowning. Of course, Emi was always frowning, so it wasn’t easy to know what she was thinking. “You’ve really never seen that.”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  Emi nodded, but as we both walked up toward Kee Sun’s domain, her frown hadn’t lessened at all.

  22—Feather Soup

  The following day, after the midday meal, Emi and I were taking the remains of a dozen chickens out through the gate in the back of the compound wall to the rubbish pit when we heard a sharp hiss from behind our dormitory. She and I blinked at each other, dull and incapable of thought after the long ordeal of plucking and butchering the birds.

  “Emi! Murasaki!” It was Aimaru’s voice, whispering as loudly as he could manage.

  Blinking at each other again, Emi and I scanned the compound. It was not snowing—it hadn’t in over a week—but it was bitterly cold as only those mountains can be, and everyone seemed to be indoors, shutters closed. I led the way back to where Aimaru was hiding.

  Our friend was wearing what looked to be every piece of clothing he could pull on—he could barely bend his arms to gesture.

  “You look silly,” Emi said, her scowl lightening slightly. He looked like a rag doll.

  “Very funny,” he said, and Emi and I choked on our laughter, unable to cover our mouths since our hands held baskets full of bones, feathers, intestines and beaks.

  “Look, I’ve been waiting out here forever since the end of the meal. It’s cold!”

  We laughed again. It wasn’t very kind of us, but after all of the dismal and odd things that we had been doing, it felt good to laugh.

  “We apologize, Aimaru-san,” I said finally with a giggle, bowing as deeply as I could without spilling the chicken offal onto his feet.

  “Fine! Fine! I’ve wanted to talk to you two for days! But if you’re having such a lovely time, clearly you don’t need to talk to me,” Aimaru grumbled, and I tried to settle myself as much as I could. Emi was scowling so fiercely that I was certain that she was biting her cheeks. He peered into our baskets. “What are you doing?”

  “Well,” I grumbled, “now that we’ve butchered these lovely chicken carcasses so that you can have some stew tonight, we’re taking the bits that even Kee Sun can’t figure out how to make edible out to the offal pit.”

  Aimaru frowned—the expression seemed wrong on his face.

  “Would you like some feather soup, Aimaru?” Emi asked. “I’m sure Murasaki and I could whip some up for you in no time.”

  He snorted, the frown gone again. “Not just now, thank you.”

  Emi scowled—at least, I think she did—and said, “What a shame. I was looking forward to seeing if you really would eat anything.”

  Sighing, Aimaru said, “Close enough. The Little Brothers have me working and training so hard, I’m ready for the mid-day meal before the sun has cleared the horizon.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Oh, working with a spear and on my strength. It’s mostly pretty boring.”

  I giggled. “Really?”

  He shrugged as much as he could in all of that clothing. “We do hours of meditation, just like when I was at the monastery. They have been taking me out on their rounds, though.”

  “Rounds?” I asked.

  “Yes, the Little Brothers serve as Lady Mochizuki’s bailiffs, making sure that her farmers are all well, and collecting...” Suddenly, Aimaru grew thoughtful, his brows contracting toward the center of his usually smooth face.

  “What are the villagers like?” I had hardly thought about the outside world in weeks, except as a map covered with pebbles and pins; it seemed odd to think that there were farmers and tanners and scribes down in the valley, living very much as my family had always done in the shadow of the Imagawa castle. “What do they think of Lady Chiyome?”

  “Fine. Very respectful.” He was staring down at the guts and feather in our baskets.

  “You didn’t change you mind about the soup, did you?” Emi asked. She held the basket up as if to let him smell.

  “No,” Aimaru said, no smirk at all this time. “No, I was thinking. You’ve been butchering chickens?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We just told you. And pigs. And the cow the other day. That was horrible.”

  “Yes,” he said, but I couldn’t tell what he was agreeing with. “The thing is, the farmers usually butcher the animals before presenting them to us. I hadn’t even thought about why they were presenting them to us unprepared.”

  “Well,” I said, shrugging, “it could be the storms?”

  “Butchering is indoor work,” Emi muttered, “and not exactly cold. I’d think we’d want the meat separated from the offal as soon after the animal was slaughtered as possible.”

  “I suppose,” I said, though I knew that they were right. “Maybe it’s just Kee Sun?”

  “Maybe,” answered Emi, wrinkling her nose.

  After a moment of silence in which all three of us stared into the nauseating stuff in the baskets, I asked, “Why would they care so much about us doing the butchering?”

  Another moment of silence followed.

  “Perhaps they want to train us as cooks,” Emi said, chewing on her lip.

  Aimaru shook his head. “Murasaki, Chiyome-sama told you that she wanted you to be a... what was it? A...?”

  “A kunoichi.”

  “Yes. Isn’t that what the older women are?”

  “Yes,” Emi said firmly.

  “Huh.” He patted his stiff, padded arms against his body to warm himself.

  Another silence followed, this one even longer. I tried to imagine Mieko-san plucking, gutting or boning a chicken. I couldn’t.

  “It was nice to see you yesterday morning at the dance lesson,” said Emi.

  Aimaru nodded and shuffled his feet. “That’s why I wanted to talk with you. I thought we were just going to clear out the stable. I had no idea we were going to join you....”

  Emi scowled at him; it seemed almost a relief to watch her face return to its normal expression. “So you don’t have any idea what the point of that lesson was?”

  “None!” he answered, eyes wide. “Is that what you’ve been learning?”

  We both shook our heads. Emi grumbled, “Oh, no. We’ve been learning to play bad music and pour cold tea.”

  “That sounds... interesting,” he said, looking perplexed again.

  I laughed. “Hardly. And it isn’t as bad as Emi is making it sound—at least it’s better than skinning cows and plucking chickens.”

  Aimaru favored us w
ith a smile. “Well, I suppose that’s true. Though at least, in the kitchen, you get to stay warm!”

  Emi and I joined his smile, but she shivered, and I became aware of the chill.

  At last I sighed. “We need to get back. Tonight’s mizutaki won’t cook itself, yeh know!” I said in something vaguely like Kee Sun’s sharp-edged accent.

  That broke the spell. They both laughed.

  Emi and I began walking toward the gate to the offal pit and Aimaru stomped straight-legged and straight-armed toward the stables. Before we’d gone more than a step or two, Emi laughed her strange laugh. “Look!” She was staring down at the patch of snow where we’d been standing. “It’s the Chinese character for goat!” she giggled.

  There in the white, trampled snow the blood dripping from one of the baskets had drawn what did indeed like a Chinese kanji character. All I could seem to see, however, was the blood.

  —

  After we had emptied the baskets, Emi and I were on our way back to the compound when we both heard a noise.

  “What was that?” Emi’s brows pursed.

  I listened, but heard nothing but the sound of the wind swirling through the tangled woods. “A... a horse? Maybe?” I was thinking of the voices I’d heard when I’d climbed through the oaks. Masugu? And... Mieko?

  “Emi-chan! Risuko-chan! You should not be out here speaking to this boy!” Fuyudori seemed to have appeared out of nowhere just inside the Full Moon’s rear gate. Her white hair disappeared into the snow, which was falling again, and her cheeks glowed red.

  “Yes, Fuyudori-senpai! Sorry, Fuyudori-senpai!” Emi and I both spluttered, hurrying back inside under her glare.

  —

  Late that night, as Toumi, Mai and Shino all began to snore in a sort of odd, grating musical chord, Emi and I whispered quietly about Mieko’s lessons—and about Aimaru’s questions concerning our work in the kitchen.

  “Do you think they have anything to do with each other?” whispered Emi, looking thoughtfully at the thin door to Fuyudori’s room.

  “I can’t imagine what,” I answered. Stifling a yawn, I whispered, “Maybe you should ask Aimaru.”

  Her eyes got round and she looked at the door again. “We’re not supposed to talk to boys,” she answered loudly. Then she turned over. “Good night, Murasaki.” As always, she was asleep before I had even finished answering.

  As I tried to follow her, I remembered the sound we had heard outside the gate. Had it been a horse? Had it been Inazuma, Masugu-san’s charger? I drifted off to the image of black hair and white snow.

  23—Poppies in Winter

  Evidently, Emi did not sleep as well as usual. When we three walked into the kitchen the next morning, Kee Sun looked at her and scowled. “Smiley, yeh look like the demons have been chasing yeh.”

  Emi frowned her most ferocious frown, and her neck turned pink. “I... could not sleep.”

  “And yeh, there, Falcon-girlie?” the cook asked Toumi, who was slumped against the big wooden cutting table.

  “Stomach ache,” muttered Toumi, though I couldn’t think why the previous day’s work would upset anyone’s stomach—thankfully, it had just been chickens, not a pig or another cow.

  Kee Sun grunted, and then gestured toward me with his cleaver. “Well, at least Bright-eyes here looks like she’s had a good night. But since I don’t want none of yeh slicing off any of those fingers o’ yehrs belonging to the lady, perhaps we’ll be starting on something I was going to teach yeh later.”

  He finished filleting a carp in four smooth, swift passes of his thin boning knife, wiped the blade, placing it carefully on cutting table, and then walked over to the beam where dozens of herbs hung, dried and drying. He ran his fingers almost reverently along their tips, and then looked at us, crossing his arms. “In Korea, we call this Hanyak. Medicine. Plants, yeh know, can make our food taste good—basil and ginger and garlic and pepper and the like. But they can do more than just that.”

  He pointed up again. “Ginseng. Mugwort. Wormwood. Corydalis.” He waved his hand at what I now realized where not just cooking herbs but hundreds of different plants. Leaves. Fruits. Roots. Dried mushrooms. “Herbs. Yeh little beggars know about the five elements? The two forces?”

  We all nodded, but I could tell that neither of the others felt any more sure of her knowledge than I did.

  “Right. Yeh know how we’re always careful to balance the flavors, the colors in meals? Sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty? Green, red, yellow, white, brown?”

  Now we nodded more certainly; he’d been drilling that into us for weeks. The evening meal the night before had included green negi onions, red smoked trout, yellow squash, white daikon radish and brown mushrooms. Of course, in Kee Sun’s opinion, which he shared with us during the preparations for every meal, the Japanese taste in food ran far too much to brown and sweet.

  “Well, it’s not just ‘cause it tastes good or looks good. We’re all of us made up of five elements—fire, wood, earth, metal and water. Each o’ them matches up with a color and to a flavor—so wood is green and sour, and fire is red and hot, and so on. And each of them elements has two sides—light and dark, or, if yeh’d rather, hot and cold. Female, male.”

  I remembered Otō-san telling me about the same things once as he was drawing a sketch of the cherry blossoms on the tree outside of our house.

  “Yin and yang,” said Emi.

  “There yeh are. Those’re the Chinese names for ‘em. So we’re all made up of these, and just like a good soup has just the right balance of broth and meat and this and that, so’re we. We need balance. So we have to eat in balance—sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty. Green, red, yellow, white, brown. Understand?”

  We nodded again.

  “Well,” he continued, “each o’ these plants here has the power to move that balance.” He looked back up at his herbs, and pointing at one we knew well—his huge clump of dried basil leaves. “Basil—that’s sweet and green and pungent; it has the power of building up the warm energy in the bits of yeh that are made up of earth. And if yeh’re feelin’ rheumy and sniffly—if yeh’re runnin’ cold and wet—that’s important. But if yeh already got too much heat and too much earth, well, then, too much basil’s gonna be bad for yeh, see?”

  Once more we nodded; even Toumi seemed interested.

  “There’s different bits of yehr bodies that need more or less of different elements, or more yin, or more yang. Well, each o’ these herbs affects different parts o’ yehr body. And people are what they eat, yeh know. So a good cook is like a healer; gotta make sure folks get all as they need.” He crossed his arms again, scowling in a manner that I had come to recognize was his way of letting us know what he was about to say was important. “Thing is, each of these herbs can help keep a body healthy, if they’re used one way—or they can make a body sick if they’re used another. Sick. Or worse.”

  Toumi snorted. When Kee Sun scowled at her even more deeply, she snapped, “Well, come on! You’re trying to tell us that basil can be a poison?”

  The cook chuckled, but his eyes were still serious. “It’d take a powerful lot of basil to make a body sick. But sure—it’d work well enough. Give enough basil to a woman who’s newly pregnant and she’ll lose her child—and whether she wants the babe or not’ll decide whether she thinks it’s poison or healing.”

  Now Toumi scowled back, her arms folded as his were. But she remained silent.

  “So,” said Kee Sun. “Herbs. Now, Smiley-girlie, do yeh recognize this one here?” He pointed up to a clump of dried flowers that reminded me of the sea urchin shells my sister Usako had tried to collect once at the beach. The paper-thin grey shells had disintegrated in her fingers no matter how careful she was, and so she had disintegrated into tears. Thinking of her tears, looking at the dried flowers made me think....

  Mouth turned down even further than usual, Em
i shook her head.

  “Any of yeh?”

  I cocked my head. “Are those... poppies?”

  Kee Sun raised a scarred brow. “And how’d yeh know that, Squirrel-girlie?”

  I remembered the sound of my sister’s arm cracking like a dry twig when she’d fallen, trying just the one time to follow me up into the trees, and I shivered. The sound of her cries. “They grow on the hill below the castle, in our village. We’d pick a couple of plants every spring. My mother used to get the seeds for baking, and the juice for brewing tea when we were hurt.”

  He grinned. “There yeh go. I keep it around for bad pain, just the same. And for when some of the girlies go nights without sleepin’.”

  Emi cleared her throat. “Isn’t poppy juice... dangerous?”

  Kee Sun gave a brisk nod. “Ayup. I told yeh—the difference ‘twixt a healin’ herb and a poison is how much yeh use, and when yeh use it. The lieutenant, he hates poppy juice; thinks it feeds the demons. But this here is the best medicine there is for pain, and also for not sleepin’, ‘specially for young ladies at... certain times. Slows the heart. Slows the bowels. Slows everythin’. Gives a body dreams....” He shuddered dramatically. “Well. We got the dried pods, here, for the seeds and for making tea, but I also squeeze the juice when they’re green, which is even stronger; I’ve got it all ready.” He pointed to one of the line of small clay bottles he occasionally used to cook from. “Make a tea with a bit o’ mint, and a drop or maybe two o’ that poppy juice—just a drop or two, no more—and I promise yeh’ll be off in dreamland. Yeh’ll sleep as sound as a bear in winter. And yeh’ll wake less grumpy.”

  Even Emi smiled at that. “What’s the mint for?”

  “Good for the bowels. But mostly? Makes it taste better,” said Kee Sun with a wink, and Emi laughed for the first time in what felt like days. “Now, takin’ too much of this stuff can make a body terrible sick. Can kill. And takin’ it too often is a good way to get yehrself possessed by a demon, and no doubt: it’ll take yehr soul till there’s nothin’ left in yehr body and yeh wither away like last autumn’s rice stalks. It’ll kill yeh with dreams. It’ll kill yeh slow, and it’s not a nice death—that’s a fact.”