But Junko paced the castle all night, and wandered the grounds like a spirit; it was dawn before he could at last reassure himself that what she had told him was both sound and sensible. Ikeda’s death had clearly been an accident, after all, and there was nothing in the least shameful in making the best of even such a tragedy. Sayuri’s shapeshifting had brought about great good for him, however unintentional; let him give thanks for such a wife and, as he rode proudly beside the Lord Kuroda, bless the wandering arrow that had found an otter instead of a wild pig. “She is my luck,” he thought often. “I should have given her that name, luck, instead of little lily.”
But he did, indeed, pray often at the family shrine erected for Daisuke Ikeda.
Now in time Junko came to realize that, while he had certainly been honored far beyond his origins in becoming part of Lord Kuroda’s private guard, he had also attained a kind of limit beyond which he had no chance of rising. Above the guard stood his master’s counselors and ministers: some of them higher in rank than others, some higher in a more subtle manner, unspoken and unwritten. In any case, their world was far out of reach for a nameless commoner, no matter how graciously favored by his lord. He would always be exactly what he was—unlike Sayuri, who could at least become different animals in her search for her true nature. And, understanding this, for the first time in his life Junko began to admit aloud that the world was unjust.
“Look at Nakamura,” he would say resentfully to his wife over the teacups. “Not only does he review the guard when Lord Kuroda is away or indisposed—Nakamura, who barely knows a lance from a chopstick—he advises my master on diplomacy, when he has never been north of the Inland Sea in his life. And Hashimoto—Finance Minister Hashimoto, if you please—Hashimoto holds the position for no other reason than that he is Lady Hara’s second cousin on her father’s side. It is not correct, Sayuri. It is not right.”
Sayuri smiled and nodded, and made tea. She had become celebrated among the ladies-in-waiting for the excellence and delicacy of her gyukuro green tea.
And a few weeks later, Minister Shiro Nakamura, who loved to stroll alone in the castle gardens before dawn, to catch the first scent of the awakening flowers, was found torn in pieces by what could only have been a wolf. There were never many wolves in Japan, even then, but there was no question of the killer in this case: the great paw prints in the soft earth were so large that Junko suggested that the animal might well have come from Hokkaido, where the wolves were notably larger. “But how could a wolf ever find its way from Hokkaido Island so far south to Honshu?” he asked himself in the night. “And why should it do so?” He was very much afraid that he knew the answer.
The hunt that was immediately organized after the discovery of Minister Nakamura’s still-warm body found no wolf of any species, but it did find blood in one of the paw prints, and on the blade of the antique dagger that Nakamura always carried. Sayuri was not at home when Junko returned; nor did she appear for several days, and even then she looked pale and faint, and spoke little. Junko made the excuse of illness to the Lady Hara, who sent medicines and dainties, plainly hoping that Sayuri’s reported condition might betoken a new godchild. For his part, he asked no questions of his wife, knowing that she would tell him the truth. She always did.
It took more time, and a great deal of courteously muffled scandal and outrage at court before Junko ascended into the ranks of Lord Kuroda’s advisors. He did not replace Minister Nakamura, but a station was created for him: that of Minister to the Lower Orders. When Junko’s first speechless gratitude began to be replaced by stumbling bewilderment, Lord Kuroda explained to him, thus: “By now, my friend, you should know that I am not one of those nobles who believe that the commoners have no reason to exist, except that we give them the privilege of serving us. Quite a few, in fact,”—and here he named a good eight or ten of the castle servants, ending with Junko himself—“show evidence of excellent sense, excellent judgment.” He paused, looking straight into Junko’s eyes. “And where there is judgment, there will be opinions.”
By this Junko understood that he had been chosen to be a liaison—what some might call a spy—between the daimyo and all those who were not nobles, priests or samurai. The notion offended him deeply, but he had not attained his unusually favored position by showing offense. He merely bowed deeply to the Lord Kuroda, and replied that he would do his best to give satisfaction. The Lord Kuroda looked long into his eyes without responding. So Junko, surname or no, became the first commoner ever accepted into a world his class had long been forbidden even to dream of entering. His and Sayuri’s quarters were changed once again for rooms that seemed to him larger than his entire native village; they were assigned a servant of their own, and a new bed that, as Sayuri giggled, was “like a great snowdrift. I am certain we will yet find a bear sleeping out the winter with us.” The haughtiness of Lord Kuroda’s other counselors, and the sense that their servant despised them, seemed a small price to pay at the time.
Out of respect and gratitude to his master, Junko served him well as Minister to the Lower Orders. He provoked no disloyal or rebellious conversations, but only listened quietly to the talk of the stables, the kitchens, the deep storerooms and the barracks. What he thought Lord Kuroda should know, he reported faithfully; what seemed to him to be no one’s business but the speakers’ remained where he heard it. And Lord Kuroda appreciated his discreet ability to tell the difference, and told him so, even calling him Junko-san in private. And once—not very long before at all—that would have been more than enough. But again he had collided with an invisible barrier. Precisely because the post had been invented especially for him, there was no precedent for promotion, nor any obvious position for him to step into whenever it should become vacant. Those who had always been kindly and amiable to Junko the castle’s chief huntsman, now looked with visible contempt on Junko the Minister, Junko the jumped-up pet of the Lord Kuroda. Those below him took great pleasure in observing his frustration and discomfort; when they dared, they murmured as they passed him, “Did you think you were better than we are? Did you really believe they would let you become one of them? Then you were a fool—and now you are no one. No one.”
Junko never spoke of his unhappiness to Lord Kuroda, but he expressed it once to his friend Akira Yamagata. The horsemaster, being a silent man, much more at ease with beasts than people, replied shortly, “Let demons fly away with them all. You cannot win with such folk; you cannot ever be even with them in their minds. Serve your master, and you cannot go wrong. Any horse will tell you that.”
As for Sayuri, she simply listened, and arranged fresh flowers everywhere in their quarters, and made green gyokuro tea. When she walked with Junko in the castle gardens, and he asked her whether she felt herself any nearer to perceiving her true nature, she most often replied, “My husband, I know more and more what I am not—but as to what I am….” and her voice would trail away, leaving the thought unfinished. Then she would add, quickly and softly, “But human—that, yes. I know I am human.”
Now the most clever and ambitious of the Lord Kuroda’s counselors, recently become Minister of Waterways and Fisheries, was a man named Mitsuo Kondo. Perhaps because he was little older than Junko, only now approaching his middle years, he went well out of his way to show his scorn for a commoner, though never in the presence of the daimyo. In the same way, Junko responded humbly to Kondo’s poorly-veiled insults; while at home he confided to his wife that he often dreamed of wringing the man’s thin neck, as he had so often done with chickens in his childhood. “Being of low birth, I am naturally acquainted with barnyards,” he remarked bitterly to Sayuri.
It happened that on a warm night of early summer, Junko woke thirsty to an empty bed—he was quite used to this by now—and was still thirsty when he had drunk the last remaining green tea. Setting off to find water, barefooted and still drowsy, he had just turned into a corridor that led to the kitchens, when he heard the scraping of giant claws on a weathered s
ugi-wood floor, and flattened himself against the wall so hard that the imprint of the molding remained on his skin for hours afterward.
A huge black bear was lumbering down a passageway just ahead. It must surely have smelled his terror—or, as he imagined, heard the frantic beating of his heart—for it hesitated, then rose on its hind legs, turning toward him to sniff the air, growling softly. He saw the deep yellow-white chevron on the creature’s breast, as well as the bright blood on its horrific fangs and claws, and he smelled both the blood and the raw, wild, strangely sweet odor of the beast itself. Even armed he might not be the creature’s match; weaponless, he knew this was the moment of his death. But then the bear’s great bulk dropped to the floor again, turning away, and his forgotten breath hissed between his teeth as the animal moved slowly on out of his sight, still growling to itself.
Junko did not go back to his quarters that night, but sat shivering where he was until dawn, tracing a trail of dead moss between two floorboards over and over with his forefinger. Then at last he slipped warily back into the new bed where Sayuri had laughingly imagined a bear keeping them company. She was sound asleep, not even stirring at his return. Junko lay still himself, studying her hands: one partly under her head, one stretched out on the pillow. There was no blood on any of the long fingers he loved to watch moving among her flowers. This was not as reassuring to him as it might once have been.
The hunt for Minister Kondo went on for days. The blood trail was washed away by a sudden summer rain, except for the track leading from his private offices, and there were other indications that he had been carried off by some great animal, or something even worse. For all his dislike of Kondo, Junko took a leading part in the hunt—as did Lord Kuroda himself—from its earliest moments to the very last, when it was silently agreed that the Minister’s body would never be found. Lord Kuroda commanded ten days of mourning, and had a shrine created in Minister Kondo’s memory on his own summer island. It is still there, though no one today knows whom it was meant to honor.
Even after the proper period of remembrance had passed, the empty place among the daimyo’s counselors remained unfilled for some considerable while. Few had liked Kondo any more than Junko did; all had feared his ambition, his gifts, and his evil tongue, and many were happy that he was gone, however horrified they may have been at the manner of his departure. But Lord Kuroda was clearly grieved—and, more than that, suspicious, though of what even he could not precisely say. Wolves and bears were common enough in Honshu in those days, but not in Honshu gardens and palaces; nor was the loss of three important members of his court, each under such curious circumstances, something even a mighty daimyo could easily let pass. The tale had already spread through the entire province, from bands of half-naked beggars huddled muttering under bridges to courts as great as his own. There was even a delicate message from the Shogun in Kyoto. Lord Kuroda brooded long over the proper response.
Junko came to feel his master’s contemplative eyes on him even when he was not in Lord Kuroda’s presence. At length, to ease his mind, he went directly to the daimyo and asked him, “Lord, have I done wrong? I pray you tell me if this is so.” For he knew his own silent part in the three deaths, and he was afraid for his wife Sayuri.
But Lord Kuroda answered him gently, “Your pardon, loyal Junko, if I have caused you to be more troubled than we all are, day on day. I think you know that I have often considered your country astuteness to be of more plain practical aid to me than the costly education of many a noble. Now I wonder whether you might have any least counsel to offer me regarding the terrible days through which we are passing.” He permitted himself a very small, sad chuckle. “Because, just as everyone in my realm knows his station, my own task is to provide each of them with wisdom, assurance and security. And I have none to offer them, no more than they. Do you understand me, Junko?”
Then Junko was torn in his heart, for he had never lost his fondness for the Lord Kuroda, and it touched him deeply to see the daimyo so distressed. But he shook his head and murmured only, “These are indeed ark times, my lord, and there is nothing that would honor my unworthy self more than to offer you any candle to light your way. But in all truth, I have no guidance for you, except to offer sacrifice and pay the priests well. Who but they can read the intentions of the kami?”
“Apparently the gods’ intentions were for my priests to leave me,” the Lord Kuroda replied. “Half of them ran off when Minister Nakamura’s body was discovered, and you yourself have seen the rest vanishing day by day since Kondo’s has not been discovered. In a little the only priest left to me will be my old Yukiyasa.” He sighed deeply, and turned from Junko, saying, “No matter, my friend. I had no business to place my own yoke upon your shoulders. Go to your bed and your wife, and think no more of this. But know that I am grateful… grateful.” And as he shuffled away, disappearing from sight among his bodyservants, it seemed to Junko for the first time that his master was an old man.
He repeated the conversation to Sayuri, generally satisfied with the way he had responded to the daimyo’s queries, but adding in some annoyance, “I expected him to offer me Kondo’s position, but he never mentioned it. It will surely come, I am certain.”
Sayuri had grown increasingly silent since the night of the black bear, more and more keeping to their quarters, avoiding her many friends and interests, shirking her duty to the Lady Hara when she dared; most often taking refuge in sleep, where she twitched and whimpered as Junko had never known her to do. Now, without looking at him, she said, “Yes. It will come.”
And so it did, in good time, and with little competition, whether direct or stealthy, for rising to high rank at the court of Lord Kuroda more and more clearly involved risking a terrible end. There was no one who openly connected the deaths with the steady advancement of the peasant Junko—Junko-san now, to all, by special order—nor, certainly, with his charming and modest wife—but there were some who pondered, and one in particular who pondered deeply. This was Yukiyasa.
Yukiyasa was the Shinto priest who had married Sayuri to Junko. As the Lord Kuroda had predicted, he was the only priest who had not fled the court, and the only person who seemed able to rouse Sayuri from her melancholic torpor. Out of his hearing, he was called the Turtle, partly due to his endlessly wrinkled face and neck, but also because of his bright black eyes that still missed nothing—not the smallest change in the flowing of the sea or the angle of the wind, not the slightest trembling of the eyelashes of a woman fearing to show fear for her husband far away in battle. If age had slowed his step, it seemed to have quickened his perceptions: he could smell rain two days off, identify a Mongolian plover before others could be sure it was even a bird, and hear a leaf’s fall or a fieldmouse’s squeak through the castle walls. But he did look more and more like a turtle every season.
Junko instinctively avoided the old priest as much as he could, keeping clear of the inari shrine he maintained, except for the Shogatsu Matsuri, the New Year’s festival. But Yukiyasi visited with Sayuri almost daily—in her quarters, if she did not come to the shrine—reading to her from the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, teasing and provoking her until she had no choice but to smile, often remarking that she should one day consider becoming a Shinto priest herself. She always changed the subject, but the notion made her thoughtful, all the same.
“Today he said that I understood the way of the gods,” she reported to Junko one spring evening. “What do you suppose he meant by that?”
They were walking together in the Realm of the Blue Dragon, still their favorite part of the castle gardens, and Junko’s attention was elsewhere at the moment, contemplating the best use of the numerous waterways and fisheries that ran through the Lord Kuroda’s vast domain. Now, his notice returning to his wife, he said, “The kami have always been shapeshifters; look at the foxes your friend’s shrine celebrates. Perhaps he senses….” He did not finish the sentence.
Sayuri’s grip on his arm tightened enough to hu
rt him. “No,” she said in a small voice. “No, that cannot be, cannot. I change no longer. Never again.” Her face had gone paler than the moon.
“The bear?” He had never meant to ask her, and immediately wished he could take back the question. But she answered him straightforwardly, almost in a rush, as the melting snows had quickened the measure even of Lord Kuroda’s gentle stream.
“I was so frightened to be the bear. I didn’t like it at all. It was a terrible thing.”
“A terrible thing that you were—or a terrible thing you did?” He could not keep his own words from tumbling out.
“Both,” she whispered, “both.” She was crying now, but she resisted strongly when Junko tried to hold her. “No, no, you mustn’t, it is too dangerous. I am sorry, so sorry, I so wish your arrow had killed me. Then Ikeda would be alive, and Nakamura, and Kondo—”
“And I would still be what I was born,” Junko interrupted her. “Junko the hunter, lower than any cook—because a cook is at least an artist, while a huntsman is a butcher—Junko, with his peasant ways and peasant accent, barely tolerable just as long as he keeps to his place. If it were not for you, my otter, my wolf—”
“No!” She twisted away from him, and actually ran a few paces off before she turned to stare at him in real horror. It was long before she spoke again, and then she said quietly, “We have quite traded places, have we not, my husband? You were the one who grieved for the poor victims of my shape-changing, and it was I who laughed at your foolish concern and prided myself upon the improvements I brought to your fortunes, as a good wife should do. And now….” She faltered for a little, still looking at him as though he were the strange animal she had never seen before. “Now you turn out to be the shapeshifter, after all, and I the soft fool who’ll have none of it, no more. Not even for love of you—and I loved you when I was an otter—not even for the sake of at last learning my own being, my own soul. That can go undiscovered forever, and welcome, and I will remain Sayuri, your wife, no more and no less. And I will tend three graves, and pray at the shrine, and live as I can with what I have done. That is how it will be.”
Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle Page 50