Spinning Silk

by T. Cook

  But that could not go on forever. And Cook found excuses to send me out.

  “Furi, it is too heavy for me to carry, bring this bucket of compost out to the garden for me.”

  “That is Kame’s job,” I said, trying to excuse myself.

  “Kame is busy and the bucket is pungent in my kitchen. Take it.”

  I would have to take the bucket, but I didn’t fear such a short task too greatly. It would be done so quickly. I could hurry away and return to my loom in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know, however, that Cook had captured a rare and venomous scorpion, and secretly released it into my robe while she helped me lift the heavy bucket. I carried it as far as the pond before I felt the sting of the bite inside my right thigh.

  I dropped the bucket. The ground rocked beneath me. I staggered and fell. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the insect dash away in a mad scatter of legs. I opened my robe to examine the wound on my thigh, and found an angry red welt. I made an effort to walk, but fell to the ground short of the plum trees.

  In a moment, Shin appeared and knelt beside me. “You’re hurt. What was it?”

  “I am not sure,” I lied. “But it doesn’t matter. They’ll be watching,” I said, struggling back to my feet.

  Shin pushed me gently, yet firmly back to the ground. Holding my gaze, he asked again. “What was it?”

  Averting my eyes, I folded my robe away, exposing my wounded thigh. “Scorpion.”

  He removed the belt from his robe, tied it around my thigh above the bite, and cinched it hard. Then he removed a knife from his pocket and cut an X over the wound until red blood oozed. He pressed his mouth to the wound and began to suck the poison with a shucking sound as the air moved between his teeth.

  I winced an objection, but he ignored me and continued until he had removed all the poison.

  I can guess how Shin’s falling upon me looked to Madame’s eyes where she followed the weavers’ pointing fingers from the veranda.

  No one ever asked me for my account, and I could not explain the bite. After all, I never suffered an hour of illness. Shin had removed the poison and I had not so much as swooned to prove the episode was anything but what it appeared to be.

  I waited for Shin through the length of the night, but Madame watched too, and he must have realized this. I never saw any hint of him.

  * * *

  In the morning, Madame sent Shin away like a common thug, escorted by the machi bugyo. I watched him leave, eyes averted, perfectly erect shoulders bare of so much as a bedroll. I never caught a parting glance through the blur of my own tears. In time, I would understand why he would not let me bid him a tearful goodbye. For one very good reason, he could not risk my tears.

  Madame had accused Shin of assault and he was sentenced to labor on a large farm within the prosperous domain of a titled daimyo, and a samurai by training with a reputation of cruelty. Many criminals passed sentences within his domain.

  Me, Madame beat, more harshly than ever. Then she banished me from the house, saying it was unfair to allow me to share Cook and Kame’s sleeping quarters. I did not know it for certain, but I believe she perceived how much I loved Shin, and meant to break my heart by closing me inside the space of his recent dwelling. In so doing, she may have saved my life.

  Days blended with nights. Still I labored at my loom, blunted and numb emotionally and physically. My stomach was too weak for proper nourishment and I lost flesh. A season passed without my marking the time. And I might have passed another season the same way. Perhaps I would have let go of my sanity eventually, but Shin had left so much of himself behind him. In time, my curiosity to understand these things pulled me from the mental cave to which I had retreated.

  He had left behind an ample supply of fermented vegetables in clay vessels. I ate from these, and knew I would live, whether I wanted to or not. Some of the vessels contained mysterious herbs, many medicinal. I experimented with them, and they surprised, even shocked me, with the strength and mental focus they supplied me.

  With newfound strength, I explored the strange notes and records Shin stored on makeshift shelves in the shed. He had obviously committed much time to their keeping. Some of the books were bound in leather, and valuable. He should have taken them, but he chose instead to leave them. I hoped he was thinking of me.

  Within the bound leaves, not a scratch made mention of me. The volume was more of a herbal field guide, and I scrutinized it as best as my limited literacy allowed. In good time, however, I learned.

  Shin was a much more learned herbalist than he had ever given me to know. His notes recorded experiment upon experiment. It seemed he was seeking an antidote for a kind of toxin, but I couldn’t decipher what because he used a character I didn’t recognize. The records went on to quite an extent, but although they were more advanced than my understanding, I never lost patience or interest in looking at them. I believed Shin had left them to me. And it was the last I had of him.

  One thing particularly confused and intrigued me. Apparently, Shin was a skilled artist in his own right. He had given several pages near the end of one volume to the depiction of a woman—more beautiful than any I had ever beheld. She was not merely an idea of a woman. Her facial details were too fine for a fanciful sketch. This was someone Shin knew, and judging from the emotion captured in her mouth—someone Shin knew well. Across from her picture was a sketch of a large orb spider.

  * * *

  My exterior wounds began to heal quickly with the aid of Shin’s salve. My skin seemed to grow in health and luster. In fact, these herbs and foods might explain why Shin looked so strong and full of health. It cut against Tatsuo’s theory of Shin’s immortality, but then, herbs could say only so much. They couldn’t explain his knowledge. Slaves were not literate—not like him. And how had he learned experimentation?

  Although my physical health increased, the edges of my emotional wounds splayed wide and ragged. I had ignored my grief, covered it over, and there it remained. I knew I should spend more time in the garden, and yet I stayed in the shed, rarely moving beyond its immediate exterior and unaware of anyone’s suffering but my own.

  My own suffering would more than fill a valley, but rain doesn’t fall to accommodate the volume of the ground beneath it.

  15

  From a distance, I began to take notice of the gradual work of death within the house. Cook succumbed to the disease, unraveling rapidly. Shin’s herbs might aid her, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Her suffering seemed a natural conclusion to her life’s hatred. How could I bother myself for her when I had not even the emotional strength to mourn for Shin?

  Roused from sleep during a rare warm night, I went to the edge of the spring. The moon’s reflection glimmered over the surface of the water. I waded in and let the cold water force a gasp from lungs as it chilled my well-heated flesh. The water swallowed me slowly up to my breast.

  Floating on my back as I had done so many weeks earlier, I scanned the shallows for the spider web, but of course, weather had long destroyed it and the spider had moved elsewhere to rebuild. This was the way with spiders. How were they always willing to begin building again knowing full well their work would not last—no matter how laboriously, how painstakingly they had produced it?

  This was resilience.

  I stared at the ruined web and looked inside of myself, wondering if I could even wish for strength of that kind. In the next instant, a heavy cloud burst with rain and thunder and poured down over my head, carrying dead emotions to the surface of my mind. Tears poured from my eyes and mingled with the fresh rain and whatever remained of Shin’s presence in the pool.

  Having once opened this channel of emotion, a great wall of sensation, thought, memory flooded—so much and so powerfully, I could hardly bear it. I paced the garden paths, nervous, and often tearful. I retreated to sleep for an escape, but vivid dreams haunted my nights. Shin always. Mild. Emotionless. Chillingly restrained.

  The momentum of this
flood of memories forced me back to nervous activity…and to the house.

  * * *

  When I entered through the southern veranda, I found the space nearly abandoned. Madame had retreated to her mountain cottage with Satomi, and left Kame to care for Cook.

  Physically, I was as well as I had ever been, and perhaps much better due to the ferments I had lived upon in Shin’s garden shed, and I observed something like dismay, even suspicion, in Kame’s weary eyes when she first took notice of me, glowing with abundant health at the entry to the house.

  “How is it you seem so healthy, Furi, while all around you are withering?” she murmured.

  Kame needed rest. Perhaps she was suffering already from the early stages of the disease. “I can see you are not well,” I answered her. “I will look after Cook tonight.”

  “Cook wouldn’t allow it.”

  She suspected I would hasten Cook’s death. “Is she well enough to even notice who is tending her?”

  “She is poorly, but I think she would know you, and believe herself dead already.”

  “Take an hour’s rest. If you still insist on nursing Cook, then I will let you. What can I do to her more than the disease has already done?”

  Kame took no further persuading.

  True. I had little wish to relieve Cook’s suffering. I could have watched her die, quite coolly, a week or two before that time. I didn’t volunteer to nurse Cook because I had no grief or feeling for the injuries she had dealt me. I nursed her because I could feel. After weeks of numbness, sensation had returned. But Cook and I both recoiled from it.

  At last, I wouldn’t force her to receive my help. When I sat by her bedside and offered her Shin’s tincture for blood borne illness, she shrank from my touch, her half closed eyes flitting around the room with fever and mistrust.

  “Cook, this medicine will not harm you. Possibly it will heal you. Will you try it?”

  “No,” the air rasped across her dry vocal chords. “I won’t take anything you give to me.”

  I raised a cool cloth to her brow. “Cook. If I were trying to poison you, don’t you think I could do it less directly?”

  “Don’t touch me! I won’t take it. Leave me alone to die in peace!”

  I left her. If Cook preferred to die than let me nurse her, I was full willing to let her.

  Tatsuo, in contrast, clung to me. “Quickly,” he rasped. “Give it to me.” I poured several drops of the liquid into a cup of tea, and lifted his head from his pillow. “Swallow slowly,” I cautioned, but he took the cup in both hands and swallowed it one gulp. I took a serving too, when I began to feel fatigue creeping up on me while I nursed Kame and Tatsuo.

  Cook died within two days, and not with the peace she had plead for. She filled the house with the harried cries of a wounded animal. When she passed it was up to me to wash and prepare her for burial. I knew of no kin to notify. I hired a boy to dig a grave in a mountain cemetery. That done, I started a fire in the garden and burned her bedding. But further preparations were unnecessary, and I had to return to nursing Tatsuo and Kame.

  Kame refused the tincture as had Cook, but after many days, in a feverish stupor she begged me for anything that would relieve her. I gave her the remedy then, but by morning, when she awakened, she was still in quite a bit of pain.

  “You poisoned me. You beastly creature! You’ve killed me!”

  By evening, she was dead.

  Her death confused me, at first, because Tatsuo was improving rapidly. He was still quite weak, but his mental clarity had returned. He became concerned about the final rites of the dead.

  I had not cared much for any of that. I had taken the trouble to alert the machi bugyo of Cook’s death, so she might be taken away and buried. But Tatsuo was devoted to the old traditions—the lore of obake and kami spirits. He wished to prepare Kame’s body to help her pass safely to the spirit realm.

  I wouldn’t interfere, but watched from a respectful distance while he poured water over her mouth and then proceeded to bathe her corpse in spring water, attentive to her comfort all the while. We had no priest to pray, so Tatsuo performed the rite himself, even bothering to offer a small talisman to the Gods. Actually, the talisman had belonged to Cook, but I was glad Tatsuo was putting it to practical use.

  Within days, Tatsuo grew strong enough to help finish the task of cleaning and disinfecting the household. We built another fire, and took several days washing the floors and walls with vinegar and warm water.

  After another week, Tatsuo felt it was safe to send for Madame, but we never heard a reply. A second and third week passed and Tatsuo wrote to Madame again. After one month, a message arrived, but it was not from Madame. It came for Tatsuo.

  A relation had become ill in a small village south of the town. He and his family begged for any help Tatsuo might offer.

  The old man packed his few belongings that very afternoon.

  “Can you not spare any quantity of the antidote you gave to me?”

  I gave him every drop of what remained of the bottle and considered myself well rid of it. News of suffering and death within the village had spread to our corner. The tincture and its healing power weighed heavily upon me. No doctor would trust it, coming from me. And although I believed it a cure, only Tatsuo had been willing to take it—and this because he knew Shin, not me. Better that Tatsuo should take the tincture and save what life he could with it.

  Rumors of uprising followed the rash of illness, and with the rumors, the thunderous march of Shogunate foot soldiers traveled through our city, muffling the desperate cries of mourning and loss and calling us to remembrance of what else takes life and how much less forgivingly.

  * * *

  Even as the property’s lone occupant, I preferred to sleep in the garden shed. I slept there, barely aware of the weather’s change and the rise of the chilly, penetrating wind against its walls.

  I retreated into sleep like I never had in all my life, including my youth. Something happened to me. The shed became a thick cocoon. Day and night blended into one continuous expanse of dreams—filmy dreams of the beautiful woman from Shin’s sketchbook. When I lifted my gaze to her, she spoke to me, and demanded I weave for her. I couldn’t refuse.

  When I waked, I returned to my loom and began to weave a manner of fabric I had never seen, thin and gauze-like. The silken threads interlaced like a vapor, and as soon as I finished one piece, the woman came naked to receive it. And I dressed her in it, before immediately beginning a new piece.

  My body seemed to grow, strengthen and never tire. In my new fervor of creative energy, I lost all sense, all inhibition, heedlessly draping myself all around in the gauzy fibers.

  I had never dared to wear my own work before, and risked my life to wear it then, but nothing seemed to matter to me—nothing but the urgency of creation and the demands of the beautiful woman, who I felt sure to be an immortal, perhaps somehow related to Shin. And that relation goaded me more to urgency of service. What if he had sent her to me? How could I fail to obey her?

  I had the vaguest notion of time’s passage and I don’t know where it would have ended and what I would have produced, had my creative rites not been cut short.

  Late one night, two soldiers entered the mill, perhaps on orders to spoil the property for supplies. Silk is difficult to penetrate and when it can be gotten, is useful under a military uniform. Ranking samurai prized it highly.

  On hot nights, I slept in the garden, and morning might have come and went without my ever knowing of their entry, but one of the soldiers nearly stumbled over my temporary bed under the ume tree.

  I awakened to a grim shadow looming above me. The moon was new and the night dark, but having found me, he couldn’t have failed to see the silk I wore like a winter’s vapor.

  He called out to his companion, “Come see what I found in the garden.”

  His arms were filled with the last of the silks I had woven in Madame Ozawa’s closet, and he cast them heavily upon
the grass, then lunged for me.

  He would have fallen upon me, but I sprung out of his reach with a reflexive leap that surprised even me. I ran. Branches lashed my sides as I raced through the garden, past the cultivated conifers to the boundary of the garden’s long untended edges. There, I stopped, my lungs rising and falling as I considered the green mass of a decade’s untended growth. Then I plunged inside the brush, throwing myself through thickets that dug and cut and tore my skin and silken robe.

  I could only evade. The soldiers stood between me and any route of escape. I dodged one way and ducked another. To my mind, in its state of clouded awareness, my path was hung all around with vines and shrouds yielding, protecting, and hiding my movement.

  I heard a curse and a single cry of pain, then all seemed to darken, like the memory of a dream. My urgency faded, my breathing slowed, but the trance continued into oblivion.

  16

  By the time I awakened, a thin film of dirt dusted my skin all over. I drew up my hand to shade my eyes from the sun’s direct rays and started—at once remembering the soldier who had chased me. My gaze darted about. The garden spread around me, a ruin of trampled bushes and shrubbery. Silk hung from the trees in tatters. Stone pieces of a lantern littered the gravel path. A carpet of once green moss had rusted into an unnatural black.

  I knelt and touched the moss. Dry. I bent my nose near and inhaled. Odorless. The stains made a path through to the back of the garden, and I followed, my pulse quickening as I progressed through a maze of now ruined raw silk, hanging about like gorgeous, though plainly destroyed burial shrouds. I gasped when I recognized the place where the stains stopped. A mound of earth stood disturbed at the very spot where, not four months prior, I had hidden my own silken weavings.

  I stood above the spot, knowing some grotesque thing was buried beneath the soil along with the silk I had hidden there myself.

  My heartbeat rose to my throat. Sweat dampened my brow and palms. I couldn’t tear up that soil again. And yet I couldn’t leave it either. I had to know what was there.