Shadows on the Moon

by Zoe Marriott

  They wear their scars on their faces. Right there on their faces. Where everyone can see . . .

  Mother retched into the basin one last time and then fell back onto the futon. I brushed the sweaty hair from her forehead and wiped her face with a cool cloth. Her low moan might have been a thank-you. The ship rolled gently. I put my hand down on the floor to steady myself, and Mother groaned again.

  “Shall I ask Terayama-san to fetch the ship’s doctor?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Don’t be silly,” she rasped. “This is the way when women are having children. Especially if they are on a boat. There is nothing to worry about.”

  I was not so sure. Mother had been like this since the first night, but her illness grew steadily worse the longer we were on board ship. For the last week, I had barely been able to leave her side, and today she could not seem to keep even water down. The captain had told Terayama-san that at the very least we had four days left of our voyage.

  “Then do you think you could get up for a little while? Walk on the deck, perhaps?”

  “No, no.” She tossed her head restlessly. “That doesn’t work anymore. Watching the water go up and down just makes the little one angrier.”

  One of her hands caressed her slightly swollen belly, gentle and soothing, even though her fingers shook from the latest bout of sickness. I propped the bowl of cool, lemon-scented water between my knees, to keep it from sliding as the ship rocked, and began wiping her face again, mimicking the slow movements of her hands on her stomach. The wooden walls and floors creaked and settled around us.

  Then her face creased. I yanked the basin forward as she rolled over again and began to retch. There was nothing in her stomach now. She convulsed in horrible dry spasms for several minutes, silent tears running down her face, before lying back again and hiding her face in the sheet.

  “I think I am done, for now,” she croaked.

  I pushed the basin away, wrung out my cloth, and laid it carefully on the back of her neck, untangling the long strands of her hair.

  “Would you like me to tell Terayama-san that he can come back in?”

  “Not just yet.” She sounded a little sleepy now. I smiled with relief. I was not entirely immune to seasickness, and the heat and the smell of sweat and vomit in the little cabin were more than enough to make my own stomach heave when the ship rocked. I desperately wanted to get out and breathe some clean, cold air.

  Everything would have been a lot easier if the female servants who were supposed to look after Mother were not both prostrate with seasickness, too. I did like being useful and feeling that I had a purpose and something to do. Still, there were times when, if I was to be fit to look after anyone, I needed to get away.

  As quietly as possible, I shifted my kimono and began to stand. Before I could get any further, Mother stirred again.

  “Where are you going?” she mumbled.

  I kept a sigh inside with an effort. “I just want to clean things up a little bit.”

  “Not yet,” she said as she pulled the cloth off her neck and rolled over. Her face, though sweaty and pale, still managed a smile. I fidgeted a little, eager to get away but anxious not to let her know it.

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked hesitantly, thinking that if I had been sick as many times as she had in the past eight days, I would probably never smile again.

  “Not really. It’s all right, though, Suzume. My mother told me once that the more illness the mother suffers, the better the baby will grow. She was terribly ill with me, and I was a big, healthy child. I barely knew that I was carrying you, and look how small and delicate you have always been.”

  “It seems a heavy price to pay,” I said without thinking. “I’d rather have a small baby.”

  Mother reached out to squeeze my wrist, and I wished I could call the words back. She was not angry, though. She made a little laughing noise and shook her head.

  “You’ll change your mind soon. When you have a baby of your own, you will realize that a mother is willing to put up with anything for a healthy child. Anything at all. It is what we are made for, to carry children. A woman cannot really be happy doing anything else.”

  I kept my face still with an effort. Was Mother’s glowing happiness at whipping Terayama-san’s household into shape and organizing this journey all part of her joy in having a baby, then? It had seemed to me that she reveled in it for its own sake. Couldn’t a woman be happy doing a great many things, just as a man could? I had been happy when I was with Aimi and my father. I had been happy playing the shamisen, and singing. I had been happy when I was with Youta, shadow-weaving.

  “Don’t worry,” Mother said, misinterpreting my expression. “We know you are not a little girl anymore, and in the city, there will be lots of young men who will be interested in you. Now that our situation is different, there will be nothing to stop you from making an advantageous marriage. In hardly any time at all, you will have babies of your own.”

  I managed to pull my mask-smile into place before she saw my grimace. “Yes, Mother.”

  I wished she had not said that.

  I had always known what I would do with my life, of course. The same thing that my mother had done with hers, and her mother before her. What else could a woman do in this world?

  Many things about my life had changed, but that had not. Had my father been alive, it would have been no different, except that the selection of possible husbands would have been rather more limited. The choice would never have been mine. That was a parent’s job: to pick an alliance that would be suitable for a girl and benefit her family. I was of age now, and the time was coming.

  So why did Mother’s words make me feel like I was being pushed out into a dark, narrow tunnel, where there was no room to turn around or even stretch, and no light to see where I was going?

  “You know I loved your father, don’t you?”

  Her words jarred me from my reverie. “Mother —?” It was the first time she had even mentioned him since we had left the ruins of his house.

  “You are old enough to hear of such things now, Suzume, and I might not have another chance before you leave us. Let me speak this once, and then we will not talk about it again. Agreed? You must not tell any of this to Shujin-sama.”

  I shook my head fervently.

  “Very well, then. You know that I came from a good family — though not a wealthy one — and I was beautiful, as beautiful as you are. I had many suitors. Terayama-san was one of them, and my aunt and uncle wished for me to marry him. But I only had eyes for Daisuke. He was not like the others. He did not try to impress me or brag to his friends about me. He wrote me poetry and talked to me. He seemed to truly see me, to love me. And I loved him in return. Eventually, after months of begging, I prevailed. We did marry, and we were so happy. At first. When I knew I was having you, I thought that I would die of happiness. But the labor was so difficult, and I bled so much, that afterward the midwife told your father . . . she told him that to have another child might kill me. It was wicked of her. It was not her business to interfere.”

  She looked so fierce and unhappy that I made soothing noises and rubbed her forearm. After a moment, she relaxed and smiled.

  “Your father listened to the midwife and told me that we would not have any more children. At first I agreed with him. I was frightened, too, you see. After a while, as I grew stronger and you grew older, I began to realize what a terrible thing we had agreed to. It was not natural, the way we lived. I longed for babies. I longed to feel close to your father, as I once had. We argued about it again and again, and he began to hide from me in his papers. Sometimes I felt that I did not know him at all anymore. He would not see how unhappy I was. All he would say was that you were enough for him. He couldn’t understand that you —” She cut herself off, paused, and then finished. “That one child was not really a proper family.”

  I heard that unfinished sentence. You were not enough for me.

  �
�I gave up. I cannot explain how awful it was, my love, to give up. It felt as if something inside me had died. But I have another chance with Shujin-sama. He waited for me. He never married. He never looked at another woman. And when I needed him, he was there. He has forgiven me for choosing his friend over him all those years ago, and now I am able to have the children I always wanted. I am so happy, Suzume.”

  I stared down at her, trying to sort through the tangled threads of my emotions. One thread stood out above all the others. “Mother, do you mean that you might die having this child? And Terayama-san doesn’t know?”

  “No,” she said, shaking my hand off. “I will not die having this child. I was only sixteen when I gave birth to you. A child myself. I had not even finished growing. I am a woman now, and I am in no more danger than any other woman. There is nothing for Shujin-sama to know. You will not speak of this to him. Will you?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “I have only told you all this so that you will know I understand a young woman’s craving for a home and family of her own. I want you to know this happiness that I have, and I am sure Shujin-sama does, too. You are too old now to live under a stepfather’s roof, too old to need a mother anymore. We will make sure you are happily settled.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” The words felt like the prickly leaves of the aloe in my mouth. She was so eager to be rid of me. So eager to forget her old life and make a new one that had no place in it for me. I was realistic enough to know that once I was married off, I would rarely, if ever, see Mother again. I dreaded this, but it seemed she looked forward to it.

  How could I be too old to need a mother anymore? It rather seemed as if I was too old for my mother to need me. In all her talk of children, she spoke only of babies, as if they were all that mattered. And it made sense, for she had been different once, when I was very young. She was softer and happier, and as I had grown, so had her sharpness and anger and restlessness. And Aimi’s arrival had made Mother worse. But I had never realized until now that some part of her blamed me for her inability to have more children. Maybe even blamed me for Father’s distance.

  And so she had turned to Terayama-san.

  “Now you may go and clean up,” she was saying. “Go up onto the deck so that you might have some fresh air. You’re looking rather pale.”

  I probably answered. I’m not sure what I said, but it got me out of the room.

  I walked along the wooden corridor, my steps gaining speed until the hem of my kimono snapped against my legs and my sandals slapped the floor. My thoughts and feelings were in turmoil.

  I had often wondered when it had begun, that strange game between Terayama-san and my mother. The game of rejection and pursuit.

  Now I had the answer. It had not been in the ruins of my father’s house, or in the few missing days before that. The game had begun before I was even born, when Mother was the same age as I was now. It had begun when she had chosen Hoshima Daisuke instead of Terayama Ryoichi. And it had lasted all those years.

  Mother seemed to think that it was devotion and love that had kept Terayama-san’s interest. But I could not free my mind of the image of the cat at its mouse hole, so still, so patient.

  He had come to our house all the time. Laughed with my father. Eaten at our table. All the time, he had been looking at her. All the time planning, watching. All the time waiting, waiting, for his chance.

  He had lost the first time.

  He had never given up.

  I burst out of the corridor, the door slamming back with a sharp crack that was hidden by the rush and boom of the water against the ship’s hull.

  It was overcast, the sky as white and hard as the inside of a tea bowl. The air was cold and tangy with salt. I stood for a moment, panting, my fists clenching and unclenching. After a couple of long, deep breaths, I pulled the door closed behind me.

  A few yards away, a thin wall of wooden planks curved around the entrance to the deck. I could look out only by standing on tiptoe and peering through one of the moon-shaped piercings in the wood. A sailor went past carrying a coil of rope over his shoulder that was as big as my torso, and a seagull flew low over the deck. I sighed.

  I had hoped, since we all shared the same corridor and door onto the deck, that I might meet the strange foreigners here. However, so far they had managed to avoid not only me but also Terayama-san. He had been talking about it — again — last night, while my mother and I had pretended to eat. He had spoken of little else since we had come aboard. He was convinced that by gaining some influence over the men he would gain influence over the Moon Prince, too — but it seemed to me that this was almost irrelevant now. It was the chase that consumed him. The more the foreigners evaded him, the more determined he became to corner them. The more he was thwarted, the deeper his obsession grew.

  Just as it had been with Mother.

  Yet once he had caught her, his frenzy had subsided. I saw the puzzled looks she gave him sometimes now, as if she, too, realized that something was different but could not understand what. He cared for her, treated her kindly, was proud of her beauty and the fact that she carried his heir, but his focus had shifted away from her. I believed he did love her, in his way, but his burning need to possess her had faded now that she belonged to him. She was his wife, and she could never leave him.

  Once the mouse was dead, the cat lifted his paw.

  I leaned against the wooden wall and kept squinting through the little pierced moon shape. I wanted to get out of the enclosure and walk — pace up and down, stamp my feet and work off the unhappy, confused feelings that were boiling inside me. But I wasn’t allowed to go out there, not without Terayama-san to escort me.

  A tiny, rebellious thought flashed through my mind. I knew a different way to get rid of the confusion and restlessness. A quick and easy way. I had my own little cabin, adjoining Mother and Terayama-san’s. I slept alone now. Mai was on the other ship. I would be able to pull the pin from my hair and make a quick, smooth cut. . . .

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed to get out and walk, now, before I gave in. I would endure whatever punishment my mother or Terayama-san meted out later.

  I reached out for the brass latch of the gate, but before I could press it down, a shadow passed across the moon piercings and Terayama-san opened it himself. I snatched my hand away and dragged a mask of calm across my face.

  Terayama-san stared at me, his eyes blank in the way that I knew meant anger. “What are you doing out here?”

  “M-Mother is sleeping. She said —”

  Just like that, his face changed; the telltale stoniness was wiped away like grime removed by a wet cloth. He smiled his warm and charming smile.

  “I am sorry, Suzu-chan. Of course you will be wanting some fresh air after being cooped up for so long. Come with me. You will feel much better after a walk.”

  He took hold of my arm and guided me firmly out of the enclosure. Having unexpectedly gotten what I wanted, I immediately wished that I was back in the enclosure. Alone.

  The wind rolled over the deck with a low, wavering moan, bringing salt droplets to sting my face, and despite my double-layered kimono, I shivered. If Terayama-san had not had such a grip on me, I would have wrapped my arms around myself for warmth. The ship jerked and rocked more strongly, making me brace my feet as a spray of gray-and-white water flew up the side of the deck.

  Overhead, the sails made deep booming noises as the wind dragged at them, and the ropes and rigging creaked loudly.

  “Well, and how is your mother today, Suzu-chan?” he asked, pitching his voice over the ship’s noises as he pulled me along.

  My name is Suzume. It may mean nothing more than “little brown sparrow,” but it is my name.

  “She is very brave, but her health is not good,” I said. “She is not eating. I am glad we will reach land soon.”

  “You have been a great comfort to her.” He smiled again, but his eyes flickered away from mine, his attention fixed somewhere over
my head. What was he looking for? I refused to crane over my shoulder and look, too, so pretended that I did not notice.

  The ship bucked again, more strongly this time. Terayama-san’s fingers tightened still further, keeping me from falling. I held in a sound of pain. I would have gotten fewer bruises from a tumble on the deck.

  “Neither of my ladies has her sea legs yet,” he said indulgently. “Why don’t we walk to the side, and you can lean against the rail? It is easier to keep your footing like that, and you can see the sea properly.”

  I didn’t really want to see the sea. I was trembling with the cold, and my arm was throbbing, and I felt . . . uneasy. Something inside was urging me to shake off Terayama-san’s hand and run back to the cabin. He didn’t wait for me to agree, just maneuvered me over to the side of the ship.

  “Here, stand on this. You’ll get a good view.” His hand left my arm at last to grab my waist, and he lifted me onto a large coil of rope. I wobbled and found myself clutching at him. Standing like this, I was taller than he was, and the rail went up only to my hips. The sea was jumping and fizzling below, blowing more spray up into my face until I had to turn my head away. I clutched at him more tightly.

  “Terayama-san, I do not think —”

  As I spoke, my eye was caught by a fleet, dark shape that swooped through the black tracery of the rigging, circling and diving as if at play. It was the falcon. This was the first time I had seen it since that day on the docks. Even above the sound of the sea, I heard my stepfather suck in a sharp breath.

  At that same moment, the ship made another bucking movement. Terayama-san seemed to stumble. His shoulder drove into mine.