The Harsh Cry of the Heron

by Lian Hearn

  “Would it be able to walk to Hagi?”

  “Perhaps we should transport it around the coast by ship. It can walk for miles without getting tired, but I do not think it can go over mountains.”

  When they had finished admiring the kirin, Ishida took it back to the enclosure, and then went with Takeo to the temple, where a short ceremony was performed and prayers made for the health of the kirin and of Lord Otori. Takeo lit incense and candles and knelt before the statue of the god; he carried out all the necessary religious practices expected of him with reverence and respect. All sects and beliefs were permitted in the Three Countries as long as they did not threaten the social order, and while Takeo himself did not believe in any one god, he recognized the need of humans for a spiritual ground to their existence, and indeed shared that need himself.

  After the ceremonies, in which the Enlightened One, the great teacher, and Ebisu, the sea god, were both honored and thanked, tea was brought with sweets of bean paste, and Takeo, Ishida, and the Abbot of the temple spent a merry time exchanging stories and composing poems full of puns about the kirin.

  A little before midday Takeo rose to his feet, said he would sit alone in the garden for a while, and walked along the side of the main hall to the smaller one behind it. The woman still knelt patiently in the same spot. He made a slight movement with his hand as he went past, indicating that she should follow.

  The building faced east—its southern side was bathed in sunlight, but on the veranda, in the deep shade of the curved roof, the air was still cool. Two young monks were engaged in cleaning the statues and sweeping the floor; they retreated without a word. Takeo sat on the edge of the veranda; the wood was weathered silver-gray and still warm from the sun. He heard Madaren’s hesitant tread on the pebbles of the path, heard her rapid, shallow breathing. In the garden, sparrows were chirping and doves murmured in the cedars. She dropped to her knees again, hiding her face.

  “There is no need to be afraid,” he said.

  “It is not fear,” she replied after a moment. “I…don’t understand. Perhaps I have made a stupid mistake. But Lord Otori is speaking alone with me, which would never happen unless what I believe is true.”

  “We recognized each other last night,” Takeo said. “I am indeed your brother. But it is many years since anyone has called me Tomasu.”

  She looked directly at him; he did not meet her gaze, but turned his eyes away toward the deep shade of the grove of trees and the distant wall where the kirin’s head swayed above the tiles like a child’s toy.

  He realized his calmness seemed like indifference to her, and he was aware of a kind of rage smoldering within her. Her voice when she spoke was almost accusing.

  “For sixteen years I have heard ballads and stories made up about you. You seemed like some remote and legendary hero—how can you be Tomasu from Mino? What happened to you while I was sold from one pleasure house to another?”

  “I was rescued by Lord Otori Shigeru—he adopted me as his heir and desired me to marry Shirakawa Kaede, the heir to Maruyama.”

  It was the barest outline of the extraordinary, turbulent journey that had led him to be the most powerful man in the Three Countries.

  Madaren said with bitterness, “I saw you kneel before the golden statue. And I know from the tales I hear that you have taken life.”

  Takeo made the smallest movement of assent with his head. He was wondering what she would demand from him, what he could do for her—what, if anything, would heal her broken life.

  “I suppose our mother and sister…” he said with pain.

  “Both dead. I do not even know where their bodies lie.”

  “I am sorry for everything you must have suffered.” He realized even as he spoke that his tone was stilted, the words inadequate. The gulf between them was too huge. There was no way that they could approach each other. If they had still shared the same faith they might have prayed together, but now the childhood beliefs that once united them formed a barrier that could not be overcome. The knowledge filled him with distress and pity.

  “If you have need of anything, you may approach the town authorities,” he said. “I will make sure you are looked after. But I cannot make our relationship public knowledge, and I must ask you not to speak of it to anyone.”

  He saw he had hurt her, and felt the twist of pity again, yet he knew he could not allow her any more place in his life than this: to be under his protection.

  “Tomasu,” she said. “You are my older brother. We have obligations toward each other. You are the only family I have. I am aunt to your children. And I have a spiritual duty to you too. I care for your soul. I cannot watch you go to hell!”

  He got to his feet and walked away from her. “There is no hell,” he replied over his shoulder. “Other than that which men make on earth. Do not attempt to approach me again.”

  10

  And the disciples of the Enlightened One saw that the tigers and their cubs were starving,” Shigeko said in her most pious voice, “and with no thought for their own lives they threw themselves over the precipice and were dashed to death on the rocks below. Then the tigers could eat them.”

  It was a warm afternoon in early summer, and the girls had been told to study quietly inside until the heat lessened. For a while they had diligently practiced writing, Shigeko demonstrating her elegant flowing hand, and then the strident drone of the cicadas and the shimmering air had made them lazy and sleepy. They had been out early, before sunrise while the day was still cool, and little by little their limbs relaxed from the formal pose they sat in to write. Shigeko had been easily persuaded to unroll the scroll of animal pictures and then to tell stories.

  But it seemed even the best stories had to have a moral. Shigeko said with solemnity, “That’s the example we should follow; we should give our own lives to be used for the benefit of all sentient beings.”

  Maya and Miki exchanged glances. They loved their older sister unreservedly, but lately she had become a little too fond of preaching to them.

  “Personally, I would rather be one of the tigers,” Maya said.

  “And eat the dead disciples!” her twin sister agreed.

  “Someone has to be the sentient beings,” Maya argued, seeing Shigeko frown.

  Her eyes gleamed with a secret knowledge, as they often did these days. She had just returned from several weeks in Kagemura, the hidden Muto village, where her innate Tribe skills had been trained and honed. Next it would be Miki’s turn. The twin girls spent little time in each other’s company; they did not fully understand the reason why, but knew it was connected with their mother’s feelings toward them. She did not like to see them together. Their identical look repulsed her. Shigeko, on the other hand, had always been fascinated by them, always took their side and protected them, even when she could not tell them apart.

  They did not like the separations, but they had become accustomed to them. Shizuka consoled them, telling them it would make the psychic bond between them strong. And so it did. If Maya fell sick, Miki came down with a fever. Sometimes they met in dreams; they were hardly able to discern between what happened in that other world and what happened in the real world.

  The world of the Otori had many compensations—Shigeko, the horses, the beautiful surroundings that their mother created everywhere she lived—but both of them preferred the mysterious life of the Tribe.

  The best times were when their father came in secret to the Tribe village, sometimes bringing one of them and taking the other back with him. For a few days they would be together—they could show him what they had learned and the new skills that had begun to appear. And he, who in the world of the Otori was usually distant and formal, in the Muto world became a different person, a teacher like Kenji or Taku, treating them with the same irresistible blend of strong discipline, impossibly high expectations, and constant affection. They bathed together in the hot springs and splashed around him, as sleek as otter cubs, tracing the scars on his sk
in that mapped his life, never tiring of hearing the story of each one, starting with the terrible fight in which he had lost two fingers from his right hand to the Kikuta master Kotaro.

  At the name Kikuta, both girls unconsciously touched the tips of their fingers to the deep crease that crossed their palm, marking them like their father, like Taku, as Kikuta.

  It was a symbol of the narrow line they walked between the worlds. Secretive by nature, they had taken eagerly to deception and pretense. They knew their mother disapproved of their Tribe skills, and that the warrior class in general believed them to be sorcery. They had learned early that what might be proudly displayed in the Muto village was to be kept hidden in the palaces of Hagi or Yamagata, but sometimes the temptation to outwit their teachers, tease their sister, or punish someone who crossed them was too great.

  “You are like me when I was a child,” Shizuka had said when Maya had hidden inside a bamboo basket for half a day without moving, or when Miki had climbed into the rafters as lithe and swift as a wild monkey, invisible against the thatch. Shizuka was rarely angry. “Enjoy these games,” she’d said. “Nothing will ever be as exciting.”

  “You are so lucky, Shizuka. You were there at the fall of Inuyama! You fought with Father in the war!”

  “Now Father says there will be no more war in the Three Countries; we will never get to fight properly.”

  “We pray there will not be,” Shigeko had said. The twins had groaned together.

  “Pray like your sister that you will never know real war,” Shizuka warned them.

  Maya returned to this theme now, for war interested her even more than tigers. “If there is to be no war, why do Father and Mother insist on us learning fighting skills?” she asked, for all three girls, like all children of the warrior class, learned the ways of bow and horse and sword, taught by Shizuka and by Sugita Hiroshi or the other great warriors of the Three Countries.

  “Lord Hiroshi says preparing for war is the best defense against it,” Shigeko replied.

  “Lord Hiroshi,” Miki whispered, elbowing Maya. Both twins giggled.

  The color rose in Shigeko’s face. “What?” she demanded.

  “You are always telling us what Lord Hiroshi says, and then you blush.”

  “I was not aware of it,” Shigeko said, covering her embarrassment with formal speech. “Anyway, it has no particular significance. Hiroshi is one of our instructors—and a very wise one. It is natural I should have learned his maxims.”

  “Lord Miyoshi Gemba is one of your instructors,” Miki said. “But you rarely quote what he says.”

  “And he does not make you turn red!” Maya added.

  “I think you could do considerably better at writing, sisters. You obviously need much more practice. Take up the brush!” Shigeko unrolled another scroll and began to dictate from it. It was one of the ancient chronicles of the Three Countries, full of difficult names and obscure events. Shigeko had had to learn all this history, and the twins would have to as well. They might as well start now. It would punish them for teasing her about Hiroshi and, she hoped, dissuade them from mentioning the subject again. She resolved to be more careful, not to allow herself the foolish pleasure of saying his name, not to gaze at him all the time, and above all not to blush. Luckily he was not in Hagi at present, having returned to Maruyama to oversee the bringing in of the harvest and the preparations for the coming ceremony in which the domain would become hers.

  He wrote often, for he was the senior retainer and her parents expected her to know every detail about her land. The letters were of course formal, but she liked looking at his hand, a warrior’s writing style, bold and well-formed, and he included information that she knew was for her, about people who were special to her for some reason, and above all about horses. He described each foal born and how they were developing, and how the colts he and Shigeko had broken in together were progressing. They discussed bloodlines and breeding, looking always for a larger, stronger horse—the Maruyama horses were already a hand higher than they had been twenty years ago, when Hiroshi was a child.

  She missed him and longed to see him again. She could not remember a time when she did not love him—he had been like a brother to her, living in the Otori household, regarded as a son of the family. He had taught her to ride, to use the bow and to fight with the sword; he had also instructed her in the art of war, strategy, and tactics, as well as the art of government. She wished above all that he might become her husband, but did not think it would ever be possible. He might be her most valuable adviser, even her most treasured friend, but nothing more. She had overheard enough discussions about her marriage to be aware of that, and as she had now turned fifteen she knew plans would soon be made for a betrothal, some match that would strengthen her family’s position and underpin her father’s desire for peace.

  All these thoughts ran through her mind as she read slowly and carefully from the scroll. The twins’ hands were aching and their eyes itching by the time she had finished. Neither of them dared make any further comment, and Shigeko relented of her sternness. She corrected their work with kindness, made them practice the characters they had misstroked only a few dozen times, and then, since the sun was descending toward the sea and the air was a little cooler, suggested a walk before the evening’s training.

  The twins, chastened by the severity of their punishment, agreed docilely.

  “We will go to the shrine,” Shigeko announced, cheering her sisters immensely, for the shrine was sacred to the river god and to horses.

  “Can we go by the weir?” Maya pleaded.

  “Certainly not,” Shigeko replied. “The weir is only used by urchins, not by the daughters of Lord Otori. We will walk to the stone bridge. Call Shizuka and ask her to come with us. And I suppose we had better take some men.”

  “We don’t need men.”

  “Can we take our swords?” Maya and Miki spoke at once.

  “For a visit to the shrine, in the center of Hagi? We will not need swords.”

  “Remember the attack at Inuyama!” Miki reminded her.

  “A warrior should always be prepared,” Maya said in a passable mimicry of Hiroshi.

  “Maybe you need a little more writing practice,” Shigeko said, looking as if she would sit down again.

  “Let it be as you say, older sister,” Miki said quickly. “Men, no swords.”

  SHIGEKO DELIBERATED FOR a few moments over the perennial question of the palanquin: whether to insist on the girls being carried in obscurity or to allow them to walk. None of them cared for the palanquin, for its uncomfortable motion and confinement, but it was more suitable to be so transported, and she knew their mother did not like the twin girls to be seen together in public. On the other hand, this was Hagi, their hometown, less formal and austere than Inuyama, and her restless sisters might be calmed and tired after walking. Tomorrow Shizuka would take Miki to the Muto village, Kagemura, and Shigeko would be left with Maya to wonder at the new skills and secret knowledge she had acquired, to console her in her loneliness, and to help her learn all that Miki had learned while she was away. Shigeko herself needed to walk, to be distracted for a few moments by the vibrant life of the city, its narrow streets and tiny shops filled with a variety of produce and craft—the first of the summer fruit, apricots and plums, young sweet beans and green vegetables, eels lashing in buckets, crabs and small silver fish thrown onto hot grills to sizzle, die, and be eaten in an instant. And then the makers of lacquer and pottery, of paper and silk clothes. Behind the broad main avenue that led from the castle gates to the stone bridge lay a whole delightful world that the girls were rarely allowed to visit.

  Two guards walked ahead of them and two behind; a maidservant brought a small bamboo basket filled with flasks of wine and other offerings, including carrots for the shrine horses. Shizuka was beside Maya, and Miki accompanied Shigeko. They all wore wooden clogs and light cotton summer robes. Shigeko held a sun-shade, for her skin was as white as her mothe
r’s and she feared the sun, but the twins had the golden-colored skin of their father, and anyway could not be bothered with protecting it.

  The tide was ebbing as they came to the stone bridge, and the river smelled of salt and mud. The bridge had been destroyed in the Great Earthquake, people said in punishment of Arai Daiichi’s treachery, for he had turned on his Otori allies right alongside the stone carved with the words THE OTORI CLAN WELCOMES THE JUST AND THE LOYAL. LET THE UNJUST AND THE DISLOYAL BEWARE.

  “And look what happened to him!” Maya said in satisfaction as they stood before the stone for a few moments, making an offering of wine, thanking the river god for protecting the Otori and remembering the death of the stonemason who had been walled up alive long ago within the parapet of the bridge. His skeleton had been found in the river and had been buried again during the rebuilding of the bridge, beneath the stone, which had also been retrieved from the river. Shizuka often told the girls this story, and that of his daughter, Akane, and sometimes they visited the shrine at the volcano’s crater where Akane’s tragic death was commemorated and her spirit invoked by unhappy lovers, men and women.

  “Shizuka must grieve for Lord Arai, though,” Shigeko said quietly as they left the bridge. For a moment the twins walked side by side; passersby dropped to their knees as Shigeko went past, but from the twins they averted their faces.

  “I grieved for the love that was once between us,” Shizuka replied. “And for my sons, who saw their father die before their eyes. But Arai had already made me an enemy, and had ordered my death. His own death was no more than a just end to the way he chose to live.”

  “You know so much about those times!” Shigeko exclaimed.

  “Yes, probably more than anyone,” Shizuka admitted. “As I grow older, all that is past becomes clearer in my mind. Ishida and I have been recording all my memories—your father requested it.”