by Lian Hearn
Maya struggled to change back. She opened her mouth, trying to call to Miki.
Miki sat up. “What’s happening?”
Maya felt again the swordlike strength of Miki’s spirit that came between the cat and its master.
“You were yowling!” Miki said.
“I changed into the cat without meaning to, and Hisao saw me.”
“Is he close?”
“I don’t know, but he knows where we are. We must leave at once.”
Miki knelt at the edge of the tree-cave and peered out into the night. “I can’t see a thing. It’s all completely black. It’s raining too. We can’t go on now.”
“Will you stay awake?” Maya said, shivering with cold and emotion. “There’s something you can do that comes between him and me and frees me from him.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Miki said. Her voice sounded frail and tired. “Or how I do it. The cat takes so much from me; what is left is sharp and hard.”
Pure was the word that came to Maya, like the purity of steel after it has been heated, folded, and hammered so many times. She put her arms round Miki and drew her close. Huddled together, the girls waited for dawn as it crept slowly toward them.
THE RAIN STOPPED at daybreak, and the sun rose, making the ground steam and turning the dripping branches and leaves into frames of gold and fractured rainbows. Spiders’ webs, bamboo grass, ferns: Everything glittered and shone. Keeping the sun on their right they continued northward, on the eastern flank of the mountains, struggling up and down deep gullies, often having to retrace their steps. Occasionally they caught sight of the high road below, and the river beyond it. It was never empty, and though they longed to walk for a while on its easy surface, they did not dare to.
Around midday they both stopped at the same time, but without speaking, in a small clearing. Ahead of them there seemed to be a rough path that promised to make the next part of the day’s journey a little easier. They had not eaten all morning, and they began to search now in the grass, silently, finding a little more beech mast, moss, last autumn’s sweet chestnuts already sprouting new shoots, a few berries, barely ripe. It was hot, even under the canopy of the forest.
“Let’s rest for a while,” Miki said, taking off her sandals and rubbing the soles of her feet in the damp grass. Her legs were scratched and bleeding, her skin turning dark copper.
Maya was already lying on her back, gazing upward into the green and gold pattern of the shifting leaves, her face dappled with round shadows.
“I’m starving,” she said. “We’ve got to get some real food. I wonder if that path leads to a village.”
The girls dozed for a while, but hunger woke them. Again, hardly needing to speak to each other, they refastened their sandals and began to follow the path as it wound along the side of the mountains. Now and then they caught sight of a farmhouse roof far below them, and thought the path would lead them there, but they came to no habitation, no village, not even a remote mountain hut or shrine, and the cultivated fields remained out of reach below them. They walked in silence, pausing only to grab at the sparse mountain food that offered itself, their stomachs growling and complaining. The sun passed behind the mountain; the clouds gathered again in the south. Neither of them wanted to spend another night in the wild—and all the nights that stretched ahead of them daunted them—but they did not know what else to do, other than walk on.
The forest and the mountain were wrapped in twilight; birds were singing the last songs of dusk. Maya, who was in front on the narrow path, came to a sudden halt.
“Smoke,” Miki whispered.
Maya nodded, and they went on more cautiously. The smell became stronger, now mixed in painfully with the odor of roasting meat, a pheasant or a hare, Maya thought, for she had tasted both in the mountains around Kagemura. The saliva rushed into her mouth. Through the trees she could make out the shape of a small hut. The fire was lit in front of it, and a slight figure knelt by it, tending the cooking meat.
Maya could tell from the outline and the movements that it was a woman, and something about her seemed very familiar.
Miki breathed in her ear. “It looks like Shizuka!”
Maya caught her sister’s arm as she was about to run forward. “It can’t be. How could she get here? I’ll go and look.”
Taking on invisibility, she slipped through the trees and behind the hut. The smell of the food was so intense she thought she would lose all concentration. She felt for her knife. There seemed to be no one else around, just the woman, her head covered in a hood, which she held away from her face with one hand while she turned the meat on its makeshift spit with the other.
A slight breeze came through the clearing and sent brown and green feathers swirling in its eddy. The woman said, without turning her head, “You don’t have to use the knife. I’ll feed you, and your sister.”
The voice was like Shizuka’s, and yet unlike. Maya thought, If she can see me, she must be from the Tribe.
“Are you Muto?” she said, and relaxed into visibility.
“Yes, I am Muto,” the woman replied. “You can call me Yusetsu.”
It was a name Maya had never heard before, with a cold and mysterious sound, like the last lingering traces of snow on the north side of the mountain in spring.
“What are you doing here? Did my father send you?”
“Your father? Takeo.” She spoke his name with a kind of profound yearning regret, both sweet and bitter, that sent a shiver down Maya’s spine. She looked at Maya now, but the hood covered her face, and even in the firelight Maya could not make out her features.
“It’s nearly ready,” Yusetsu said. “Call your sister and wash.”
There was a pitcher of water on the step of the hut. The girls took it in turns to pour it over each other’s hands and feet. Yusetsu put the charred pheasant on a slab of bark covered with leaves, placed it on the step and, kneeling beside them, cut it into pieces with a small knife. The girls ate without speaking, bolting the meat like animals; it burned lips and tongue. Yusetsu did not eat, but watched every bite they took, studying their faces and their hands.
When they had sucked the last bone, she poured water onto a cloth and wiped their hands, holding them upward and tracing the Kikuta mark with her fingers.
Then she showed them where to go to relieve themselves, and gave them moss to wipe afterward; her manner was attentive and matter of fact, as if she were their mother. Later she lit a lamp from a spill taken from the last of the fire, and they lay down on the floor of the hut while she continued to stare at them with hungry eyes.
“So you are Takeo’s daughters,” she said quietly. “You resemble him. You should have been mine.”
And both the girls, warm and fed, felt that it would have been better if they had been, though they still did not know who she was.
She extinguished the lamp and spread her cloak over them. “Sleep,” she said. “Nothing will harm you while I am here.”
They slept without dreaming and woke at daybreak, the rain falling on their faces, the ground damp beneath them. There was no trace of the hut, or the pitcher, or the woman. Only the bird’s feathers in the mud and the cold embers of the fire gave any proof that she had been there.
Miki said, “It was a ghost woman.”
“Mmm,” Maya replied, agreeing.
“Is it Hisao’s mother? Yuki?”
“Who else could it be?” Maya began to walk toward the north. Neither of them spoke anymore about her, but the taste of the pheasant lay on their tongues and in their throats.
“There’s a sort of path,” Miki said, catching up with her. “Like yesterday.”
A rough track, like a fox’s road, led away through the undergrowth. They padded along it all day, resting in the heat of noon in a tangle of hazelnut bushes, walking again until nightfall as the new moon rose, a slender sickle in the eastern sky.
There was the same sudden smell of smoke, the mouthwatering fragrance of cooking mea
t, the woman tending the fire, her face hidden by her hooded cloak. Behind her was the hut, the pitcher of water.
“We’re home,” Maya said in the familiar greeting.
“Welcome home,” she replied. “Wash your hands; the food is ready.”
“Is it ghost food?” Miki asked when the woman brought the meat—it was hare, this time—and cut it for them.
Yusetsu, whose name in the world had been Yuki, laughed. “All food is ghost food. All food has already died and gives you its spirit so that you may live.
“Don’t be afraid,” she added, when Miki hesitated; Maya was already cramming the meat into her mouth. “I am here to help you.”
“But what do you want in return?” Miki said, still not eating.
“I am paying back a favor. I am in your debt. For you cut the bond that tied me to my child.”
“I did?”
“You set the cat free, and at the same time freed me.”
“If you are freed, you should move on,” Miki said in a calm, stern voice that Maya had never heard before. “Your time is over in this world. You must let go, and allow your spirit to go forward to its next rebirth.”
“You are wise,” Yuki replied. “Wiser now, and more powerful, than you will be once you become a woman. Within a month or two, you and your sister will start bleeding. Being a woman makes you weak, falling in love destroys you, and having a child puts a knife against your throat. Never lie with a man; if you never start, you will not miss it. I loved the act of love; when I took your father as my lover, I felt I had entered Heaven. I let him possess me completely. I longed for him day and night. And I was doing what I was told to do: You are children of the Tribe; you must know about obedience.”
The girls nodded, but did not speak.
“I was obedient to the Kikuta Master and to Akio, whom I knew I was supposed to marry one day. But I thought I would marry Takeo and have his children. We were perfectly matched in Tribe skills, and I assumed he had fallen in love with me. He seemed as obsessed with me as I was with him. Then I discovered that it was Shirakawa Kaede whom he loved, a stupid infatuation that led him to abscond from the Tribe and signed my death warrant.”
Yuki fell silent. The girls also said nothing. They had never heard this version of their parents’ history, told by the woman who had suffered so much because of her love for their father. Finally Maya said, “Hisao fights against listening to you.”
Miki leaned forward and took a piece of meat, chewing it carefully, tasting the grease and the blood.
“He does not want to know who he is,” Yuki replied. “He is split against his own nature, and so feels terrible pain.”
“He cannot be redeemed,” Maya said, the anger returning. “He has become evil through and through.”
Night had fallen; the moon had passed behind the mountains. The fire crackled quietly.
“You are his sisters,” Yuki said. “One of you becomes the cat, whom he loves; the other has some spiritual quality that resists his power. If he ever realizes that power completely, then he will become truly evil. But until then he can be saved.” She leaned forward, and let the hood fall away from her face. “When he is saved, I will move on. I cannot let my child kill his true father. But his false father must pay for his brutal murder of me.”
She is beautiful, Maya thought, not like Mother but in a way I would like to be, strong and vital. I wish she had been my mother. I wish she had not died.
“Now you must sleep. Keep walking north. I will feed you and guide you back to Hagi. We will find your father and warn him, while we are free, and then we will save Hisao.”
Yuki washed their hands as she had the previous night, but this time she caressed them more intimately, like a mother. Her touch was firm and real—she did not feel like a spirit. But in the morning the girls woke in the empty forest. The ghost woman had gone.
Miki was even more silent than the previous day. Maya’s mood was volatile, swinging between excitement at the prospect of seeing Yuki again that night, fear that Akio and Hisao were already close behind them, and a deeper unease. She tried to get Miki to talk, but Miki’s replies were short and unsatisfactory.
“Do you think we did the wrong thing?” Maya said.
“It’s too late now,” Miki snapped, and then relented a little. “We’ve eaten her food and accepted her help. There’s nothing we can do about it; we just have to get home and hope Father returns soon.”
“How do you know so much about it?” Maya said, irritated by Miki’s bad temper. “You’re not a ghostmaster, too, are you?”
“No, of course I’m not,” Miki cried. “I don’t even know what that is. I’d never heard of it until you said Hisao was one.”
They were making their way down a steep slope. The path wound between huge boulders. It seemed to be a favorite basking spot for snakes, and as the sinuous bodies whisked out of sight beneath the rocks, Maya couldn’t help shuddering. She remembered all the stories she’d heard about ghosts, and thought of Akane’s spirit, and how she had teased Sunaomi about the dead courtesan without believing her own words.
“What do you think Yuki really wants?” she asked.
“All ghosts seek revenge,” Miki answered. “She wants revenge.”
“On Akio?”
“On everyone who has hurt her.”
“You see, you do know all about it,” Maya said.
“Why is she guiding us to Hagi?” Miki said.
“To find Father; she said so.”
“But Father will not be back all summer,” Miki went on, as if carrying out an argument with herself.
SO THEIR JOURNEY continued as the moon grew toward full and waned again. The sixth month came and summer moved toward the solstice. Yuki met them every night; they became accustomed to her, and then, without their noticing it, came to love her as if she truly were their mother. She stayed with them only between sunset and sunrise, but each day’s walk seemed easier now that they knew she would be waiting for them at its end. Her desires became theirs. Every night she told them stories from her past. Her childhood in the Tribe, in many ways so like theirs; the first great sorrow of her life, when her friend from Yamagata burned to death with all her family the night Otori Takeshi was murdered by the Tohan warriors; how she had brought Lord Shigeru’s sword, Jato, and put it in Takeo’s hands before they had rescued Shigeru together from Inuyama castle; and how Yuki had taken the lord’s head back to Terayama, alone, through hostile country. They were full of admiration for her courage and her loyalty, shocked and outraged at her cruel death, moved with grief and pity for her son.
49
The girls came to Hagi late one afternoon just before the solstice. The sun was still high in the western sky, turning the sea brassy. They crouched in the bamboo grove just on the edge of the cultivated fields, the rice a brilliant luxuriant green, just tinged with a hint of gold. The vegetable fields were a mass of leaves, beans, carrots, and onions.
“We won’t need Yuki tonight,” Miki said. “We can sleep at home.”
But the thought saddened Maya. She would miss Yuki, and she suddenly and perversely wanted to go wherever Yuki went.
The tide was ebbing and the mud banks were exposed along the twin rivers. Maya could see the arches of the stone bridge, the shrine to the river god where she had killed Mori Hiroki’s cat with the Kikuta gaze and its spirit had possessed her, the wooden piles of the fish weir, and the boats lying on their sides, like corpses waiting for the water to bring them back to life. Beyond them were the trees and garden of the old family house. Farther to the west, above the low tiled and shingled roofs of the town, rose her other home, the castle, the golden dolphins on its topmost roof glinting in the sun, its walls brilliant white, the Otori banners fluttering in the slight breeze from the sea. The water in the cup of the bay was a deep indigo blue, hardly ruffled by white. In the gardens opposite the castle, around the volcano crater, the last azaleas glowed against the lush, golden-tipped summer foliage.
&
nbsp; Maya squinted against the sun. She could make out the Otori heron on the banners, but alongside them were others, the black bear’s foot on a red background: the Arai.
“Aunt Hana is here,” she whispered to Miki. “I don’t want her to see me.”
“She must be at the castle,” Miki said, and they smiled at each other, thinking of Hana’s love of luxury and importance. “I suppose Mother is there too.”
“Let’s go to the house first,” Maya suggested. “See Haruka and Chiyo. They’ll send word to Mother.”
She realized she was not sure what her mother’s reaction would be. She recalled suddenly their last meeting, Kaede’s anger, the slaps. She had heard nothing from her since, no letters, no messages. Even the news of the birth of the little boy had only come to her through Shigeko in Hofu. I could have been killed with Sada and Taku, she thought. Mother does not care. The emotions were deep and troubled: She had longed to come home, but now she feared her reception. If only it were Yuki, she thought. I could run to her and tell her everything, and she would believe me.
A terrible grief washed through her—that Yuki was dead and had never known her child’s love. That Kaede lived…
“I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll see who’s there, if Father is back.”
“He won’t be,” Miki said. “He has gone all the way to Miyako.”
“Well, he is safer away than at home,” Maya replied. “But we must tell Mother about Uncle Zenko, how he had Taku killed and is raising an army.”
“How does he dare when Hana and his sons are here in Hagi?”
“Hana’s probably planning to spirit them away; that’s why she’s come. You wait here. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
Maya was still in boy’s clothes and she did not think anyone would take any notice of her. Lots of boys her age played on the riverbank and used the fish weir to cross the river. She ran lightly over it as she had many times before. The tops of the piles were damp and slippery, and green weed hung lankly from them. The river smelled familiarly of salt and mud. At the farther side she paused in front of the opening in the garden wall, where the stream flowed out into the river. The bamboo grill was not in place. Taking on invisibility, she stepped into the garden.