Across the Nightingale Floor (5 page)

The room was empty, the screens
overlooking the garden wide-open. It was just beginning to rain. Chiyo bowed to
me—not very deeply, I noticed—and went back down the staircase. I listened to
her footsteps and heard her speak to the maids in the kitchen.

I thought the room was the most
beautiful I had ever been in. Since then I've known my share of castles,
palaces, nobles' residences, but nothing can compare with the way the upstairs
room in Lord Otori's house looked that evening late in the eight-month with the
rain falling gently on the garden outside. At the back of the room one huge pole,
the trunk of a single cedar, rose from floor to ceiling, polished to reveal the
knots and the grain of the wood. The beams were of cedar, too, their soft
reddish brown contrasting with the creamy white walls. The matting was already
fading to soft gold, the edges joined by broad strips of indigo material with
the Otori heron woven into them in white.

A scroll hung in the alcove with a
painting of a small bird on it. It looked like the green-and-white-winged
flycatcher from my forest. It was so real that I half expected it to fly away.
It amazed me that a great painter would have known so well the humble birds of
the mountain.

I heard footsteps below and sat
down quickly on the floor, my feet tucked neatly beneath me. Through the open
windows I could see a great gray-and-white heron standing in one of the garden
pools. Its beak jabbed into the water and came up holding some little wriggling
creature. The heron lifted itself elegantly upwards and flew away over the
wall.

Lord Otori came into the room, followed
by two of the girls carrying trays of food. He looked at me and nodded. I bowed
to the floor. It occurred to me that he, Otori Shigeru, was the heron and I was
the little wriggling thing he had scooped up, plunging down the mountain into
my world and swooping away again.

The rain fell more heavily, and the
house and garden began to sing with water. It overflowed from the gutters and
ran down the chains and into the stream that leaped from pool to pool, every
waterfall making a different sound. The house sang to me, and I fell in love
with it. I wanted to belong to it. I would do anything for it, and anything its
owner wanted me to do.

When we had finished the meal and
the trays had been removed, we sat by the open window as night drew in. In the
last of the light, Lord Otori pointed towards the end of the garden. The stream
that cascaded through it swept under a low opening in the tiled roof wall into
the river beyond. The river gave a deep, constant roar and its gray-green
waters filled the opening like a painted screen.

“It's good to come home,” he said
quietly. “But just as the river is always at the door, so is the world always
outside. And it is in the world that we have to live.”

The same year Otori Shigeru rescued
the boy who was to become Otori Takeo at Mino, certain events took place in a
castle a long way to the south. The castle had been given to Noguchi Masayoshi
by Iida Sadamu for his part in the battle of Yaegahara. Iida, having defeated
his traditional enemies, the Otori, and forced their surrender on favorable
terms to himself, now turned his attention to the third great clan of the Three
Countries, the Seishuu, whose domains covered most of the south and west. The
Seishuu preferred to make peace through alliances rather than war, and these
were sealed with hostages, both from great domains, like the Maruyama, and
smaller ones, like their close relatives, the Shirakawa.

Lord Shirakawa's eldest daughter,
Kaede, went to Noguchi Castle as a hostage when she had just changed her sash
of childhood for a girl's, and she had now lived there for half her life—long
enough to think of a thousand things she detested about it. At night, when she
was too tired to sleep and did not dare even toss and turn in case one of the
older girls reached over and slapped her, she made lists of them inside her
head. She had learned early to keep her thoughts to herself. At least no one
could reach inside and slap her mind, although she knew more than one of them
longed to. Which was why they slapped her so often on her body or face.

She clung with a child's
single-mindedness to the faint memories she had of the home she had left when
she was seven. She had not seen her mother or her younger sisters since the day
her father had escorted her to the castle.

Her father had returned three times
since then, only to find she was housed with the servants, not with the Noguchi
children, as would have been suitable for the daughter of a warrior family. His
humiliation was complete: He was unable even to protest, although she,
unnaturally observant even at that age, had seen the shock and fury in his
eyes. The first two times they had been allowed to speak in private for a few
moments. Her clearest memory was of him holding her by the shoulders and saying
in an intense voice, “If only you had been born a boy!” The third time he was
permitted only to look at her. After that he had not come again, and she had
had no word from her home.

She understood his reasons
perfectly. By the time she was twelve, through a mixture of keeping her eyes
and ears open and engaging the few people sympathetic to her in seemingly
innocent conversation, she knew her own position: She was a hostage, a pawn in
the struggles between the clans. Her life was worth nothing to the lords who
virtually owned her, except in what she added to their bargaining power. Her
father was the lord of the strategically important domain of Shirakawa; her
mother was closely related to the Maruyama. Since her father had no sons, he
would adopt as his heir whoever Kaede was married to. The Noguchi, by
possessing her, also possessed his loyalty, his alliance, and his inheritance.

She no longer even considered the
great things—fear, homesickness, loneliness—but the sense that the Noguchi did
not even value her as a hostage headed her list of things she hated, as she
hated the way the girls teased her for being left-handed and clumsy, the stench
of the guards' room by the gate, the steep stairs that were so hard to climb
when you were carrying things . . . And she was always carrying things: bowls
of cold water, kettles of hot water, food for the always ravenous men to cram
into their mouths, things they had forgotten or were too lazy to fetch for
themselves. She hated the castle itself, the massive stones of the foundations,
the dark oppressiveness of the upper rooms, where the twisted roof beams seemed
to echo her feelings, wanted to break free of the distortion they were trapped
in and fly back to the forest they came from.

And the men. How she hated them.
The older she grew, the more they harassed her. The maids her age competed for
their attentions. They flattered and cosseted the men, putting on childish
voices, pretending to be delicate, even simpleminded, to gain the protection of
one soldier or another. Kaede did not blame them for it—she had come to believe
that all women should use every weapon they had to protect themselves in the
battle that life seemed to be—but she would not stoop to that. She could not.
Her only value, her only escape from the castle, lay in marriage to someone of
her own class. If she threw that chance away, she was as good as dead.

She knew she should not have to
endure it. She should go to someone and complain. Of course it was unthinkable
to approach Lord Noguchi, but maybe she could ask to speak to the lady. On
second thought, even to be allowed access to her seemed unlikely. The truth
was, there was no one to turn to. She would have to protect herself. But the
men were so strong. She was tall for a girl—too tall, the other girls said
maliciously—and not weak—the hard work saw to that—but once or twice a man had
grabbed her in play and held her just with one hand, and she had not been able
to escape. The memory made her shiver with fear.

And every month it became harder to
avoid their attentions. Late in the eighth month of her fifteenth year a
typhoon in the West brought days of heavy rain. Kaede hated the rain, the way
it made everything smell of mold and dampness, and she hated the way her skimpy
robes clung to her when they were wet, showing the curve of her back and
thighs, making the men call after her even more.

“Hey, Kaede, little sister!” a
guard shouted to her as she ran through the rain from the kitchen, past the
second turreted gate. “Don't go so fast! I've got an errand for you! Tell
Captain Arai to come down, will you? His lordship wants him to check out a new
horse.”

The rain was pouring like a river
from the crenellations, from the tiles, from the gutters, from the dolphins
that topped every roof as a protection against fire. The whole castle spouted
water. Within seconds she was soaked, her sandals saturated, making her slip
and stumble on the cobbled steps. But she obeyed without too much bitterness;
for, of everyone in the castle, Arai was the only person she did not hate. He always
spoke nicely to her, he didn't tease or harass her, and she knew his lands lay
alongside her father's and he spoke with the same slight accent of the West.

“Hey, Kaede!” The guard leered as
she entered the main keep. “You're always running everywhere! Stop and chat!”

When she ignored him and started up
the stairs, he shouted after her, “They say you're really a boy! Come here and
show me you're not a boy!”

“Fool!” she muttered, her legs
aching as she began the second flight of stairs.

The guards on the top floor were
playing some kind of gambling game with a knife. Arai got to his feet as soon
as he saw her and greeted her by name.

“Lady Shirakawa.” He was a big man,
with an impressive presence and intelligent eyes. She gave him the message. He
thanked her, looking for a moment as though he would say something more to her,
but seemed to change his mind. He went hastily down the stairs.

She lingered, gazing out of the
windows. The wind from the mountains blew in, raw and damp. The view was almost
completely blotted out by clouds, but below her was the Noguchi residence,
where, she thought resentfully, she should by rights be living, not running
around in the rain at everyone's beck and call.

“If you're going to dawdle, Lady
Shirakawa, come and sit down with us,” one of the guards said, coming up behind
her and patting her on the backside.

“Get your hands off me!” she said
angrily.

The men laughed. She feared their
mood: They were bored and tense, fed up with the rain, the constant watching
and waiting, the lack of action.

“Ah, the captain forgot his knife,”
one of them said. “Kaede, run down after him.”

She took the knife, feeling its
weight and balance in her left hand.

“She looks dangerous!” the men
joked. “Don't cut yourself, little sister!”

She ran down the stairs, but Arai
had already left the keep. She heard his voice in the yard and was about to
call to him, but before she could get outside, the man who had spoken to her
earlier stepped out of the guardroom. She stopped dead, hiding the knife behind
her back. He stood right in front of her, too close, blocking the dim gray
light from outside.

“Come on, Kaede, show me you're not
a boy!”

He grabbed her by the right hand
and pulled her close to him, pushing one leg between hers, forcing her thighs
apart. She felt the hard bulge of his sex against her, and with her left hand,
almost without thinking, she jabbed the knife into his neck.

He cried out instantly and let go
of her, clasping his hands to his neck and staring at her with amazed eyes. He
was not badly hurt, but the wound was bleeding freely. She could not believe
what she had done. I am dead, she thought. As the man began to shout for help,
Arai came back through the doorway. He took in the scene at a glance, grabbed
the knife from Kaede, and without hesitation slit the guard's throat. The man
fell, gurgling, to the ground.

Arai pulled Kaede outside. The rain
sluiced over them. He whispered, “He tried to rape you. I came back and killed
him. Anything else and we are both dead.”

She nodded. He had left his weapon
behind, she had stabbed a guard: both unforgivable offences. Arai's swift
action had removed the only witness. She thought she would be shocked at the
man's death and at her part in it, but she found she was only glad. So may they
all die, she thought, the Noguchi, the Tohan, the whole clan.

“I will speak to his lordship on
your behalf, Lady Shirakawa,” Arai said, making her start with surprise. “He
should not leave you unprotected.” He added, almost to himself, “A man of honor
would not do that.”

He gave a great shout up the
stairwell for the guards, then said to Kaede, “Don't forget, I saved your life.
More than your life!”

She looked at him directly. “Don't
forget, it was your knife,” she returned.

He gave a wry smile of forced
respect. “We are in each other's hands, then.”

“What about them?” she said,
hearing the thud of steps on the stairs. “They know I left with the knife.”

“They will not betray me,” he
replied. “I can trust them.”

“I trust no one,” she whispered.

“You must trust me,” he said.

Later that day Kaede was told she
was to move to the Noguchi family residence. As she wrapped her few belongings
into her carrying cloth, she stroked the faded pattern, with its crests of the
white river for her family and the setting sun of the Seishuu. She was bitterly
ashamed of how little she owned. The events of the day kept going through her
mind: the feel of the knife in the forbidden left hand, the grip of the man,
his lust, the way he had died. And Arai's words: A man of honor would not do
that! He should not have spoken of his lord like that. He would never have
dared to, not even to her, if he did not already have rebellion in his mind.
Why had he treated her so well, not only at that vital moment, but previously?
Was he, too, seeking allies? He was already a powerful and popular man; now she
saw that he might have greater ambitions. He was capable of acting in an
instant, seizing opportunities.