Brilliance of the Moon (36 page)

Kondo Kiichi had accompanied Shizuka and Kenji to Shuho, and I
realized he could also be useful to me, being now in Arai’s service. Arai and
Fujiwara were, after all, allies, which gave Kondo an excuse to approach the
nobleman directly. Shizuka told me that Kondo was essentially a pragmatic and
obedient man who would serve whomever he was told to by Kenji. He seemed to
have no problems with swearing allegiance to me. With Kenji’s agreement, Kondo
and Shizuka set out to make contact with their Muto spies in the Southwest.
Before they left, I drew Shizuka aside and gave her a message to pass on to
Kaede: that I loved her, that I would come for her soon, that she should be
patient, that she must not die before I saw her again.

“It’s dangerous, especially to Kaede herself,” Shizuka said.
“I’ll do what I can, but I can’t promise anything. But we will send messages
back to you before the full moon.”

I returned to the deserted shrine on the coast and set up camp
there. A week passed; the moon entered into the first quarter. We had our first
message from Kondo: Arai had encountered the Otori army near Yamagata, and it
was in retreat toward Hagi. Ryoma returned from Oshima to say the Terada were
ready. The weather held fair, the seas calm, apart from the earthquakes, which
caused large swells, increasing my sense of urgency.

Two days before the full moon, at midday, we saw dark shapes in
the distance coming from Oshima: It was the fleet of pirate ships. There were
twelve of them, enough with the fishing boats to take all my remaining men. I
lined my warriors up on the shore, ready to embark.

Fumio leaped out of the leading boat and waded through the water
toward me. One of his men followed him carrying a long bundle and two smaller
baskets. After we embraced he said, “I’ve brought something to show you. Take
me inside; I don’t want everyone to see it.”

We went inside the shrine while his sailors began directing the
embarkation. The man put the bundles down and went to sit on the edge of the
veranda. I could already guess from the smell what one of the objects was, and
I wondered why Fumio should have gone to the bother of bringing someone’s head
to me, and whose it was.

He unwrapped it first. “Look at it and then we’ll bury it. We
took a ship a couple of weeks ago with this man on it—one of several.”

I looked at the head with distaste. The skin was white as pearl
and the hair yellow like the yolk of a bird’s egg. The features were large, the
nose hooked.

“Is it a man or a demon?”

“It’s one of the barbarians that made the seeing tube.”

“Is that what’s in
there?” I indicated the long bundle. “No! Something much more interesting!”
Fumio unwrapped the object and showed it to me. I took it wanly.

“A weapon?” I wasn’t sure how you wielded it, but it had the
unmistakable look of something designed to kill.

“Yes, and I think we can copy it. I’ve had another one made
already. Not quite right—it killed the man who was testing it—but I think I
know where we went wrong.” His eyes were gleaming, his face alight. “What does
it do?”

“I’ll show you. Do you have someone you can dispense with?” I
thought of the two bandits we had taken. They had been pegged out on the beach,
an example to anyone else who might be considering their calling, and given
just enough water to keep them alive. I’d heard their groans while we were
waiting for Fumio and thought I must do something about them before we left.

Fumio called to his man, who brought a pan of coals. We had the
bandits, pleading and cursing, tied upright to trees. Fumio walked about fifty
or sixty paces down the beach, signaling to me to go with him. He lit a cord
from the coals and applied the smoldering end to one end of the tube. It had a
kind of hook, like a spring. He held the tube up, squinting along it toward the
prisoners. There was a sudden sharp noise, which made me jump, and a puff of
smoke. The bandit gave one fierce cry. Blood was pouring from a wound in his
throat. He was dead within seconds.

“Ah,” Fumio said with satisfaction, “I’m getting the hang of it.”

“How long before you can shoot again?” I asked. The weapon was
crude and ugly. It had none of the beauty of the sword, none of the majesty of
the bow, but I could see that it would be more effective than either.

He went through the process again and I counted my breaths: over
one hundred, a long time in the middle of a battle. The second shot hit the
other bandit in the chest, tearing a sizable hole. I guessed the ball would
penetrate most armor. The possibilities of the weapon both intrigued and
repelled me.

“Warriors will call it a coward’s weapon,” I said to Fumio.

He laughed. “I don’t mind fighting the coward’s way if it means I
survive!”

“You’ll bring it with you?”

“If you promise to destroy it if we lose.” He grinned. “No one
else must learn how to make them.”

“We are not going to lose. What do you call it?”

“A firearm,” he replied.

We went back inside and Fumio rewrapped the firearm. The hideous
head stared with blind eyes. Flies were beginning to settle on it, and the
smell seemed to permeate the whole room, nauseating me.

“Take it away,” I ordered the pirate. He looked at his master.

“I’ll just show you his other things.” Fumio took the third
bundle and unwrapped it. “He wore this round his neck.”

“Prayer beads?” I said, taking the white string. The beads looked
like ivory. The string unraveled and the sign the Hidden use, the cross, fell
into the air before my eyes. It shocked me to see so openly displayed something
that for me had always been the deepest secret. In our priest’s house in Mino the windows were set so that at certain times of day the sun formed a golden cross on
the wall, but that fleeting image was the only one I’d seen before.

Keeping my face impassive, I tossed the beads back to Fumio.
“Strange. Some barbarian religion?”

“You are an innocent, Takeo. This is the sign the Hidden
worship.”

“How do you know?”

“I know all sorts of things,” he said impatiently. “I’m not
afraid of knowledge. I’ve been to the mainland. I know the world is much larger
than our string of islands. The barbarians share the beliefs of the Hidden. I
find that fascinating.”

“No use in battle, though!” I found it not so much fascinating as
alarming, as though it were some sinister message from a god I no longer
believed in.

“But what else do they have, the barbarians? Takeo, when you are
established in Hagi, send me to them. Let’s trade with them. Let’s learn from
them.”

It was hard for me to imagine that future. All I could think
about was the coming struggle.

By midafternoon the last of the men were on board. Fumio told me
we had to leave to catch the evening tide. I putTaku on my shoulders and Kenji,
Zenko, and I waded out to Fumio’s boat and were pulled over the gunwales. The
fleet was already under way, the yellow sails catching the breeze. I stared at
the land as it became smaller and smaller and then faded into the mist of
evening. Shizuka had said she would send messages before we left, but we had
heard nothing from her. Her silence added to my anxiety, for her and for Kaede.

Rieko’s disposition was nervous, and she was as alarmed by the
typhoon as she had been by the earthquake. It threw her into a state of near
collapse. Despite the discomfort of the storm, Kaede was grateful to be free of
the woman’s constant attention. However, after two days the wind dropped, clear
autumn weather followed, and Rieko recovered her health and strength along with
her aggravating attentiveness. She seemed to find something to do to Kaede
every day, plucking her eyebrows, scrubbing her skin with rice bran, washing
and combing her hair, powdering her face to an unnatural whiteness, creaming
her hands and feet until they were as smooth and translucent as pearl. She
selected Kaede’s clothes for her and dressed her with the help of the maids.
Occasionally, as a special privilege, she would read a little to her or play
the lute—at which, as she let Kaede know, she was considered to be highly
skilled.

Fujiwara visited once a day. Kaede was instructed by Rieko in the
art of making tea and she prepared it for him, going silently through the
ritual while he followed every movement, correcting her from time to time. On
fine days the women sat in a room that looked out onto a small enclosed garden.
Two twisted pine trees and a plum tree of extreme antiquity grew there along
with azaleas and peonies.

“We will enjoy the flowers in the spring,” Rieko said, for the
shrubs were a dull autumn green, and Kaede thought of the long winter that
stretched ahead and after that another and another, reducing her to a lifeless
treasure, seen only by Lord Fujiwara.

The garden reminded her of the one at Noguchi Castle where she
had sat briefly with her father when he had been informed of the marriage
arranged with Lord Otori Shigeru. He had been proud then, relieved that she was
to make such a good marriage. Neither of them had known that that marriage,
too, would be a sham, a trap for Shigeru. Since she had so little with which to
occupy her thoughts, she went over and over the past in her mind while she
gazed out on the garden, watching every minute change as the days went slowly
by. The plum tree began to drop its leaves and an old man came into the garden
to pick them one by one off the moss. Kaede had to be kept out of his sight, as
from all men, but she watched him from behind a screen. With infinite patience
he picked up each leaf between finger and thumb so the moss would not be
damaged and placed it in a bamboo basket. Then he combed the moss as if it were
hair, removing every scrap of twig and grass, worm castings, birds’ feathers,
pieces of bark. For the rest of the day the moss looked pristine, and then
slowly, imperceptibly, the world, life, began to encroach on it, and the next
morning the process began again.

Green and white lichen grew on the gnarled trunk and branches of
the plum tree, and Kaede found herself watching that too every day. Tiny events
had the power to startle her. One morning an ivory-marbled pale pink fungus
like a flower carved from flesh had erupted in the moss, and when occasionally
a bird alighted on the top of one of the pine trees and let out a trill of
song, her pulse stammered in response.

Running a domain had not fully occupied her restless, hungry
mind; now she had so little to do, she thought she would die of boredom. She
tried to hear the rhythm of the household beyond the walls of her rooms, but
few sounds penetrated to the solitary place. Once she heard the cadence of a
flute and thought it might be Makoto. She dreaded seeing him, for she was
gripped with jealousy at the thought of him free to come and go, free to be
with Takeo and fight alongside him; yet she longed to see him, to have some
news, any news. But she had no way of knowing if it was the young monk or not.

After the boredom, the worst thing was knowing nothing. Battles
might be fought and lost, warlords might rise and fall—all news was kept from
her. Her one consolation was that
if
Takeo
were dead, she felt Fujiwara would tell her, taunting her with it, taking
pleasure in his death and her suffering.

She knew Fujiwara continued to have his plays performed and
wondered sometimes
if
he had written her
own story as he had once suggested. Mamoru frequently accompanied him on his
visits and was reminded to study Kaede’s expressions and copy them. She was not
permitted to watch the dramas, but she could hear snatches of words and
chanting, the sounds of the musicians, the beating of a drum. Occasionally she
would catch a phrase that she was familiar with and the play it came from would
take shape in her head and she would find herself suddenly moved to tears by
the beauty of the words and the poignancy of the emotions.

Her own life seemed just as poignant, just as moving. Forced to
contemplate the tiny details of her present existence, she began to seek ways
to capture her own feelings. Words came to her one by one. Sometimes it took
her all day to select them. She knew little of formal poetry, other than that
which she had read in her father’s books, but she collected words like golden
beads and strung them together in ways that pleased her. She kept them secret
inside her own heart.

She came to love above everything the silence in which the poems
formed themselves, like the pillars in the sacred caves of Shirakawa, drip by
drip from the limy water. She resented Rieko’s chatter, a mixture of malice and
self-importance expressed in commonplaces, and Fujiwara’s visits, his contrived
artificiality, which seemed the complete opposite of the unadorned truth that
she sought. Apart from Fuji-wara, the only man she saw was Ishida. The
physician came every few days and she enjoyed his visits, though they hardly
spoke to each other. When she started looking for words, she stopped taking the
calming teas; she wanted to know her feelings, no matter what the anguish.

Next to the room that gave onto the garden was a small household
shrine with statues of the Enlightened One and the all-merciful Kannon. Not
even Rieko dared to prevent Kaede from praying, and she knelt there for many
hours until she entered a state where prayer and poetry became one and the
everyday world seemed full of holiness and significance. She meditated often on
the thoughts that had disturbed her after the battle of Asagawa andTakeo’s persecution
of the Tribe, and wondered if this state of holiness that she brushed against
might bring an answer on how to rule without resorting to violence. Then she
chided herself, for she could not see how she would ever rule again, and she
had to admit that if she were to wield power she would seek revenge on all
those who had inflicted suffering upon her.