The Harsh Cry of the Heron (2 page)

‘It seems cruel to
you, Lord Takeo,’ Chiyo had warned him. ‘But it is better to act now than to
bear the disgrace and ill-fortune that, as the father of twins, people will
believe you to be subject to.’

‘How will people ever
give up their superstitions and cruelty unless we show them?’ he replied with
anger, for in the way of those born into the Hidden he valued the life of a
child above all else, and he could not believe that sparing a baby’s life would
be the cause of disapproval or bad luck.

He had been surprised
subsequently by the strength of the superstition. Kaede herself was not
untouched by it, and her attitude to her younger daughters reflected her uneasy
ambivalence. She preferred them to live apart, and most of the year they did,
one or the other of them usually with the Tribe; and she had not wanted them
both to be present at their older sister’s coming of age, fearing that their
appearance would bring bad luck to Shigeko. But Shigeko, who was as protective
of the twins as her father, had insisted that they both be there. Takeo was
glad of it, never happier than when the whole family was together, close to
him. He gazed on them all with fondness, and realized the feeling was being
taken over by something more passionate: the desire to lie down with his wife
and feel her skin against his. The fight with poles had awakened memories of
when he had first fallen in love with her, the first time they had sparred
against each other in Tsuwano when he was seventeen and she fifteen. It was in
Inuyama, almost in this very spot, that they had first lain together, driven by
a passion born of desperation and grief. The former residence, Iida Sadamu’s
castle, and the first nightingale floor had burned when Inuyama fell, but Arai
Daiichi had rebuilt it in a similar fashion, and now it was one of the famous
Four Cities of the Three Countries.

‘The girls should
rest before tonight,’ he said, for there would be lengthy ceremonies at the
shrines at midnight, followed by the New Year Feast. They would not go to bed
until the Hour of the Tiger. ‘I will also lie down for a while.’

‘I will have braziers
sent to the room,’ Kaede said, ‘and join you in a little while.’

The light had faded
by the time she came to him, and the early winter dusk had set in. Despite the
braziers, glowing with charcoal, her breath was a cloud of white in the freezing
air. She had bathed, and the fragrance of rice bran and aloes from the water
clung to her skin. Beneath the quilted winter robe her flesh was warm. He undid
her sash and slipped his hands inside the garment, drawing her close to him.
Then he loosened the scarf that covered her head and pulled it off, running his
hand over the short silky locks.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It
is so ugly.’ He knew that she had never got over the loss of her beautiful long
hair, or the scars on the white nape of her neck that marred the beauty that
had once been the subject of legends and superstition; but he did not see the
disfigurement, only the increased vulnerability which in his eyes made her more
lovely.

‘I like it. It is
like an actor’s. It makes you look like both man and woman, both adult and
child.’

‘Then you must bare
your scars to me too.’ She drew off the silk glove that he habitually wore on
his right hand, and brought the stumps of the fingers to her lips. ‘I hurt you
earlier?’

‘Not really. Just the
residual pain - any blow jars the joints and sets them aching.’ He added in a
low voice, ‘I am aching now, but for another reason.’

‘That ache I can
heal,’ she whispered, pulling him to her, opening up to him, taking him inside
her, meeting his urgency with her own and then melting with tenderness, loving
the familiarity of his skin, his hair, his smell, and the strangeness that each
separate act of love brought newly with it.

‘You always heal me,’
he said afterwards. ‘You make me whole.’

She lay in his arms,
her head on his shoulder. She let her gaze drift around the room. Lamps shone
from iron holders, but beyond the shutters the sky was dark.

‘Perhaps we have made
a son,’ she said, unable to hide the longing in her voice.

‘I hope we have not!’
Takeo exclaimed. ‘Twice my children have nearly cost you your life. We have no
need of a son,’ he went on more lightly. ‘We have three daughters.’

‘I once said the same
to my father,’ Kaede confessed. ‘I believed I should be the equal of any boy.’

‘Shigeko certainly
is,’ Takeo said. ‘She will inherit the Three Countries, and her children after
her.’

‘Her children! She
seems still a child herself, yet she is nearly old enough to be betrothed. Who
will we ever find for her to marry?’

‘There is no hurry.
She is a prize, a jewel almost beyond price. We will not give her away cheaply.’

Kaede returned to her
earlier subject as though it gnawed at her. ‘I long to give you a son.’

‘Despite your own
inheritance and Lady Maruyama’s example! You still speak like the daughter of a
warrior family.’

The dark, the
quietness around them led her to voice her concerns further. ‘Sometimes I think
that the twin girls closed my womb. I think that if they had not been born,
sons would have come to me.’

‘You listen to
superstitious old women too much!’

‘You are probably
right. But what will happen to our younger daughters? They can hardly inherit,
should anything befall Shigeko, Heaven forbid it. And whom will they marry? No
nobleman’s or warrior’s family will risk accepting a twin, especially one
tainted - forgive me -with the blood of the Tribe and those skills so close to
sorcery.’

Takeo could not deny
that the same thought often troubled him, but he tried to put it from him. The
girls were still so young: who knew what fate had in store for them?

After a moment Kaede
said quietly, ‘But maybe we are already too old. Everyone wonders why you do
not take a second wife, or a concubine, to have more children with.’

‘I want only one
wife,’ he said seriously. ‘Whatever emotions I have pretended, whatever roles I
have assumed, my love for you is unassumed and true - I will never lie with
anyone but you. I have told you, I made a vow to Kannon in Ohama. I have not
broken it in sixteen years. I am not going to break it now.’

‘I think I would die
of jealousy,’ Kaede admitted. ‘But my feelings are unimportant compared with
the needs of the country.’

‘I believe for us to
be united in love is the foundation of our good government. I will never do
anything to undermine that,’ he replied. He pulled her close to him again,
running his hands gently over her scarred neck, feeling the hardened ribs of
tissue left by the flames. ‘As long as we are united, our country will remain
peaceful and strong.’

Kaede spoke
half-sleepily. ‘Do you remember when we parted at Terayama? You gazed into my
eyes and I fell asleep. I have never told you this before. I dreamed of the
White Goddess: she spoke to me. Be patient, she said, he will come for you. And
again at the Sacred Caves I heard her voice saying the same words. It was the
only thing that sustained me during my captivity at Lord Fujiwara’s. I learned
patience there. I had to learn how to wait, how to do nothing, so he had no
excuse to take my life. And afterwards, when he was dead, the only place I
could think of to go was back to the caves, back to the goddess. If you had not
come, I would have stayed there in her service for the rest of my life. And you
came: I saw you, so thin, the poison still in you, your beautiful hand ruined.
I will never forget that moment: your hand on my neck, the snow falling, the
harsh cry of the heron . . .’

‘I don’t deserve your
love,’ Takeo whispered. ‘It is the greatest blessing of my life, and I cannot
live without you. You know, my life has also been guided by a prophecy . . .’

‘You told me. And we
have seen it all fulfilled: the Five Battles, earth’s intervention—’

I will tell her the
rest now, Takeo thought. I will tell her why I do not want sons, for the blind
seer told me only my son could bring death to me. I will tell her about Yuki,
and the Łhild she had, my son, now sixteen years old.

But he could not
bring himself to cause his wife pain. What was the purpose of raking over the
past? The Five Battles had entered into the mythology of the Otori, though he
was aware that he himself had chosen how to count those battles: they could
have been six, or four, or three. Words could be altered and manipulated to
mean almost anything. If a prophecy was believed, it often came true. He would
not utter the words, in case by so doing he breathed life into them.

He saw that Kaede was
nearly asleep. It was warm under the quilts, though the air on his face was
freezing. In a little while he must arise, bathe, dress in formal clothes and
prepare himself for the ceremonies that would welcome the New Year. It would be
a long night. His limbs began to relax, and he too slept.

All three of Lord
Otori’s daughters loved the Aapproach to the temple at Inuyama, for it was lined
with statues of white dogs, interspersed with stone lanterns where on the
nights of the great festivals hundreds of lamps burned, sending flickering
lights over the dogs and making them seem alive. The air was cold enough to
numb their faces, fingers and toes, and was filled with smoke and the smell of
incense and fresh-cut pine.

Worshippers making
the first holy visit of the new year thronged on the steep steps that led
upwards to the temple, and from above the great bell was tolling, sending
shivers down Shigeko’s spine. Her mother was a few paces in front of her,
walking next to Muto Shizuka, her favourite companion. Shizuka’s husband, Dr
Ishida, was away on one of his trips to the mainland. He was not expected back
until spring. Shigeko was glad Shizuka would spend the winter with them, for
she was one of the few people the twins respected and heeded; and, Shigeko
thought, she in her turn genuinely cared for them and understood them.

The twins walked with
Shigeko, one on each side; every now and then someone in the crowd around them
would stare at them before moving away out of reach, lest they jostle against
them; but mostly, in the half-light, they went unnoticed.

She knew guards
accompanied them both in front and behind, and that Shizuka’s son, Taku, was in
attendance on her father as he performed the ceremonies at the main temple. She
was not in the least afraid; she knew Shizuka and her mother were armed with
short swords, and she herself had hidden within her robe a very useful stick
that Lord Miyoshi Gemba, one of her teachers at Terayama, had shown her how to
use to disable a man without killing him. She half-hoped she would have the
chance to try it out, but it did not seem likely that they would be attacked in
the heart of Inuyama.

Yet there was
something about the night and the darkness that put her on her guard: hadn’t
her teachers told her frequently that a warrior must always be prepared, so
that death, whether one’s opponent’s or one’s own, could be avoided through
anticipation?

They came to the main
hall of the temple, where she could see her father’s figure, dwarfed by the
high roof and the huge statues of the lords of Heaven, the guardians of the
next world. It was hard to believe the formal person seated so gravely before
the altar was the same man she had fought that afternoon on the nightingale
floor. She felt a wave of love and reverence for him.

After making their
offerings and prayers before the Enlightened One, the women went away to the
left and climbed a little higher up the mountain to the temple of Kannon the
all-merciful. Here the guards remained outside the gate, for only women were
allowed inside the courtyard. Kaede went alone to the feet of the goddess and
bowed to the ground before her.

There was a moment of
silence as they all followed her example, but as Shigeko knelt on the lowest
wooden step before the gleaming statue, Miki touched her older sister on the
sleeve. ‘Shigeko,’ she whispered. ‘What’s that man doing in here?’

‘Where is here?

Miki pointed to the
end of the veranda, where a young woman was walking towards them, apparently
carrying some gift: she knelt before Kaede and held out the tray.

‘Don’t touch it!’
Shigeko called to her mother. ‘Miki, how many men?’

‘Two,’ Miki cried. ‘And
they have knives!’

In that moment
Shigeko saw them. They came out of the air, leaping towards them. She screamed
another warning and drew out the stick.

‘They are going to
kill Mother!’ Miki shrieked.

But Kaede was already
alerted by Shigeko’s first cry. Her sword was in her hand. The girl threw the
tray in her face as she pulled out her own weapon, but Shizuka, also armed, had
leaped to Kaede’s side, deflected the first thrust, sent the weapon flying
through the air and turned to face the men. Kaede seized the woman and threw
her to the ground, pinioning her.

‘Maya, inside the
mouth,’ Shizuka called. ‘Don’t let her take poison.’

The woman thrashed
and kicked, but Maya and Kaede forced her mouth open and Maya slipped her
fingers inside, locating the poison pellet and extracting it.