The Harsh Cry of the Heron (66 page)

‘I must prepare to
fight Zenko. But how can I fight against my wife?’

In Hofu, high tide at
the start of the fifth month, the opening of summer, came after noon, in the
Hour of the Horse. The port was at its most active, with ships leaving and
arriving in a steady flow, taking advantage of the mild west wind which would
drive them to Akashi, laden with the produce of the Three Countries. Eating
houses and inns were crammed with the newly disembarked, drinking, exchanging
news and travellers’ tales, voicing their shock and regret at Muto Taku’s death
and marvelling at the miracle of his mother, who was fed by birds in Daifukuji,
resentful of Arai Zenko, who showed such a lack of filial duty and such
contempt for the gods and would surely be punished for it. The townspeople of
Hofu were bold and opinionated. They had loathed their enslavement under the
Tohan and the Noguchi; they had no desire to return to those days under the
Arai. Zenko’s departure from the town was accompanied by jeers and other
manifestations of ill will: his guards at the end of his long train were even
pelted with refuse, and in some cases stones.

Miki and Maya saw
little of this; they ran blindly and unseen through the narrow streets, intent
only on distancing themselves from Hisao and Akio. It was stiflingly hot away
from the sea; the town smelled of fish and rotting seaweed, and the dark
shadows alternating with brilliant sunshine disoriented them. Maya was already
exhausted from the sleepless night, the encounter with Hisao, the conversation
with the ghost woman. She kept looking nervously behind her as they ran, sure
that Hisao would pursue her; he would never let her go. And Akio would have
learned by now about the cat. Hisao will be punished, she thought, but did not
know if the idea pleased or pained her.

She felt invisibility
leave her as she tired; she slowed to catch her breath, and saw Miki reappear
beside her. The street here was quiet; most people were indoors eating the
midday meal. Immediately next to them, outside a small shop, a man was
squatting on the ground, sharpening knives with a grindstone, using water from
the little canal that ran past each house. He jumped in surprise at their
sudden appearance and dropped the knife he was holding. Maya felt frantic,
defenceless. Almost without thinking she seized the knife and jabbed it into
the man’s hand.

‘What are you doing?’
Miki cried.

‘We need weapons, and
food, and money,’ Maya answered. ‘He will give them to us.’

The man was staring
in disbelief at his own blood. Maya split herself and came behind him, cutting
him again, this time on the neck.

‘Get us food and money,
or you die,’ she said. ‘Sister, get a knife too.’

Miki picked up a
small knife from where it lay on a cloth spread out on the ground. She seized
the man by the unwounded hand and led him into the shop. His eyes bulging with
terror, he showed them where he kept a few coins, and pressed the rice balls
his wife had prepared for him into Maya’s hand.

‘Don’t kill me,’ he
pleaded. ‘I hate Lord Arai’s wickedness: I know he has stirred up the gods
against him, but I had no part in it. I’m just a poor craftsman.’

‘The gods punish the
people for the wickedness of the ruler,’ Maya intoned. If this fool thought
they were demons or ghosts, she would make the most of it.

‘What was all that
about?’ Miki asked when they had left the shop, now both armed with knives hidden
inside their clothes.

‘I’ll tell you later.
Let’s find somewhere to hide for a bit, somewhere where there’s water.’

They followed the
canal until, on the road leading out of town towards the north, they came upon
a roadside shrine, a small grove of trees around a spring-fed pool. Here they
drank deeply, and found a secluded spot behind bushes, where they sat down and
shared the rice cakes. Crows were cawing high in the cedars, and cicadas were
rasping monotonously. Sweat trickled down the girls’ faces, and under their
clothes their bodies, on the cusp between child and woman, were damp and itchy.

Maya said, ‘Our uncle
is preparing an army against Father. We have to go to Hagi and warn Mother.
Aunt Hana is on her way there. Mother must not trust her.’

‘But Maya, you used
your Tribe skills against an innocent man. Father’s told us we must never do
that.’

‘Listen, Miki, you
don’t know what I’ve been through. I saw Taku and Sada murdered in front of my
eyes. I’ve been kept prisoner by Kikuta Akio.’ For a moment she thought she was
going to cry, but the feeling passed. ‘And that boy, who was calling out to me,
is Kikuta Hisao; he’s Kenji’s grandson. You must have heard about him in
Kagemura. His mother, Yuki, was married to Akio, but after the boy was born the
Kikuta made her kill herself.

It’s the reason why
Kenji brought the Tribe back to Father.’

Miki nodded. She had
heard all these Tribe stories since childhood.

‘Anyway, no one’s
innocent in the long run,’ Maya said. ‘It was that man’s fate to be there when
he was.’ She was staring moodily at the surface of the pool. The branches of
the cedars and the clouds behind them were reflected in its still surface. ‘Hisao
is our brother,’ she said abruptly. ‘Everyone thinks he’s Akio’s son, but he’s
not. He’s Father’s.’

‘It cannot be true,’
Miki said in a faint voice.

‘It is true. And
there was some prophecy that said Father would only be killed by his own son.
So Hisao is going to kill Father, unless we stop him.’

‘What about our baby
brother?’ Miki whispered.

Maya stared at her.
She had almost forgotten the existence of the new child, as if by not
recognizing his birth she could make him unreal. She had never seen him, nor
had she even thought about him. A mosquito settled on her arm and she slapped
it.

Miki said, ‘Father
must know all this too.’

‘If he does, why has
he done nothing about it?’ Maya replied, wondering why this made her so angry.

‘If he chooses to do
nothing, we should too. Anyway, what can he do?’

‘He should have Hisao
put to death. Hisao deserves it anyway. He is evil, the most evil person I’ve
ever met, worse than Akio.’

‘But what about our
little brother?’ Miki said again.

‘Stop making it all
so complicated, Miki!’ Maya stood and brushed the dust off her clothes. ‘I need
to piss,’ she said, using men’s language, and went a little further into the
grove. Here there were tombstones, mossy and neglected. Maya thought she should
not defile them, so she climbed the side wall and relieved herself in its
shelter. As she clambered back over the wall, the earth shook, and she felt the
stones slide sideways beneath her hands. She half fell onto the ground, made
dizzy for a moment. The tops of the cedars were still quivering. At that moment
she felt an intense longing to be the cat, along with an emotion she did not
recognize, but which unsettled her and nagged at her.

When she saw Miki
still sitting by the pool, she was struck by how thin her sister had become.
This also irritated her. She did not want to have to worry about Miki: she
wanted things to be as they always had been, when the twins seemed to share one
mind. She did not want Miki disagreeing with her.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We
have to get going.’

‘What’s our plan?’
Miki said as she stood up.

‘To go home, of
course.’

‘Are we going to walk
all the way?’

‘Do you have any
better ideas?’

‘We could get help
from someone. A man called Bunta came with Shizuka and me. He would help us.’

‘Is he Muto?’

‘Imai.’

‘None of them can be
trusted any more,’ Maya said in disgust. ‘We’ve got to go alone.’

‘It’s a long way,’
Miki said. ‘It took us a week from Yamagata on horseback, riding openly with
two men to help us. From Yamagata to Hagi is ten days, by the road. If we’re on
foot, and hiding, it will take three times as long. And how will we get food?’

‘Like we did before,’
Maya said, touching the hidden knife. ‘We’ll steal it.’

‘All right,’ Miki
said, not looking happy about it. ‘Are we to follow the high road?’ She
gestured at the dusty road that wound through the rice fields, still bright
green, towards the forest-covered mountains. Maya peered at the usual
travellers moving along it in both directions: warriors on horseback, women
wearing large hats and veils against the sun, monks walking with staffs and
begging bowls, peddlers, merchants, pilgrims. Any one of them might try and
detain them, at worst, or at best ask difficult questions. Or they might be
members of the Tribe, already warned to look out for them. She looked back
towards the city, half expecting to see Hisao and Akio pursuing them. Her heart
lurched and she realized she missed Hisao and longed to see him again.

But I hate him! How
can I want to see him?

Trying to hide this
from Miki, she said, ‘Even though I’m in boy’s clothes, anyone can see we’re
twins. We don’t want people looking at us, gossiping about us. We’ll go through
the mountains.’

‘We’ll starve,’ Miki
protested, ‘or get lost. Let’s go back to the town. Let’s go and find Shizuka.’

‘She’s in Daifukuji,’
Maya said, recalling the servant girl’s words. ‘Fasting and praying. We can’t
go back. Akio is probably there waiting for us.’

The tension within
her was growing by the moment; she could feel the pull on her, feel him looking
for her. She jumped suddenly, hearing his voice.

Come to me.

It echoed like a
whisper through the shadowy grove.

‘Did you hear that?’
She grabbed Miki by the arm.

‘What?’

‘That voice. It’s
him.’

Miki stood, listened
intently. ‘I can’t hear anyone.’

‘Let’s go,’ Maya
said. She looked up at the sky. The sun had moved from its zenith towards the
west. The high road was almost due north, through some of the most fertile land
in the Three Countries, following the bed of the river all the way to Tsuwano.
Rice fields lay on either side of the valley, farm houses and huts dotted here
and there among them. The road ran along the western side until the bridge at
Kibi. There was also a new bridge, just before the confluence of the Yamagata
River. The river often flooded over the coastal plain, but a day’s journey
north of Hofu it became shallow, white water rushing in rapids over a rocky
bed.

Both girls had
travelled this road frequently; Miki the most recently, just a few days before,
Maya the previous autumn with Taku and Sada.

‘I wonder where the
mares are,’ she said to Miki as they left the shelter of the trees and stepped
out into the afternoon heat. T lost them, you know.’

‘What mares?’

‘The ones Shigeko
gave us to ride from Maruyama.’

As they began to
climb up the slope into the bamboo groves, Maya told her sister briefly about
the attack, and the deaths of Taku and Sada. By the time she was finished, Miki
was crying silently, but Maya’s eyes were dry.

‘I dreamt about you,’
Miki said, wiping her eyes with her hand. ‘I dreamt you were the cat, and I was
its shadow. I knew something terrible was happening to you.’

She was silent for a
while, and then said, ‘Did Akio hurt you?’

‘He nearly throttled
me to shut me up, and then he hit me a couple of times, that’s all.’

‘What about Hisao?’

Maya began to walk
faster, until she was almost jogging through the silver-green trunks. An adder
slid across the path in front of them, disappearing into the tangled
undergrowth, and somewhere to their left a small bird was piping. The relentless
droning of cicadas seemed to intensify.

Miki was running too.
They slipped easily between the shafts of bamboo, as surefooted as deer, and
more silent.

‘Hisao is a
ghostmaster,’ Maya said, when finally the steepening slope forced her to slow
down.

‘A Tribe ghostmaster?’

‘Yes. He could be
terribly powerful, except he doesn’t know how to deal with it. No one’s ever
taught him anything much, other than how to be cruel. And he knows how to make
firearms. I suppose someone taught him that.’

The sun had slipped
behind the high peaks of the mountains on their left. There would be no moon,
and already low clouds were spreading across the sky from the south; there
would be no starlight either. It seemed a long time since they had eaten the
rice cakes at the shrine. As they walked, the girls now began instinctively to
look for food: early mushrooms beneath pine trees, wine-berries, the tender
shoots of bamboo, the last of the fern heads, though these were becoming hard
to find. Since childhood they had been taught by the Tribe to live off the
land, to gather its leaves, roots and fruits as both sustenance and poison.
They followed the sound of trickling water and drank from a small stream, where
they also found small crabs which they ate raw and living, sucking the muddy
flesh from the fragile shells. So they went through the long twilight until it
was too dark to see. They were now in the deep forest, and there were many
craggy outcrops and fallen trees to provide shelter.