Across the Nightingale Floor (2 page)

As the track steepened near the
waterfall the two noisy ones dropped back a bit, but the third quickened his
pace as an animal will when it runs uphill. We passed by the shrine; a bird was
pecking at the millet and it flew off with a flash of green and white in its
wings. The track curved a little round the trunk of a huge cedar, and as I ran
with stone legs and sobbing breath past the tree, someone rose out of its
shadow and blocked the path in front of me.

I ran straight into him. He grunted
as though I had winded him, but he held me immediately. He looked in my face
and I saw something flicker in his eyes: surprise, recognition. Whatever it
was, it made him grip me more tightly. There was no getting away this time. I
heard the Tohan man stop, then the heavy footfalls of the other two coming up
behind him.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the man I
feared, his voice steady. “You have apprehended the criminal we were chasing.
Thank you.”

The man holding me turned me round
to face my pursuers. I wanted to cry out to him, to plead with him, but I knew
it was no use. I could feel the soft fabric of his clothes, the smoothness of
his hands. He was some sort of lord, no doubt, just like Iida. They were all of
the same cut. He would do nothing to help me. I kept silent, thought of the
prayers my mother had taught me, thought fleetingly of the bird.

“What has this criminal done?” the
lord asked.

The man in front of me had a long
face, like a wolf's. “Excuse me,” he said again, less politely. “That is no
concern of yours. It is purely the business of Iida Sadamu and the Tohan.”

“Unnh!” the lord grunted. “Is that
so? And who might you be to tell me what is and what is not my concern?”

“Just hand him over!” the wolf man
snarled, all politeness gone. As he stepped forward, I knew suddenly that the
lord was not going to hand me over. With one neat movement he twisted me behind
his back and let go of me. I heard for the second time in my life the hiss of
the warrior's sword as it is brought to life. The wolf man drew out a knife.
The other two had poles. The lord raised the sword with both hands, sidestepped
under one of the poles, lopped off the head of the man holding it, came back at
the wolf man, and took off the right arm, still holding the knife.

It happened in a moment, yet took
an eternity. It happened in the last of the light, in the rain, but when I
close my eyes I can still see every detail.

The headless body fell with a thud
and a gush of blood, the head rolling down the slope. The third man dropped his
stick and ran backwards, calling for help. The wolf man was on his knees,
trying to stanch the blood from the stump at his elbow. He did not groan or
speak.

The lord wiped the sword and
returned it to its sheath in his belt. “Come on,” he said to me.

I stood shaking, unable to move.
This man had appeared from nowhere. He had killed in front of my eyes to save
my life. I dropped to the ground before him, trying to find the words to thank
him.

“Get up,” he said. “The rest of
them will be after us in a moment.”

“I can't leave,” I managed to say.
“I must find my mother.”

“Not now. Now is the time for us to
run!” He pulled me to my feet, and began to hurry me up the slope. “What
happened down there?”

“They burned the village and killed
. . .” The memory of my stepfather came back to me and I could not go on.

“Hidden?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“It's happening all over the fief.
Iida is stirring up hatred against them everywhere. I suppose you're one of
them?”

“Yes.” I was shivering. Although it
was still late summer and the rain was warm, I had never felt so cold. “But
that wasn't only why they were after me. I caused Lord Iida to fall from his
horse.”

To my amazement the lord began to
snort with laughter. “That would have been worth seeing! But it places you
doubly in danger. It's an insult he'll have to wipe out. Still, you are under
my protection now. I won't let Iida take you from me.”

“You saved my life,” I said. “It
belongs to you from this day on.”

For some reason that made him laugh
again. “We have a long walk, on empty stomachs and with wet garments. We must
be over the range before daybreak, when they will come after us.” He strode off
at great speed, and I ran after him, willing my legs not to shake, my teeth not
to chatter. I didn't even know his name, but I wanted him to be proud of me,
never to regret that he had saved my life.

“I am Otori Shigeru,” he said as we
began the climb to the pass. “Of the Otori clan, from Hagi. But while I'm on
the road I don't use that name, so don't you use it either.”

Hagi was as distant as the moon to
me, and although I had heard of the Otori, I knew nothing about them except
that they had been defeated by the Tohan at a great battle ten years earlier on
the plain of Yaegahara.

“What's your name, boy?”

“Tomasu.”

“That's a common name among the
Hidden. Better get rid of it.” He said nothing for a while, and then spoke
briefly out of the darkness. “You can be called Takeo.”

And so between the waterfall and
the top of the mountain I lost my name, became someone new, and joined my
destiny with the Otori.

———«»———«»———«»———

Dawn found us, cold and hungry, in
the village of Hinode, famous for its hot springs. I was already farther from
my own house than I had ever been in my life. All I knew of Hinode was what the
boys in my village said: that the men were cheats and the women were as hot as
the springs and would lie down with you for the price of a cup of wine. I
didn't have the chance to find out if either was true. No one dared to cheat
Lord Otori, and the only woman I saw was the innkeeper's wife who served our
meals.

I was ashamed of how I looked, in
the old clothes my mother had patched so often it was impossible to tell what
color they'd been to start with, filthy, bloodstained. I couldn't believe that
the lord expected me to sleep in the inn with him. I thought I would stay in
the stables. But he seemed not to want to let me too often out of his sight. He
told the woman to wash my clothes and sent me to the hot spring to scrub myself.
When I came back, almost asleep from the effect of the hot water after the
sleepless night, the morning meal was laid out in the room, and he was already
eating. He gestured to me to join him. I knelt on the floor and said the
prayers we always used before the first meal of the day.

“You can't do that,” Lord Otori
said through a mouthful of rice and pickles. “Not even alone. If you want to
live, you have to forget that part of your life. It is over forever.” He
swallowed and took another mouthful. “There are better things to die for.”

I suppose a true believer would
have insisted on the prayers anyway. I wondered if that was what the dead men
of my village would have done. I remembered the way their eyes had looked blank
and surprised at the same time. I stopped praying. My appetite left me.

“Eat,” the lord said, not unkindly.
“I don't want to carry you all the way to Hagi.”

I forced myself to eat a little so
he would not despise me. Then he sent me to tell the woman to spread out the
beds. I felt uncomfortable giving orders to her, not only because I thought she
would laugh at me and ask me if I'd lost the use of my hands, but also because
something was happening to my voice. I could feel it draining away from me, as
though words were too weak to frame what my eyes had seen. Anyway, once she'd
grasped what I meant, she bowed almost as low as she had to Lord Otori and
bustled along to obey.

Lord Otori lay down and closed his
eyes. He seemed to fall asleep immediately.

I thought I, too, would sleep at
once, but my mind kept jumping around, shocked and exhausted. My burned hand
was throbbing and I could hear everything around me with an unusual and
slightly alarming clarity—every word that was spoken in the kitchens, every
sound from the town. Over and over my thoughts kept returning to my mother and
the little girls. I told myself I had not actually seen them dead. They had
probably run away; they would be safe. Everyone liked my mother in our village.
She would not have chosen death. Although she had been born into the Hidden,
she was not a fanatic. She lit incense in the shrine and took offerings to the
god of the mountain. Surely my mother, with her broad face, her rough hands,
and her honey-colored skin, was not dead, was not lying somewhere under the sky,
her sharp eyes empty and surprised, her daughters next to her!

My own eyes were not empty: They
were shamefully full of tears. I buried my face in the mattress and tried to
will the tears away. I could not keep my shoulders from shaking or my breath
from coming in rough sobs. After a few moments I felt a hand on my shoulder and
Lord Otori said quietly, “Death comes suddenly and life is fragile and brief.
No one can alter this, either by prayers or spells. Children cry about it, but
men and women do not cry. They have to endure.”

His own voice broke on this last
word. Lord Otori was as grief-stricken as I was. His face was clenched but the
tears still trickled from his eyes. I knew who I wept for, but I did not dare
question him.

I must have fallen asleep, for I
was dreaming I was at home, eating supper out of a bowl as familiar to me as my
own hands. There was a black crab in the soup, and it jumped out of the bowl
and ran away into the forest. I ran after it, and after a while I didn't know
where I was. I tried to cry out “I'm lost!” but the crab had taken away my
voice.

I woke to find Lord Otori shaking
me.

“Get up!”

I could hear that it had stopped
raining. The light told me it was the middle of the day. The room seemed close
and sticky, the air heavy and still. The straw matting smelled slightly sour.

“I don't want Iida coming after me
with a hundred warriors just because a boy made him fall off his horse,” Lord
Otori grumbled good-naturedly. “We must move on quickly.”

I didn't say anything. My clothes,
washed and dried, lay on the floor. I put them on silently.

“Though how you dared stand up to
Sadamu when you're too scared to say a word to me . . .”

I wasn't exactly scared of him—more
like in complete awe. It was as if one of God's angels, or one of the spirits
of the forest, or a hero from the old days, had suddenly appeared in front of
me and taken me under his protection. I could hardly have told you then what he
looked like, for I did not dare look at him directly. When I did sneak a glance
at him, his face in repose was calm—not exactly stern, but expressionless. I
did not then know the way it was transformed by his smile. He was perhaps
thirty years old, or a little younger, well above medium height,
broad-shouldered. His hands were light-skinned, almost white, well formed, and
with long, restless fingers that seemed made to shape themselves around the
sword's handle.

They did that now, lifting the
sword from where it lay on the matting. The sight of it sent a shudder through
me. I imagined it had known the intimate flesh, the lifeblood, of many men—had
heard their last cries. It terrified and fascinated me.

“Jato,” Lord Otori said, noticing
my gaze. He laughed and patted the shabby black sheath. “In traveling clothes,
like me. At home we both dress more elegantly!”

Jato , I repeated under my breath.
The snake sword, which had saved my life by taking life.

We left the inn and resumed our
journey past the sulfur-smelling hot springs of Hinode and up another mountain.
The rice paddles gave way to bamboo groves, just like the ones around my
village; then came chestnuts, maples, and cedars. The forest steamed from the
warmth of the sun, although it was so dense that little sunlight penetrated to
us below. Twice, snakes slithered out of our path, one the little black adder
and another, larger one the color of tea. It seemed to roll like a hoop, and it
leaped into the undergrowth as though it knew Jato might lop off its head.
Cicadas sang stridently, and the min-min moaned with head-splitting monotony.

We went at a brisk pace despite the
heat. Sometimes Lord Otori would outstride me and I would toil up the track as
if utterly alone, hearing only his footsteps ahead, and then come upon him at
the top of the pass, gazing out over the view of mountains, and beyond them
more mountains stretching away, and everywhere the impenetrable forest.

He seemed to know his way through
this wild country. We walked for long days and slept only a few hours at night,
sometimes in a solitary farmhouse, sometimes in a deserted mountain hut. Apart
from the places we stopped at, we met few people on this lonely road: a
woodcutter, two girls collecting mushrooms who ran away at the sight of us, a
monk on a journey to a distant temple. After a few days we crossed the spine of
the country. We still had steep hills to climb, but we descended more
frequently. The sea became visible, a distant glint at first, then a broad
silky expanse with islands jutting up like drowned mountains. I had never seen
it before, and I couldn't stop looking at it. Sometimes it seemed like a high
wall about to topple across the land.

My hand healed slowly, leaving a
silver scar across my right palm.

The villages became larger, until
we finally stopped for the night in what could only be called a town. It was on
the high road between Inuyama and the coast and had many inns and eating
places. We were still in Tohan territory, and the triple oak leaf was
everywhere, making me afraid to go out in the streets, yet I felt the people at
the inn recognized Lord Otori in some way. The usual respect people paid to him
was tinged by something deeper, some old loyalty that had to be kept hidden.
They treated me with affection, even though I did not speak to them. I had not
spoken for days, not even to Lord Otori. It did not seem to bother him much. He
was a silent man himself, wrapped up in his own thoughts, but every now and
then I would sneak a look at him and find him studying me with an expression on
his face that might have been pity. He would seem to be about to speak, then
he'd grunt and mutter, “Never mind, never mind, things can't be helped.”