Shadows on the Moon (30 page)

“Maybe it reminded you of a bird?” I said.

His eyes flashed up to mine, and he smiled, the shadow of sadness leaving his face. “Yes, it was that. I asked to hold one of the bows, and as a joke they gave me one that had been made for a teenager to train with, and told me to try stringing it. It was taller than I was. I should not even have been able to bend it, let alone string it. Yet I did. Easily. It was the gift, but I did not realize it then. I just thought it was magic, magic of the kind you hear about in children’s stories. I can still remember how the training ground fell silent. How everyone came to watch me, so cautiously, not daring to let the excitement show, just as parents will bite their lips as a child takes his first steps, fearful that to cry out will cause him to fall. My aunt handed me an arrow. The skin of my hands seemed to sing where it touched the arrow; I nocked it, and drew the string on that bow, which was made for a boy of eighteen, and it felt like the most wonderful and most natural thing I had ever done. I let the arrow fly, and it hit the target. Not dead center, but it did not matter. Everyone began yelling and hugging, and slapping me on the back. My father put me on his shoulders, though I was far too heavy for it by then. We had all come alive again. It was as if the laughter and singing and stories rushed back into the empty space my grandmother had left behind. I will never forget the way it felt as long as I live.”

For a moment, I felt lost in the world of his story. A noisy and chaotic world, to be sure, but one where grief and love were expressed freely and honestly, not repressed. In such a world, a girl who had seen her father and foster sister die, and whose home had been lost, would be allowed to speak of them, and cry for them, and admit that they had existed. She would not need to hide her pain — her lostness — behind the mask of a dead smile, and cut herself, just to survive.

Then Otieno said, “For a long time, that was the best day of my life, Pipit. I thought I would never know such a joyous sense of rightness again. But I did. The first day I saw you.”

I drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, Otieno —”

The movement of the carriage slowed and then stopped. Otieno pushed the door open from the inside instead of waiting for the driver, and jumped out. He called out a word in a soft, musical tongue, and Mirkasha shrieked in answer and spread her wings. The tip of the left one brushed ever so faintly across my cheek as she flew out to land on Otieno’s gauntlet.

Was there something wrong with me that, after the draining emotional talk we had just had, I still found myself distracted by the way his upper arm bulged when he took the weight of the bird?

I made myself look down at my own feet as I moved to the doorway, but I had to look at him when he took my hand to help me down. The carriage had obviously been constructed with long-legged, athletic men in mind. My short limbs and three-layered kimono made getting out a rather more tricky exercise than getting in had been. I envied the easy way he bounded around. It had been a very long time since I had been able to do that. Even when I had, I had usually been caught by my mother and punished.

The day was warm: filled with gentle breezes that stirred the wild sweet scent of
sakura
around us, mixing it with that perfume of spring, which is less a smell than a sort of freshness, telling of sunlight and growing things.

We had drawn up by the park’s entrance, where a wide gravel path led between wrought iron gates. We crunched slowly along the path, Otieno eyeing me for a few moments before repeating his gesture from the bridge and drawing my hand through the crook of his elbow so that I could lean on him as I navigated the uneven surface. He clucked at Mirkasha, and she let out another of her piercing shrieks and leaped from his arm into the air.

“She has spotted her lunch,” he said.

“I pity it,” I said feelingly, watching the bird transform into a dark lightning bolt as she darted into the shivering cherry blossoms.

We walked side by side in the sunlight and the shadows of the trees, enjoying the almost unearthly beauty of the flowers and nodding politely at those we passed, though many of them stared at Otieno. I did not care; I was proud to walk with him for however long he wished it.

“What of you, then?” Otieno asked. “What happened the first time you picked up an instrument?”

He sounded so eager that I hated to disappoint him. “I do not have a story to tell, Otieno. Nothing happened the first time I had a music lesson. I knew straightaway that I loved to play, but unfortunately I was not really very good at all. Because it was a proper activity for a young woman, and because I begged my father, my mother allowed me to continue despite my lack of skill. That is all.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Lack of skill? I do not believe it. I heard you play. It was beautiful. Are you saying you never showed any extraordinary degree of talent as a child? Never astonished your teachers or brought your friends and family to tears with your performance?”

I frowned. “I do not think my teacher was allowed to — I mean he never praised me. He never spoke to me at all, really, apart from instructing me. My mother probably asked him not to. All the servants had orders about that. I was rather wild and unruly — my mother said that my father indulged me too much.”

“What about your father, then, and the rest of your family?”

“I was not allowed to play for them,” I said uncomfortably. “Well, not for my father and cousin. Mother listened to me a few times and said . . . she said I was not good enough. I would have to spend less time running around like a savage and more time practicing . . .” My voice trailed off.

“Was your mother tone-deaf? Did she hate music for some reason?”

“Not — not that I know of.” I looked up at him. “Do you mean that she did it on purpose?”

“I cannot see any other explanation.” His brow wrinkled with confusion. “Only it makes no sense. She must have been proud of you. Why would a mother who knew her daughter was so immensely talented try to hide it from everyone?”

I squeezed my eyes shut as my memory jumped back eight years. I remembered that first lesson, when the teacher had called Mother in to hear me play. I remembered his face, with its wide, excited eyes, and hers, so set and white that she looked quite ill. She had taken him out of the room, and when he came back, he had been rubbing his hands nervously over the threadbare edges of his kimono and would not look at me. And Mother had said that she did not think I needed any more lessons, that I should learn embroidery instead. I had burst into tears.

For a week, I pestered Father to intercede, and begged and cried and begged again, and finally — when Father said that perhaps he should hear me and judge for himself — Mother gave in. I could keep my
shamisen
and have my lessons if I promised never to play where anyone could hear, until she told me I was good enough. Father, with his desire for a quiet life, had accepted it, and I had been so happy that I had not questioned it. And after that I had had a different teacher. A stern-faced one, with much nicer clothes, who hardly ever spoke to me at all . . .

“It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense if you knew her,” I whispered.

Father would have been so happy, so proud of me. He had loved poetry and music. But Mother had no talent for those things at all. In finding that connection, we would have excluded her. No wonder she never let Terayama-san get me a new instrument. He would have wanted to hear me play, and she was frightened it would take his attention away from her.

“Yue?” Otieno’s hand on my face recalled me to myself. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing. Or rather something I should have seen for myself a long time ago. It does not matter.”

It didn’t, did it? Not now. Once it would have broken my heart, but what was that small betrayal so many years ago compared to the great one later? And what was either of them compared with my own betrayal, my ultimate crime?

“You have that look on your face again,” he said softly.

“What look?” I asked, playing for time as I tried to rearrange my expression. He saw through my shadow-weavings too easily. I almost wanted to curse him for it.

“The sad, lost look. It makes me think of a little girl, abandoned in a crowd, who cannot find her parents.”

I felt my eyes widen, and only just managed to keep my hands from rising to my face, to hide myself. “I have such an expression?” I made a strange noise, a strangled laugh. “You must be the only one who can see it.”

“Perhaps. I am sorry. Sorry that your life has been so full of unhappy things, and that I reminded you of them again now.”

I sighed. “You are not responsible for any of it. Not even my feelings.”

“That does not mean I do not care about them. I want to chase that lost look away, so far away that it can never come back.”

“Thank you. But I do not think you can.”

He smiled, and it felt like the warm light of a lantern banishing the chill of a dark, lonely room somewhere inside me. “Well, I am going to try,” he said. “And I might surprise you.”

I looked away, and we kept walking. Gradually my tumultuous feelings quieted, and calmness returned.

“I think I must be boring you.” Otieno broke the companionable silence.

“Why?”

“One of my uncles said, when I told him I was coming here, that it is traditional when viewing the cherry blossoms to compose haiku in honor of its beauty. He said I ought to make some up beforehand, in case you expected it.”

It was too much. After the morning I had had — the tension, the revelation — the image of Otieno squinting at a page with a puzzled frown on his face, scribbling away, was too much for my self-control. I burst out laughing.

“Oh, oh, I cannot — I —” I gasped helplessly.

“Why is that funny?” he demanded. “I am not an idiot. Do you think I am incapable of writing a simple poem? I can play poetry games as well as you can!”

I rubbed my streaming eyes with the heel of my free hand, sniffed, and finally managed to answer. “Can you, indeed?”

I stared up at the trees, considering, and then said:

“Knowing we must part . . .

cherry blossoms

shiver in the wind.”

Otieno stared at me. “Was that —? Did you really just make that up?”

“You challenged; I answered,” I said. “Now, in order to play the game correctly, you should take the last line of my haiku and use it to begin a new one. Go ahead.”

He made a noise of disgust, which started me giggling again. “My father was a poet,” I said, surprised that I was able to mention him so easily for the second time that day. “Perhaps I have an unfair advantage.”

“Perhaps we should just admire the scenery. Quietly. With no talking.”

“Very well.”

“And no laughing, either,” he said pointedly, as he took my arm again.

“I do not think I can promise that.”

“Shhh.”

I snorted and giggled my way around the park for another ten minutes. Then Mirkasha flew back and horrified me by dropping a dead finch at our feet. After my time in the kitchen, there was little that could make me squeamish, but the surprise of the little body hurtling past my face made me squeak like a trapped mouse, and this time it was Otieno who was helpless with laughter. He had to stumble off the path and lean on a tree, my support being insufficient.

He only managed to recover when I walked off down the path without him and nearly turned my ankle.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Do not injure yourself on my account.”

When we reached the main gates again, Otieno let out a deafening whistle that made everyone within sight start violently, and Mirkasha came hurtling back, this time with no presents for us. As she took her place on the perch inside the carriage, Otieno asked, “Your name now means ‘moon’, yes?”

“It does. Why?”

He shook his head. “Just curious.”

He spent the rest of the journey staring pensively out the window. I did not mind. I had more than enough to think about.

We arrived at the house to find Akira working in the garden, her skin shielded from the sun by a straw hat, a basket full of spring flowers in her hand.

“Hello,” she called out as I clambered out of the carriage, wishing for some steps, or even a box, to make the process easier. “Did you have a nice time?”

“Very, thank you,” Otieno called back. “Excuse me a moment.”

He caught my arm as I passed and drew me to him with a gentle but implacable grip. “I had a very nice time,” he repeated. “Thanks to you.”

Then he kissed me, warm lips parting mine. His hand slid possessively down my spine, making me arch like a cat begging to be stroked. I gasped and felt his smile against my mouth. The caress of his tongue made me gasp again.

Then he stepped away, holding my shoulders considerately until I caught my balance.

“That’s the look I want to see,” he whispered. He took one of my hands and pressed something into it. He had turned away and was back in his carriage and rattling down the drive before I had even managed to close my mouth.

“Such a nice young man,” Akira said from somewhere close by. I hadn’t noticed her approach. “So polite.”

“Polite,” I echoed, staring at the retreating shape of the carriage.

Paper crackled in my hand. I blinked a few times, then brought that hand up and managed to extract and unfold the note.

Scratched out in tiny, painstaking characters, were the words: