The Harsh Cry of the Heron (11 page)

She raised her hands
to her mouth; the sleeve fell back and revealed the skin of her forearm, smooth
and dark, so like his own, so like his mother’s.

The shock was
overwhelming, stripping his self-control, turning him into a scared, persecuted
boy. The woman gasped and said, ‘Tomasu?’

Her eyes filled with
tears. She was shaking with emotion. He remembered a little girl crying in the
same way over a dead bird, a lost toy. He had imagined her lifeless over the
years, lying next to her dead mother and her older sister - she had their calm,
broad features, and she had his skin. He spoke her name aloud for the first
time in over sixteen years:

‘Madaren!’

It drove everything
else from his mind: the threat from the East, Fumio’s mission to retrieve the
smuggled firearms, Kono, even the pain, even the kirin. He could only stare at
the sister he had imagined dead; his life seemed to melt and fade away. All
that existed in his memory was his childhood, his family.

Ishida said, ‘Lord,
are you all right? You are unwell.’ He said quickly to Madaren, ‘Tell Don Joao
I will meet him tomorrow. Send word to me at Daifukuji.’

‘I will come there
tomorrow,’ she said, her eyes fixed on Takeo’s face.

He regained his
self-control and said, ‘We cannot speak now. I will come to Daifukuji; wait for
me there.’

‘May he bless and
keep you,’ she said, using the prayer the Hidden use in parting. Even though it
was at his command that the Hidden were now free to worship openly, it still
shocked him to see revealed what had once been secret, just as the cross Don
Joao wore on his breast seemed a flagrant display.

‘You are more unwell
than I thought!’ Ishida exclaimed when they were outside. ‘Shall I sent for a
palanquin?’

‘No, of course not!’
Takeo breathed in deeply. ‘It was just the closeness of the air. And drinking
too much wine, too fast.’

‘And you received
some terrible shock. Did you know that woman?’

‘From a long time
ago. I did not know she translated for the foreigners.’

‘I’ve seen her
before, but not recently - I have been away for months.’ The town was growing
quieter, the lights being extinguished one by one, the last shutter being
closed. As they crossed the wooden bridge outside the Umedaya and took one of
the narrow streets that led towards the mansion, Ishida remarked, ‘She did not
recognize you as Lord Otori, but as someone else.’

‘As I said, I knew
her a long time ago, before I became Otori.’

Takeo was still
half-stunned by the meeting - and more than half-inclined to doubt what he had
seen. How could it be her? How could she have survived the massacre in which
his family had been destroyed and his village burned? Doubtless she was not
only an interpreter: he had seen that in Don Joao’s hands and eyes. The
foreigners frequented brothels like any other men, but the women were mostly
reluctant to sleep with them: only the lowest-class prostitutes went with them.
His skin crawled as he thought of what her life must have been.

Yet she had called
him by name. And he had recognized her.

At the last house
before the mansion gates, Takeo drew Ishida into the shadows. ‘Wait here for a
short while. I must go inside unobserved. I will send word to the guards to
admit you.’

The gates were
already closed, but he tucked the long hem of his robe up into his sash and
scaled the wall lightly enough, though the jolt of landing on the far side sent
the pain throbbing again. Taking on invisibility, he slipped through the silent
garden, past Jun and Shin to his room. He changed back into his night robes and
called for lamps and tea, sending Jun to tell the guards to let Ishida in.

The doctor arrived:
they exchanged delighted greetings, as if they had not seen each other for six
months. The maid poured tea and brought more hot water, then Takeo dismissed
her. He drew off the silk glove that covered the crippled hand and Ishida moved
the lamp closer so he could see. He pressed the scar tissue gently with the
tips of his fingers and flexed the remaining digits. The growth of scar tissue
had clawed the hand slightly.

‘Can you still write
with this hand?’

‘After a fashion. I
support it with the left.’ He showed Ishida. ‘I believe I could still fight
with the sword, but I have not had reason to for many years.’

‘It does seem
inflamed,’ Ishida said finally. ‘I will try the needles tomorrow, to open up
the meridians. In the meantime, this will help you sleep.’

As he prepared the
tea, he said in a low voice, T often did this for your wife. I am afraid to
meet Kono; just the mention of his father’s name, the knowledge that the son
lies somewhere in this mansion, has stirred up many memories. I wonder if he
has grown like his father.’

‘I never laid eyes on
Fujiwara.’

‘You were fortunate.
I did his bidding, obeying him in everything, for most of my life. I knew he
was a cruel man but he always treated me with kindness, encouraged me in my
studies and my travels, allowed me access to his great collections of books and
other treasures. I turned my eyes away from his darker pleasures. I never
believed his cruelty would fall on me.’

He stopped abruptly
and poured the boiling water onto the dried herbs. A faint smell of summer
grass rose from them, fragrant and soothing.

‘My wife has told me
a little of that time,’ Takeo said quietly.

‘Only the earthquake
saved us. I have never experienced such terror in my life, though I have faced
many dangers: storms at sea, shipwreck, pirates and savages. I had already
thrown myself at his feet and begged to be allowed to kill myself: he pretended
to consent, playing with my fears. Sometimes I dream about it; it is something
I will never recover from: absolute evil in the person of a man.’

He paused, lost in
memories. ‘My dog was howling,’ he said very quietly. ‘I could hear my dog
howling. He always warned me of earthquakes like that. I found myself wondering
if anyone would look after him.’

Ishida took up the
bowl and handed it to Takeo. ‘I am profoundly sorry for the part I played in
your wife’s imprisonment.’

‘It is all long past,’
Takeo said, taking the bowl and draining it gratefully.

‘But if the son is
anything like the father, he will only do you ill. Be on your guard.’

‘You are drugging me
and warning me in the same breath,’ Takeo said. ‘Maybe I should put up with the
pain - at least it keeps me awake.’

‘I should stay here
with you . . .’

‘No. The kirin needs
you. My own men are here to guard me. For the time being I am in no danger.’

He walked through the
garden with Ishida as far as the gate, feeling the deep relief as the pain
began to dull. He did not lie awake long - just long enough to tally the
amazing events of the day: Kono, the Emperor’s displeasure, the Dog Catcher,
the kirin. And his sister: what was he going to do about Madaren, a foreigner’s
woman, one of the Hidden, sister to Lord Otori?

The sight of her
older brother, whom she had believed dead, was no less of a shock to the woman
who had once been called Madaren, a common name among the Hidden. For many
years after the massacre Madaren had been called by the name given to her by
the woman to whom the Tohan soldier had sold her. He was one of the men who had
taken part in the rape and murder of her mother and sister, but Madaren had no
direct memory of that: she remembered only the summer rain, the smell of the
horse’s sweat when her cheek pressed against its neck, the weight of the man’s
hand holding her still, a hand that seemed larger and heavier than her whole
body. Everything smelled of smoke and mud and she knew she would never be clean
again. At the start of the fire and the horses and the swords she had screamed
out for her father, for Tomasu, as she had called earlier that year when she
had fallen into the swollen stream and been trapped on the slippery rocks, and
Tomasu had heard her from the fields and come running to pull her out, scolding
her and comforting her.

But Tomasu had not
heard her this time; nor had her father, already dead; no one had heard her and
no one had ever come to her aid again.

Many children, not
only among the Hidden, suffered in a similar way when Iida Sadamu ruled in his
black-walled castle at Inuyama; nor did the situation change after Inuyama fell
to Arai. Some lived to grow up, and Madaren was one of them, one of the large
number of young women who serviced the needs of the warrior class, becoming
maids, kitchen servants or women of the pleasure houses. They had no families
and therefore no protection; Madaren worked for the woman who bought her, the
lowest of the servants, the one who rose first in the morning before even the
roosters were awake and could not lie down to sleep until the last customers
had gone home. She thought exhaustion and hunger had dulled her to everything
around her, but when she became a woman and became briefly desirable in the way
young girls usually do, she realized she had been learning all the time from
the older girls, observing them and listening to them, and had become wise
without knowing it in their favourite - indeed their only - subject: the men
who visited them.

The pleasure house
was possibly the meanest in Inuyama, set far from the castle in one of the
narrow streets that ran between the main avenues, where tiny houses rebuilt
after the fire clustered together like a wasp’s nest, each clinging onto the
next. But all men have their desires, even porters, labourers and night soil
collectors, and among these are as many who can be made fools for love as in
any other class. So Madaren learned; at the same time she learned that women
who are ruled by love are the least powerful beings in the city, more dominated
even than dogs, as easily discarded as unwanted kittens, and she used this
knowledge shrewdly. She went with men that the other girls shunned, and took
advantage of their gratitude. She extracted gifts from them, or some- times
stole, and finally allowed a failing merchant to take her with him to Hofu,
leaving the house in the early morning before dawn and meeting him at the misty
dock-side. They boarded a ship carrying cedar wood from the forests of the
East, and the smell reminded her of Mino, her birthplace, and she suddenly
recalled her family and the strange half-wild boy who had been her brother, who
infuriated and enchanted their mother. Tears filled her eyes as she crouched
beneath the lumber planks, and when her lover turned to embrace her she pushed
him away. He was easily cowed, and no more successful in Hofu than he had been
in Inuyama. He bored and infuriated her, and eventually she went back to her
early life, joining a pleasure house a little higher in class than her first
one.

Then the foreigners
came with their beards, their strange smell and their large frames - and other
parts. Madaren saw some power in them that might be exploited and volunteered
to sleep with them; she chose the one called Don Joao, though he always thought
he had chosen her: the foreigners were both sentimental and ashamed when it
came to matters of the body’s needs: they wanted to feel special to one woman,
even when they bought her. They paid well in silver; Madaren was able to
explain to the owner of the house that Don Joao wanted her only, and soon she
did not have to sleep with anyone else.

At first their only
language was that of the body: his lust, her ability to satisfy it. The
foreigners had an interpreter, a fisherman who had been plucked out of the
water by one of their kind after a shipwreck and taken back to their base in
the Southern Islands, for they themselves came from a land far away in the
west: you could sail for a year with the wind behind you and still not reach
it. The fisherman had learned their language: he sometimes accompanied them to
the pleasure house; it was obvious from his speech that he was uneducated and
low-born, yet his association with the foreigners gave him status and power.
They depended on him completely. He was their entry into the complex new world
they had discovered and from which they hoped to gain wealth and glory, and
they believed everything he told them, even when he was making it up.

I could have
something of that power, for he is no better than I, Madaren thought, and she
began to try to understand Don Joao, and encouraged him to teach her. The
language was hard, full of difficult sounds and put together back to front -
everything had a gender: she could not imagine the reason, but a door was
female, and so was rain; the floor and the sun were male - but it intrigued
her; and when she spoke in the new language to Don Joao she felt as if she were
turning into another person.

As she became more
fluent - Don Joao never mastered more than a few words of her language - they
spoke of deeper things. He had a wife and children back in Porutogaru, about
whom he wept when he had been drinking. Madaren discounted them, not believing
he would ever see them again. They were so remote she could not imagine their
life. And he spoke of his faith and his God - Deus - and his words and the
cross he wore round his neck awakened childhood memories of her family’s faith
and the rituals of the Hidden.

He was eager to speak
of Deus, and told her of priests of his religion who longed to convert other
nations to their faith. This surprised Madaren. She remembered little of the
beliefs of the Hidden, only the need for utter secrecy and an echo of the
prayers and rituals that her family shared with their small community. The new
lord of the Three Countries, Otori Takeo, had decreed that people could worship
freely and believe whatever they chose to believe, and old prejudices were
slowly giving way. Indeed, many were interested in the foreigners’ religion and
even willing to try it if it increased trade and wealth for everyone. There
were rumours that Lord Otori himself had once been one of the Hidden, and that
the former ruler of the Maruyama domain, Maruyama Naomi, had also held their
beliefs, but Madaren did not think either was very likely - for had not Lord
Otori slain his great uncles in revenge? Had not Lady Maruyama thrown herself
into the river at Inuyama with her daughter? The one thing everyone knew about
the Hidden was that their god, the Secret One, forbade them to take life,
neither their own nor anyone else’s.