Beneath an Opal Moon (32 page)

“No,” he said. They were so close that his deeper voice had a kind of sonic overtone. “It saved your life. Nothing to be ashamed of in that.”

“I'm not fit to be a warrior, let alone a shujin.”

“Listen to me, Chiisai,” he said, cupping her chin so that she looked directly into his eyes. “One thing I learned very early in life is that good healthy fear is, at times, the only thing that keeps you alive. Just think. You're here now to be listening to me. If you hadn't been afraid—” He shrugged.

Still she was silent. Perhaps time was all she needed; then again perhaps not. He shrugged mentally. His own battle had been quite an ordeal. Through it, some ghosts had been exorcised. But, he knew, others still remained.

That night he dreamed of coming home, not in bright searing flashes or odd disconnected scenes—not, to put a fine point on it, in the timeless image-laden language of dreams—but rather as if he were awake, recalling the incidents of his past.

The wind had told him. At least that was how he would always recall it.

He awoke, come cormorant, and went up on deck. It was the
Biy'hee
, his first ship. The sea was as calm as a sheet of slate and the sun was a glow as it hung incipient just below the eastern horizon, where its pale light had already pushed back the night.

But everything was not the same as when he had gone to bed. The difference was the wind. Sometime during the short southern night, it had changed, backing up until now it was coming out of the south.

He took a deep breath and scented it there, hanging like a pall. He crossed to the starboard taffrail, his eyes scanning the horizon. But there was nothing to see save sea and sky. Sky and sea. Still, it was there.

He turned and called out the change in course to the helmsman then, cupping his hand beside his mouth; he cried into the rigging and within moments all canvas had been broken out. Moments later, the first mate came on deck and Moichi informed him of the change.

He had been away, it seemed to him, for a very long time, but perhaps this was merely subjective. Certainly Alara'at seemed unchanged. The Iskamen port city from whence he had first set sail so long ago teemed with life. Yet, as he maneuvered the
Biy'hee
in toward the wharves, he could detect, here and there, a new edifice or some reclaimed ground he remembered as wilderness now transformed into a square or a tiled plaza. But this was natural, for all healthy cultures must expand over time. The tall shady palms were still there, however, lining the shore on the near side of the first buildings.

His father had been the last person he had seen when he left as a boy, turning his face up for the brusque farewell kiss that Moichi thought was more tradition than emotion.

And now it was his father who brought him home again. For that was the message the wind had brought him, that his father was dying.

And so it was. The main hall of his family's house was ablaze with the myriad white candles of death.

It was just past midmorning and there seemed little activity. No one paid him any heed until his brother, Jesah, opened the cedar door to what he knew was his father's room and stepped into the hallway.

They stood staring at each other, while servants hurried by them, these two brothers who were so dissimilar both physically and psychologically. Where Moichi normally seemed massive, he was dwarfed in the presence of his younger brother, who was a veritable giant of a man. And, of course, Jesah followed their father in all things. He had always been contemptuous of his older brother's interests, considering them unworthy of one who might have been—nay,
should
have been shouldering his responsibility as future leader of the family.

Jesah cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “You've come home, Moichi. You picked a perfect time to show up.”

“I came because he's dying, Jesah.”

“Ah, yes.” He clasped his hands in front of him, a gesture which he affected, believing it gave him a rather solemn liturgical air. Moichi rather thought it made him look like a prissy school instructor. “From what far-off land did you come?”

“I was on the high seas, seventeen days out from Bylante'an.”

“A long way away. I'm surprised you made it.”

“He's my father.”

“Yes.
I
know that.”

“Just what does that mean?”

“You've been away a long time but I see you haven't changed.”

“I did the only thing I could. It was you or me. You could never defend yourself decently. That boy was killed. One of us had to take the blame and leave Iskael.”

“You
wanted
to leave!” The resentment in Jesah's voice was tangible. “You dreamed of shedding your responsibility to Father—and to me and the girls. The family never mattered to you. Let Jesah take care of that, you thought, it is what he loves anyway.”

Moichi stared at him. It was the first time that he had gotten an inkling that, perhaps, Jesah did not relish his position. “Jesah, I—” he began.

His brother cut him off. “Father has been calling for you,” he said curtly.

“I would see him.”

“All right.” As if he were giving permission to an outsider. He stepped aside to allow Moichi entrance.

He had been in his father's room many times as he was growing up. When he was a child, it had been his parents' room. Until his mother had died of a disease no physician could diagnose. Quite naturally, his father felt that it was a sign from God and there followed a year of prayer and stringent discipline, as if the entire family had been guilty of some sin for which each member now had to atone. It was a place unlike any other in the house. The stone-and-brick kitchen, for instance, was light and airy with many windows overlooking the rolling grassland; the sitting room was dark and cavernous, dominated by the immense flagstone fireplace whose hearth seemed like the mouth of God when he was small, the great flat stones rising through the roof and reaching, he had once believed, to the very heart of heaven. His father may or may not have instilled this grotesque and absurd image but surely he did nothing to dispel the notion; the bedroom he shared with Jesah he always found cozy and comforting (the girls' rooms were in the opposite wing and he had never seen those). But his father's room was enormous, easily the largest in the house, bigger even than the sitting room or the kitchen, which included the long cedar dining table around which the entire family sat without fail three times a day. And, of all the rooms in the house, it alone had a sloping roof, this owing to the fact that it was part of the original dwelling which, over time and the furtherance of a large family, his father had found it necessary to add to considerably. It felt old, too. Not the oldness associated with must and death and—well, aging, but rather a peculiar kind of stolid antiquity which Moichi found secretly delightful, like a warm down comforter thrown over the shoulders on a chill winter's night. When he was quite small he used to love to creep clandestinely into the room and just sit, not moving, not touching anything, not even looking anywhere in particular. Just sitting in his father's great scarred wooden chair by the desk—which might have contained all the secrets of the ages—and letting the aura of the room seep slowly into him. And he found, as he grew older and thus more subject to the daily aggravations of life, that this room's silent, breathing atmosphere had the power to calm him, as if it were somehow alive.

Now there was a different feeling about the room. As he stepped over the threshold and pushed the door to behind him, he felt again the ancient quietude hovering, but held at bay, perhaps, by the new sadness here.

He crossed the bare polished floor and stood beside the high brass bed. He seemed suddenly very tall, the slanting roof almost brushing the top of his head so that he unconsciously stooped a little.

The figure in the bed seemed frail indeed and he realized with a start that he had been thinking of him for quite a while as he had been when he, Moichi, was young. He had deliberately disregarded the encroachment of time and, like a child still, refused to believe in age advancing at all. Not for him. Not for his father.

He could never bring himself to think of his father as an old man, not even now, ravaged as he was by time and disease. The man had always been far too vital. That he was immobile now on the bed attested to the gravity of his condition. Like a horse, his fiercely defiant will would not allow him to go down save under dire circumstances. And, perhaps for him, death was the only one.

Now Moichi leaned over the bed, listening to the unquiet susurrus of his father's labored breathing, sounding as if there was fluid in his lungs; and he was unaccountably reminded of the nights he would lie awake as a child, watching the painfully slow progress of the moon in its arc as it rode, like a schooner, the vast sea of stars, or listening to Jesah's gentle, shallow breathing from the bunk below, as he dreamed of the unknown sea lapping at the shores of Alara'at far away.

His father's eyes were closed but the veined lids seemed as thin and translucent as tissue. There were blue circles around his eyes, as if the flesh was somehow being eaten away from within so that now the lethargically pumping blood was closer to the surface, bubbling, threatening to break through, to breach, at last, the portals of mortality which had kept it safely in check for a lifetime.

A lifetime.

As he stood silently over his father he thought, Here is someone I don't know. This person with the old and tired face might as well be a stranger.

His father died at sunset, peacefully, without saying a word or opening his eyes, the shallow breathing ceasing, it seemed to Moichi, just as the distant sun slid behind the high peaks far to the west, their tops so high it was said that even the rock had capitulated and turned to solid ice.

Darkness came for them both, the shadows stealing through the window and into the room as if sent as a messenger, and he realized that the transition had been so swift or, again, so subtle that he had missed the actual moment of his father's passing.

He turned and went out of the room.

Jesah and his three sisters and their husbands—two of them were married—filed past him into the room and he left them to it. No one said a word to him.

He went through the long wide hallway and into the kitchen, still smouldering, since it faced south and west, with the last of the reflected light of dusk and, though the sun was gone from the sky, still gloriously illuminated.

He opened the back door and went out, hearing at once the cicadas' shrill singing and the infrequent throaty calls of the gray geese. He became aware of a brown-and-white jackrabbit sitting up on its powerful hind legs half within the tangled shadow of a thorn bush, staring at him. For a long while they were both immobile. Then the rabbit's nose twitched as if it were a character out of a children's storybook his mother used to read to him and he saw the long rodent's teeth underneath. In a flash, the creature was away, bounding into the tall grass.

He heard a sound behind him, knew someone had slipped through the door. He did not turn around and, for a moment, was strangely angry that anyone would have the temerity to see what he saw, hear what he heard, to intrude upon his private world.

Someone took his arm, slim strong fingers wrapping themselves around his right elbow.

It was Sanda, the youngest of his sisters. He watched the sweep of her long dark hair as the wind took it and her enormous black eyes set wide apart and deep within her face. She was strikingly beautiful, fine-boned yet strong of countenance. With a start, he realized that she looked more like him than any other member of the family.

“It's so good to have you home again,” she said, her voice rich and musical. “You'll not go away again, will you?” Her head rested against the crook of his arm; she was as short as their father had been. She required no answer, but said, “Remember when you used to put me on your shoulders and take me riding?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And Father would be so cross with you.”

“You were much younger then.”

But she had already turned her face into his chest, her body wracked with sobs. He put his arms around her, filled with a great sadness, not for his father, that dead stranger lying in his parents' room inside the house, but for Sanda, this young woman, for all the time away from his land and for a little girl whom he loved and whom he had missed terribly.

“You know, I always loved you for that,” she said, her words a vibration against his massive body. “I was so proud that you thought enough of me to stand up to him and to Jesah.” She held him tightly. “You were the only one who treated me as an individual, not as someone who was always the last in line, who got the clothes when everyone was finished with them, who was always belittled because everyone else already knew the things she was trying to find out.” She wiped at her eyes. “Do you know you never teased me. That's what I loved about you most.”

Moichi laughed softly. “I could never deny you anything. Remember the time I took you with me into Alara'at without anyone knowing and you saw that bit of jewelry in a shop window as we passed. You wanted it so desperately and I laughed at you and told you you could have it when you became a woman.”

“I remember,” she said, her eyes as soft as mist. “When I started to cry, you went back and bought it for me.”

“I couldn't bear to hurt you. You know how children are. They want everything they see and then, a day later, it's lying somewhere, forgotten. But I knew I'd hurt you and I couldn't bear that. I remember you wore it every day, and when Father asked you where you got it you told him one of the boys at school had given it to you.”

Her eyes flashed. “I still wear it.” And her slim fingers plucked at the small six-pointed star hanging around her neck on a thin chain.

“Do you not have a man who gives you jewelry now?” he said, mock-severely.