Cloud of Sparrows (54 page)

“Do you see the foolishness of your reasoning? We were killing each other for a thousand years before you arrived. Because one man stepped into another’s shadow. Because a geisha served one before the other the night before. Because an ancestor of one betrayed the ancestor of another ten generations in the past. If we did not have the color of your eyes to kill for, believe me, we would have no shortage of reasons.”

The effect on Emily was not what Genji had expected. She blinked in silence several times, then dissolved into sobbing so piteous, it rendered her former misery negligible.

“Emily.” Genji sat beside her again. He put his hand under her chin and tried to coax her into lifting her face. She turned away and continued to sob. “If I’ve said the wrong thing, forgive me. I only meant to show you, by exaggeration, that your absence is no solution.”

Between sobs she said, “I have been very happy here.”

“You do not appear so.”

“Lord.” Hanako knelt at the doorway.

“Ah, Hanako, please come in. I’m at a loss.”

As soon as she heard Hanako’s name, Emily looked up. She ran to her and clung to her as she cried. Genji moved to join them, but Hanako shook her head.

“I will take care of her,” Hanako said, and led the weeping woman away.

Genji stood where he was, alone and amazed. This was not difficult to understand. It was impossible. He dropped down into the chair, stood immediately, went to the window, noticed nothing he saw, and sat down on a cushion on the floor. Perhaps in the void of meditation, some clarity would come to him. But he was unable to release the tumult of thoughts that bound him. He was unable even to release the tension from his muscles. Where the simplest bodily control was lacking, how could he hope for mental control? He could not, so he stood, and again didn’t know what to do next.

When Heiko had first suggested the possibility—so ridiculous at the time—that Emily would be the mother of his child, the seemingly insurmountable obstacle was his own feelings, or lack of them. A man did not need to love a woman in order to have a child with her. Sexual attraction, however, was required, and there was none.

And then, suddenly, inexplicably, there was.

His perception of her physical being had not changed. How could it? She was too much herself to deny, with breasts far too large for correct aesthetic balance, a waist that choked the center of her body into a tiny circle that could not help but restrict the healthy flow of ki, a torso unnaturally short and legs unnaturally long, hips too wide, buttocks excessively round and protrusive. He could not imagine such a grotesquely exaggerated shape contained within a kimono. And even if it could somehow be bound and restrained, what colors, what patterns would distract even an iota of attention from her outrageous golden hair? Elegance would be impossible.

There was also the matter of her height, if more defects needed enumeration. She was not shorter than him by a head, which was the ideal that Heiko met so perfectly. Emily was, instead, exactly as tall as Genji. When she looked at him, she did not look up. She looked straight at him with those dizzyingly blue eyes of hers.

Yet, with every passing day, he found himself desiring her more, not because of her physical attributes—he had not gone mad, after all—but despite them. Her heart was so open, so ready to see good, so blind to bad, so innocent and defenseless, so without guile and manipulation, it opened his heart as well. With her, he could let down his guard in every way, he could be himself as she was herself, plain, with first thoughts the ones that made their way into words. He desired her because he loved who she was despite how she looked. He loved her because of who he was when he was with her.

He loved her.

This realization was the great shock of his life. How had it happened? With prophecy to warn him, he should have seen it coming, but he had not. Even now, looking back, he couldn’t find the time or place or event.

After he admitted the impossible had happened to him, he still had hope that Heiko’s interpretation of the prophecy was wrong. Whether he desired her or not, surely she did not desire him. She was a Christian missionary almost wholly intent on spreading the gospel of her religion. One barrier was gone, but the other, even more formidable than his own resistance, remained.

Then that, too, disappeared. Emily’s feelings, which she uncharacteristically attempted to conceal, were not long hidden. Any three-year-old in the palace was better at pretense than she was. Genji’s last hope was Stark. Upon the demise of Emily’s former fiancé, Reverend Cromwell, Stark had stepped forward as her future husband. But this hope was also disappointed. Stark was not to marry Emily. Once he helped construct the mission house he had come to build, he would return to America. Jimbo—whom he had known as Ethan Cruz—was dead. There was nothing more to keep him in Japan. In fact, Stark tarried for some months thereafter. There was nothing to keep him in Japan, but there was apparently nothing to take him quickly to America, either. Still, he was to leave, and finally this morning he did.

Emily and Genji were now separated only by her ignorance of his feelings, and his self-control. He could continue to rely on her to do her part. She was far too modest to suspect how he felt. He had no doubt about himself, either, but it was a different kind of certainty. He knew his resistance would eventually cease, and when it did, hers would, too. He knew because he finally understood the first prophecy.

Until he had, he could continue to hope that nothing would happen between Emily and himself. Otherwise the second prophecy must be a foretelling of her death in childbirth, and as their love for each other grew, it only made the end more imminent. Surely life could not be so cruel.

But now he knew it could indeed be that cruel. He had discovered Lady Shizuka’s identity, not in a vision, but in an illumination of understanding, where all he already knew came together with sudden clarity. That told him tragic fulfillment was inevitable.

“My lord.” Hanako knelt at the doorway.

“How is she?”

“Much recovered.”

“Will she rejoin me here?”

“I think it will be better, my lord, if you go to her.”

“Very well.”

Hanako accompanied Genji through the corridors to Emily’s room. She wished to speak, but was waiting for him to give her opportunity and permission. This Genji did.

He said, “What is your advice?”

“I would not presume to advise you, my lord.”

“Of course not. Women have never presumed to advise me.”

Hanako returned Genji’s smile and bowed. “She is very sensitive about the project. I hope you will be able to praise her efforts, even if they fall short of perfection.”

“I am sure her efforts are praiseworthy.”

“Translation is a very difficult art,” Hanako said. “I did not appreciate how difficult until I began assisting Heiko in Lady Emily’s Sunday school. Our language and hers are so different. It is not just the words but the thoughts themselves.”

“All true communication, even between two people speaking the same language, requires translation,” Genji said. “In the end, our hearts must hear what cannot be spoken.”

“I’m changing the dates to the Western calendar,” Emily said. Her eyes were swollen and red, but the smile was back on her face, and her normal enthusiasm was in her voice. “‘The Seventh Year of the Emperor Go-toba’ gives the reader of English no sense of chronology. If, instead, we say 1291, then our reader will know the event here took place at the time the last Crusader Kingdom in the Holy Land fell to the Saracens. Do you think that would be all right?”

“Yes, I think it will be fine.”

“There is so much material,” Emily said. “I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time, asking you to make the initial translation from the Japanese.”

“I’m more than happy to do it.” Genji sat next to her. When she finally looked at him, he smiled. She returned it shyly with a small smile of her own, and turned immediately back to the pages on the desk in front of her. He wanted very much to embrace her, but he did not.

“The one thing I’m very unsure of is the title.”

“Emily.”

“Yes?”

“I’m very sorry I upset you.”

“Oh, no.” She put her hand reassuringly on his. “My own oversensitivity is at fault. Really, what did you say? Only the truth.”

“I sometimes joke when I shouldn’t. Not everything should be laughed at.”

“No,” Emily said, looking down, “not everything.” She began to withdraw her hand from his, but he held on.

“We are friends,” Genji said. “We will have misunderstandings, as everyone does. We will never let them stand between us. Agreed?”

She looked at their hands together before she looked into his eyes. “Agreed.”

“So now, let me see what you’ve done.”

She placed the sheets of paper in front of him. “I’ve left the title in Japanese for now. Later, if we decide, we can substitute the English.”

“Yes,” Genji said, knowing that when the translation was finally finished, many years hence, the title would indeed be in English, because “English” is the last word he will ever speak in his life.

The sword goes deep into Genji’s chest, and everything goes white. When he opens his eyes, he sees worried faces peering down at him.

Lady Shizuka appears and, heedless of the blood, takes him in her arms and holds him close against her breast. Tears flow down her cheeks and drop onto his face. For several moments, their heartbeats are synchronous.

“You will always be my Shining Prince,” she says. She smiles at him through her tears. “I finished the translation this morning. I wonder whether we should use the Japanese name, or translate the title into English as well. What do you think?”

Genji sees that her beauty is not entirely Japanese. Her eyes are hazel, not black, and her hair is light brown. Her features are rather sharper and more dramatic than is usual, more outsider than Japanese. But not entirely so. Though there is perhaps more of her mother in her appearance than her father, her father is there, too, especially in the small smile that always seems to be upon her lips.

“English,” Genji says.

“English it is, then,” Lady Shizuka says. “It will be another scandal. ‘Genji again,’ people will say, ‘and that terrible Shizuka of his.’ But we don’t care, do we?” Her lips tremble, her eyelids flutter, but her smile holds. “She would be so proud of us.”

Yes, Genji wants to say, she would have been as proud of you as I am. But he has no voice left.

Something sparkles at her throat. Emily’s silver locket, with its cross and fleur-de-lis.

He looks from the locket to Shizuka, and his daughter’s beautiful face is the last thing he sees on earth.

“You have made a wonderful translation,” Genji says.

“Do you think so?” Emily glowed with happiness. “But if it is, we have done it, not I. You must have your name on it, too.”

“You may say I have consulted with you. No more. You are the translator.”

“But, Genji—”

“I insist.”

Emily sighed. There was no use arguing with him when he was being stubborn. Perhaps later she would be able to talk him into it.

“I’ll get right to work on the next part.”

“Enough for now,” Genji said. “You will not get through the recorded wisdom and insanity of six hundred years all at once. The day is beautiful. Let us go out and view the winter cranes.”

Emily laughed her delightful childish laugh.

Genji heard it and cherished it for the fragile evanescent treasure that it was.

“Yes,” Emily said, standing with him and taking his arm in hers, “that’s a very fine idea.”

“Perhaps it will snow,” Genji said.

“Genji!” Emily said, admonishment in her voice. But she smiled when she said his name.

Consider this carefully. Clearly comprehend the difference between definition and metaphor, and the limitations of each. Only then will you be fit to unsheathe this weapon in matters of life and death.