Grass for His Pillow (18 page)

I tuned out the snores of the wrestlers and concentrated on the voices below. I could hear them clearly through the floor. It always amazed me that Akio seemed to forget how acute my hearing was. I supposed he did not want to acknowledge my gifts, and this made him underestimate me. At first I thought it was a weakness in him, almost the only one; later it occurred to me that there were some things he might have wanted me to hear.

The conversation was commonplace—the training Hajime would undergo, the friends they'd caught up with—until the wine began to loosen their tongues.

“You'll go to Yamagata, presumably?” Hajime asked.

“Probably not. The Muto master is still in the mountains, and the house is empty.”

“I assumed Yuki had gone back to her family.”

“No, she's gone to the Kikuta village, north of Matsue. She'll stay there until the child is born.”

“The child?” Hajime sounded as dumbfounded as I was.

There was a long silence. I heard Akio drink and swallow. When he spoke again his voice was much quieter. “She is carrying the Dog's child.”

Hajime hissed through his teeth. “Sorry, Cousin, I don't want to upset you, but was that part of the plan?”

“Why should it not have been?”

“I always thought, you and she . . . that you would marry eventually.”

“We have been promised to each other since we were children,” Akio said. “We may still marry. The masters wanted her to sleep with him, to keep him quiet, to distract him, to get a child if possible.”

If he felt pain he was not showing it. “I was to pretend suspicion and jealousy,” he said flatly. “If the Dog knew he was being manipulated, he might never have gone with her. Well, I did not have to pretend it: I did not realize she would enjoy it so much. I could not believe how she was with him, seeking him out day and night like a bitch in heat—” His voice broke off. I heard him gulp down a cup of wine and heard the clink and gurgle of the flask as more was poured.

“Good must come of it, though,” Hajime suggested, his voice regaining some of its cheerfulness. “The child will inherit a rare combination of talents.”

“So the Kikuta master thinks. And this child will be with us from birth. It will be raised properly, with none of the Dog's deficiencies.”

“It's astonishing news,” Hajime said. “No wonder you've been preoccupied.”

“Most of the time I'm thinking about how I'll kill him,” Akio confessed, drinking deeply again.

“You've been ordered to?” Hajime said bleakly.

“It all depends on what happens at Hagi. You might say he's on his last chance.”

“Does he know that? That he's being tested?”

“If he doesn't, he'll soon find out,” Akio said. After another long pause he said, “If the Kikuta had known of his existence, they would have claimed him as a child and brought him up. But he was
ruined first by his upbringing and then by his association with the Otori.”

“His father died before he was born. Do you know who killed him?”

“They drew lots,” Akio whispered. “No one knows who actually did it, but it was decided by the whole family. The master told me this in Inuyama.”

“Sad,” Hajime murmured. “So much talent wasted.”

“It comes from mixing the blood,” Akio said. “It's true that it sometimes throws up rare talents, but they seem to come with stupidity. And the only cure for stupidity is death.”

Shortly afterward they came to bed. I lay still, feigning sleep, until daybreak, my mind gnawing uselessly at the news. I was sure that no matter what I did or failed to do in Hagi, Akio would seize on any excuse to kill me there.

As we bade farewell to Hajime the next morning, he would not look me in the eye. His voice held a false cheerfulness, and he stared after us, his expression glum. I imagine he thought he would never see me again.

We traveled for three days, barely speaking to each other, until we came to the barrier that marked the beginning of the Otori lands. It presented no problem to us, Akio having been supplied with the necessary tablets of identification. He made all the decisions on our journey: where we should eat, where we should stop for the night, which road we should take. I followed passively. I knew he would not kill me before we got to Hagi; he needed me to get into Shigeru's house, across the nightingale floor. After a while I began to feel a sort of regret that we weren't good friends, traveling together. It seemed a waste of a journey. I longed for a companion,
someone like Makoto or my old friend from Hagi, Fumio, with whom I could talk on the road and share the confusion of my thoughts.

Once we were in Otori land I expected the countryside to look as prosperous as it had when I had first traveled through it with Shigeru, but everywhere bore signs of the ravages of the storms and the famine that followed them. Many villages seemed to be deserted, damaged houses stood unrepaired, starving people begged at the side of the road. I overheard snatches of conversation: how the Otori lords were now demanding sixty percent of the rice harvest, instead of the forty percent they had taken previously, to pay for the army they were raising to fight Arai, and how men might as well kill themselves and their children rather than starve slowly to death when winter came.

Earlier in the year we might have made the journey more swiftly by boat, but the winter gales were already lashing the coast, driving foaming gray waves onto the black shore. The fishermen's boats were moored in such shelter as they could find, or pulled high onto the shingle, lived in by families until spring. Throughout winter the fishing families burned fires to get salt from the seawater. Once or twice we stopped to warm ourselves and eat with them, Akio paying them a few small coins. The food was meager: salt fish, soup made from kelp, sea urchins, and small shellfish.

One man begged us to buy his daughter, take her with us to Hagi, and use her ourselves or sell her to a brothel. She could not have been more than thirteen years old, barely into womanhood. She was not pretty, but I can still recall her face, her eyes both frightened and pleading, her tears, the look of relief when Akio politely declined, the despair in her father's attitude as he turned away.

That night Akio grumbled about the cold, regretting his decision. “She'd have kept me warm,” he said more than once.

I thought of her sleeping next to her mother, faced with the choice between starvation and what would have been no more than slavery. I thought about Furoda's family, turned out of their shabby, comfortable house, and I thought of the man I'd killed in his secret field, and the village that would die because of me.

These things did not bother anyone else—it was the way the world was—but they haunted me. And of course, as I did every night, I took out the thoughts that had lain within me all day and examined them.

Yuki was carrying my child. It was to be raised by the Tribe. I would probably never even set eyes on it.

The Kikuta had killed my father because he had broken the rules of the Tribe, and they would not hesitate to kill me.

I made no decisions and came to no conclusions. I simply lay awake for long hours of the night, holding the thoughts as I would hold black pebbles in my hand, and looking at them.

T
HE MOUNTAINS FELL
directly to the sea around Hagi, and we had to turn inland and climb steeply before we crossed the last pass and began the descent toward the town.

My heart was full of emotion, though I said nothing and gave nothing away. The town lay as it always had, in the cradle of the bay, encircled by its twin rivers and the sea. It was late afternoon on the day of the winter solstice, and a pale sun was struggling through gray clouds. The trees were bare, fallen leaves thick
underfoot. Smoke from the burning of the last rice stalks spread a blue haze that hung above the rivers, level with the stone bridge.

Preparations were already being made for the New Year Festival: Sacred ropes of straw hung everywhere and dark-leaved pine trees had been placed by doorways; the shrines were filling with visitors. The river was swollen with the tide that was just past the turn and ebbing. It sang its wild song to me, and beneath its churning waters I seemed to hear the voice of the stonemason, walled up inside his creation, carrying on his endless conversation with the river. A heron rose from the shallows at our approach.

When we crossed the bridge I read again the inscription that Shigeru had read to me:
The Otori clan welcomes the just and the loyal. Let the unjust and the disloyal beware.

Unjust and disloyal.
I was both: disloyal to Shigeru, who had entrusted his lands to me, and unjust as the Tribe are, unjust and pitiless.

I walked through the streets, head down and eyes lowered, changing the set of my features in the way Kenji had taught me. I did not think anyone would recognize me. I had grown a little and had become both leaner and more muscular during the past months. My hair was cut short; my clothes were those of an artisan. My body language, my speech, my gait—everything about me was changed since the days when I'd walked through these streets as a young lord of the Otori clan.

We went to a brewery on the edge of town. I'd walked by it dozens of times in the past, knowing nothing of its real trade.
But,
I thought,
Shigeru would have known.
The idea pleased me: that he had kept track of the Tribe's activities, had known things that they were ignorant of, had known of my existence.

The place was busy with preparations for the winter's work. Huge amounts of wood were being gathered to heat the vats, and the air was thick with the smell of fermenting rice. We were met by a small, distracted man who resembled Kenji. He was from the Muto family; Yuzuru was his given name. He had not been expecting visitors so late in the year, and my presence and what we told him of our mission unnerved him. He took us hastily inside to another concealed room.

“These are terrible times,” he said. “The Otori are certain to start preparing for war with Arai in the spring. It's only winter that protects us now.”

“You've heard of Arai's campaign against the Tribe?”

“Everyone's talking about it,” Yuzuru replied. “We've been told we should support the Otori against him as much as we can for that reason.” He shot a look at me and said resentfully, “Things were much better under Iida. And surely it's a grave mistake to bring him here. If anyone should recognize him . . .”

“We'll be gone tomorrow,” Akio replied. “He just has to retrieve something from his former home.”

“From Lord Shigeru's? It's madness. He'll be caught.”

“I don't think so. He's quite talented.” I thought I heard mockery beneath the compliment and took it as one more indication that he meant to kill me.

Yuzuru stuck out his bottom lip. “Even monkeys fall from trees. What can be so important?”

“We think Otori might have kept extensive records on the Tribe's affairs.”

“Shigeru? The Farmer? Impossible!”

Akio's eyes hardened. “Why do you think that?”

“Everyone knows . . . well, Shigeru was a good man. Everyone loved him. His death was a terrible tragedy. But he died because he was . . .” Yuzuru blinked furiously and looked apologetically at me. “He was too trusting. Innocent almost. He was never a conspirator. He knew nothing about the Tribe.”

“We have reasons to think otherwise,” Akio said. “We'll know who's right before tomorrow's dawn.”

“You're going there tonight?”

“We must be back in Matsue before the snows come.”

“Well, they'll be early this year, possibly before the year's end.” Yuzuru sounded relieved to be talking about something as mundane as the weather. “All the signs are for a long, hard winter. And if spring's going to bring war, I wish it may never come.”

It was already freezing within the small, dark room, the third such that I had been concealed in. Yuzuru himself brought us food, tea—already cooling by the time we tasted it—and wine. Akio drank the wine but I did not, feeling I needed my senses to remain acute. We sat without speaking as night fell.