Grass for His Pillow (8 page)

Something in her voice told me the conversation was moving onto dangerous ground. I found Yuki very attractive. I knew she had strong feelings for me. But I did not feel for her what I had felt for Kaede, and I did not want to be talking about love.

I tried to change the subject. “I thought the sleep thing was something only Kikuta do. Wasn't Shintaro from the Kuroda family?”

“On his father's side. His mother was Kikuta. Shintaro and your father were cousins.”

It chilled me to think that the man whose death I'd caused, whom everyone said I resembled, should have been a relative.

“What exactly happened the night Shintaro died?” Yuki said curiously.

“I heard someone climbing into the house. The window of the first floor was open because of the heat. Lord Shigeru wanted to take him alive, but when he seized him, we all three fell into the garden. The intruder struck his head on a rock, but we thought he
also took poison in the moment of the fall. Anyway, he died without regaining consciousness. Your father confirmed it was Kuroda Shintaro. Later we learned that Shigeru's uncles, the Otori lords, had hired him to assassinate Shigeru.”

“It's extraordinary,” Yuki said, “that you should have been there and no one knew who you were.”

I answered her unguardedly, disarmed, perhaps, by the memories of that night. “Not so extraordinary. Shigeru was looking for me when he rescued me at Mino. He already knew of my existence and knew my father had been an assassin.” Lord Shigeru had told me this when we had talked in Tsuwano. I had asked him if that was why he had sought me out, and he had told me it was the main reason but not the only one. I never found out what the other reasons might have been, and now I never would.

Yuki's hands had gone still. “My father was not aware of that.”

“No, he was allowed to believe that Shigeru acted on an impulse, that he saved my life and brought me back to Hagi purely by chance.”

“You can't be serious?”

Too late, her intensity aroused my suspicions. “What does it matter now?”

“How did Lord Otori find out something that even the Tribe had not suspected? What else did he tell you?”

“He told me many things,” I said impatiently. “He and Ichiro taught me almost everything I know.”

“I mean about the Tribe!”

I shook my head as if I did not understand. “Nothing. I know nothing about the Tribe other than what your father taught me and what I've learned here.”

She stared at me. I avoided looking at her directly. “There's a
whole lot more to learn,” she said finally. “I'll be able to teach you on the road.” She ran her hands over my cropped hair and stood in one movement, as her mother had. “Put these on. I'll bring you something to eat.”

“I'm not hungry,” I said, reaching over and picking up the clothes. Once brightly colored, they had faded to dull orange and brown. I wondered who had worn them and what had befallen him on the road.

“We have many hours of travel ahead,” she said. “We may not eat again today. Whatever Akio and I tell you to do, you do. If we tell you to brew the dirt under our fingernails and drink it, you do it. If we say eat, you eat. And you don't do anything else. We learned this sort of obedience when we were children. You have to learn it now.”

I wanted to ask her if she had been obedient when she'd brought Shigeru's sword, Jato, to me in Inuyama, but it seemed wiser to say nothing. I changed into the actor's clothes, and when Yuki came back with food, I ate without question.

She watched me silently, and when I finished she said, “The outcast is dead.”

They wanted my heart hardened. I did not look at her or reply.

“He said nothing about you,” she went on. “I did not know an outcast would have such courage. He had no poison to release himself. Yet, he said nothing.”

I thanked Jo-An in my heart, thanked the Hidden who take their secrets with them . . . where? Into Paradise? Into another life? Into the silencing fire, the silent grave? I wanted to pray for him, after the fashion of our people. Or light candles and burn incense for him, as Ichiro and Chiyo had taught me in Shigeru's house in
Hagi. I thought of Jo-An going alone into the dark. What would his people do without him?

“Do you pray to anyone?” I asked Yuki.

“Of course,” she said, surprised.

“Who to?”

“The Enlightened One, in all his forms. The gods of the mountain, the forest, the river: all the old ones. This morning I took rice and flowers to the shrine at the bridge to ask a blessing on our journey. I'm glad we're leaving today after all. It's a good day for traveling: All the signs are favorable.” She looked at me as if she were thinking it all over, then shook her head. “Don't ask things like that. It makes you sound so different. No one else would ask that.”

“No one else has lived my life.”

“You're one of the Tribe now. Try and behave like it.”

She took a small bag from inside her sleeve and passed it to me. “Here. Akio said to give you these.”

I opened it and felt inside, then tipped the contents out. Five juggler's balls, smooth and firm, packed with rice grain, fell to the floor. Much as I hated juggling, it was impossible not to pick them up and handle them. With three in my right hand and two in my left, I stood up. The feel of the balls, the actor's clothes, had already turned me into someone else.

“You are Minoru,” Yuki said. “These would have been given to you by your father. Akio is your older brother; I'm your sister.”

“We don't look very alike,” I said, tossing the balls up.

“We will become alike enough,” Yuki replied. “My father said you could change your features to some extent.”

“What happened to our father?” Round and back the balls went, the circle, the fountain . . .

“He's dead.”

“Convenient.”

She ignored me. “We're traveling to Matsue for the autumn festival. It will take five or six days, depending on the weather. Arai still has men looking for you, but the main search here is over. He has already left for Inuyama. We travel in the opposite direction. At night we have safe houses to go to. But the road belongs to no one. If we meet any patrols, you'll have to prove who you are.”

I dropped one of the balls and bent to retrieve it.

“You can't drop them,” Yuki said. “No one of your age ever drops them. My father also said you could impersonate well. Don't bring any of us into danger.”

W
E LEFT FROM
the back entrance. Kenji's wife came out to bid us farewell. She looked me over, checked my hair and clothes. “I hope we meet again,” she said. “But, knowing your recklessness, I hardly expect it.”

I bowed to her, saying nothing. Akio was already in the yard with a handcart like the one I'd been bundled into in Inuyama. He told me to get inside and I climbed in among the props and costumes. Yuki handed me my knife. I was pleased to see it again and tucked it away inside my clothes.

Akio lifted the cart handles and began to push. I rocked through the town in semidarkness, listening to its sounds and to the speech of the actors. I recognized the voice of the other girl from Inuyama, Keiko. There was one other man with us, too; I'd heard his voice in the house but had not set eyes on him.

When we were well beyond the last houses, Akio stopped, opened the side of the cart, and told me to get out. It was about the second half of the Hour of the Goat and still very warm, despite the onset of autumn. Akio gleamed with sweat. He had removed most of his clothes to push the cart. I could see how strong he was. He was taller than me, and much more muscular. He went to drink from the stream that ran beside the road and splashed water onto his head and face. Yuki, Keiko, and the older man were squatting by the side of the road. I would hardly have recognized any of them. They were completely transformed into a troupe of actors making a precarious living from town to town, existing on their wits and talents, always on the verge of starvation or crime.

The man gave me a grin, showing his missing teeth. His face was lean, expressive, and slightly sinister. Keiko ignored me. Like Akio, she had half-healed scars on one hand, from my knife.

I took a deep breath. Hot as it was, it was infinitely better than the room I'd been shut up in and the stifling cart. Behind us lay the town of Yamagata, the castle white against the mountains, which were still mostly green and luxuriant, with splashes of color here and there where the leaves had started to turn. The rice fields were turning gold too. It would soon be harvest time. To the southwest I could see the steep slope of Terayama, but the roofs of the temple were invisible behind the cedars. Beyond lay fold after fold of mountains, turning blue in the distance, shimmering in the afternoon haze. Silently I said farewell to Shigeru, reluctant to turn away and break my last tie with him and with my life as one of the Otori.

Akio gave me a blow on the shoulder. “Stop dreaming like an imbecile,” he said, his voice changed into a rougher accent and dialect. “It's your turn to push.”

By the time evening came I'd conceived the deepest hatred possible for that cart. It was heavy and unwieldy, blistering the hands and straining the back. Pulling it uphill was bad enough, as the wheels caught in potholes and ruts and it took all of us to get it free, but hanging on to it downhill was even harder. I would happily have let go and sent it hurtling into the forest. I thought longingly of my horse, Raku.

The older man, Kazuo, walked alongside me, helping me to adjust my accent and telling me the words I needed to know in the private language of actors. Some Kenji had already taught me, the dark street slang of the Tribe; some were new to me. I mimicked him, as I'd mimicked Ichiro, my Otori teacher, in a very different kind of learning, and tried to think myself into becoming Minoru.

Toward the end of the day, when the light was beginning to fade, we descended a slope toward a village. The road leveled out and the surface grew smoother. A man walking home called the evening greeting to us.

I could smell wood smoke and food cooking. All around me rose the sounds of the village at the end of the day: the splash of water as the farmers washed, children playing and squabbling, women gossiping as they cooked, the crackle of the fires, the chink of ax on wood, the shrine bell, the whole web of life that I'd been raised in.

And I caught something else: the clink of a bridle, the muffled stamp of a horse's feet.

“There's a patrol ahead,” I said to Kazuo.

He held up his hand for us to stop and called quietly to Akio, “Minoru says there's a patrol.”

Akio squinted at me against the setting sun. “You heard them?”

“I can hear horses. What else would it be?”

He nodded and shrugged as if to say,
As good now as anytime.
“Take the cart.”

As I took Akio's place Kazuo began to sing a rowdy comic song. He had a good voice. It rang out into the still evening air. Yuki reached into the cart and took out a small drum, which she threw to Akio. Catching it, he began to beat out the rhythm of the song. Yuki also brought out a one-stringed instrument that she twanged as she walked beside us. Keiko had spinning tops, like the ones that had captured my attention at Inuyama.

Singing and playing, we rounded the corner and came to the patrol. They had set up a bamboo barrier just before the first houses of the village. There were about nine or ten men, most of them sitting on the ground, eating. They wore Arai's bear crest on their jackets; the setting-sun banners of the Seishuu had been erected on the bank. Four horses grazed beneath them.

A swarm of children hung around, and when they saw us they ran toward us, shouting and giggling. Kazuo broke off his song to direct a couple of riddles at them and then shouted impudently to the soldiers, “What's going on, lads?”

Their commander rose to his feet and approached us. We all immediately dropped to the dust.

“Get up,” he said. “Where've you come from?” He had a squarish face with heavy brows, a thin mouth, and a clenched jaw. He wiped the rice from his lips on the back of his hand.