Risuko (18 page)

Kee Sun grunted, and then gestured toward me with his cleaver. “Well, at least Bright-eyes here looks like she's had a good night. But since I don't want none of yeh slicing off any of those fingers o' yehrs belonging to the lady, perhaps we'll be starting on something I was going to teach yeh later.”

He finished filleting a carp in four smooth, swift passes of his thin boning knife, wiped the blade, placing it carefully on cutting table, and then walked over to the beam where dozens of herbs hung, dried and drying. He ran his fingers almost reverently along their tips, and then looked at us, crossing his arms. “In Korea, we call this
Hanyak
. Medicine. Plants, yeh know, can make our food taste good—basil and ginger and garlic and pepper and the like. But they can do more than just that.”

He pointed up again. “Ginseng. Mugwort. Wormwood. Corydalis.” He waved his hand at what I now realized where not just cooking herbs but hundreds of different plants. Leaves. Fruits. Roots. Dried mushrooms. “Herbs. Yeh little beggars know about the five elements? The two forces?”

We all nodded, but I could tell that neither of the others felt any more sure of her knowledge than I did.

“Right. Yeh know how we're always careful to balance the flavors, the colors in meals? Sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty? Green, red, yellow, white, brown?”

Now we nodded more certainly; he'd been drilling that into us for weeks. The evening meal the night before had included green negi onions, red smoked trout, yellow squash, white
daikon
radish and brown mushrooms. Of course, in Kee Sun's opinion, which he shared with us during the preparations for every meal, the Japanese taste in food ran far too much to brown and sweet.

“Well, it's not just ‘cause it tastes good or looks good. We're all of us made up of five elements—fire, wood, earth, metal and water. Each o' them matches up with a color and to a flavor—so wood is green and sour, and fire is red and hot, and so on. And each of them elements has two sides—light and dark, or, if yeh'd rather, hot and cold. Female, male.”

I remembered
Otō-
san
telling me about the same things once as he was drawing a sketch of the cherry blossoms on the tree outside of our house.

“
Yin
and
yang
,” said Emi.

“There yeh are. Those're the Chinese names for ‘em. So we're all made up of these, and just like a good soup has just the right balance of broth and meat and this and that, so're we. We need balance. So we have to eat in balance—sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty. Green, red, yellow, white, brown. Understand?”

We nodded again.

“Well,” he continued, “each o' these plants here has the power to move that balance.” He looked back up at his herbs, and pointing at one we knew well—his huge clump of dried basil leaves. “Basil—that's sweet and green and pungent; it has the power of building up the warm energy in the bits of yeh that are made up of earth. And if yeh're feelin' rheumy and sniffly—if yeh're runnin' cold and wet—that's important. But if yeh already got too much heat and too much earth, well, then, too much basil's gonna be bad for yeh, see?”

Once more we nodded; even Toumi seemed interested.

“There's different bits of yehr bodies that need more or less of different elements, or more
yin
, or more
yang
. Well, each o' these herbs affects different parts o' yehr body. And people are what they eat, yeh know. So a good cook is like a healer; gotta make sure folks get all as they need.” He crossed his arms again, scowling in a manner that I had come to recognize was his way of letting us know what he was about to say was important. “Thing is, each of these herbs can help keep a body healthy, if they're used one way—or they can make a body sick if they're used another. Sick. Or worse.”

Toumi snorted. When Kee Sun scowled at her even more deeply, she snapped, “Well, come on! You're trying to tell us that
basil
can be a poison?”

The cook chuckled, but his eyes were still serious. “It'd take a powerful lot of basil to make a body sick. But sure—it'd work well enough. Give enough basil to a woman who's newly pregnant and she'll lose her child—and whether she wants the babe or not'll decide whether she thinks it's poison or healing.”

Now Toumi scowled back, her arms folded as his were. But she remained silent.

“So,” said Kee Sun. “Herbs. Now, Smiley-girlie, do yeh recognize this one here?” He pointed up to a clump of dried flowers that reminded me of the sea urchin shells my sister Usako had tried to collect once at the beach. The paper-thin grey shells had disintegrated in her fingers no matter how careful she was, and so she had disintegrated into tears. Thinking of her tears, looking at the dried flowers made me think....

Mouth turned down even further than usual, Emi shook her head.

“Any of yeh?”

I cocked my head. “Are those... poppies?”

Kee Sun raised a scarred brow. “And how'd yeh know that, Squirrel-girlie?”

I remembered the sound of my sister's arm cracking like a dry twig when she'd fallen, trying just the one time to follow me up into the trees, and I shivered. The sound of her cries. “They grow on the hill below the castle, in our village. We'd pick a couple of plants every spring. My mother used to get the seeds for baking, and the juice for brewing tea when we were hurt.”

He grinned. “There yeh go. I keep it around for bad pain, just the same. And for when some of the girlies go nights without sleepin'.”

Emi cleared her throat. “Isn't poppy juice... dangerous?”

Kee Sun gave a brisk nod. “Ayup. I told yeh—the difference ‘twixt a healin' herb and a poison is how much yeh use, and when yeh use it. The lieutenant, he
hates
poppy juice; thinks it feeds the demons. But this here is the best medicine there is for pain, and also for not sleepin', ‘specially for young ladies at... certain times. Slows the heart. Slows the bowels. Slows everythin'. Gives a body dreams....” He shuddered dramatically. “Well. We got the dried pods, here, for the seeds and for making tea, but I also squeeze the juice when they're green, which is even stronger; I've got it all ready.” He pointed to one of the line of small clay bottles he occasionally used to cook from. “Make a tea with a bit o' mint, and a drop or maybe two o' that poppy juice—just a drop or two,
no more—
and I promise yeh'll be off in dreamland. Yeh'll sleep as sound as a bear in winter. And yeh'll wake less grumpy.”

Even Emi smiled at that. “What's the mint for?”

“Good for the bowels. But mostly? Makes it taste better,” said Kee Sun with a wink, and Emi laughed for the first time in what felt like days. “Now, takin' too much of this stuff can make a body terrible sick. Can kill. And takin' it too often is a good way to get yehrself possessed by a demon, and no doubt: it'll take yehr soul till there's nothin' left in yehr body and yeh wither away like last autumn's rice stalks. It'll kill yeh with dreams. It'll kill yeh slow, and it's not a nice death—that's a fact.”

We all stood there listening, eyes open wide.

“So, I'll brew yeh a bit if it gets real bad, Smiley, but ‘till then...” He pointed up to a net hanging beside the poppies. “Know what these are, Bright-eyes?” When I didn't respond, he raised an eyebrow to the others, but they shook their heads. He took down the net and showed us the fingernail-sized bits it contained: they were button-shaped and golden brown, like flattened rabbit pellets, and I felt sure that I'd seen our mother buying them off of the herbalist who came through every summer. “Well, this one yeh'll all get to know better. Corydalis root. Puts a body t'sleep and takes away aches—not as good as poppy juice, mind, but good enough, and the sleep yeh fall into ain't as like to last a lifetime. It's a favorite of some of the older girlies, if yeh catch my drift. And to help the lady sleep sometimes when she can't.”

“Really?” asked Emi, scowling; I was probably scowling too, since it hadn't occurred to me that Lady Chiyome slept at all, or that she would want to. Somehow, taking a sleeping draft seemed... human.

“Ayup.” Kee Sun grunted. Then he smiled again. “But I don't want yeh coming in here usin' knives when yeh haven't slept well, so I'll show yeh girlies how to make a good tea with this”—he let a handful of the corydalis fall through his fingers—“that'll give even a crabby old man like me a good night's sleep.”

—

Later that day, we went out to the stable for another lesson with Mieko
-san
.

As we arrived, the women were still moving the equipment out of our way. one of the women barked, “Hey! Where are all of the blankets?”

“Blankets?” asked Toumi.

“Yeah. We usually move all of the saddle blankets, but they're not here.”

Pointing to the far wall, Fuyudori answered brightly, “See! They're over here, already out of the way. Perhaps Masugu
-san
moved them.”

Emi muttered, voice low so that even standing beside her I could hardly hear, “Or maybe it's our fox spirit again.”

Before I could begin to wonder what she meant, Mieko stood silently and led us through her dreamlike dance once again. Once again, I had the odd, disturbing sense that I knew the movements. Perhaps I had danced it as a child. Perhaps I had danced it in a previous life. Perhaps I was simply imagining it.

Now that they were sure that they knew where they were going, my limbs wanted to go faster, but Mieko
-san
's steady, flowing movements lulled me into following at her pace.

My hands. My hands felt... empty.

And the air was full of the metallic scent of snow.

—

True winter closed in that night. A blizzard turned the whole world into a huge sheet of blank paper, and didn't let up.

After several days of being snowbound, we all began to feel jumpy. We were only outside long enough to scurry from one building to another.

At meals, the women became quieter for a time, but soon some of them began to grumble—though not so loudly that Lady Chiyome could hear. “It can stay like this for weeks at a time, up here in the mountains,” muttered one of the women into her soup one night. “We won't be going out on any trips any time soon.”

A broad-shouldered
kunoichi
who had come in just before the blizzard answered, “Trust me, you're not missing anything out there.”

As the rest of us became gloomier and gloomier, only two people seemed to be merry. The first was Lady Chiyome, who said that the valley needed a good snow, and who always seemed most cheerful when others were miserable.

The other was snow-haired Fuyudori, who seemed to be in her element. At lessons, she chirped and laughed. At meals, she sat near Masugu
-san
and flirted shamelessly.

Mieko
-san
didn't seem to find anything about the proceedings at all amusing. She glowered in the opposite direction—at Kuniko's nightly memorial bowl of rice. At me. At the wall.

Masugu
-san
sat like a stone statue of himself. Then again, he hadn't been able to take his horse out. He was never happy when he couldn't ride.

T
he snow did not relent for days. Every morning, Emi, Toumi and I had to break the ice that had formed atop the well in order to fill the tubs. As the snow kept piling up, Emi pointed out that we could use the drifts that had fallen in the courtyard overnight. Not only was this easier than trudging all of the way to the back of the estate where the well was, but it had the benefit of clearing the snow from the area immediately around the bathhouse, which made walking to and from the kitchen easier.

Though we never discussed it, we began to stay in the bathhouse longer and longer, letting the heat of the fires and the warming baths thaw us.

Having to trudge out into the cold again each day just as the baths began to heat up was unbearably hard. That we were able to flee to the warmth of Kee Sun's kitchen was at least a small blessing.

Kee Sun continued to teach us about herbs. And each night, after we had finished cleaning out the tubs for the day, Emi went to the kitchens to pick up a pot of corydalis tea that the cook had prepared; he had already brewed one for Lady Chiyome, he said, so one more was no trouble, if it meant that Emi came to work in the mornings with a smile on her face. I think that he was joking.

The tea certainly helped Emi sleep. Sometimes it seemed as if she went through the rest of the next day barely awake.

—

After five steady days, the blizzard let up. Emi, Toumi and I were in the teahouse that morning with the older girls, writing out one of the Buddha's sermons. Even when we warmed the ink stones at the small fire, it took a great deal of rubbing to get the ink sticks to mix smoothly with the water, and even then the ink was thick as honey from the cold, full of clumps that left splotches on the page. Mai just laughed when Emi's attempt to write the Chinese character for
bliss
came out looking more like—as Mai said—“a kid's drawing of a cow turd.”

Suddenly, the screened walls of the teahouse glowed brightly, as for the first time in days something like bright sun broke through the overcast. We all stumbled to the door—though the clouds were still heavy and it was still cold. “Go!” said our teacher, sighing. “I want to read some more of what the Buddha had to say about cow plops.”

We looked up, all of us, as if the mottled grey overhead were the bright blue of a summer's day. “Hey, Risuko,” laughed Shino, “you're supposed to be such a great climber—think you can get up into the big tree and see if the rest of the world is still there?” She pointed up at the huge hemlock that grew beside the great hall.