Thousand Shrine Warrior (21 page)

“Just this one cup,” said Lord Sato. “Then you must hurry along your way, for the sake of my daughter's handmaiden, who will become your ward.”

The priest, still holding his strange posture, was looking into the bikuni's eyes; and his expression was knowing and forlorn. He seemed to say to her, “Aren't these foolish men? You and I alone can see the sorrow of the world.” She would have pitied him if she did not see so clearly what his actions led to.

“This is too large a cup,” said the bikuni.

“Oh?” Sato responded, sounding as though his feelings were injured. Was he unable to see the size of the cup presented? If she drank so much, she could die of it. At the least, she would be unable to make it to Shinji and Otane. “No one has ever refused,” said Sato, “a cup of saké from a lord.”

“It is too large,” she reiterated. “I cannot drink so much.”

Now she heard the voice of Norifune issue from darkness: “Don't insult my liege. It is only a tiny cup. It is unforgiveable to refuse. Can't you see that if you humor him a little, he will not insist you play a game of chess?”

“This is madness,” said the bikuni.

“We agreed not to discuss that part,” said Norifune reasonably.

“I am standing here in darkness,” she said. “I can see very little except Priest Kuro, who stands before me motionless, shining, arms akimbo. The rest of you are hidden.”

“That's foolish,” said Norifune. “Priest Kuro is still sitting near our Lord.”

“No. He is not.”

Lord Sato spoke again, a pouting edge to the words. “If you won't drink one cup before you go, then I will revoke the license that makes Otane your servant from now on.”

The nun took the huge bowl from the page, who was ghostly and faint despite standing closer than Kuro, who alone could be seen plainly. For a moment she considered dashing the contents onto the tatami; but Sato added with petulant cruelty:

“It is not much to ask that you finish one small cup. If you fail, it can only be out of disrespect. As you can see, my vassals stand ready to kill you at my command.”

In fact she could not see any vassals. She believed they were close by. She held the basin near her mouth and, before drinking, quoted the aphorism, “‘When drinking poison, do so to the dregs!'”

Then she began to gulp.

Priest Kuro relaxed his posture. The lights came up as between acts of a play. The bikuni saw Lord Sato was draining his very tiny cup; he looked happy now that the nun shared saké with him. Norifune had finished his cup. He was scratching behind his ear, then scraped under one fingernail with another, unmindful of sorcery. Several vassals stood near, swords drawn, but at bay.

The bikuni finished the wine and tossed the shallow basin upon the tatami mat. “Keep your promise to me,” she said, more to Kuro than Sato. “Let me go now.” The wine had not yet taken effect, except for making her stomach uneasy.

Priest Kuro took another strange pose, his head turned demurely, his frail hands held forward, the thumbs interlocked, his fingers like the wings of a nightingale.

Lord Sato sighed, then said, “Now that she is gone, I feel bored.”

“I'm still here,” said the bikuni. Nobody heard.

“I am too wound up,” continued Sato, “to consider sleep. I wish the weather were clear enough for a midnight hunt.”

Even now the bikuni could not deny the beauty of the face that gazed at hers. It was her own vanity to find him beautiful. She had hated to think he might be a relative; but now she welcomed thinking it, for if he were not a man of Heida, then he was not a man at all, but some distorted reflection of herself. He spoke a few seemingly idle words, which were directed at Lord Sato, who presumedly believed the priest still sat close at hand.

“The snow has ceased falling only a little while ago, my Lord.” Kuro's tone was sweet, his narrative poetic: “The wind has cleared Heaven of its clouds. The Celestial River is a bright rainbow. The moon is full, surrounded by a vast halo.”

“Wouldn't it be fine,” Lord Sato exulted, “to view the moon in its big rain hat!”

The bikuni heard everything, but saw nothing beyond Kuro in the resurged dark.

“A midnight hunt indeed!” said Norifune, sounding relieved that the evening's nuisances were over. “It would be a challenge!”

Priest Kuro cocked his head a bit more, increasingly sweet and, if one knew no better, utterly guileless.

Lord Sato commanded gleefully, “Turn that gray doe loose, the one who was so frisky this morning! I will hunt her to the ground!”

Kuro parted his hands. The lights came up again, but no one noticed the bikuni still in their midst. Lord Sato's bodyguards, who had obeyed none of his commands earlier, were now quite eager to fetch his hunting cape and hat and other garments for a mounted chase. The other vassals scurried out of the room to get their own hunting gear or to prepare the horses. The nun had given up on drawing her sword, but thought to grapple the priest by leaping on him in a contest of physical strength. Her feet would not move in his direction. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Priest Kuro pointed to the door, the only route open to her. How painful was his expression!

“Each step we take,” he said, “is mistaken.”

Thinking only of Otane and Shinji, the nun darted from the meeting-chamber. Halfway along the halls, she staggered against one wall, feeling the effects of the drink. Her arms were light but at the same time heavy. When she found her way outside, she fell upon a snowy path and vomited noisily. A small portion of what she had swallowed came out. She looked upward at the black sky, which was not as clear as Priest Kuro had promised. Here and there were smudges of moonlit clouds rushing majestically along the curve of the Celestial River. The moon indeed had a halo. It was called a rain-hat because it generally heralded a storm. Off in the west, there were still billowing clouds, changing and roiling at a miraculous pace. The clarity over Lord Sato's castle was, then, the calm before the long-promised storm, a gargantuan blizzard to freeze Otane and Shinji to their cross.

She stumbled across the veritable mesa on which the castle was built, and came to the gate leading downward. The post was curiously abandoned. No one stopped her from unsealing the gate. She stood at the top of the long stairway, the sight making her woozy. It had been cleared of snow, though a bit more had fallen since vassals did that labor. She felt the effects of the liquor rather too much now. Her first step downward caused her a sensation of sudden vertigo. If she took each step as carefully as she felt necessary, the hunters would be after her before she was halfway down.

Alongside the staircase was a rough slope for horses to ascend and descend. It, too, had been more cleared than not, but had an icy slickness here and there. To her bothersome state, the slope appeared more manageable than the stairs; but she had gone only a short ways when she slipped off her wooden geta and tumbled face downward.

More fretful of her sword's sheath than her own bones, she protected the Sword of Okio and slid dangerously along the incline, coming to halt after what felt like a very long time. She lay on her side, feet higher than her head, feeling annoyed, and uncertain if she were injured. The saké dulled her sense of pain, but her left arm ached from the plunge.

She half slid, half hopped the rest of the way to the lower gate, which was also unguarded. She opened it without difficulty.

Hunters on horseback might pour downward at any moment. She tried to run across the moat's causeway, staggering left and staggering right, fearful of dumping herself into the frigid water. At the end of the earthen bridge, she had to stop, dizzied by her flight. Before her, the snowy sea rose and fell. The sight amused her despite her predicament: a sea of snow. Didn't it go up and down just like water? How exciting! It was slow and subtle, but definitely moving. The world had become an ocean.

Her arm definitely ached. Pain reminded her of the seriousness of her situation. How moods swayed under the influence of spiritous drink! Things now appeared gloomy and hopeless. And in a few more moments, it no longer seemed that anything mattered one way or the other.

Already she heard horses neighing as they issued from stables above, prepared by grooms for the night hunt. Would Priest Kuro's glamour be so complete that not one vassal, not even Norifune, who was more under the sway of laziness and corruption than Kuro's magic, would be able to tell they hunted no deer, but a drunken nun? She couldn't think about it. She could barely think at all. If she dwelled too much upon it, she might convince herself that she had drunk a magic potion and become, indeed, a gray deer, and the perceptions of the hunters were less foggy than her own belief in her human appearance.

More by instinct than reason—for her reason was askew—she knew not to use the main road across Sato's estates, for she would be run to the ground at once. She staggered from the road, through snow, leaving unfortunate markings to betray her passing. She saw the glistening, moonlit sea of whiteness, and a stand of trees way across the fields. Among those young trees, she might have a chance at surviving. But she had become so awkward, she might never make it so far. Night erased depth-perception and the trees were actually further than she guessed—a shadowy forest of misbegotten hope, which stayed the same distance ahead, try as she might to get nearer.

Mounted vassals clattered from the castle's height, drummed the earth of the causeway. The sound carried nicely over the quiet fields. They had directional lanterns, reflector beacons that cast long stripes of light across the snow. She heard Lord Sato's childish shout of joy as he spotted what he thought to be the deer. She heard a whistling arrow. Only by blundering face-down upon the snow was she saved, by luck alone.

She fell into a narrow ravine, so shallow that she had to tuck her head down in order to be protected. The ravine had a small overhang; and the harried nun half crawled, half loped along the narrow space where no snow had reached the ground. The ravine came eventually to an abrupt end, where snowdrifts had filled it. She raised her head and saw Lord Sato and his men far off, arrows poking upward at their backs, tall hunters' hats upon their heads, their hand-held beacons shining this way and that. They looked left and right but didn't see where the prey had vanished; from their perspective, there was no ravine to be seen.

They rode across the snowy field in the wrong direction. Some of them split into a second party and started in an even more mistaken direction. The bikuni was little encouraged by their miscalculations. The moment she were to climb from cover, they would see her; and if she remained where she was, they would eventually find her.

The two groups of hunters split up again, intending to flush the deer from whatever feeble hiding place it had discovered. The nun sat in the bottom of the ravine, back against the wall, massaging her left shoulder. She realized her fingers were stiff, either from the fall alongside the staircase or from her usual problem in cold weather.

She tried to make her wine-enfeebled consciousness think more clearly. “If I climb out, I'll be a big gray shadow on white snow. Even in the darkness, they will catch me.” That was as much as she could resolve.

Her wooden geta had been a nuisance. She removed them, tied them together, and hung them from her belt. Her toe-socks would suffice against the cold, unless they got wet. She needed every edge of sure-footedness, considering her present awkwardness.

For the moment, she felt a reckless calm and did not feel as harried as she did a bit earlier. Her mind was resigned though no less befuddled. As Lord Sato's men had broken into several groups, perhaps she would have a chance against them. Surely she could devise some plan, she thought, if she sat quietly a few moments more and concentrated.

Concentration was difficult. Her mind wandered. Her arm hurt. She had, in one sleeve, a bamboo container packed with the ointment Priest Bundori had made for her. She removed some of this and put the aromatic remedy on her sprained shoulder and her stiff knuckles.

If she stayed in the ravine much longer, she would be in trouble.

But she could think of no plan.

Some of Lord Sato's hunting companions were highly skilled men who, in fact, were specialists in catching healthy beasts alive, and bringing them to the estates for their lord to hunt down. Others were not skillful men. Most rode after their prey with no sense of the untoward; with no sense of urgency; but there were one or two who sensed and appreciated the evil jest.

These latter were men without conscience who, akin to Chamberlain Norifune, were less in the weird priest's thrall, for there was less goodness in them for Kuro to suck out. In the case of Norifune, the lack of conscience made him an indifferent sort of fellow, willing to go this way or that way as the tide insists. But those hunters who suspected they were not chasing a deer, who could only half pretend to see tracks as those of a deer and not a stumbling, drunken warrior-nun … these men could not suppress a tight-lipped, knowing grin as they looked at their companions and their lord, wondering who else, if any, shared this macabre knowledge.