Chapter Four Rui
CHAPTER FOUR
Rui
The wheelbarrow slid down into the muck with a sickening lurch and Rui was thrown sideways, hitting her head upon the stone. “Fuck!”
It spilled over the road, and soon the wet gravel and dirt were both covered in manure. She shouted wearily, struggling to push it out. “Come on, you stupid thing!”
Rui Misosazai was nineteen years old, and she was fighting with a wheelbarrow full of shit. Above her, the high-built road stretched off toward the slope of Kitano to the east, dotted with little houses and thatched roofs.
“Want some help?”
Old man Goro sat perched on the side of his hill, watching her.
His tattooed arms were crossed against his chest. They were old marks, she knew, Iteki marks, of birds and beasts and sea; of the people who’d lived in these lands for thousands of years, since before there was an empire.
She shoved herself against the cart again. “No.”
It didn’t move. In fact, it slid down, even deeper. She slipped, banged her shin against the side. “Damn it!”
“Come,” the old man said, working his way to the road. “I may be old, but I know how to right a cart.”
Goro’s hut lay at the far end of the village, upon a barren hill with maple trees overlooking the shallow-paddied husk of earth he called his “field”.
Above them, Mount Kanzan stood like a god over the junction of the two rivers, the Kitano and Oshuno, which carved their lines north, eventually forming the boundary between Lady Iyo’s lands and the towns of the mountains.
Like most peasants in early summer, he was preparing to plant the next year’s rice in wet plots of clay and mud, and all across the outvillage, no’in were collecting manure with which to fertilize it.
“Tell ’em thank you for me,” he said, when they were done, wiping sweat from his brow. “For sending you. Maybe I’m blessed with luck for once in my life. Aha!”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Rui said.
He laughed. “Well, the Wild Rui Misosazai’s come to help me, eh? It’s a miracle. I already got good luck!”
She couldn’t help but smile. The old townsman settled down onto the fence and brought out a bamboo flask. “So. First you bring me firewood, then you offer to help me manure the field. What gives?”
She couldn’t avoid it any longer. She stood before him, opening her hands. “Elder, I need your help.”
In the days and weeks after her encounter with the monks, nothing felt the same. Western penitents, and priests of the mountain temples near the capital, had come, they said, to celebrate the wedding of Lady Iyo of Kitanohara to the lord of Kurogane in the north.
But they were everywhere now.
She saw them in the little square by the watchtower, clapping wooden blocks together to attract attention. “A savage from the mountain towns, a barbarian, a hairy shrimp-eater! A no’in has offended us!”
“We have taken it up with the lord,” they cried. “Be advised! Understand what the consequence will be, if it is determined you have hidden such a one!”
Rui had slipped back into the shadows of the miller’s hut, worried that at any moment, the head monk, the big man with square shoulders and a broken scowl on his face, would see her. Who knew what would happen then.
The lady of Kitanohara, people were whispering, was angry because they had killed a serow in her borders. But the monks?
The monks raised their icon of the goddess Kouzeon, shouting, calling Rui a blasphemer.
So, for the past week she had hidden as best she could, doing her tasks and taking the long walk up to the Godspath, always looking over her shoulder.
“They say I offended the enlightened ones,” she said now, coming beside him on the fence. The old man sighed.
“If anything, it’s them that done it,” he said. “Don’t you worry over that. Those people from the capital, they’ll say you offended any god if it’d get them what they want. The Ogami’in rules these lands, not the monks-of-the-west. Ah, but she’s in a bind. Can’t risk damaging the treaty…”
The treaty, Rui thought. The famous pact that Ogami’in and her ancestors had made, the one that allowed them to rule in Kitano, while the Ten’in emperors reigned from their royal city of Saikyo at the center of the realm.
The Kitanohara clan had fought and bled for their freedom for hundreds of years, and now, in exchange for fealty and gold, the Ogami’in and her family had done what no others ever had: scraped out control of their own country and the province of the east.
“Uncle,” asked Rui. “What do I do, if those monks don’t go away?”
He waved a hand. “Don’t you worry over them. They don’t care about us. To those people, we’re just blades of grass. Capital monks, capital lords? No. It’ll all blow over soon enough.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” The monks had seemed so violent, so angry, determined to punish her for insulting them on their hunt.
He eyed her. “I was thinking,” Rui said, “I could try… to work up at the fortress. At Kitano. It might be safer there. There’s people. And the lords, and…”
His eyes gleamed knowingly. “So, you want to work the castle. Eh?”
“I don’t know, I just…” Rui fumbled over her words. “I just met them on the trail. And they were… I didn’t mean to…”
“They killed a serow. You did what any of us shoulda done.” He tutted.
“Ah. It’s been too long since I looked in on the youths of the village.
I let the years go past, now I’m old. But I remember the day you came, young child.
I remember. My advice: don’t worry yourself about what these monks and kings will do.
Live your life. You still have some say about your path in this world. ”
She shrugged.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I’m just a kusa like the rest of us,” she said, uneasy. “Believe it when I see it.”
He smiled again, sighing, and turned up to the mountains.
“Well. Either way. You really want to work with them, those Kitano lords, they do take no’in on, as in service.
They’ll be at the harvest festival. If you really want to work with them, that’ll be your chance.
Meantime, there’s still gods in these woods, they’ll be seein’ you on.
Our gods. ‘Gods of earth and water, and of the air; gods of the land itself. They lived this transitory world longer’n humans ever did; they formed it, shaped it, live among it, present yet unseen, separate yet whole. ’”
He lowered his head in prayer. “Yes. We still got some little say, ’bout our path in this world. The gods, you know. They been watching you. Want you to live long and happy. Ah.”
Goro turned, digging about the barrow she’d moved to the side of the road. “Here. Got too many, these. Help me out.”
He came back with two rice balls in his hands.
“I can’t take these,” she said.
“Take ’em,” he said. “Gesture of my thanks.”
The hill at Kitano turned flat at an even pace, rolling slowly down to the valley, where the outvillages lay at the edge of the estates, the Blue Woods and the slopes of Mount Kanzan beyond, the barrier to the south.
Music floated in the air as she walked; harvest was coming, and the villagers were preparing for the festival.
Rui loved it. Loved this place, this land, the freedom here, the wide sky and the air rich with life.
She took the long way home, first through the shops and craft-houses, over the little road that skirted the mountain, then out, into the fields where Koroku had his barns.
She thought about what old man Goro said.
Behind her, the huge, unsleeping city of Kitano buzzed with its rhythms, reminding her of a beehive, always in motion.
She closed her eyes, breathed in the warm orange blaze as it set.
Walking along the woodland trail a few moments led to a turn in the road, and a depression to a smaller path.
She took it, following the dirt trail to a shrine dedicated to the god O-inenari, the many-spirited deity of prosperity, the harvest, and orphaned children.
Hidden between giant himorogi and buna trees, the shrine awaited her, small and sacred.
Here, she clapped her hands together once, then once again, and prayed to the statue of O-ine that rested on the altar.
Two-sided, made of stone, it represented the god in male and female counterparts.
Here, a bearded man, accompanied by a white fox; here, a woman, holding sheaves of rice, long hair flowing to her knees.
Rui bowed again, placed one of the rice balls at the bottom of the shrine, in offering, and ate the other, silently, in the shade of the whispering leaves.
When morning broke, early, as it always did in summer, she was woken by Koroku, the grizzled stablekeeper, who loved her in his way but didn’t know how to get close.
“Dawn-time,” he grunted, his frown not a sign of displeasure so much as of his perpetual surrender to the ills of the world.
She descended the ladder and began grooming the horses, brushing her teeth with salt and a tassel of horsehair and willow-wood.
She washed her face in the basin, hurried to bring fresh water for the tea.
By the hour of the dragon, she’d gathered her blue-dyed hemp cloak and her satchel, and, squinting in the shards of morning light, headed to the small shrines on the mountain trail, where people often left offerings for the monks.
Each day since she was twelve, she hiked up the mountain, swept the road before the monastery of Kannagara, and attended the free school taught by lower monks.
In the afternoons, she tended to their horses.
Today was no different. In the evening, she hiked back down and stopped at a grove to collect herbal flowers and roots.
Then it was back to the outvillage in time to clean the stables again.