Chapter Four Rui #2
When she got home, she tied the fresh herbs to the rafters to dry and set about grinding the previous day’s in a pestle.
Beside her, Koroku helped his wife Otsu spin hemp linen.
Later they would send it to her family, who were dyers, using the red-brown dye from unripe persimmons and other rice-pastes that would embellish their simple cloths.
Once they’d finished, Koroku turned to the cooking fire, lifted the wooden lid off the iron pot, and ladled Rui a serving of millet-and-barley with some radishes and lily bulbs.
“Little rice left,” he said. “Bad stuff, though, with what we had to pay in taxes, so.”
Early in the year, through the good weather into summer, people of the outvillage ate well, often a mixture of rice and barley, with fresh vegetables and radishes and other tubers, lily bulbs, taro, cowpeas, sprouting beans.
Harvest in the autumn meant they had to rely on lower-quality rice as the stores ran down, mixed with a higher proportion of barley, and wheat glumes.
They usually had enough, though it wasn’t as varied as Rui would have liked. At least they had preserves.
“Thanks,” she said, and made her way into the evening.
Sometimes, in her time alone, Rui walked through town and told the children stories.
She thought of them now, as she tried to push the gold-robed monks from her mind.
They would laugh and sing; hard-worn parents watched.
It was a time of scuffed toes, dirty cheeks and earlobes, snotty noses; she would tell them tales of comedy, of adventure, of rising beasts and heroes, of peace in all the world.
She would growl with the harshness of the evil Daiaku, speak high with the shining voice of the sky-seen, Sora’in.
She told the legend of Misaki Meiko and the Dreameater, Izumo-of-the-clouds.
She laughed with the throaty howl of the old Iteki of Taga and Kurogane, and gestured dramatically, enacting tales she’d learned by heart, stories of no’in and farms and the coming of the rain.
These were stories she’d known since before she could remember, and it felt good to pass them on.
Sometimes, they even felt like they were hers.
But at the end of the day, inevitably, another trader from the west would come, and speak of famine.
Inevitably, the no’in shut their doors. The little boys would run around her, begging for more, while their parents called them in.
“Please, elder-sister, please,” they’d shout, and she would decline, claiming she was all worn out, she’d told every story that she knew.
But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t told one story. Her story.
How she was found in Azemichi, the fieldridge town on the Gensei estate. How she was saved. By a famous warrior, the Poet.
How she saved someone herself.
She didn’t tell it because it felt wrong to talk about herself.
Didn’t tell it because she wasn’t sure what really happened.
Didn’t tell it, because she did not know its end.
Now, as she walked back to the barn, she wondered, Is this my life?
To live and tell stories? To build a better town for these children?
That wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Not at all.
And yet she feared letting it happen without a choice.
Feared waking up one day to find thirty years had passed, and she’d never stepped outside Kitano.
Without changing. Without ever knowing, really, who she was.
There’s so much in the world, she thought. How could anyone ever see it all? But there’s so much in a single town; that’s a world too.
There was truth in that. There was something good. Something whole.
Still, she yearned.
And hated herself for yearning. For wanting something more.
Is this my life? she asked, and no one answered. Is this who I am?
When she was young, the great poet saved her. Saved Sen Hoshiakari, too. They were together.
She’d been found holding a small jade bead, with its string, in her hand.
In her room above the barn, Rui had a small medicine box looped with twine.
A tiny thing, no larger than three fingers side by side, meant to be worn around the belt.
The smooth, round rectangle of lacquered wood opened into nested containers meant for herbs.
A small bird – a wren – adorned the lacquer on one side, and on the other, a fan of bamboo leaves around a flower.
Inside, she kept the curved jade bead, on a string.
She lay back, held the bead to her lips, and watched it shine in the dimming light.
She wondered, often, on nights like these, nights which seemed to draw great gusts of wind from all the eight directions, or else murky, storm-lashed nights, where the barn would tremble, and shake, and leak gouts of water from the thatch.
Who were her parents? How had she come to be found?
As she held the bead, feeling its comforting curve, she thought again of the warriors her family once served. Carved on it was the flower-and-leaf emblem of the Gensei, one of the oldest clanlines, who made their name waging wars for the Ten’in emperors hundreds of years before.
She thought that, in another world, there might have been a version of her life in which she served the Gensei lords, where they had never rebelled, and where she tended to their horses, maybe even attended them to battle or to the imperial court.
She laughed at herself, then, knowing they’d never let a no’in like her into the palace. But a girl could dream.
Night fell softly; the woods grew deep and silent.
She moved to her little window by the rafters, as she often did when nights were calm.
The world beyond breathed an endless blue, lit with the flame of a sky soon after dusk, azure and purple in the clouds far off, like the colors of the Northern Hara flags. Huge, proud, powerful.
She shrugged into her old hemp cloak, shivering.
“This is the way of the world,” Koroku would often say. “Highborn are highborn. We’re but leaves of grass. This is our lot.”
“Why?” she’d ask. “According to who?”
He’d smile sadly and tell her to find happiness closer to home. “Better groom them horses ’fore they grow angry,” he’d say. “Horses never forget a slight. But if you’re good to them, they’ll love you for ever.”
When she returned to her bed, she lit a candle to recite the evening words: “‘Every day, and in three ways, I ask myself: have I succeeded in my pledge, to carry out my work for others with their interests in my heart? Have I been sincere with friends? Have I practiced what I’ve been taught?’”
The candle flickered. Soon the last of the sunlight faded and the blue grew deep.
She went again to the window, to glimpse the early stars, muttered a quick prayer to O-ine, and crawled to her straw bed.
On the floor beside it she had a small wicker box where she kept her things, a broken-toothed comb and some lucky rocks.
And the box and bead, her prized possessions.
Rui often tried to imagine the footpaths of Azemichi by the capital, where she was born.
But she remembered none of it; the elders told her this was normal, for it was a traumatic event, and she’d been so young, after all.
But now, as she drifted to sleep, she thought she could remember: the arched entryway, and the thatch, the looming walls of their house; and the smell of it, like fresh wood, and earth, and fire; and the oaken chest her father had, with the symbol of flowers-over-leaves.
But these memories were vague and ephemeral as mist, and sometimes she wasn’t sure if she really remembered them at all, or if she’d merely dreamed them, longing for the family she never knew, the mother and the father who were taken from her.
She lay back with the bead in her hand, alone on her straw bed at the top of the stables by the inn.
But in those last moments before she fell asleep, she heard a sound at the front of the house, the murmur of soft voices in the night.
Strangers. She moved to the window again, trying to hear.
There were several other voices now, at least three or four in the little garden down below.
Otsu and Koroku had come out, and were speaking, urging the strangers to leave.
The monks again, she realized, glimpsing a flash of red and gold amid the lanterns they held aloft like little shrines. Why won’t they leave me alone?
“News has come to us from the royal city,” they were saying, voices rising from below. “Sent by the retired-emperor himself. We are on a holy mission, you see.” There was a pause.
“We were told the girl in your care, she was brought here years ago. She was not born of your little outvillage in Kitano. No?”
“She was raised by nuns,” Otsu said, carefully. “At the local temple.”
“And she was from where, before she was here? Not from the west? A town perhaps, called Azemichi?”
Otsu stiffened. “What do you want?”
“In truth, we’re looking for someone,” the squat monk said.
“Not a no’in, no. Not one of you… Someone more important.
Someone born in the west – perhaps, oh, twenty years ago?
He would just be reaching his age…” The monk gave a little nod, like he was seeking confirmation for something.
“And now? We hear this girl, this same, meaningless kusa who attacked us on the road, we hear she was born there, too… You can see, it’s quite suspicious. ”
“We know nothing of that,” said Otsu.
“I have knowledge she is of this village,” said the monk. “I’ve been sending letters. There is a record of her birth. In Azemichi.”
“We know none like that,” Koroku said now, emboldened by his wife. Rui gripped the sill, listening.
“Girl,” the old monk announced, loudly, to the night.
“We forgive you for your insults! We merely want to talk.” He turned back to Koroku, speaking in a low voice that even Rui’s keen ears almost couldn’t hear.
“We want to confirm some things. About events that… you could say… that brought her here. How she came into this village, nearly twenty years ago…”
Rui shrank back. The nuns hadn’t known everything, but they’d known enough.
They’d known that her family had served the Gensei in Azemichi.
Known that she was found, that night, when all the Gensei died.
Known that she was rescued by the great poet, Yora Shijin, who had brought her here to live in safety, far from the conflicts of the court…
They’re looking for him, she thought. That boy.
Below, Otsu held her ground. “Look somewhere else. We want no problems here. We know nothing of any Azemichi.”
For a moment, Rui thought the monks would argue. They’d seen her, that day with the serow, after all. They’d somehow found out who she was. But now the head monk merely nodded, gave a muttered “As you say,” and made his leave.
“Tell me,” he said in parting. “I’m curious. The town of Azemichi. Do you know where it is?” Koroku shook his head blankly. Otsu stared. “It’s in the west,” the squat monk said. “Near the capital.” He bowed his head. “But that is neither here nor there. We’ll disturb you no more.”
Rui thought of the decree they’d held, a license from the retired-emperor to cross the lands of the realm.
She thought again of the fury and the spite in his eyes, when he’d seen her, that day, as she tried to stop them from taking the sacred deer in the woods.
Her heart fluttered. She wondered what would happen if they found her.
Finally, among the clamor of the cicadas, the monks turned onto the road, which would take them back through the outvillage and on, toward wherever they were going next.
But before they left, the squat monk, his face strangely illuminated by the lanterns, glanced to the side of the barn and the stables, and his eyes landed on hers before she had a chance to pull away.
He stood there, like that, watching her from across the distance, as if he’d always known that she was there.
His eyes met hers again, and at the end, he gave a little nod. Then he turned, and headed off, toward the highroad that would lead him to the west, and to the mysterious retired-emperor who’d sent him his decree.