Chapter Twenty-One Rui
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rui
They’re taking over everything, Rui thought.
All around her the Gensei camp grew outward like an occupying force.
The outvillage road lay burdened with the weight of their carts, their heavy-footed men.
Some called to her as she passed, hooting, whistling.
She ignored them. She hadn’t been able to talk to Sen since they’d arrived; it was like she’d been erased, discarded, now that the kijin came. Now that Sen had his family again.
“Who cares, anyway,” she muttered. They wouldn’t let her in the castle, so she decided to watch what these soldiers were up to on the field. Soon they shouted at her: go away.
They don’t know me, she thought. They don’t know my heart.
She could shoe a horse. Build fires. Thatch a roof so it never leaked in the rain.
She could heal broken bones after a fall.
Sing to horses so they were not afraid. I can do all of this and more and nobody cares.
I could walk like a boy through this city, I was a crow monk and no one wanted to come near. I could go as I pleased.
Except there. Except the fortress. Except their house.
The house of the family who brewed rice-wine near the gate.
The family of the boy, Idachi.
I could pass for a ghost here, she thought. I’m living, but what life do I have? I wait for peace, and always the wind blows it away. I find myself staring at them, now and again, and never have the courage to speak.
She was about to leave for the mountain when she saw them. The boy’s parents had come out, as many of the merchants and the traders had, to watch these newcomers set their camp. As she passed her eyes over the crowd, she saw the Honnen couple staring back, staring at her.
I should go to them, she thought. I should say something.
She couldn’t bear it. Instead, she turned away.
Hurried back up the mountain trail in shame.
She wandered to the little shrine, sat trying to repair a damaged bind of reeds. There Sen found her. Rui didn’t know what to say – everything had become so complicated, now that the clan had arrived, now that the Gensei said, Come home.
He stepped into the hollow, a small, round place just beside the shrine where the trail split off and a shallow fold of earth dipped down.
A quiet place, here in the leaves, where the forest and its sights and sounds seemed gentle; the broken turf, the fallen tree, still blanketed with fronds and the fuzz of moss and insects.
A place of emerald green now turning to the flame of autumn, where the air grew chill, even in the sun, where you might glimpse a harvest moon through branches; and where shadows danced upon the forest floor with the quickness and sure motions of a child, singing.
Those are the gods, Granny Chie told her once, when she was young.
The older woman brought her out to collect fresh mountain herbs, bundled them together with her loop of string.
In autumn, when the days turned sharp and the dew-chill layered on the grass, the shadows grew all around them, quick, fleeting.
The writing of the gods, old Chie said. They tell us things.
Now Sen sat beside her; now the shadows danced. He grasped one hand about the other, fingers looped around a wrist.
“I can’t stand the castle,” Rui said, looking off.
The afternoon sky grew larger, vast and endless, marked with tattered cloud. Her anger was disintegrating. Sen seemed unsure what to say. “I can’t imagine what it’s like.”
Rui shook her head. “Guess not.” She stopped, overwhelmed by a simple hopelessness. “You people think you have to save everyone and you don’t even see what you’re doing. Maybe you don’t care.”
“But I do care,” Sen said. “I do.”
“I just want…” Rui began. Then nothing came.
Sen waited. “What is it?”
“All they want is war,” Rui said. “I know they’re your family, but you have to see that. It’s not your place. Don’t you think it’s better to try to stop the killing? Not all this… retribution. All this death.”
“That’s what my family wanted to do,” Sen said. “The Keishi didn’t let us. They took everything instead. And it’s just going to keep getting worse.”
“Then when does it end?”
She rose and walked off, toward the small road that led back up the mountain, to the Blue Woods and Kannagara. The sun was falling. Sen clearly wanted to follow but something held him back.
“Rui.” A dozen words seemed to come into Sen’s mind and leave him just as fast. “You know I have mixed thoughts about them. About…”
“I know.”
“They want me to go with them.”
Rui’s voice betrayed her, nearly soundless when she spoke. “I know.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“I always figured you’d go back to them,” she said at last. “Your family. I just didn’t think it would be so soon… I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon…” Something fluttered in her chest; a warm, rising feeling, the sense of fullness when someone offered something and expected nothing in return.
A spike of emotion jolted in her; she didn’t know what it was. “Do you… do you remember anything about that night? When our parents died? Because, I don’t remember anything… I try… It’s like I’m empty.”
She wanted to know what it was like. She had nothing of her own, mere fragments, vague and ephemeral, so dim as to be disbelieved, thin as air, and just as fleeting.
It was impossible to know if they were real memories at all, or just the remnants of something that had turned into imagination.
She could see a round, kind face, a softness of skin, of being held in her mother’s arms. The shape and color of a room.
A tall, dark-eyed man who was her father, who never spoke, who only stared.
Sen said, “We were too young.”
She placed her medicine box into his hands. “Sometimes I ask O-ine what my life is supposed to be. They never answer. If none of this had happened, I’d probably be in the village where I was born. And you’d be in the palace. You’d have everything you want…”
Sen paused at that. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of things that way. Perhaps he’d thought she didn’t feel the same. Perhaps he’d hoped, and dismissed; for what was so easy to cast off as hope? As that which would never be? And yet, it never left you.
He said, “I’m sorry, about before.”
“I can’t…” She stopped.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Rui said.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Because I don’t know what I think. Because you’re everything I wanted to be, you have everything I couldn’t have. Because I thought you could be my family, too.
As always, she said nothing, and hated herself for it.
She said, “You’re all I’ve got. I’m not even allowed in the castle gates. That world, where you come from… I’ll never see it. Never be… nothing but an outcast.”
Sen took her hand. “None of that. This world takes so much from us. It’s easy to forget what it gives. But there’s nothing wrong with who you are.” He sat back, bumping his knuckles idly against Rui’s knee.
“It’s easier for you,” she said.
With that, he tackled Rui to the ground. They rolled down the hill, laughing and fighting, until they landed on a soft patch of grass at the bottom, and lay there together, winded, with grass stains on their knees.
“Hear that?” Sen listened to the sound of the wind in the branches. “The gods are happy we’re here.”
They regarded the sky for a moment. Not yet sunset, but already the bright full moon was visible overhead.
“You know the story of the moon?” Rui asked.
“No’in tell it. A monkey, a fox, and a rabbit found an old man starving on the road.
He had a fire, but was so weak he couldn’t walk.
The monkey could’ve climbed and found a branch of fruit to share, but he was selfish, and he ran off to hide in the trees.
Even the fox was suspicious. He could’ve caught a fish in a stream, but he did nothing.
The rabbit had nothing to give. He saw how wretched the old man was, and offered to throw himself into the fire so the man would have something to eat.
“Before he could do it, the old man lifted his head and transformed. Because it wasn’t a man, it was a spirit-god: the god of the moon.
And so the god thanked the rabbit for his selflessness and offered to let him join them in their kingdom, in the stars and sky.
” She pointed. “See? That’s why there’s a rabbit on the moon. ”
Sen smiled at that. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. They told me that they’re hunting for me. The people in the capital. That I need to go with Tokuon. That it isn’t safe…”
A silence again.
“What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just know that, right now, I’m happy. And I know, whatever happens, there will always be this moment. This night, this grove… If we can remember this, we’ll still have a little bit of home inside us, no matter where we go.”
“No matter where,” Rui agreed.
They stayed for a while, watching the early moon and the small tufts of cloud. The world glowed, golden; Rui took it in, feeling Sen’s warmth on the grass beside her as the air began to cool.
Sen lay back with his legs stretched out, feet crossed and an arm behind his head, breathing in the cold air.
Above them, the clouds had cleared, and the sky seemed endless, lush and full of changing colors.
It felt open; it felt full. Rui liked that.
She let her breath go out, then in, breathing the colors and the smells of the grass; she felt the earth, solid and yet soft beneath them, the cool breeze lulling her to sleep, the whisper of Sen’s breath in her ear like a secret, the heat of his touch, the shifting of his ankles against her own, and the warm freedom of knowing they had nowhere else to be but where they were.
But like all else in the world, it was fleeting.
“I want to remember this afternoon for ever,” Sen said. “So it can last me until I see you again.”
“I can still come with you.”