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as a child and brought him up. But he was ruined first by his upbringing and
then by his association with the Otori.ö
ôHis father died before he was born. Do you know who killed him?ö
ôThey drew lots,ö Akio whispered. ôNo one knows who actually did it, but it
was decided by the whole family. The master told me this in Inuyama.ö
ôSad,ö Hajime murmured. ôSo much talent wasted.ö
ôIt comes from mixing the blood,ö Akio said. ôIt's true that it sometimes
throws up rare talents, but they seem to come with stupidity. And the only
cure for stupidity is death.ö
Shortly afterward they came to bed. I lay still, feigning sleep, until
daybreak, my mind gnawing uselessly at the news. I was sure that no matter
what I did or failed to do in Hagi, Akio would seize on any excuse to kill me
there.
As we bade farewell to Hajime the next morning, he would not look me in the
eye. His voice held a false cheerfulness, and he stared after us, his
expression glum. I imagine he thought he would never see me again.
We traveled for three days, barely speaking to each other, until we came to
the barrier that marked the beginning of the Otori lands. It presented no
problem to us, Akio having been supplied with the necessary tablets of
identification. He made all the decisions on our journey: where we should eat,
where we should stop for the night, which road we should take. I followed
passively. I knew he would not kill me before we got to Hagi; he needed me to
get into Shigeru's house, across the nightingale floor. After a while I began
to feel a sort of regret that we weren't good friends, traveling together. It
seemed a waste of a journey. I longed for a companion, someone like Makoto or
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my old friend from Hagi, Fumio, with whom I could talk on the road and share
the confusion of my thoughts.
Once we were in Otori land I expected the countryside to look as prosperous as
it had when I had first traveled through it with Shigeru, but everywhere bore
signs of the ravages of the storms and the famine that followed them. Many
villages seemed to be deserted, damaged houses stood unrepaired, starving
people begged at the side of the road. I overheard snatches of conversation:
how the Otori lords were now demanding sixty percent of the rice harvest,
instead of the forty percent they had taken previously, to pay for the army
they were raising to fight Arai, and how men might as well kill themselves and
their children rather than starve slowly to death when winter came.
Earlier in the year we might have made the journey more swiftly by boat, but
the winter gales were already lashing the coast, driving foaming gray waves
onto the black shore. The fishermen's boats were moored in such shelter as
they could find, or pulled high onto the shingle, lived in by families until
spring. Throughout winter the fishing families burned fires to get salt from
the seawater. Once or twice we stopped to warm ourselves and eat with them,
Akio paying them a few small coins. The food was meager: salt fish, soup made
from kelp, sea urchins, and small shellfish.
One man begged us to buy his daughter, take her with us to Hagi, and use her
ourselves or sell her to a brothel. She could not have been more than thirteen
years old, barely into womanhood. She was not pretty, but I can still recall
her face, her eyes both frightened and pleading, her tears, the look of relief
when Akio politely declined, the despair in her father's attitude as he turned
away.
That night Akio grumbled about the cold, regretting his decision. ôShe'd have
kept me warm,ö he said more than once.
I thought of her sleeping next to her mother, faced with the choice between
starvation and what would have been no more than slavery. I thought about
Furoda's family, turned out of their shabby, comfortable house, and I thought
of the man I'd killed in his secret field, and the village that would die
because of me.
These things did not bother anyone elseùit was the way the world-but they
haunted me. And of course, as I did every night, I took walking out the
thoughts that had lain within me all day and examined them.
Yuki was carrying my child. It was to be raised by the Tribe. I would probably
never even set eyes on it.
The Kikuta had killed my father because he had broken the rules of the Tribe,
and they would not hesitate to kill me.
I made no decisions and came to no conclusions. I simply lay awake for long
hours of the night, holding the thoughts as I would hold black pebbles in my
hand, and looking at them.
The mountains fell directly to the sea around Hagi, and we had to turn inland
and climb steeply before we crossed the last pass and began the descent toward
the town.
My heart was full of emotion, though I said nothing and gave nothing away. The
town lay as it always had, in the cradle of the bay, encircled by its twin
rivers and the sea. It was late afternoon on the day of the winter solstice,
and a pale sun was struggling through gray clouds. The trees were bare, fallen
leaves thick underfoot. Smoke from the burning of the last rice stalks spread
a blue haze that hung above the rivers, level with the stone bridge.
Preparations were already being made for the New Year Festival: Sacred ropes
of straw hung everywhere and dark-leaved pine trees had been placed by
doorways; the shrines were filling with visitors. The river was swollen with
the tide that was just past the turn and ebbing. It sang its wild song to me,
and beneath its churning waters I seemed to hear the voice of the stonemason,
walled up inside his creation, carrying on his endless conversation with the
river. A heron rose from the shallows at our approach.
When we crossed the bridge I read again the inscription that Shigeru had read
to me: The Otori clan welcomes the just and the loyal. Let the unjust and the
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disloyal beware.
Unjust and disloyal I was both: disloyal to Shigeru, who had entrusted his
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