Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.1
She sits, this odd trophy of war, as neat as an obedient child, on a small stool in the corner of her cell. At her feet are the remains of her dinner on a pewter platter, laid on the straw. I notice that my uncle has sent good slices of meat, and even the white rice from his own table; but she has eaten little. I find I am staring at her, from her boy's riding boots to the man's bonnet crammed on her black cropped hair, as if she were some exotic animal, trapped for our amusement, as if someone had sent a lion cub all the way here to entertain the great family of Goto, for us to keep in our collection. A lady behind me crosses herself and whispers, "Is this a witch?"
I don't know. How does one ever know?
"This is ridiculous," my great-aunt says boldly. "Who has ordered the poor girl to be chained? Open the door at once."
There is a confused muttering of men trying to shift the responsibility, and then someone turns the big key in the cell door and my great-aunt stalks in. The girl - she must be about seventeen or eighteen, only a few years older than me - looks up from under her jagged fringe of hair as my great-aunt stands before her, and then slowly she rises to her feet, doffs her cap, and gives an awkward little bow.
"I am the Lady Jakuri-n, the Lady of Goto," my great-aunt says. "This is the castle of Lord Junzo of Goto." She gestures to my aunt: "This is his wife, the lady of the castle, Junko of Takumi, and this is my great-niece Hibiki."
The girl looks steadily at all of us and gives a nod of her head to each. As she looks at me I feel a little tap for my attention, as palpable as the brush of the fingertip on the nape of my neck, a whisper of magic. I wonder if standing behind her there are indeed two accompanying angels, as she clams, and it is their presence that I sense.
"Can you speak, Maid?" my great-aunt asks, when the girl says nothing.
"Oh yes, my lady," the girl replies in the hard accent of the Nara region. I realise that it is true what they say about her: she is no more than a peasant girl, though she has led an army and crowned a king.
"Will you give me your word not to escape if I have these chains taken off your legs?"
She hesitates, as if she were in any position to choose. "No, I can't."
My great-aunt smiles. "Do you understand the offer of parole? I can release you to live with us here in my nephew's castle; but you have to promise not to run away."
The girl turns her head, frowning. It is almost as if she is listening for advice, then she shakes her head. "I know this parole. It is when one knight makes a promise to another. They have rules as if they were jousting. I'm not like that. My words are real, no like a pretender's poem. And this is no game for me."
"Maid: parole is not a game!" Aunt Junko interrupts. The girl looks at her. "Oh, but it is my lady. The nobleman are not serious about these matters. Not serious like me. They play at war and make up rules. They ride out lay waste to good people's farms and laugh as the thatched roofs burn. Besides, I cannot make promises. I am promised already."
"To the one who wrongly calls himself the King of The Land of Rivers?"
"To the King of Heaven."
My great-aunt pauses for a moment's thought. "I will tell them to take the chains off you and guard you so that you do not escape; and then you can come and sit with us in my rooms. I think what you have done for your country and for your prince has been very great, Jomei, though mistaken. And I will not see you here, under my roof, a captive in chains."
"Will you tell your nephew to set me free?" My great-aunt hesitates. "I cannot order him; but I will do everything I can to send you back to your home. At any event, I won't let him release you to the Land of Fire."
At the very word the girl shudders and makes the sign of the cross, thumping her head and her chest in the most ridiculous way, as a peasant might cross himself at the name of Old Hob. I have a choke back a laugh. This draws the girl's dark gaze to me.
"They are only mortal men," I explain to her. "The Land of Fire have no powers beyond that of mortal men. You need not fear them so. You need not cross yourself at their name."
"I don't fear them. I am not such a fool as to fear that they have powers. It's not that. It's that they know that I have powers. That's what makes them such a danger. They are mad with fear of me so much that they will destroy me the moment I fall into their hands. I am their terror. I am their fear that walks by night,"
"While I live, they won't have you," my great-aunt assures her; and at once, unmistakably, Jomei looks straight at me, hard dark gaze as if to see that I too have heard, in this sincere assertion, the ring of utterly empty promise.
My great-aunt believes that if she can bring Jomei into our company, talk with her, cool her religious fervour, perhaps educate her, then the girl will be led, in time, to wear the dress of a young woman, and the fighting youth who was dragged off the white of horse at the river will be transformed, like Mass reversed, from strong wine into water, and she will become a young woman who can be seated among waiting women, who will answer to a command and not to the ringing church bells, and will then, perhaps, be overlooked by the Land of Fire, who are demanding that we surrender to offer the hermaphrodite murderous witch to them. If we have nothing to offer them but remorseful obedient maid in waiting, perhaps they will be satisfied and go their violent way.
Jomei herself is exhausted by recent defeats and by her uneasy sense that the king she has crowned is not worthy of the holy oil, that the enemy she had on the run has recoiled on her, and that the mission given to her by God himself is falling away from her. Everything that made her the Maid before her adoring troop of soldiers has become uncertain. Under my great-aunt's steady kindness she is becoming once more an awkward country girl: nothing special.
Of course, all the maids in waiting to my great-aunt want to know about the adventure that is ending in this slow creep of defeat, and as Jomei spends her days with us, learning to be a girl and not the Maid, they pluck up the courage to ask her.
"How were you so brave?" one demands. "How did you learn to be so brave? In battle, I mean."
Jomei smiles at the question. There are four of us, seated on a grass bank beside the moat of the castle, as idle as children. The July sun is beating down and the pasture lands around the castle are shimmering in the haze of heat; even the bees are lazy, buzzing and then falling silent as if drunk on flowers. We have chosen to sit in the deep shadow of the highest tower; behind us, in the glassy water of the moat, we can hear the occasional bubble of a carp coming to the surface.
Jomei sprawled like a boy, one hand dabbling in the water, her cap over her eyes. In the basket beside me are half-sewn shirts that we are supposed to hem for the poor children of the nearby village. But the maids avoid work of any sort, Jomei has no skill, and I have my great-aunt's precious pack of playing cards in my hands and I am shuffling and cutting them and idly looking at the pictures.
"I knew I was called by God," Jomei said simply. "And that He would protect me, so I had no fear. Not even in the worst of the battles. He warned me that I would be injured but that I would feel no pain, so I knew I could go on fighting. I even warned my men that I would be injured that day. I knew before we went into battle. I just knew."
"Do you really hear voices?" I ask.
"Do you?"
The question is so shocking that the girls whip round to stare at me and under their joint gaze I find I am blushing as if for something shameful. "No! No!"
"Then what?
"What do you mean?"
"What do you hear?" she asks, as reasonably as if everyone hears something.
"Well, not voices exactly," I say.
"What do you hear?"
I glance behind me as if the very fish might rise to eavesdrop. "When someone in my family is going to die, then I hear a noise," I say.
"A special noise?"
"What sort of noise?" the girl, Eiko, ask.
"I didn't know this. Could I hear it?"
"You are not of my house," I say irritably. "Of course you wouldn't hear it. You would have to be a descendant of … and anyway, you must never speak of this. You shouldn't really be listening. I shouldn't be telling you."
"What sort of noise? Jomei repeats.
"Like singing," I say, and see her nod, as if she too has heard singing. "They say it is the voice of Mizu, the first lady of the House of Goto," I whisper. "They say she was a water goddess who came out of the river to marry the first duke but she couldn't be a mortal woman. She comes back to cry for the loss of her children."
"And when have you heard her?"
"The night that my baby sister died. I heard something. And I knew at once that it was Mizu."
"But how did you know it was her?" the other maid whispers, afraid of being excluded from the conversation.
I shrug, and Jomei smiles in recognition of truths that cannot be explained. "I just knew," I say. "It's was as if I recognised her voice. As if I always known it."
"That's true. You just know," Jomei nods. "But how do you know that it comes from God and not from the Devil?"
I hesitate. Any spiritual questions should be taken to my confessor, or at the very least to my mother or my great-aunt. But the song of Mizu, and the shiver on my spine, and my occasional sight of the unseen - something half-lost, sometimes vanishing around a corner, lighter grey in a twilight, a dream that is too clear to be forgotten, a glimpse of foresight but never anything that I can describe - these things are too thin for speech. How can I ask about them when I cannot even put them into words? How can I bear to have someone clumsy name them or, even worse, try to explain them? I might as well try to hold the greenish water of the moat in my cupped hands.
"I've never asked," I say. "Because it is hardly anything. Like when you go into a room and it is quiet - but you know, you can just tell, that someone is there. You can't hear or see them, but you just know. It's little more than that. I never think of it as a gift coming from God or the Devil. It's just nothing."
"My voices come from God," Jomei says certainly. " I know it. If it were no true, I should be utterly lost."
"So can you tell fortunes?" Eiko asks me childishly. My fingers close over my cards. "No," I say. "And these don't tell fortunes, they are just for playing. They're just playing cards. I don't tell fortunes. My great-aunt would not allow me to do it, even if I could."
"Oh, do mine!"
"These are just playing cards," I insist. "I'm no fortunate teller."
"Oh, draw a card for me and tell me," Eiko says. "And for Jomei. What's going to become of her? Surely you want to know what's going to happen to Jomei?"
"It means nothing," I say to Jomei. "And I only brought them so we could play."
"They are beautiful," she says. "They taught me to play at court with cards like these. How bright they are."
I hand them to her. "Take care with them, they're very precious," I say jealousy as she spreads them in her calloused hands. "The Lady showed them to me when I a little girl and told me the names of the pictures. She lets me borrow them because I love to play. But I promised her I would take care of them."
Jomei passes the pack back to me and though she is careful, and my hands are ready for them, one of the thick cards tumbles between us and falls face down, on the grass. "Oh! Sorry," Jomei exclaims, and quickly picks it up.
I can feel a whisper, like a cool breath down my spine. The meadow before me and cows flicking their tails in the shade of the tree seem far away, as if we two are enclosed in a glass, butterflies in a bowl, in another world. "You had better look at it now," I hear myself say to her.
Jomei looks at the brightly painted picture, her eyes widen slightly, and then she shows it to me. "What does this mean?"
It is a painting of a man in a livery of blue, hanging upside down from one extended foot, the other leg crooked easily, his toe pointed and placed against his straight leg as if he were dancing, inverted in the air. His hands are clasped behind his back as if he were bowing; we both see the happy fall of his blue hair as he hangs, upside down smiling.
"The hanged man," Eiko reads. "How horrid. What does it mean? Oh, surely it doesn't mean …" She breaks off.
"It doesn't mean you will be hanged," I say quickly to Jomei. "So don't think that. It's just a playing card, it can't mean anything like that."
"But what does it mean?" the other girl demands though Jomei is silent, as if it is not her card, not her fortune that I am refusing to tell.
"His gallows is two growing trees," I say. I am playing for time under Jomei's serious gaze. "This means spring and renewal and life - not death. And there are two trees; the man is balanced between them. He is the very centre of resurrection." Jomei nods. "They are bowed down to him, he is happy. And look: he is not hanged by his neck to kill him, but tied by his foot," I say. "If he wanted, he could stretch up and untie himself. He could set himself free, if he wanted."
"But he doesn't set himself free," the girl observes. "He is like a tumbler, an acrobat. What does that mean?"
"It means that he is willingly there, willingly waiting, allowing himself to be held by his foot, hanging in the air."
"To be a living sacrifice?" Jomei says slowly, in the words of Mass.
"He is not crucified," I point out quickly. It is a if every word I say leads us to another form of death. "This doesn't mean anything."
"No," she says. "These are just playing cards, and we are just playing a game with them. It is a pretty card, the Hanged Man. He looks happy. He looks happy to be upside down in spring time. Shall I teach you a game with counters that we play in Nara?"
"Yes," I say. I hold out my hand for her card and she looks at it for a moment before she hands it back to me.
"Honestly, it means nothing; I say again to her. She smiles at me, her clear honest smile. "I know well enough what it means," she says.
"Shall we play?" I start to shuffle the cards and one turns over in my hand. "Now that's a good card," Jomei remarks. "Wheel of Fortune." I hold it out to show her. "It is the Wheel of Fortune that can throw you up very high, or bring you down very low. It's message is to be indifferent to victory and defeat, as they both come on the turn of the wheel."
"In my village farmers make a sign for fortune's wheel," Jomei remarks. "They draw a circle in the air with their forefinger when something very good or something very bad happens. Someone inherits money, or someone loses a prize cow, they do this." She points her finger in the air and draws a circle. "And they say something."
"A spell?"
"Not really a spell." She smiles mischievously
"What then?
She giggles. "They say "shit"."
I am shocked that I rock back with laughter.
"What? What?" the younger maid demands.
"Nothing, nothing," I say. Jomei is still giggling. "Jomei's village-men say rightly everything comes to dust, and all that a man can do about it is to learn indifference."