When one decided at the last minute to fly from Gotham City to Reno, Nevada on December 23rd, one had to take what one could get, and today that involved changing planes in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the airline had just announced her connecting flight was going to be delayed. Yukie had her tablet and was never bored as long as she could read, but before she could even open the book file, her phone rang.
It was Ra's Al Ghul. In flawless Japanese he said, "Miss Kuwano, it would give a very old man great pleasure if you could take tea with him in the Ordway Park Garden Teahouse at the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory…in half an hour. You need not worry about missing your flight. It will be delayed until you board. There is a car and driver waiting for you outside Terminal 2."
She was not terribly surprised. This was clearly the follow up to the email message he'd sent several days before. "I am greatly honored," she replied in the same language. "Of course I shall send Mr. Wilson a message about the delay."
"Of course," Ra's said, with no surprise in his voice. Yet she was sure no earthly consideration could keep Ra's Al Ghul from doing as he pleased, not even the oblique threat of Deathstroke's vengeance. Therefore she did not tell Slade who or why her plane would be late. If Ra's did not kill her, she would have to explain everything, and if he did, she would either be well on her way to her next existence and not care, or she would come back as an extremely vengeful ghost, in which case Slade would be the least of his worries. She was betting on the latter.
The car was a Rolls Royce, the driver competent, respectful, and largely silent. Minneapolis was decked out for the holiday, covered in snow, and therefore looked its best. The conservatory grounds were especially beautiful, and the groundskeepers had taken the trouble of sweeping the paths to the tea house in the Japanese style garden. In Yukie's opinion, American attempts at recreating Japanese gardens were inherently doomed to failure, even if they hired master gardeners from Japan, and the reason was that they tried too hard. Instead of telling the master gardener to design a garden, they told them they wanted a Japanese garden, and that meant cramming every element of a Japanese garden into the available space.
Ra's had not gone to all this trouble to invite her to take tea in the British style, with cucumber sandwiches and cream scones. No, this was to be according to the ritual of the tea ceremony, which was closer to a religious rite. (Hopefully this was to be an informal tea, rather than the full four hour ritual.)
The principle behind the Way of Tea was this: Life is brief and uncertain, therefore we must take joy in the moment and in our friends, for we never know when or if we will see them again. Making tea for them with one's own hands, sitting and sharing something sweet like fruit to symbolize the good things in life before drinking the tea, which is bitter and symbolic of the miseries of life, shows the love one bears them. One could bring the Way of Tea into every aspect of life, into every meal cooked, every load of laundry, every act done for another person. Enjoy the now, for now is all we ever have.
Entering the tea house, she changed out of her boots into the provided slippers, washed her hands and rinsed her mouth in the stone basin of water provided in the waiting room, in accordance with custom. The water was still warm, a thoughtful touch on a frigid day. Then she bent down to enter through the low-linteled door, symbolic of equality—everyone humbled themselves before sharing the ritual, great and small alike.
Ra's was already within, and he greeted her with a silent bow as the host. She returned it, and knelt upon the floor. The room was austere and unfurnished, as a tea room should be, and the only heat source was the hearth for heating water. No matter; she did not mind the cold as other people did. As he began cleaning the utensils, she looked around the room.
There was always a place in a tea house for a scroll and a vase—the scroll could be either a painting or a piece of calligraphy, perhaps a poem to meditate on, and the vase was always for a seasonal flower. This being December, the flower was a branch of holly, and instead of a scroll—it was the print of Miss Carnation.
"Yes," Ra's said, interpreting her slight indrawn breath when she saw it. "I knew your grandmother. Not in the Biblical sense, I assure you. You, of course, know how old I am said to be."
"It is said you are centuries old," she said. "However, many things are said, both true and false. I do not know which this is."
"It is true. I appear to be a vigorous fifty. I am, however, a vigorous four hundred and forty-eight. Possibly four hundred and fifty-three. The years were not kept track of so diligently then as now. As you may imagine, I travel extensively, and it was upon my first visit to Japan that I met your celebrated grandmother. She was then a courtesan at the Bower of Fragrances. No common prostitute, not she, but a very elite entertainer who had but one patron at a time and kept him a year or more. She was about to retire and marry her last patron, for she was with child. Whether it was his or not, I do not know, but as it turned out to be a boy and he had no other sons, he was delighted to claim paternity. That was in the year…1809. Possibly 1810."
The utensils were now clean. He picked up a bowl full of tangerines and presented it to her with both hands. "Please. Have some."
The fruit glowed in the thin winter sunlight. She took one and began peeling it. "Thank you." Conversation was not part of the ceremony at that point, but he had initiated it.
He nodded. "Thank you for not insisting that could not be true."
"I hope I would never be so boring. There are stranger things in this world."
"You are not boring." Next he took up the canister of green tea powder and measured out three scoops. "I did not meet her again until 1922. She was then—or, I should say, again, working as a courtesan in the Jade Moon House in Beijing. We recognized one another, and I do not know which of us was more surprised. I have met a few natural long-lifers over the years, but she had not. We had a very long and fascinating conversation, during which she told me about her son—about her first son, I should say, for she had several. He was, in fact, her first child, and because she was about fifty when he was born, she thought he would be her last and only. She looked no older than you when I met her first. Or when I met her in Beijing, for that matter.
"She was her patron's third wife, polygamy being a common practice. As you might imagine, despite her status in the household as mother of the heir, her husband's first wife did her best to make life unpleasant for her. After a few years, she allowed the first wife to adopt her son for certain financial compensation, and moved to Kyoto. This was necessary because if she stayed any longer, they would have noticed she was not aging. That pattern repeated itself with variations over the next hundred years, and she had five more sons with various fathers by 1922." He poured water into the tea bowl and began whisking the brew into a froth.
Yukie ate a segment of tangerine, savoring the tartness on her tongue. "Yet my mother was born in 1949. As far as I knew, she was my grandmother's only child."
"So she was—or rather, she was the only child of your grandmother's last marriage, and her only daughter. I kept track of your grandmother after meeting her a second time. When your mother was of marriageable age, I arranged for her to marry your father—who was the descendant of your granddam's first son. Five generations removed made them very distant cousins, well beyond the stigma of incest. In promoting that match, I hoped to recreate the gene complex which produced your grandmother in the first place." He looked out the window of the tea house, at the children dashing around the gardens in the snow.
"Longevity and fertility rarely march together," he commented. "One sacrifices quantity of life for quality of life. I myself fathered only a handful of children, and of them, only one was born sound in both body and mind, my daughter Talia. Or so I thought, for Talia has done a very foolish thing.
"Up until the last few decades of the last century, there was only one way of bringing new human beings into the world, by conceiving them and gestating them in a woman's belly. These days, they can take the healthy ovum of one woman, insert the DNA of another into it, mix it with the seed of a man who may never have met, let alone touched, either one, put the resultant embryo into the womb of a third woman, and then give the child over to a fourth woman who will call herself its mother, and like as not she will hire a fifth to raise it for her.
"Now the technology exists that cuts the human element out of the gestation, and the child conceived in a test tube may spend nine months in it. What might go wrong with that, even if the child be whole and healthy physically?"
Yukie did not see the reason for the abrupt change of subject, but she was not about to be rude. "I would guess, and I guess as a woman and not a scientist, that a gestation chamber differs from a womb. In the womb, a child hears and feels his mother's heartbeat, hears her voice, the voice of his father, if he lives with them. It feels tremors when she walks, it kicks and feels her flesh give, it absorbs myriad sensations from the world around it, filtered through her body. Even a deaf child will still feel sound as physical vibration. Such is the common human experience.
"Without that—would such a child feel any connection to the human race? I would guess that such a child would suffer from an inability to bond to others, an inability to feel empathy, and perhaps be unable to love."
Ra's Al Ghul nodded. "Very well—and accurately—reasoned. Your grandmother was both an excellent wife and mother. She was nurturing by nature."
"I know it well. She left me a letter to be read after she died. In it she said that of all those descended of her, I alone was like her. This is what she meant, I think. You are not my father, but you are, in a sense, my progenitor. To what end was I conceived and born, sir?"
"Not to an end," he said, "but a beginning, shall we say?" He held out the bowl full of tea.
She took it in both hands, admiring the shape of it. It had a silky ivory glaze over roughly shaped clay, haphazardly uneven and imperfect, yet beautiful. "Such an evocative piece," she said. Appreciation of the bowl and other utensils was part of the ceremony. "I shall think of all the distinguished people who must have drunk from it before me." She turned it carefully before she set her lips to the rim and drank deeply.
Lowering the bowl, she wiped the place where her mouth came into contact with it, and passed it back to him. Ordinarily there would have been several other guests, but they were alone there in an ocean of silence. "Yet I am an end," she pointed out, "as I am ungainly, defective and sterile."
"No more ungainly and defective than this bowl, which exists to demonstrate the beauty in imperfection. And, if you are indeed like your grandmother, you may not be sterile after all. You may simply be too young as yet." He drank, and she watched his Adam's Apple bob in his throat.
"Do you think to beg a child of me?" she asked. "Or ask to give me two?" Those she said in English: it was a paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth, part 3.
"I have already a child of yours," he said. "Twenty of them, in fact."
It was good that she was not holding the tea bowl at that moment, because if she did not drop it, she would have been tempted to throw it at his head. "My daughters!"
"Your near-clones," he corrected. "That was a very useful inspiration of yours. Do not fear. I will be most careful with them, and choose their families from among my most trustworthy followers. You yourself signed them away for whoever might ask for them, and I made a most sizeable donation to the clinic. Or, if you so choose, I will give you an opportunity to earn them back."
"But…but I am so tired," she said. "I have worked for twelve years without more than three days off in a row. I want—I need to rest."
He passed her the bowl again, and observed her closely. "I see. Well, I can give you…six months, shall we say? Rest, recuperate, enjoy the company of Mr. Wilson, and your upcoming visit to Japan—and then we shall talk again."
She drank. What more could she do? Yet a thought occurred to her even as she swallowed the bitter brew. "What do you know about Mount Hakkoda?" she asked.
"Mount Hakkoda?" he repeated, and his bewilderment was both evident and convincing. "As I recall…there was an infamous military disaster there, was there not? Why? Is there something I should know about it?"
"No," she said, lowering her eyes. "My grandmother never went there, but she always wanted to. That is all." So Ra's Al Ghul has nothing to do with whatever I might find there. That makes sense—he may have had something to do with my existence, but Grandmother came into the world unbidden by him. "Did she ever tell you anything about her parents or her people?"
"Very little, in all truth," he admitted. "She was born a peasant in what would become Shiga prefecture. She became a courtesan in her teens in order to help support her family. That is all I know."
"Thank you," Yukie murmured. "Through your reminiscences, I feel closer to her in spirit than ever." She took a second tangerine. "Such a beautiful winter day, and how golden this fruit is!"
A/N: Ra's Al Ghul is of course thinking of his grandson, Damian Wayne, when he talks about how foolish Talia has been and refers to a child gestated in a tube.
Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession, and therefore, statistically speaking, we all probably have one somewhere in our family trees. A courtesan occupies a rung somewhere between a geisha, who is an artist with a 'patron' who pays the bills and enjoys her favors, and a high-class call girl. Courtesans were expected to be able to liven up a party with conversation, music, party games, and witty remarks. Many wrote poetry that survives until this day. They also had long-term liaisons rather than turning tricks on a nightly basis.
I have never been to Minneapolis, and got all my details about the garden and tea house from their web site. However, I have read The Way of Tea by Sen No Rikyu. My explanation does not do it justice.
To my reviewers: Thanks so much! Aww, I'm sorry the chapter was so short, fandelivres. This one is a little longer, and the next is already half written. Swordstitcher, I love being accused of brilliance. Thank you. Tev, right back at you, girl!
