The Golden Naginata (45 page)

“Cheeky nun!” exclaimed Chojiro, but he was beginning to sober up a little. His upper lip was sweaty and quivering. His hand moved toward his sword. He exclaimed to his two friends, “
Kiru!
” meaning, “Kill her!”

“Agreed,” said Yojiemon, flashing a smile. Three swords slid from their scabbards. The three men readied themselves to attack. The nun did not draw her sword. She said,

“I came to this place to honor one among the thousand shrines I must visit on my ceaseless pilgrimage through the sixty-six provinces of Naipon. It was my desire to play my shakuhachi for the spirits here tonight, especially for those who died by violence. It would dishonor them if I fought you in their graveyard. Please do not make me fight.”

The bikuni started to bow politely. Chojiro used this chance to try to cut her. She stepped backward so that he missed. She turned quickly and pushed the frightened maid into the cemetery's toolshed. When her back was turned, Chojiro struck again, barely missing her but clipping the shakuhachi, which she had put behind herself in the silk bag. She reeled about and her sword was suddenly in her hand. Chojiro had not seen the swift draw. He stepped backward, suddenly afraid.

The nun looked at the tip of her shakuhachi on the ground and sucked in a long, angry breath. “That was made by my instructor, who taught me to play,” she said. “He is dead now and it cannot be replaced. Your lives are like that, too. There is still time to run away.”

Her arm raised slowly. Moonlight played up and down the length of the sword's polished steel. “Careful,” Takeno whispered as he and Yojiemon attacked together. She stepped sideways, evading Takeno and slicing Yojiemon from shoulder to opposite thigh. His body fell two ways at once. Takeno was quick to attempt vengeance for Yojiemon, but the nun did not even turn to face him. Her sword reached sideways and he stuck himself on the weapon's point.

Chojiro saw his second friend spitted through the throat, saw him stand there making gagging sounds while the nun held her sword motionless, still looking another direction. The spitted Takeno dropped his own sword, reached up to grab at the blade in his voice box. He gurgled and blood gushed from his wide-open mouth. Finally the bikuni pulled the sword out and let the man fall to the ground to die. Chojiro threw his longsword away and fell onto his knees, realizing the terrible error in attacking this woman.

“Please!” he said. “I was led astray by these other men! I will abide by the Way the rest of my life if you will pardon me tonight!” He bowed several times, striking his head on the hard, cold ground.

“A tragedy that you have become a beggar,” said the nun. “I will keep my promise to you!” Her sword swept up and down and the craven samurai's head rolled between grave markers. The nun took a piece of paper from her kimono, wiped the blade of her sword clean, and dropped the paper on one of the corpses. As she sheathed her sword, the woman in the shed came out and fell before her savior, saying over and over, “Thank you! Thank you very much!” The nun picked up the clipped mouthpiece of her shakuhachi and started to walk away, but the woman she left behind ran after her, threw herself down to block the path, bowing again.

“Don't bow to me!” said the nun. “Go home!”

“I am too dishonored!” said the woman, who began to weep horribly. “I disgraced myself and my family by having that affair! Those men found me out and captured me afterward. How can I live? You must complete your duty and kill me, too!”

“Did those men touch you in the woods? No, do not tell me; no one needs to know. Why should you die for it? Once I was a samurai and as such would have killed you for the sake of your own honor. That was a long time ago. Life is too precious; so much so that I will feel compelled to build those three men a shrine to atone for what I have done tonight. But since they are dead, who will know your secret?”

“I will know!” said the woman, no longer crying, but aghast. “How can I live with it?”

“Tell your master and his daughter about your illicit affair. Maybe Lord Sato will have you beaten for it, and your family will disown you for mingling below your class. Then, divested of all privilege, you will be free to marry the peasant boy. You will work hard and your beauty will fade from struggling in the rain and sun. You will have many brats and that will be painful, too. Women suffer a thousand times in life! Do you think yourself so different from the rest? It is boastful to think you deserve to die! Now, run away and see what you can do about yourself. If you follow me again, I may kill you after all!”

The woman did not move as the nun walked away.

The night had not been quite as cold as the dawn. The path began to sparkle with frozen dew. The cold did not appear to perturb the traveler, though certainly it did not make the morning pleasant.

Deciduous trees had lost their leaves, for autumn came early to the mountain region of Kanno, and winter already approached, though in lower domains, maples were bright red and gingko yellow. The leaves that softened her path were already devoid of color, mildewed, rotting.

To the south were high hills, the tops blanketed with snow. There was a stillness in the air broken only rarely by the wind's hissed deathhhh, deathhhh, chilling the bikuni to the marrow. Her hands ached from the cold, so she kept them inside her kimono, next to her flesh.

In a while she stopped, pushed her hands out from the warmth of her kimono's interior, and looked at the ground to one side of the road, seemingly at nothing. Then she knelt near a tiny patch of brittle grass. The grass was white with morning's frost. Beside the stiff, dry stems there reposed a small serpent, coiled upon the ground. It was a white snake with pink eyes. It was scarcely able to move. Doubtless it had misjudged the weather due to the night's relative mildness, and, foraging at dawn, became ensnared by the frost.

The bikuni cupped her hands around the white serpent and lifted it to her hat-shaded face, breathing moist air between her thumbs. The pitiful, small thing coiled more tightly about itself, perhaps understanding that its life was being saved. The bikuni talked to it briefly. “The wrong day to bask in sunshine, Snake. The sky is clear but Amaterasu's light is colder than that of her moon-brother. As you are a white creature, I will take you to a Shinto shrine, where you will be honored.”

Shintoists considered unpigmented creatures of any sort to be holy and supernatural. Though tradition among warrior-widows dictated that such a woman become a nun of a Buddhist sect, in the wanderer's heart she sympathized more strongly with Naipon's older faith, and was eager to save the snake for this reason.

The wandering nun owned little. Besides her two swords, deep bamboo hat, and damaged shakuhachi, she also had a pouch, which hung loose from her neck. It was an alms-bag, in which she was supposed to receive payment for playing shakuhachi at doorways and gates. Though the alms-bag was intended to take a cup of rice or small coin or other donation, the bikuni could not expect to make her living properly until her shakuhachi was repaired or replaced. So she used the alms-bag to hold the snake. She placed the creature in the pouch with utmost care, then pushed it halfway into the fold of her kimono, to assure the small occupant warmth.

Along the way was a Shinto shrine with a
torii
gate facing the ridge highway. The bikuni stood at the road's high point, where the view was remarkable. The pretty, rustic shrine-houses formed a fairly large compound, far enough away that they could all be framed within the tall torii, which was nearer the road. The gate itself was ceremonial rather than functional, inviting rather than a barrier, consisting of two vertical poles thick as logs, and two horizontal beams near the top. There was an old, worn, moss-grown staircase leading sharply downward, the torii being halfway down the slope. There was no fence from this approach, though the shrine grounds were somewhat protected by the natural wall of the mountain's slope. She could see, far across the compound, where two sides of the grounds were protected from desecration by high walls; but there were numerous entries, as though none would really desecrate such a place, and everyone was welcome.

Beyond the torii and at the foot of the ancient staircase, there stood two stone guardians so worn by time that it was impossible to say if they had once been lions, or dogs, or foxes. The fangs of one were broken out; the other was clamp-mouthed. If the guardians had ever been fierce, their current weathered softness had erased all ferocity.

Beyond stair, torii, and featureless knee-tall guardians, the path was winding and indirect. It passed amidst blossomless lily ponds, grottos, carved bridges, and small cascades artfully improved, with numerous tiny streams rushing from high ground to lower. In spring, this place was surely gorgeously ablossom. Even now, mouldering leaves on paths or floating on ponds, naked branches twisting upward, it remained a pleasant sight to soften one's heart. As winter hurried nearer, the grounds would become more and more stark; but there were evergreens both large and dwarfed, well-situated rocks, and stone lanterns on gravel jetties, so that the sanctuary would be beautiful even at the height of winter, when everything would be dulcetly muted by blankets of snow.

Some of the auxiliary buildings were in extreme disrepair. Large areas of the gardens looked wilder than they should. It was not a rich shrine, to be sure, but a haven nonetheless, and the nun liked the looks of it. She said, “A good place for you to live!” and had anyone been close enough to hear her words, it might have seemed she meant herself, though a Buddhist nun living at a Shinto shrine would be unusual. But it was the serpent she addressed. The occupant of her alms-bag moved almost imperceptibly.

A group of children were running through the gardens of the sanctuary. A white elk fled the racket of rowdy, ill-clad youngsters, bounding out of sight. An old man came running out from somewhere, beseeching the children not to bother the holy creatures who lived in the sanctuary, bowing to the scamps several times as though they were his elders. Their response was to run and dance around the old fellow, making a lot of noise, calling him names that were more whimsical than disparaging. Soon he seemed dizzy from trying to catch this one or that one, and staggered like a scrawny, drunken ape, to the heightened amusement of the peasant brats.

The watcher on the upper road lifted the front of her big hat, to better observe the comical business among the shrine-houses and gardens. She descended halfway down the steep stairs, then stood in the frame of the torii gate, her usual solemn expression betraying amusement.

The children had bundles of twigs and bags of leaves tied to their backs, light enough loads that the weight did not slow them down too much to avoid the priest. They were slender children, too hungry-looking and small to be sent out in the mornings to gather fallen limbs and leaves that would be used to kindle charcoal in the firepits of peasants' houses. But such were their duties, young though they were for it, and they obviously wished to turn their hard work into moments of wild freedom—at the old priest's willing expense.

They relieved the harsh tedium of their morning chore by meeting at the shrine, attempting to infuriate the tiny, elderly man. From the bikuni's vantage point, it was clear the priest was not easily annoyed, but was more like one of the children himself, participating in a silly game he could never hope to win. In this way, he brightened the dark lives of poor mountain children, encouraged their laughter, and at the same time eased his own lonesome life.

Eventually the children tired of their sport and ran off in the direction of a village, screaming laughter as they went. The Shintoist stood watching them leave by way of back exits. Then, shaking his shaven head, he went into one of the main shrine-houses and closed the door against the cold.

The bikuni went down the rest of the steps, passing between the gently observing guardians, scabrous with lichen. She sauntered along the winding approach to the buildings. For a moment she stood near a bridge and watched a little cataract tumble over stones and spill into a pool. White fish rose to the surface, then dropped into murky depths. She was surprised to see a pink-eyed turtle with a carapace white as a mound of snow. At first she had thought it a stone, until it looked at her then slid into the chilly pool.

She came in due course to the door of the sanctuary's caretaker. Before she could slap the door, the entry slid open and there stood the wizened Shinto priest in stiff green cloth. He said,

“I saw you on the high road enjoying the nonsense. You are Buddha's woman, I can see; but all pilgrims are welcome here. Please enter. I have already prepared a morning meal. Perhaps you will be kind enough to play your shakuhachi for me before you're on your way.”

The mendicant entered, the odor of the promised meal inviting. She doffed sandals and hat, listening to the sound of baby birds, hatched out of season, peeping in the warm rafters. Before making herself comfortable at the fireplace, she bowed deeply and said in an apologetic tone, “I fear there was trouble in the night and my instrument was damaged in a scuffle. Yet fortune saves me from becoming a true beggar, for I have come upon a thing which should prove valuable to your shrine and gardens.”

She removed the small serpent from her alms-bag. It was livelier for its warmth and wrapped itself tightly about two of the bikuni's fingers. The Shintoist could barely contain himself. The deep creases of his aged face traced his delight. He took the serpent from the bikuni's fingers and let the small thing rest in his two cupped hands. Then he looked up into the rafters and made chirping sounds. Directly, six small white birds fluttered down to the Shinto priest's shoulders and arms. There were three species represented, but the bikuni could not identify them with any certainty, for they lacked familiar colors. They blinked red eyes and turned their heads from side to side to inspect the creature in the priest's hands. He said to them,