The Harsh Cry of the Heron (53 page)

Now everyone fell
silent. He felt all eyes were on him, though he looked at no one. He tasted
defeat in his throat and belly, bitter, galling. Saga and Shigeko must at least
be equal. Two draws and one win - the victory would go to Saga.

But suddenly, before
his eyes, as if continuing the dream, the white sand of the arena began to
blossom red. The dog was bleeding terribly, from both mouth and anus. People
exclaimed in shock. The dog arched its back, shook its head, scattering blood
in an arc across the sand, yelped once, and died.

Saga’s strength was
too great, Takeo thought. He could not temper his male force: he could slow the
arrow, but could not lessen its power. The two earlier blows had destroyed the
dog’s internal organs and killed it.

He heard the shouts
and cheering as if from a great distance. He rose slowly to his feet, gazing
towards the end of the arena, where the Emperor sat behind the bamboo screen.
The contest had ended in a draw: the decision was now the Emperor’s. Slowly the
crowd fell silent. The contestants waited, motionless, the red team on the
eastern side, the white team on the western, the long shadows of the horses’
legs stretching right across the arena. Dogs still barked from the enclosure,
but there was no other sound.

Takeo realized that
during the course of the contest people had drawn away from him, not wanting to
witness his humiliation too closely, or to share in his inauspicious fate. Now
he waited alone to hear the outcome.

Whispering came from
behind the screen, but he deliberately closed his ears to it. Only when the
minister appeared and he saw the official glance first towards Shigeko, and
then, more nervously, at Saga, did he feel the first glimmer of hope.

‘Since Lady Maruyama’s
team shed no blood, the Emperor awards the victory to the white team!’

Takeo dropped to his
knees and prostrated himself. The crowd shouted in approval. When he sat up he
saw that suddenly the space around him had filled as people rushed to
congratulate him, to be close to him. As the news spread throughout the arena
and beyond, the singing started again.

Lord Otori has
appeared in the capital;

His horses stir up
our land.

His daughter won a
great victory;

Lady Maruyama shed no
blood.

The sand is white.
The dogs are white.

The white riders
prevail.

The Three Countries
live in peace;

So will all the Eight
Islands!

Takeo looked towards
Saga, and saw the warlord was gazing back at him. Their eyes met, and Saga
inclined his head in recognition of the victory.

It is not what he
expected, Takeo thought, and remembered Minoru’s words. He expected to remove
me without fighting, but he has failed. He will grasp at any excuse not to keep
his word.

Lord Saga had
arranged a great feast to celebrate his anticipated victory; the feast took
place as planned, but unlike the unfeigned delight in the streets of the city,
the rejoicing was not altogether sincere. Courtesy prevailed, however, and Saga
was generous in his compliments to Lady Maruyama, making it clear that he now
desired the marriage more than ever.

‘We will be allies,
and you will be my father-in-law,’ he said, laughing with forced jollity. ‘Though
I believe I am your senior by a few years.’

‘It will be my great
pleasure to call you son,’ Takeo said, with a slight jolt of surprise as the
word formed in his mouth. ‘But we must delay announcing the betrothal until my
daughter has sought the opinion of her clan. Including her mother.’ He glanced
at Lord Kono and wondered what the nobleman’s true reaction was, beneath the
polite exterior: what message would he send to Zenko about the contest’s
outcome, and what was Zenko doing right now?

The feast continued
until late into the night: the moon had set and the stars were huge, their
light made diffuse and hazy by the moisture in the air.

‘I must ask you all
to delay sleep a little longer,’ Takeo said when they returned to their
residence, and led Shigeko, Gemba and Hiroshi into the most secluded room of
the house. All the doors stood open; water trickled in the garden and
occasionally a mosquito whined. Minoru was summoned.

‘Father, what is
wrong?’ Shigeko questioned urgently. ‘You have had bad news from home - is it
Mother? The baby?’

‘Minoru has something
to read to you,’ he replied, and indicated that the scribe should begin.

He read without
emotion, in his usual dry manner, but they were no less riven by the news.
Shigeko wept openly. Hiroshi sat, face drained of colour, as if he had been hit
in the chest and winded. Gemba sniffed loudly and said, ‘You have kept this to
yourself all day?’

‘I did not want
anything to distract you. I did not expect you to win. How can I thank you all?
You were magnificent!’ Takeo spoke with tears of emotion in his eyes.

‘Luckily the Emperor
was sufficiently impressed by you not to want to risk offending the gods by
deciding against you. Everything has combined to convince him that you have the
blessing of Heaven.’

‘I thought him
sufficiently worldly to see in me a check on Saga’s power,’ Takeo replied.

‘That too,’ Gemba
agreed. ‘Of course, he is a divine being - but he is no different from any of
us, motivated by a mixture of idealism, pragmatism, self-preservation and good
intentions!’

‘Your victory has
bought us his favour,’ Takeo said. ‘But Taku’s death means we should return as
soon as possible. Zenko must be dealt with now.’

‘Yes, I feel it is
time to return,’ Gemba said. ‘Not only because of Taku, but to forestall any
further unravelling. There is something else amiss.’

‘Something to do with
Maya?’ Shigeko asked, fear in her voice.

‘Possibly,’ Gemba
replied, but would say no more.

‘Hiroshi,’ Takeo
said. ‘You have lost your closest friend  ...  I am deeply sorry.’

‘I am trying to
suppress my desire for revenge.’ Hiroshi’s voice was harsh. ‘All I want is
Zenko’s death, as well as that of Kikuta Akio and his son. My instinct is to
leave at once and hunt them down - but all my training in the Way of the Houou
has been to refrain from violence. Yet how else do we deal with these
murderers?’

‘We will hunt them
down,’ Takeo replied. ‘But it will be done with justice, and they will be
executed according to law. I have been recognized by the Emperor, my rule
confirmed by His Divine Majesty. Zenko no longer has any legal grounds for
challenging me. If he does not genuinely submit, we will defeat him in battle
and he will take his own life. Akio will be hanged like the common criminal he
is. But we must leave swiftly.’

‘Father,’ Shigeko
said. ‘I know you are right. But will a hasty departure not offend Lord Saga and
the Emperor? And, to tell you the truth, I am concerned about the kirin. Her
good health is essential to your continued good standing. She will fret if we
all leave so suddenly. I had hoped to see her settled before we left ...  Maybe
I should stay here with her?’

‘No, I will not leave
you in Saga’s hands,’ he said with a vehemence that surprised them all. ‘Am I
to surrender all my daughters to my enemies? We have given the kirin to the
Emperor. He and his court are responsible for her. We must leave before the end
of the week: we will have the waxing moon to travel with.’

‘We will be riding
into the rain, and may not see the moon at all,’ Hiroshi murmured.

Takeo turned to
Gemba. ‘Gemba, you have proved yourself all-knowing so far. Will Heaven
continue to favour us by delaying the plum rains?’

‘We’ll see what we
can do,’ Gemba promised, smiling through his tears.

In the year since
Takeo had asked her to take over the leadership of the Tribe, Muto Shizuka had travelled
widely through the Three Countries, visiting the hidden villages in the
mountains and the merchant houses in the cities where her relatives ran their
varied and multilayered businesses of brewing rice wine, fermenting soybean
products, moneylending and, to a lesser extent, spying, protectionism and
different forms of persuasion. The ancient hierarchies of the Tribe still
persisted, with their vertical structure and their traditional family
loyalties, which meant that even among themselves the Tribe kept their secrets
and often went their own way. Shizuka was usually greeted with courtesy and
deference, yet she was aware that there was a certain surprise, even
resentment, at her new position: if Zenko had supported her it might have been
different; but she knew that while he lived any dissatisfaction among the Muto
family would be fomented into defiance. For that reason she felt obliged to
maintain her contacts with all her relatives, to try to keep them loyal to her,
to side with her against her eldest son.

She herself knew all
too well how secrets might be kept and disobedience flourish within the Tribe;
for, many years ago, she had revealed the workings of the Tribe to Lord
Shigeru, and his meticulous records had enabled Takeo to outwit and control
them. Kenji had known of her acts, and had chosen to overlook what could only
be described as treachery, but she wondered, from time to time, who else might
have suspected her. People in the Tribe had long memories, and were both
patient and unrelenting when it came to revenge.

A month after Kaede’s
child was born, and shortly after Takeo had left for Miyako, Shizuka made
preparations, to set out again, first to Yamagata and then to Kagemura in the
mountains behind Yamagata, and on to Hofu.

‘Both Kaede and the
little boy seem so healthy, I feel I can go before the plum rains,’ she said to
Ishida. ‘You are here to take care of them; you will not travel this year while
Fumio is away.’

‘The child is very
strong,’ Ishida agreed. ‘Of course, you can never tell with infants: they often
have only a tenuous grasp on life, and slip away unexpectedly. But this little
boy seems like a fighter.’

‘He is a true
warrior,’ Shizuka said. ‘Kaede adores him!’

‘I’ve never seen a
mother so besotted with her own child,’ Ishida admitted.

Kaede could hardly
bear to be parted from the infant. She nursed him herself, which she had not
done with her other children. Shizuka watched them with a mixture of envy and
pity: the child’s fierce concentration on sucking, the mother’s equally intense
protectiveness.

‘What will his name
be?’ she said.

‘We have not yet
decided,’ Kaede replied. ‘Takeo fancies Shigeru, but the name has unhappy
associations, and we already have Shigeko. Perhaps another of the Otori names,
Takeshi, Takeyoshi. But he will not be named until he is two years old. So I
call him my little lion.’

Shizuka remembered
how she had adored her own sons when they were children, reflecting on the
disappointment and anxiety they caused her now.

When she had married
Ishida, she had hoped for another child, a girl, but the years had passed and
she had not conceived again. Now she hardly bled; her chances were nearly over:
and indeed she no longer wanted her hopes to be fulfilled. Ishida had no
children from his former marriage: his wife had died many years ago; though he
had wanted to marry again, being excessively fond of women, no one had ever
been acceptable to Lord Fujiwara. He was as amorous and kind as ever, and, as
Shizuka had told Takeo, she would have been quite content to live quietly with
him in Hagi and continue to be Kaede’s companion. But she had agreed to become
the head of the Muto family, and therefore the nominal leader of the Tribe, and
now the task was consuming her energy and time. It also meant that there were
numerous matters she could not discuss with Ishida: she loved her husband, and
he had many qualities that she admired, but discretion was not one of them. He
talked too freely about everything that interested him, and had little concept
of public and private subjects: he had enormous curiosity about the world and
its creatures, humans and animals, plants and rocks and minerals, and would
discuss his latest discoveries and theories with everyone he met. Rice wine
loosened his tongue even further, and he invariably forgot what he had been
babbling about the night before. He liked all the pleasures of peace - the
plentiful food, his freedom to travel, interaction with the foreigners, the
wonderful curiosities they brought from the far side of the world - to such an
extent that he did not want to face the fact that peace was always under
threat, that not everyone was to be trusted, that enemies might exist even
within his own family circle.

So Shizuka did not
confide in him her concerns about Taku and Zenko, and Ishida himself had almost
forgotten the night in Hofu when he had drunkenly revealed to Zenko, Hana and
Lord Kono his theories on the power of the human mind, and the self-fulfilling
effects of belief in prophecies, and how these applied to Takeo.

Sunaomi and Chikara
were sad at her departure, but their mother, Hana, was expected in Hagi before
the end of the month, and they were kept too busy with their education and
training to miss their grandmother. Since they had been in Hagi, Shizuka had
watched them closely for any sign of developing Tribe skills, but the boys
seemed like normal warriors’ sons, no different from the boys of their own age
with whom they trained, competed and squabbled.