Shadows on the Moon (13 page)

She whapped me on the side of the head with one thick, callused hand. I staggered, eyes watering.

“Don’t cry about it!” she said, catching me by the back of my kimono before I could fall. She began to tow me forward. “Clean water won’t kill you.”

Before I knew what was happening, I was out of the light and warmth of the kitchen and in the darkness of the predawn morning, my breath clouding up before me. Frost crunched under my bare feet and I yelped.

“Ach, you’ll need sandals, too, or your feet will be tracking dirt everywhere. I will find some for you later. In you go.”

My scream turned into a wet gurgle as my face was shoved down into a barrel full of rainwater.

Cold water rushed up my nostrils and into my mouth. My nose and cheekbones felt as if I had run headfirst into a wall. I flailed and pushed desperately against the hand clamped over the back of my head. I was finally allowed to surface, coughing and snorting, and now the hand that had held me down was holding me up as I stumbled about, blind.

“Anyone would think you’d never washed before in your life. Though, looking at you, maybe you haven’t,” she said.

She dropped a square of rough material over my head and rubbed my face and hair vigorously, scraping my numb skin until it caught fire. I made helpless squeaks of protest, which were ignored.

“Now listen, little Rin,” the woman said, still rubbing my hair. “I am Madarame Aya-san and I am your boss now. We drudges live in the kitchen — which no one else does — so it’s our place and we take care of it. Your job is to do what I tell you. I do what Chika-san tells me, and Chika-san does what Sumiko-sama tells her. Now Sumiko-sama takes her orders from Terayama-sama — which means if you give me any trouble, it is the next best thing to trying to disobey the lord. And what happens if you disobey a lord? You get your hands chopped off. Understand?”

For a second I tried to follow this dizzying line of logic, but my teeth were chattering too hard. I nodded anyway. It made as much sense as anything else in the insanity which had taken over my world.

“You make sure you don’t give me trouble, and I’ll make sure you get enough to eat and no beatings if I can help it. Sound fair?”

I nodded again, wrapping my arms around myself as she pushed me back into the kitchen, where another girl stood waiting.

“This is Yuki, Rin,” Aya said. “Rin is simple but nice enough. I want this floor clean by the time the cooks arrive. Show her how to go about it.”

Aya bustled away without waiting for a reply, and Yuki looked me over. I did the same. The other girl was about twenty, much taller than me, and had brown, muscular arms that were revealed by the kilted-up sleeves of her kimono. Her face was probably pretty, except that she was looking at me with such disgust, it made me want to spit like a cat. I forced my eyes down again.

“I hate simpletons,” she said. “Especially filthy ones. Get to work and stay out of my way.” She thrust a brush into my hand and dumped a wooden pail of water at my feet, causing it to slop over and drench my toes. She was gone before I could say a word.

Shaken and bewildered, I stood there for a moment. Then I remembered what Aya had said about clean floors. I knelt down and dipped the brush into the puddle of soapy water Yuki had left and began to scrub. I had seen women doing this back at home — my old home — before everything changed and went so wrong.

Dip, slosh, scrub, scrape, slide back and pull the bucket, then dip again. In seconds my kimono was soaked with gray suds and within minutes my hands were sore. I kept my eyes down, only pausing if feet walked in front of me and got in the way of my brush. Scrub, scrub, scrub until you hit the wall and then shuffle around and go again.

“You can stop now.”

I blinked and looked up through the sweaty clumps of my hair.

Aya was standing above me. “You don’t need to scrub it twice. It’s time to eat, before the cooks get here. Don’t your shoulders hurt by now? Up you get.”

She grabbed my wrists in her strong, rough hands and pulled me to my feet. I let out an involuntary grunt of pain as my shoulders, neck, and back suddenly began to throb with pain. My knees let out sharp cracks as they straightened.

She tutted and took the scrub brush away from me, then led me across the kitchen to where Youta and Yuki were sitting by the stove. She sat. Hesitantly I lowered myself to the ground beside her. My knees cracked again and Aya shook her head.

“It’s good to work hard, but you should stop every now and again to stretch. I won’t beat you for it.”

“Why bother talking to her?” Yuki said. “She won’t remember. She’s a
baka-yarou.
”

Youta flinched. I said nothing. Rin had nothing to say. Rin was
slow
and stupid.

“That’s enough out of you,” Aya said, her face suddenly stern. “There is enough cruelty in the world without adding to it for no reason, Yuki.”

Yuki shut her mouth with a snap and looked away.

Aya whipped the cloth off a large plate, revealing
onigiri
— rice balls — wrapped with dried seaweed and filled with pickled plums.

“Eat up, now,” she said, and before the words had left her mouth, everyone dived on the plate. Youta grabbed two
onigiri
and gave one to me, probably realizing I would not be fast enough without help. I took it and wolfed it down. I only managed to eat one more before they were all gone. I could have eaten twice as many.

“So,” Yuki said, wiping stray bits of rice from her lips, “does anyone know what that was about last night? I heard that Suzume-sama went mad and ran off screaming into the night. She just disappeared.”

I forced myself to be still, letting a cloak of disinterest fall gently into place over my face. Aya said, “She’s certainly run off, anyway, or else why would they have been searching? Though why they came bothering us in here, I don’t know.”

Youta’s sigh of relief was audible, but I was careful not to look in his direction. The drudges spoke about Terayama-san — and about me — in the same way that Mai and Isane gossiped about the goings-on at the Moon Palace, as if the people concerned were players on a stage. Characters in a story. Not real people. Certainly not people that they would ever meet, or who would be working and eating beside them.

Or so I thought — until I realized that Yuki was staring at my arms. I looked down at them in a panic. I had thought that the dirt would be enough to conceal the unusual whiteness of the skin, but what if it wasn’t?

Did I dare try to pull a shadow-weaving over them with Yuki looking?

“You have a lot of scars,” she said suddenly.

Oh. I looked at my arms again, and saw that, without the illusion of smooth, fine skin that normally hid them, my scars were very obvious. No one knew Suzume-sama had scars.

Youta cleared his throat. “Rin’s father is . . . a harsh man. He was not always patient with her.”

A flash of sympathy lit Yuki’s eyes. Then she jerked her shoulder, her face closing up again. “Plenty of fathers like that in the world. At least no one here will cut her up.”

Youta smiled at her. “That is right. We will take care of her, won’t we?”

The door at the back of the kitchen opened and a crowd of men in white kimonos and white cloth hats began to pour in.

“Up, girls,” Aya said, groaning as she pushed herself to her feet. “Time for the real work.”

The real work was assisting the cooks as the kitchen became a place of shouting and sizzling, chopping and bubbling, and great clouds of steam and smoke that carried scents which made my stomach cramp with yearning.

The cooks themselves did all the skillful work, their hands wielding knives as delicately as I had once held a pen. We drudges were expected to do any peeling, gutting, or rough chopping, to fetch and carry firewood, to haul in the huge cuts of meat or the armfuls of vegetables or sacks of rice. Most of all, we kept the kitchen clean, scouring out the used pots and dishes as they were discarded, then wiping and stacking them, or gathering up the debris and scrubbing everything down.

By the end of that first back-aching day, it was known that Rin could not be trusted with anything more than the most basic of tasks. If someone handed me one of the huge white daikon radishes and asked me to peel and chop it, their dish would be complete — without radish — before I had even managed to get the tough skin off the thing. If I was given a pile of plates to wash, I would drop or chip half of them. If I was asked to carefully scoop an even portion of boiled rice into a series of small bowls, I would get the rice everywhere from my hair to the floor, but little would make it into the rice bowls.

I was glad when Aya threw up her hands and confined me to sweeping, carrying, hauling water and tipping out rubbish, even if they were the most physically demanding jobs. It suited Rin’s personality, and made my fumbling incompetence easier to hide. Some things could be explained by Rin’s supposed slowness, but I did not want anyone to notice that the hardworking peasant girl did not even know how to shell peas. Much better to pretend to be clumsier than I actually was and to be banished from touching the food at all.

“One of you take that pail of garbage and tip it out,” Aya said, yawning. “And be quiet on your way back in. I’m going to sleep.”

Yuki looked at me. I groaned quietly and weaved to my feet. I was so tired that the ground seemed to quiver as I went to pick up the full bucket.

Outside, night had long since fallen, and it was cold. After the hot and sweaty day, I welcomed the chill on my skin, even if it made my joints ache all the more. Distantly I was aware that I needed a bath and to wash my hair, not to mention some clean clothes, but I was too exhausted to feel as miserable as I knew I should.

I reached for the wooden gate of the rubbish dump. It was hidden behind a stand of coniferous trees so that it would not offend the eyes of visitors to the garden. The piney scent of the needles could not quite disguise the stink of rotting food and worse things that rose from the trench inside the fenced-off area. A day ago, I had had no idea that such a place even existed.

Standing well back, I tipped the pail out over the trench, making sure to shake it well so that nothing stuck to the bottom. Aya had whacked me on the back of the head earlier in the day for that.

I jumped violently when I heard a quiet rustle — something was moving in the trench. I started to back away, then went limp with relief when I saw the trio of cats emerge to pick over my offering of scraps. They were skinny, rough-looking things. Strays.

Like me.

I left them to their feast and turned to walk back to the kitchen, slamming the gate behind me.

From my place under the trees, I could see the whole house, lamplight shining golden through the wood and paper screens at the windows. The shadows cast onto the paper gave me a glimpse of what was happening in each room, like a real-life version of the shadow theater I had seen once as a child.

In one room, a man reached up, and the room brightened. He was lighting lamps. In another, a woman stood with her back to me, and I could not see what she was doing, until she turned and stepped aside, revealing a vase with flowers that made long streaks of shadow on the screen. The woman nodded and picked the vase up. Her shadow grew larger and then disappeared as she walked away.

On the floor above, another female form stood in profile to me, her head bent. She was very close to the screen, and I could see the bony points of her elbows as she hugged her own chest. The pose was one of utter loneliness, of terrible sorrow.

A large male shadow approached her and held out his arms. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman went to him. He gathered her up and embraced her.

It was the window of my mother’s room.

A strange, high-pitched noise filled the air around me. A kind of keening, like some little animal caught in a trap. Dying.

It wasn’t until my knees buckled that I realized the noise was coming from me.

My ribs seemed to clench around my lungs. I could not breathe. Sobs piled up in my chest like stones, unable to escape. I knelt there in the dark, in the dirt, alone.

I pulled at my kimono sleeve until my arm was exposed, and with dirty, ragged fingernails, ripped open my skin.

The days turned into weeks, the weeks into a month and then another. It was frightening how quickly time slipped away from me. It was frightening how, most days, I could not even bring myself to care.

I was a healthy young woman, but I had never in my life done anything like work. I had never risen before dawn and toiled until after the sun set again, and then tried to sleep on a blanket spread on a hard tiled floor. I had never gone without rest when I longed for it, or forced my muscles to keep moving when they cramped and tore. The drudgery wore me down until I had no room in my head for anything but an inchoate longing for respite; when I did find the energy to think about something other than food or my aching back, I did not enjoy it.

Everyone was always exclaiming over how clumsy I was. Hardly a day went past without a new bandage appearing on some part of my body. The most common injury was a burn, because they were so easy to inflict, and no one ever looked askance at a burn on a kitchen worker’s arm, even if she had had no reason to be near the fire. My favorite was still cutting, though. Nothing eased the crushing pressure of sorrow and anger in my chest like the sharp, bright spill of blood. I made sure that the cuts were jagged and irregular and looked as accidental as possible. I avoided injuring my hands and lower arms when I could, because wounds there took so much longer to heal.