Spirit's Chosen (4 page)

Another one replied: “
Shhh!
If she doesn’t know yet, better if the news comes from Masa. It will be kinder that way.”

“Why should
she
have special treatment?” I recognized Suzu’s harsh voice at once. When we were children, she had bullied her way into becoming leader of all our age-mates. We played together, but she resented me for being a chieftain’s daughter and she turned the rest of the girls against me. “She’s been spared enough! She wasn’t here when the wolf clan came; she didn’t have to
see
her father die! I had to
watch
while they took my little sister away with the rest of the slaves, but she gets to be sheltered from it all? Is the pampered little princess too weak to meet the truth? Does she melt in the rain? Is she—?”

A sudden slap rang out, followed by a yelp from Suzu, then silence.

“Don’t hit her!” I called into the gathering shadows. “She hasn’t said anything wrong. I was
not
here when we were attacked. I know that my father and my two eldest brothers died in battle. All I want is to go home to mourn them properly, and to give thanks for the family I have left.”

The people murmured their approval, yet there was a strange note in their voices. I thought I caught a few more whispers—
“soon enough, poor girl … tell her now or … Masa should be the one who …”
—but before I could question anyone, Kaya stepped out of Master Michio’s house and the crowd moved their attention toward her. By the time I introduced her to my clan, night had fallen. Even though the snow had melted, a cold, cutting wind reminded us that we faced a long time until spring. Everyone retreated to their homes, leaving Masa, Kaya, Master Michio, and me behind.

The shaman clicked his tongue and exchanged a look with Kaya. “Not a worthy welcome for you, Lady Badger, but cold always gets the better of curiosity.” He hunched his shoulders. “I could use some warmth myself, now that I’ve placed you in Masa’s hands. We will talk again in the morning.” With that, he ducked into his house.

Masa looked at Kaya. “Lady Badger?” he repeated.

“I’ll explain later,” I said. “Right now—”

“I know; you want to go home. I’ll escort you there.” He started walking the well-remembered path.

I matched him step for step. “Masa, I know the way myself. There’s no need for you to go out of your way like this. Won’t your wife have your evening meal waiting? In this weather, you should eat it while it’s hot.”

“Hot or cold, there’s not that much of it,” Masa replied. “Don’t worry about Fusa. She knows I won’t be back until I see you well settled at home.”

“Why would you have to do that?” I asked.

Kaya answered for him: “Maybe he needs to give your mother some warning. She’s been caught in a landslide of tragedies, so many losses crashing down on her all at once. She shouldn’t have a fresh shock.”

“Yes, exactly, your friend is right!” Masa exclaimed a little too quickly. “That’s why I need to be there when Mother sees you, to make sure it’s not too much for her.”

It was useless to argue with him. I let Masa conduct me home as if I were as much of a stranger there as Kaya. He climbed the carved ladder ahead of me and dashed into the house before I could set foot on the high wooden platform in front of our doorway. As I turned to offer Kaya a hand up, I heard him talking to Yukari, the youngest of Father’s three wives. Her gasp of surprise was loud, but then she immediately dropped her voice to an almost inaudible murmur. I was about to enter the house to find out what was going on when I heard her clearly say, “Let me tell her,” and she stepped out of our doorway onto the platform.

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“Ah! So you overheard.” My younger stepmother sounded beaten down by weariness. “We’ve missed you, dear one. All of us were terribly worried when you didn’t come home that evening. Your father and Aki argued about where to look for—”

“I know all that from Master Michio,” I said evenly. “If there’s nothing more, can we please go inside? This is
Kaya, daughter of Lady Ikumi, who is chieftess and shaman of the Shika clan.” I waved to where my friend stood waiting at the edge of the platform. “We’ve come a long way since daybreak, and it’s getting colder.”

“Oh, Himiko, forgive me!” Yukari exclaimed. “And you, Lady Kaya, I beg your pardon for such rudeness. It’s only that there is something my daughter should know, a warning I must give her before she sees—before she is prepared to see—”

A terrified shriek sounded from within the house. A small shape came running out onto the platform so fast that it would have plunged over the edge if Kaya hadn’t snagged it and pulled it back to safety. It squealed and thrashed in her arms, desperately calling, “Mama! Mama! Save me!”

“Takehiko?” Clouds veiled the moon, leaving me little light by which to see the face of Yukari’s son, one of my three younger brothers.

“May the gods have mercy, not again, not now!” Yukari cried, retrieving her boy from Kaya and scooping him up into her arms. She was weeping.

“It was my fault.” Masa stood in the doorway, flickering firelight at his back. “I should have watched her more closely. I only turned aside for a moment when she grabbed him.”

A shadow rose behind him, and I heard a wail so desolate it was barely human. Had Master Michio failed to perform the proper rites for Father, Aki, and Shoichi? Was our home now haunted by their spirits?

“What did I do to you, my sweet little boy?” the shadow groaned pitifully. Pale hands thrust themselves past Masa,
grasping the air, and a gaunt face with dark smears for eyes and mouth leaned heavily against his side. “All I wanted to do was hold you on my lap and feed you your evening meal. Why did you run away from me, my darling? Tell Mama. I’ll give you whatever you ask. Don’t you leave me too, my precious Noboru!”

With an extraordinary effort, my mother shoved Masa out of the way and lurched through the door. She lunged for Takehiko, crooning my brother Noboru’s name. The child screamed and buried his face against his mother’s shoulder. Yukari drew back without looking, coming perilously close to the platform edge.

“Mama!”
I shouted and threw myself on my mother, wrapping my arms around her from behind and pulling her close. As she struggled to escape me, I spoke urgently in her ear: “Mama, what’s wrong with you? Stop, I beg you, stop, you’re scaring Takehiko. Oh, Mama, please let me help you!”

As if my words held magic, my mother ceased struggling and relaxed completely. “Himiko?” Her voice wavered. Without releasing her from my embrace, I gave her enough freedom to turn and see my face. Even in the darkness, her smile was radiant. “Oh, my darling daughter, I thought I’d lost you too!” She collapsed against me, laughing and sobbing.

I spent a restless first night home. As tired as I was from my journey, I could only catch a few short, troubled periods of sleep. Whenever I felt myself sinking into dreams, a host of demons sprang up to jolt me awake. They leered and
clashed their tusked jaws, chittering like a cloud of bats as they reminded me over and over of all the appalling things I had faced in the short time since I’d returned.

I finally decided to give up any hope of real rest and rose to prepare myself for the new day. I sat up and looked around. Bright sunlight was streaming through the door, and the air was crisp and refreshing, and not as cold as the previous night. I took a deep, hungry breath of it, reveling in the familiar smells of my home, my village, my place in the world.

Still asleep in the bedroll to my right, Kaya snuffled and muttered, then flung herself onto her back with a snore that made me giggle. Mama lay to my left, her hand knotted in the fabric of my bedroll. I took care not to disturb her when I stood up and began the morning chores.

“Himiko?” Yukari’s sleepy voice called out softly as she rolled over to face me. She had stowed her son in the corner of our house that lay as far as possible from where Mama slept and had passed the night curled protectively around him, a human palisade.

“Good morning, Yukari,” I said as cheerily as I could, kneeling beside her. “Shall I make our breakfast?”

“You’d better let me do that,” she said, pushing her way out of the bedroll.

“Why? You’re making me feel like a stranger. Kaya’s our guest, not me.”

“It’s not that, dear one. I welcome having you back to help me with the household duties. It’s just that I want to show you the changes we’ve been forced to make since—”

“Changes?” I recalled the scanty meal Master Michio
had served last night. “Oh. Of course. You don’t want me cooking more food than we can afford.”

“What a smart young lady.” Yukari smiled sadly. “You’ll learn quickly about the way we do things now, and soon I can spend my days at leisure while you take care of all the housework.” It was good to hear her laugh, even if it sounded halfhearted.

I leaned closer. “Yukari, I’ve only been able to get bits and pieces of what happened here. Before Mama wakes up, can you tell me everything?”

She looked confused. “But you said that Master Michio already—”

“Not about the battle. Tell me what happened
here
, within
these
walls, to
this
household.” I clasped her hands. “To us.”

Yukari tilted her head back and stared at the beams of our house as though seeking beloved ghosts in the shadows. “When the Ookami first broke through our gates, I was outside on the platform with Takehiko. We weren’t supposed to be there. Before your father went forth to face the enemy, he ordered us to stay inside, out of sight, but Takehiko refused to be pent up. He kept squirming away from me and dashing out the door, time after time. I think he would have scrambled down the ladder and straight into the heart of the battle if I hadn’t caught him and dragged him back. Finally I gave in and said he could watch things from the porch as long as I was with him. Your mother scolded us both, but stayed where she’d been told, indoors with Emi and their little ones.”

She closed her eyes and her body sagged with a great
weariness. “That was why Takehiko and I were the first to see the moment when our men lost the fight. I pray that my boy didn’t see
too
much of what happened there below, but I know that he must have seen something of the horror: he didn’t resist at all when I swept him up into my arms and held his face against my shoulder. I remember shouting back into the house, ‘They’ve won, the wolf clan’s won, our men are falling! We have to get away! Hurry, hurry, run!’ ” She looked at me again, her pretty face transformed with sorrow. “I don’t know how I managed to race down the ladder while carrying my son. Perhaps the spirits gave me strength. I ducked under the house where we keep the big storage jars and put Takehiko inside an empty one, then hid nearby.”

“Weren’t you afraid that the Ookami would discover him when they came to steal our rice?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I thought of that. Strange, how calm I became when I was trying to protect my boy. It was as if I were planning what to do on an ordinary day—clear away the bedrolls, clean up after breakfast, tidy the house, first this, then that, one, two, three.” Tears slipped down her face. “Before I put Takehiko in the empty jar, I rolled it to where we pile the broken ones and heaped shards over it. I reasoned that shattered jars don’t hold rice, so the Ookami would ignore them. At first he clung to me and balked at going into the jar, but I screeched at him like a crazy”—she glanced at my mother’s sleeping form and guiltily snatched back the word—“like a wild creature. I terrified him into obedience, then found another pile of debris away from the full jars and hid myself. Then we waited for it all to be over.
“That was the hardest part. I had managed to scoop pottery fragments over myself, but knew I wasn’t completely covered. All I could do was lie in the dirt, my face in my arms, my lips moving constantly in silent prayer, and hear our enemies’ shouts of triumph come closer and closer, listen to them pounding up our ladder, to the sound of heavy footsteps on the floorboards above my head, to more of the wolves laughing nearby as they swarmed around the pillars of our house, ordering our own people to trundle out the filled storage jars from underneath. Perhaps it was a blessing that they made others do their dirty work: it meant that the Ookami didn’t come near my hiding place, and if any of our clanfolk caught a glimpse of me, they didn’t betray my presence. The debt I owe them can never be repaid.”

Takehiko whimpered in his sleep. The sound made Yukari lurch toward him as though a rope bound her and the end of it was in his tiny hands. At the last possible moment she stopped herself from seizing him, sat back, and gave me a sheepish look.

“I’m sorry. He suffers from nightmares and I’ve gotten into the habit of rousing him before he can scream himself awake. I often mistake the sounds of ordinary sleep for the onset of those evil dreams, and then we’re both fretful from lack of sleep.”

“I understand,” I said, patting her arm. “Do you think he’ll wake soon? You still haven’t told me—”

“—what happened to the others?” Yukari’s glance darted toward the doorway, as if she were contemplating a fresh flight. Her once-pretty face was wan and strained.
“Himiko—” Her voice rasped. “Himiko, do you hate me too?”

The question took me off guard. “Where did you get such an idea? You and Emi raised me with as much tenderness as Mama ever did, and I love you!” I hugged her fiercely. “Why would I ever hate you?”

She pushed me away and hunched herself over until she seemed as small as a girl. “Because it’s my fault that our family is broken,” she said. “When danger came, I saved my son and myself, but I left everyone else behind.”

“Yukari, you did everything that you could for them,” I reassured her. “You saw the enemy coming and gave them as much warning as you had for yourself. It’s not your responsibility if they didn’t heed you.”

She shook her head violently. “I should have done more. I should have stayed with them. We are a
family
. We must all share the same fate. What’s wrong with me? Do I really believe that I am better than they are? Am I a coward? Did I—?”

“Who said such things to you?” I asked softly. But my heart knew the answer.