The Harsh Cry of the Heron (67 page)

They came upon a huge
beech that had been half uprooted by an earth tremor or a storm. Its leaves had
fallen for year after year to provide a soft bed, and its massive trunk and
roots formed a cave. There was even some mast still edible among the leaves.
The girls lay down, curled together like animals. In her sister’s embrace Maya
felt her body at last begin to relax, as if she were becoming whole again.

She was not sure if
she spoke the words or only thought them.

Hisao loves the cat
and is its master.

Miki stirred slightly
against her. ‘I think I knew that. I felt it outside the house in Hofu: I cut
through the bond between the boy who was calling to you and the cat; and you
changed into your real self.’

‘Moreover, his mother
is always with him. When Hisao is with the cat he can talk to her spirit.’

A small shiver ran
through Miki’s thin frame. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘Yes.’

An owl hooted in the
trees above them, making them both jump, and in the distance a vixen screamed.

‘Were you afraid?’
Miki whispered.

‘No.’ Maya thought
about it. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I feel sorry for her. She was made to die before
her time, and she’s had to watch her son being turned into someone evil’

‘It’s so easy to
become evil,’ Miki said in a small voice.

There was a slight
cool change in the quality of the air, and a light pattering on the ground.

‘It’s raining,’ Maya
said. Under the first drops, a moist smell began to rise from the earth. It
filled her nostrils with both life and decay.

‘Are you running away
from him? As well as going home, I mean.’

‘He is looking for
me, calling to me.’

‘He’s following us?’

Maya did not answer
directly. Her limbs twitched restlessly. ‘I know Father and Shigeko will still
be away, but Mother will protect us, won’t she? Once we are in Hagi, I will
feel safe from him.’

But even as the words
left her lips she was not sure they were true. Part of her feared him and
wanted to flee. Part of her was drawn back to him, longing to be with him and
to walk with him between the worlds.

Am I becoming evil?
Maya recalled the knife grinder, whom she had wounded and robbed without
thinking twice. Father would be angry with me, she thought; she felt guilty and
did not like it, so poured her own anger over it to extinguish it. Father made
me; it is his fault I am how I am. He should not have sent me away. He should
not have left me so much when I was little. He should have told me he had a
son. He should not have had a son!

Miki seemed to have
fallen asleep. Her breathing was quiet and even. Her elbow was digging into
Maya, and Maya shifted slightly. The owl hooted again. Mosquitoes had scented
their sweat and were whining in Maya’s ear. The rain was making her cold.
Almost without thinking she let the cat come, with its thick warm pelt.

Immediately she heard
his voice. Come to me.

And she felt his gaze
turn towards her, as though he could see across the tracts of forest and
through the darkness, right into the cat’s golden eyes, as its head swivelled
in his direction. The cat stretched, flattened its ears, and purred.

Maya struggled to
change back. She opened her mouth, trying to call to Miki.

Miki sat up. ‘What’s
happening?’

Maya felt again the
sword-like strength of Miki’s spirit that came between the cat and its master.

‘You were yowling!’
Miki said.

‘I changed into the
cat without meaning to, and Hisao saw me.’

‘Is he close?’

‘I don’t know, but he
knows where we are. We must leave at once.’

Miki knelt at the
edge of the tree-cave and peered out into the night. ‘I can’t see a thing. It’s
all completely black. It’s raining, too. We can’t go on now.’

‘Will you stay awake?’
Maya said shivering with cold and emotion. ‘There’s something you can do that
comes between him and me and frees me from him.’

‘I don’t know what it
is,’ Miki said. Her voice sounded frail and tired. ‘Or how I do it. The cat
takes so much from me, what is left is sharp and hard.’

Pure was the word
that came to Maya, like the purity of steel after it has been heated, folded
and hammered so many times. She put her arms round Miki and drew her close.
Huddled together, the girls waited for dawn as it crept slowly towards them.

The rain stopped at
daybreak, and the sun rose, making the ground steam and turning the dripping
branches and leaves into frames of gold and fractured rainbows.

Spiders’ webs, bamboo
grass, ferns: everything glittered and shone. Keeping the sun on their right
they continued northwards, on the eastern flank of the mountains, struggling up
and down deep gullies, often having to retrace their steps; occasionally they
caught sight of the high road below, and the river beyond it. It was never
empty, and though they longed to walk for a while on its easy surface, they did
not dare to.

Around midday they
both stopped at the same time, but without speaking, in a small clearing. Ahead
of them there seemed to be a rough path which promised to make the next part of
the day’s journey a little easier. They had not eaten all morning, and they
began to search now in the grass, silently, finding a little more beech mast,
moss, last autumn’s sweet chestnuts already sprouting new shoots, a few
berries, barely ripe. It was hot, even under the canopy of the forest.

‘Let’s rest for a
while,’ Miki said, taking off her sandals and rubbing the soles of her feet in
the damp grass. Her legs were scratched and bleeding, her skin turning dark
copper.

Maya was already
lying on her back, gazing upward into the green and gold pattern of the
shifting leaves, her face dappled with round shadows.

‘I’m starving,’ she
said. ‘We’ve got to get some real food. I wonder if that path leads to a
village.’

The girls dozed for a
while, but hunger woke them. Again, hardly needing to speak to each other, they
re-fastened their sandals and began to follow the path as it wound along the
side of the mountains. Now and then they caught sight of a farmhouse roof far
below them, and thought the path would lead them there, but they came to no
habitation, no village, not even a remote mountain hut or shrine, and the
cultivated fields remained out of reach below them. They walked in silence,
pausing only to grab at the sparse mountain food that offered itself, their
stomachs growling and complaining. The sun passed behind the mountain; the
clouds gathered again in the south. Neither of them wanted to spend another
night in the wild - and all the nights that stretched ahead of them daunted
them - but they did not know what else to do, other than walk on.

The forest and the
mountain were wrapped in twilight; birds were singing the last songs of dusk.
Maya, who was in front on the narrow path, came to a sudden halt.

‘Smoke,’ Miki
whispered.

Maya nodded, and they
went on more cautiously. The smell became stronger, now mixed in painfully with
the odour of roasting meat, a pheasant or a hare, Maya thought, for she had
tasted both in the mountains around Kagemura. The saliva rushed into her mouth.
Through the trees she could make out the shape of a small hut. The fire was lit
in front of it, and a slight figure knelt by it, tending the cooking meat.

Maya could tell from
the outline and the movements that it was a woman, and something about her
seemed very familiar.

Miki breathed in her
ear. ‘It looks like Shizuka!’

Maya caught her
sister’s arm as she was about to run forward. ‘It can’t be. How could she get
here? I’ll go and look.’

Taking on invisibility,
she slipped through the trees and behind the hut. The smell of the food was so
intense she thought she would lose all concentration. She felt for her knife.
There seemed to be no one else around, just the woman, her head covered in a
hood, which she held away from her face with one hand while she turned the meat
on its makeshift spit with the other.

A slight breeze came
through the clearing and sent brown and green feathers swirling in its eddy.
The woman said, without turning her head, ‘You don’t have to use the knife. I’ll
feed you, and your sister.’

The voice was like
Shizuka’s, and yet unlike. Maya thought, If she can see me, she must be from
the Tribe.

‘Are you Muto?’ she
said, and relaxed into visibility.

‘Yes, I am Muto,’ the
woman replied. ‘You can call me Yusetsu.’

It was a name Maya
had never heard before, with a cold and mysterious sound, like the last
lingering traces of snow on the north side of the mountain in spring.

‘What are you doing
here? Did my father send you?’

‘Your father? Takeo?’
She spoke his name with a kind of profound yearning regret, both sweet and
bitter, that sent a shiver down Maya’s spine. She looked at Maya now, but the
hood covered her face, and even in the firelight Maya could not make out her
features.

‘It’s nearly ready,’
Yusetsu said. ‘Call your sister and wash.’

There was a pitcher
of water on the step of the hut. The girls took it in turns to pour it over
each other’s hands and feet. Yusetsu put the charred pheasant on a slab of bark
covered with leaves, placed it on the step and, kneeling beside them, cut it
into pieces with a small knife. The girls ate without speaking, bolting the
meat like animals; it burned lips and tongue. Yusetsu did not eat, but watched
every bite they took, studying their faces and their hands.

When they had had
sucked the last bone, she poured water onto a cloth and wiped their hands,
holding them upwards and tracing the Kikuta mark with her fingers.

Then she showed them
where to go to relieve themselves, and gave them moss to wipe afterwards; her
manner was attentive and matter of fact, as if she were their mother. Later she
lit a lamp from a spill taken from the last of the fire, and they lay down on
the floor of the hut while she continued to stare at them with hungry eyes.

‘So you are Takeo’s
daughters,’ she said quietly. ‘You resemble him. You should have been mine.’

And both the girls,
warm and fed, felt that it would have been better if they had been, though they
still did not know who she was.

She extinguished the
lamp and spread her cloak over them. ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Nothing will harm you
while I am here.’

They slept without
dreaming and woke at daybreak, the rain falling on their faces, the ground damp
beneath them. There was no trace of the hut, or the pitcher, or the woman. Only
the bird’s feathers in the mud and the cold embers of the fire gave any proof
that she had been there.

Miki said, ‘It was a
ghost woman.’

‘Mmm,’ Maya replied,
agreeing.

‘Is it Hisao’s
mother? Yuki?’

‘Who else could it
be?’ Maya began to walk towards the north. Neither of them spoke any more about
her, but the taste of the pheasant lay on their tongues and in their throats.

‘There’s a sort of
path,’ Miki said, catching up with her. ‘Like yesterday.’

A rough track, like a
fox’s road, led away through the undergrowth. They padded along it all day,
resting in the heat of noon in a tangle of hazelnut bushes, walking again until
nightfall as the new moon rose, a slender sickle in the eastern sky.

There was the same
sudden smell of smoke, the mouth-watering fragrance of cooking meat, the woman
tending the fire, her face hidden by her hooded cloak. Behind her was the hut,
the pitcher of water.

‘We’re home,’ Maya
said in the familiar greeting.

‘Welcome home,’ she
replied. ‘Wash your hands; the food is ready.’

‘Is it ghost food?’
Miki asked when the woman brought the meat - it was hare, this time - and cut
it for them.

Yusetsu, whose name
in the world had been Yuki, laughed. ‘All food is ghost food. All food has
already died and gives you its spirit so that you may live.

‘Don’t be afraid,’
she added, when Miki hesitated; Maya was already cramming the meat into her
mouth. ‘I am here to help you.’

‘But what do you want
in return?’ Miki said, still not eating.

‘I am paying back a
favour. I am in your debt. For you cut the bond that tied me to my child.’

‘I did?’

‘You set the cat
free, and at the same time freed me.’

‘If you are freed,
you should move on,’ Miki said in a calm, stern voice that Maya had never heard
before. ‘Your time is over in this world. You must let go, and allow your
spirit to go forward to its next rebirth.’

‘You are wise,’ Yuki
replied. ‘Wiser now, and more powerful, than you will be once you become a
woman. Within a month or two, you and your sister will start bleeding. Being a
woman makes you weak, falling in love destroys you, and having a child puts a
knife against your throat. Never lie with a man; if you never start you will
not miss it. I loved the act of love; when I took your father as my lover I
felt I had entered Heaven. I let him possess me completely. I longed for him
day and night. And I was doing what I was told to do: you are children of the
Tribe; you must know about obedience.’