The Shadow and the Star (15 page)

The flowers and stones were not impossible: Samuel learned to climb and jump; he walked with Dojun to Diamond Head on Saturdays, ten miles there and back, no stopping, and Dojun merely accepted the hard-won prizes with a nod and floated them in water in a black bowl above Samuel's place at the dinner table. When dinner was over, Samuel carried the bowl to his room and lay on his bed, staring down into the bowl on the floor, studying it, wondering what it was about the object that made Dojun choose it.

The feather eluded him. He studied the bird and the nest for hours, watched what it ate and where it landed. He talked to some Hawaiians and learned to build a trap with a net and sticky sap spread on the branches. He trapped the sparrow, and took a feather from its tail before he let it go.

Dojun accepted the feather silently. In halting Japanese, Samuel explained the trap, pointed out the clever sticky snare and how he'd chosen where to hide it. Dojun listened without speaking.

At dinner, there was no black bowl and feather.

Samuel felt ashamed, not knowing how or why he'd failed. He spent long afternoons on the lanai, staring at the sparrow as it hopped along the eave. He climbed the nearest tree and sat still, unblinking, watching the tiny bird flit among the thin branches far out of his reach.

One day Master Robert came into Samuel's room and caught Samuel practicing with a pincushion, trying to move with the flash of speed it would take to capture the unhampered bird in his hand. Robert thought it was play; he was six years old and rather foolish to Samuel's mind�even little Kai, at three, could be quiet and thoughtful sometimes, but Robert never stopped wriggling or talking or crying except when he was asleep.

Samuel made it into a game for him, tying a string to the cushion, but Robert was so impatient and clumsy that he could never once jerk the target away before Samuel could capture it with his hand. Even if Samuel closed his eyes, he could outstrip Robert, over and over, until the younger boy began to cry, his wails of frustration rising to greater frenzy with each defeat.

Lady Tess came, standing in the doorway with a vexed look. Robert ran to her, burying his face in her skirts, crying so that he couldn't even speak over his hiccupping sobs.

Samuel stood up as she hugged her son. "I'm sorry!" he said quickly. "I was teasing him. I'm sorry."

He waited while she comforted Robert, a sick uncertainty curling in his stomach, making his breath seem thick and achy in his chest. She patted the boy's back and let him cry out his baby frustration against her neck. When she stood up, Samuel took a step backward, watching her face, dreading to see a disapproving frown. His secret fear was that she wouldn't want him anymore, that she would discover that she didn't like him after all, and his room and his place and his anchor would disappear. He didn't know where he would go or what he would do if she made him leave, but he only cared that she wanted him to stay.

"What a very silly pair of boys," she said, and held out her hand to Samuel. "Come here and tell me what monstrous torment you've caused this little wretch."

A huge relief swept him at her smile. He went forward, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he suddenly did what he hadn't done in three years—he gripped her skirt in his fist and leaned into her embrace, holding tight to the single steadfast kinship he'd had in his life. "I'm sorry," he whispered again. "I'm sorry."

She stroked his hair. Suddenly Robert wriggled from her arm, already out of sniffles and on to another topic of interest. Lady Tess let him go and stood with her hold tight around Samuel. The sound of Robert's bare feet on the floor receded as he trotted off down the hall.

Silence fell around them. Samuel kept his fierce grip. She rubbed his hair between her fingers and squeezed him hard. "I love you, Sammy," she said softly. "You're safe here with me."

She was the only one who could call him by that old and hated name; the only one who knew it. No one, not Dojun, not even Lord Gryphon, understood what Samuel's life had been the way that she understood. She had been there. She had seen it. And still she said she loved him, and he wished that he could stand here in this secure and protected place and hold on to her for the rest of time.

When he looked at her face, she was wiping her fingers across her eyes. "There now," she said, in a muffled voice. "You see that Robert is not entirely heartbroken. But I shouldn't think you'd find it very rewarding to tease him anymore, unless you have a fondness for passionate scenes."

"No, ma'am," he said obediently, not letting go.

She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. "Smile for me, Samuel. You almost never smile."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and made a curve with his mouth.

She held the handkerchief and shook her head. "Good!" she said cheerfully.

He broke away from her and went to his koa-wood chest of drawers. He dug down beneath his clean shirts and found the sharp, pockmarked brown stone with the tiny sparkling shards of green in it that he'd brought from the cliff at Diamond Head. "This is for you," he said, and held it out in his cupped hand.

She took the stone, and looked at it, and rolled it over with her fingers, touching it gently, as if it were something precious. "Thank you," she said. "It's beautiful."

He did smile, then. It wasn't beautiful, not really, but he felt embarrassed and pleased anyway, and sat down on the floor, toying with the string on the pincushion, tugging it in little jerks across the slick wood. He heard her blow her nose again.

"You're still helping Dojun," she said. "You remember what Gryf told you, Samuel—you don't have to do that. You mustn't think you have to work."

"Yes, ma'am." He flicked the pincushion back and forth. "I remember."

"As long as your schoolwork is as good as it's been, all you have to do is play."

"I like to work," he said to the floor between his crossed legs. "I want to do it."

She stood silently behind him. He felt her looking at him, felt all hot and agitated, but he only sat still, as still as if he were in the tree with the bird, and stared down at the floor.

"All right," Lady Tess said finally, in a reluctant voice. "If you truly like it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "I do."

She stood there for another moment more, and then he heard her soft sigh, and the sound of her skirts rustle as she went away.

That afternoon, he tried to catch the bird. He waited in the tree, dived to grab the sparrow when it came, and fell out of the branches. Dojun found him woozy and helpless at the root of the tree. Samuel vaguely remembered that the butler put his bare foot on Samuel's armpit and pulled on his arm, and it hurt awfully for an instant before he went blank. He woke up in bed, and stayed there for a week recovering from a dislocated shoulder and concussion.

He was afraid Dojun was disgusted with him. For a long time after that, he could not find the courage to speak to the Japanese butler. When Dojun came near, Samuel faded away, making himself unnoticeable: quiet and still and humble the way a mouse would hide in shadows. Until one day Dojun came upon him unexpectedly, passing through the empty dining room. Samuel heard his step; he had time only to move behind the door and freeze into invisibility. The butler laid the table setting, moving around the room with small chinks and clinks of silverware.

"Good at that, aren't you?" he said in Japanese as he leaned over to place a fork. "
Kyojitsu
is difficult to learn, and already you know how to do it."

Samuel knew Dojun must be speaking to him: no one else had any Japanese at all. Samuel didn't know the word
kyojitsu
, and he was pretty sure Dojun knew he didn't.

"Foolish people use only one kind of disguise." Dojun went on setting the table. "
Shin
is what you are in your mind. What you are in your heart.
Itsuwaru
is pretending to be what you're not. Together, they can be
kyojitsu
. It's too easy to be a tiger all the time. If you're a tiger, you do things the way a tiger does, you move the way a tiger moves, you use only set form, the
kata
, of the tiger. You meet a bigger tiger, and then what? You're in trouble. Better to know the
kata
of a mouse, too. Better to know how to be small and silent. Maybe then the big tiger won't see you, and you live to be a tiger again."

Samuel listened, startled to hear Dojun speak of a mouse as if he'd seen into Samuel's head. But he didn't sound angry or scornful about it; he sounded as if it were a good thing. Slowly, Samuel took a breath and stepped out from behind the door.

Dojun just went on laying out the silver.

After a moment, Samuel bowed respectfully the way Dojun had taught him. "I can't get the feather," he said in Japanese. "I'm ashamed, Dojun-san."

Dojun straightened up from the table and looked at him. The very foreignness of his features was reassuring. Samuel had never known anyone like Dojun: he never looked mad or hungry or eager. The enigmatic Oriental eyes made Samuel feel safe and curious at the same time.

"Why ashamed?" Dojun said blandly. "Got the feather, first time you tried, with the trap."

Samuel hesitated. "I thought—it was wrong. You didn't put it in the bowl."

"You think too much. How do you know what's right or wrong? You're too young to know. You want too much. You want a feather in a bowl. So what do you do? You fall on your head to get it. Tonight I'll put a feather in a bowl for you. Will that make you happy?"

Samuel frowned down at his feet. "No, Dojun-san."

"You're hard to please."

He looked up. "I think
you're
hard to please," he said in English, and then backed up a step and hung on to the doorknob, daunted by his own effrontery.

Dojun made a careless motion with his hand. "No can please all anybody," he grunted, dropping into pidgin, as if disdaining Samuel's clumsy Japanese. "Gotta savvy when use
tiger-
kata
, when use
mouse-kata
, Samua-kun. Gotta savvy here." He struck his fist just below his navel. "What Dojun want ain't no big thing when Samua-kun fall out from tree. Big thing how hard ground,
ne
?"

Samuel leaned against the door, rubbing his hand up and down the wood.

"How hard been, Samua-chan?" Dojun asked.

"Pretty hard," Samuel said, keeping his head down.

Dojun began setting out plates. He spoke in Japanese again. "What if I teach you how to roll and break your fall?" he asked. "This is called
taihenjutsu ukemi
. I could teach you that. But I ask myself, what good will it do this boy who wants so much? I can't put a fall into a bowl of water. I can't give him what he seems to want. If he learns to fall, that's all he gets. He only learns how to turn hard ground into soft. What is that to a boy who wants feathers in bowls of water?"

"It wasn't just the feather in a bowl," Samuel objected plaintively in English. "You don't understand."

"Stupid fellow, me. Real stupid."

"I don't think that!"

"More smart you then, eh?"

Samuel twisted the doorknob, frustrated and confused. "I don't know what you want!"

Dojun stopped and looked at him. He smiled.

Samuel's shoulders sank. He watched Dojun go back to the plates, waited until they were all in place and the butler was almost ready to leave the room.

"Dojun-san," he said in a whisper of Japanese. "Will you teach me how to fall?"

"This Saturday," Dojun said, "come with me again to the diamond mountain."