So, for the past week she had hidden as best she could, doing her tasks and taking the long walk up to the Godspath, always looking over her shoulder.
“They say I offended the enlightened ones,” she said now, coming beside him on the fence. The old man sighed.
“If anything, it’sthemthat done it,” he said. “Don’t you worry over that. Those people from the capital, they’ll say you offended any god if it’d get them what they want. The Ogami’in rules these lands, not the monks-of-the-west. Ah, but she’s in a bind. Can’t risk damaging the treaty…”
The treaty, Rui thought. The famous pact that Ogami’in and her ancestors had made, the one that allowed them to rule in Kitano, while the Ten’in emperors reigned from their royal city of Saikyo at the center of the realm. The Kitanohara clan had fought and bled for their freedom for hundreds of years, and now, in exchange for fealty and gold, the Ogami’in and her family had done what no others ever had: scraped out control of their own country and the province of the east.
“Uncle,” asked Rui. “What do I do, if those monks don’t go away?”
He waved a hand. “Don’t you worry over them. They don’t care about us. To those people, we’re just blades of grass. Capital monks, capital lords? No. It’ll all blow over soon enough.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” The monks had seemed so violent, so angry, determined to punish her for insulting them on their hunt.
He eyed her. “I was thinking,” Rui said, “I could try… to work up at the fortress. At Kitano. It might be safer there. There’s people. And the lords, and…”
His eyes gleamed knowingly. “So, you want to work the castle. Eh?”
“I don’t know, I just…” Rui fumbled over her words. “I just met them on the trail. And they were… I didn’tmeanto…”
“They killed a serow. You did what any of us shoulda done.” He tutted. “Ah. It’s been too long since I looked in on the youths of the village. I let the years go past, now I’m old. But I remember the day you came, young child. I remember. My advice: don’t worry yourself about what these monks and kings will do. Live your life. You still have some say about your path in this world.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I’m just a kusa like the rest of us,” she said, uneasy. “Believe it when I see it.”
He smiled again, sighing, and turned up to the mountains. “Well. Either way. You really want to work with them, those Kitano lords, they do take no’in on, as in service. They’ll be at the harvest festival. If you really want to work with them, that’ll be your chance. Meantime, there’s still gods in these woods, they’ll be seein’ you on. Our gods. ‘Gods of earth and water, and of the air; gods of the land itself. They lived this transitoryworld longer’n humans ever did; they formed it, shaped it, live among it, present yet unseen, separate yet whole.’”
He lowered his head in prayer. “Yes. We still got some little say, ’bout our path in this world. The gods, you know. They been watching you. Want you to live long and happy. Ah.”
Goro turned, digging about the barrow she’d moved to the side of the road. “Here. Got too many, these. Help me out.”
He came back with two rice balls in his hands.
“I can’t take these,” she said.
“Take ’em,” he said. “Gesture of my thanks.”
The hill at Kitano turned flat at an even pace, rolling slowly down to the valley, where the outvillages lay at the edge of the estates, the Blue Woods and the slopes of Mount Kanzan beyond, the barrier to the south. Music floated in the air as she walked; harvest was coming, and the villagers were preparing for the festival. Rui loved it. Loved this place, this land, the freedom here, the wide sky and the air rich with life. She took the long way home, first through the shops and craft-houses, over the little road that skirted the mountain, then out, into the fields where Koroku had his barns. She thought about what old man Goro said. Behind her, the huge, unsleeping city of Kitano buzzed with its rhythms, reminding her of a beehive, always in motion. She closed her eyes, breathed in the warm orange blaze as it set.
Walking along the woodland trail a few moments led to a turn in the road, and a depression to a smaller path. She took it, following the dirt trail to a shrine dedicated to the god O-inenari, the many-spirited deity of prosperity, the harvest, and orphaned children. Hidden between giant himorogi and buna trees, the shrine awaited her, small and sacred.
Here, she clapped her hands together once, then once again, and prayed to the statue of O-ine that rested on the altar. Two-sided, made of stone, it represented the god in male and female counterparts. Here, a bearded man, accompanied by a white fox; here, a woman, holding sheaves of rice, long hair flowing to her knees. Rui bowed again, placed one of the rice balls at the bottom of the shrine, in offering, and ate the other, silently, in the shade of the whispering leaves.
When morning broke, early, as it always did in summer, she was woken by Koroku, the grizzled stablekeeper, who loved her in his way but didn’t know how to get close. “Dawn-time,” he grunted, his frown not a sign of displeasure so much as of his perpetual surrender to the ills ofthe world. She descended the ladder and began grooming the horses, brushing her teeth with salt and a tassel of horsehair and willow-wood. She washed her face in the basin, hurried to bring fresh water for the tea. By the hour of the dragon, she’d gathered her blue-dyed hemp cloak and her satchel, and, squinting in the shards of morning light, headed to the small shrines on the mountain trail, where people often left offerings for the monks.
Each day since she was twelve, she hiked up the mountain, swept the road before the monastery of Kannagara, and attended the free school taught by lower monks. In the afternoons, she tended to their horses. Today was no different. In the evening, she hiked back down and stopped at a grove to collect herbal flowers and roots. Then it was back to the outvillage in time to clean the stables again.
When she got home, she tied the fresh herbs to the rafters to dry and set about grinding the previous day’s in a pestle. Beside her, Koroku helped his wife Otsu spin hemp linen. Later they would send it to her family, who were dyers, using the red-brown dye from unripe persimmons and other rice-pastes that would embellish their simple cloths. Once they’d finished, Koroku turned to the cooking fire, lifted the wooden lid off the iron pot, and ladled Rui a serving of millet-and-barley with some radishes and lily bulbs.
“Little rice left,” he said. “Bad stuff, though, with what we had to pay in taxes, so.”
Early in the year, through the good weather into summer, people of the outvillage ate well, often a mixture of rice and barley, with fresh vegetables and radishes and other tubers, lily bulbs, taro, cowpeas, sprouting beans. Harvest in the autumn meant they had to rely on lower-quality rice as the stores ran down, mixed with a higher proportion of barley, and wheat glumes. They usually had enough, though it wasn’t as varied as Rui would have liked. At least they had preserves.
“Thanks,” she said, and made her way into the evening.
Sometimes, in her time alone, Rui walked through town and told the children stories. She thought of them now, as she tried to push the gold-robed monks from her mind. They would laugh and sing; hard-worn parents watched. It was a time of scuffed toes, dirty cheeks and earlobes, snotty noses; she would tell them tales of comedy, of adventure, of rising beasts and heroes, of peace in all the world. She would growl with the harshness of the evil Daiaku, speak high with the shining voice of the sky-seen, Sora’in. She told the legend of Misaki Meiko and the Dreameater, Izumo-of-the-clouds. She laughed with the throaty howl of the old Itekiof Taga and Kurogane, and gestured dramatically, enacting tales she’d learned by heart, stories of no’in and farms and the coming of the rain.
