The horse was frustrated, whinnying, kicking at the hay. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be home soon. I’ll bring you lots of oats and brush your coat; you’re beautiful, what a beautiful boy.”
Horses never lied to you, like people did. They gave you what they got. Didn’t care if you were highborn or low; didn’t care where you came from. Rui yearned to know where she really came from. It was said her family were just servants to the Gensei; they might have come from anywhere. They might have been anyone.
Or no one, she thought.Does that mean I am no one, too?
In her trunk she still had her jade, a pale green-and-blue stone, curved like a crescent moon. She wore it on a necklace, sometimes, under her clothes on special days; it made her feel closer to them. They watched her still, she told herself. They spoke, if you were willing to listen.
She left the outvillage early, intending to return before the autumn festival began. Time had passed, and with the changing seasons, a new feeling came into the air. The monks were finally gone. They had failed to intimidate the lord of Kitano, and instead walked off, claiming the autumn season meant they must make pilgrimage to the great temples in the south and west, on Mount Takano.
Now dawn crept above the western fields, cold and wet with dew, and when she approached, the echo pond glinted in thin sunlight. It lay silent as a mirror, reflecting the world back to itself, the sky and cranes above.She sat on the little dock and thought of her mother. The smell of home, of wood, resin, a scent of flowers; high ceilings and the shadows of a night. She remembered symbols on the flags outside: gentian flowers with a fan of leaves. She remembered the smell of the rice bin, when she held the highborn child’s hand, and hid there. She had no memory of the rest of that night, nor of its slaughter.
She had almost no other memories of that time, nothing until she was brought to Aizumi and the city at Kitano; nothing until they placed her with the monks. They brought her to her adoptive family, first nun Iwa, then Koroku and Otsu, who let her stay in their stables. But she wanted to see the world. She dreamed of traveling to Unasaka, bartering for passage on one of the square-sailed ships, sailing to one of the far islands or the Wings; or maybe south, to where the sun shone and traders came calling from the continent. She allowed a smile: it was fantasy. The truth was something different – she was no’in, and would probably be here, working the fields outside the city, until she was old as Goro, until they laid her down to rest and lit a flame for her departed spirit.
The pond shimmered, chips of broken light reflecting on the surface. If someone lost someone, the no’in said, they come here. They clap loudly. And if they hear an echo, it meant the person that they lost shall return.
Rui clapped her hands.
By noon, the outvillage was abuzz. Goro played his bowstring, a jaunty tune. Children danced; others, on the sloping of the hill outside Kitano, pointed to the sky. “Look!” they shouted. “Look!” More laughter. Red-tailed kites rose, darted through the blue. A few had tangled, their pilots at a loss, and the birds of bamboo wings crashed onto the grass.
By the stalls, some of the children were eating little rice cakes dipped in ivy sugar, and they spun around, slapping at each other with sticky hands, dizzy from the sweets. Rui hurried down; harvest was a special time, and the festival their biggest celebration. The ending of a year brought change; a winter soon to come, a time where things could alter, where you could remake your life.
“Always been a wanderer,” Auntie Otsu often said, in evening, when the sun began to fall. “Oi, dreamer-girl!” Uncle Koroku snapped, clicking his tongue so she’d do the job she’d promised.
A dreamer?she wondered, remembering the light, the sun transmuted into thin reflections on the surface of the pond at dawn. Soon it would be too cold to go there in the morning, the fog would cast a blanket over everything, mask the mirror and shroud the world. Sunlight would giveway to frost. But it would come again, in the new year, she reminded herself; and we can start afresh.
She was a child no longer, though it felt that she had so much yet to learn.
She was a child no longer, and for the first time, this season, this festival, this year, it felt that she could make a difference.
If they made a better showing at the line, when the lords came down to watch; if they made a good impression with their wares, if the horsekeepers stood out, and the little figurines she’d carved, and the deep blue dyes that Otsu had perfected, if any of them caught their lord protector’s eye.
They brought no’in up to work for them, sometimes, in the fortress of Kitano.So, you want to work the castle, eh?Goro had said.
She thought of her family, who were gone, thought of how they’d served the highborn once, as house-people to the Gensei clan.
So, you want to work the castle?
The monks were gone, but the truth was, now, she did.You can move up in the world, Koroku told her once.I always knew you were meant for bigger things.He’d said it like a compliment, like a dream; like the things you say to any child, anyone in the outvillage who was young and watched the far ends of the valley and the mountains like a wall, and wondered what was there, what was on the other side.The world is so big, she’d always thought, remembering how far she was, now, from the town of her birth, the town she hardly remembered. The town in the west, by the royal city.There’s still so much to see.
Now she heard the music. Now she saw the flags, Kitanohara and Taga, fluttering in a breeze; she caught a sense of something sweeter in the air. The festival had begun with dances, children laughing, flutes. Goro tried to give up his harp, but the musicians called out, laughing, for him to play.
“I’m too old,” he begged. The crowd cried out, urging him for more. Goro soon relented. The strings were plucked, the little drums began to sound. Drums and flutes, children running with small dumplings steaming in their hands. A dewdrop sky stretched flat above, without a hint of cold; instead, it opened, as if bringing sunlight to the rice, and warming rays onto their skin. The mountains, snow-tipped, loomed on every side.
Koroku and the other horsekeepers brought out their foals in a parade. They went to the gates of Kitaiji, to celebrate the harvest, and for health and prosperity in the winter that would follow. She could hear the bells, soundingchagu-chaguin the air. It would grow colder now, at night, but here the wind still sifted gently. She pictured bright red tassels and thegarments they would wear, their horses, and the smile on Otsu’s face as they brought their little herd up to the temple. She remembered being terrified and proud the first time she’d been picked to ride their draft horse, a mountain of an animal named Yamakage, when she was no older than five or six. Surrounded by Koroku and his stableboys, they trotted up the steps of Mount Kanzan, surrounded by the sound of bells. The monks there offered a touch of water and salt onto their hands. She’d felt like she was sitting atop a mountain, then, truly, so small was she, and so huge, but gentle, was the horse.
She paused now, and let herself be lost in the soft breeze, the murmuring of air, the children, laughing at their stories, singing their songs; the elders, watching with lined faces, the dance, young couples laughing, flutes whistling like birds, and the drums that beat with the sound of a collective heart.
Then, as if on cue: a hush. Everything quieted.
Children ran past. Elders called their families together.
The road emptied.
The sound of horses approached.
Her heart leaped to her chest:
They’d come.
