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encouraged me in my studies and my travels, allowed me access to his great
collections of books and other treasures. I turned my eyes away from his
darker pleasures. I never believed his cruelty would fall on me.'
He stopped abruptly and poured the boiling water onto the dried herbs. A faint
smell of summer grass rose from them, fragrant and soothing.
'My wife has told me a little of that time,' Takeo said quietly.
'Only the earthquake saved us. I have never experienced such terror in my
life, though I have faced many dangers: storms at sea, shipwreck, pirates and
savages. I had already thrown myself at his feet and begged to be allowed to
kill myself: he pretended to consent, playing with my fears. Sometimes I dream
about it; it is something I will never recover from: absolute evil in the
person of a man.'
He paused, lost in memories. 'My dog was howling,' he said very quietly. 'I
could hear my dog howling. He always warned me of earthquakes like that. I
found myself wondering if anyone would look after him.'
Ishida took up the bowl and handed it to Takeo. 'I am profoundly sorry for the
part I played in your wife's imprisonment.'
'It is all long past,' Takeo said, taking the bowl and draining it gratefully.
'But if the son is anything like the father, he will only do you ill. Be on
your guard.'
'You are drugging me and warning me in the same breath,' Takeo said. 'Maybe I
should put up with the pain - at least it keeps me awake.'
'I should stay here with you . . .'
'No. The kirin needs you. My own men are here to guard me. For the time being
I am in no danger.'
He walked through the garden with Ishida as far as the gate, feeling the deep
relief as the pain began to dull. He did not lie awake long - just long enough
to tally the amazing events of the day: Kono, the Emperor's displeasure, the
Dog Catcher, the kirin. And his sister: what was he going to do about Madaren,
a foreigner's woman, one of the Hidden, sister to Lord Otori?
Eight
The sight of her older brother, whom she had believed dead, was no less of a
shock to the
woman who had once been called Madaren, a common name among the Hidden. For
many years after the massacre Madaren had been called by the name given to her
by the woman to whom the Tohan soldier had sold her. He was one of the men who
had taken part in the rape and murder of her mother and sister, but Madaren
had no direct memory of that: she remembered only the summer rain, the smell
of the horse's sweat when her cheek pressed against its neck, the weight of
the man's hand holding her still, a hand that seemed larger and heavier than
her whole body. Everything smelled of smoke and mud and she knew she would
never be clean again. At the start of the fire and the horses and the swords
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she had screamed out for her father, for Tomasu, as she had called earlier
that year when she had fallen into the swollen stream and been trapped on the
slippery rocks, and Tomasu had heard her from the fields and come running to
pull her out, scolding her and comforting her.
But Tomasu had not heard her this time; nor had her father, already dead; no
one had heard her and no one had ever come to her aid again.
Many children, not only among the Hidden, suffered
in a similar way when Iida Sadamu ruled in his black-walled castle at Inuyama;
nor did the situation change after Inuyama fell to Arai. Some lived to grow
up, and Madaren was one of them, one of the large number of young women who
serviced the needs of the warrior class, becoming maids, kitchen servants or
women of the pleasure houses. They had no families and therefore no
protection; Madaren worked for the woman who bought her, the lowest of the
servants, the one who rose first in the morning before even the roosters were
awake and could not lie down to sleep until the last customers had gone home.
She thought exhaustion and hunger had dulled her to everything around her, but
when she became a woman and became briefly desirable in the way young girls
usually do, she realized she had been learning all the time from the older
girls, observing them and listening to them, and had become wise without
knowing it in their favourite - indeed their only - subject: the men who
visited them.
The pleasure house was possibly the meanest in Inuyama, set far from the
castle in one of the narrow streets that ran between the main avenues, where
tiny houses rebuilt after the fire clustered together like a wasp's nest, each
clinging onto the next. But all men have their desires, even porters,
labourers and night soil collectors, and among these are as many who can be
made fools for love as in any other class. So Madaren learned; at the same
time she learned that women who are ruled by love are the least powerful
beings in the city, more dominated even than dogs, as easily discarded as
unwanted kittens, and she used this knowledge shrewdly. She went with men that
the other girls shunned, and took advantage of their gratitude. She extracted
gifts from them, or some-
times stole, and finally allowed a failing merchant to take her with him to
Hofu, leaving the house in the early morning before dawn and meeting him at
the misty dock-side. They boarded a ship carrying cedar wood from the forests
of the East, and the smell reminded her of Mino, her birthplace, and she
suddenly recalled her family and the strange half-wild boy who had been her
brother, who infuriated and enchanted their mother. Tears filled her eyes as
she crouched beneath the lumber planks, and when her lover turned to embrace
her she pushed him away. He was easily cowed, and no more successful in Hofu
than he had been in Inuyama. He bored and infuriated her, and eventually she
went back to her early life, joining a pleasure house a little higher in class
than her first one.
Then the foreigners came with their beards, their strange smell and their
large frames - and other parts. Madaren saw some power in them that might be
exploited and volunteered to sleep with them; she chose the one called Don
Joao, though he always thought he had chosen her: the foreigners were both
sentimental and ashamed when it came to matters of the body's needs: they
wanted to feel special to one woman, even when they bought her. They paid well
in silver; Madaren was able to explain to the owner of the house that Don Joao
wanted her only, and soon she did not have to sleep with anyone else.
At first their only language was that of the body: his lust, her ability to
satisfy it. The foreigners had an interpreter, a fisherman who had been
plucked out of the water by one of their kind after a shipwreck and taken back
to their base in the Southern Islands, for they themselves came from a land
far away in the west: you could
sail for a year with the wind behind you and still not reach it. The fisherman
had learned their language: he sometimes accompanied them to the pleasure
house; it was obvious from his speech that he was uneducated and low-born, yet
his association with the foreigners gave him status and power. They depended
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