Autumn Bridge (11 page)

Hanako, looking into the study, saw that Lady Emily’s desk was not occupied, and entered to tidy up. She should leave it to the maids, but today’s young women were not as trustworthy as those of old. They were too curious, lacked discipline, and loved gossip far too much. Everyone knew Emily was working on an English translation of
Suzume-no-kumo,
the inner history of the Okumichi clan. If a scroll were inadvertently left open, or even tied closed but not put away, one of the maids might find the temptation to look within too much to resist. This was reason enough for her to do the work. So Hanako told herself. She knew such a menial task was not her responsibility, nor was it appropriate for one of her lofty station. She was, after all, the wife of Lord Genji’s chief bodyguard, Lord Hidé, and was herself entitled to the sobriquet “lady.” But old habits were hard to break. She had been born a lowly farmer’s daughter in the valley below Mushindo Monastery, an ancestral outpost of the Great Lords of Akaoka for six hundred years. When she was nine years old, she had lost her parents. The kindly old abbot of the monastery, Zengen, had taken pity on her and had arranged for her to enter the household service of Lord Kiyori, Genji’s grandfather and predecessor. She was twenty-two, without family, connections, or dowry, and resigned to the life of an old maid, when Lord Genji himself had arranged her marriage to Hidé, a samurai she had long admired from afar.

That such unexpected things had happened still amazed her. In her twenty-ninth year, she was the mother of a noble son, the wife of the lord’s most trusted companion, and the best friend of Lady Emily, the American who had, through a strange twist of fate, become as much a member of the clan as any outsider could. How fortunate they all were that Lord Genji, unlike ordinary men, could see the future. Because of that, his judgment, even if it sometimes seemed strange, could always be trusted.

Hanako pinned back the empty left sleeve of her kimono to keep it out of the way. She never did this when others were around, since she felt it called excessive attention to the absence of her left arm. Though only six years had passed since the fight at the monastery, people already spoke of it in reverent terms as the Great Battle at Mushindo Monastery. Hanako, Hidé, Lord Genji, and Lady Emily had been among the very few who had lived through the ambush by six hundred enemy musketeers, and triumphed against seemingly impossible odds. Naturally, their exploits had been magnified in retellings by those who knew nothing, and Hanako herself had gained unwanted notoriety for courage because she had lost an arm in the fight. Because of this, any visible emphasis upon her loss, even if unintended, seemed to her to be a kind of boastful display.

Scrolls were everywhere, some opened, some not. Emily, usually so neat, had left the place in an uncharacteristic mess. Had she been called away suddenly? It was a good thing Hanako had decided to clean up. Too many scrolls were open. Only someone such as herself, someone determined not to see, could close them without recognizing a single character.

To distract herself, she tried to remember what
Suzume-no-kumo
was in English. Emily had just told her the other day. It had seemed much stranger in English than in Japanese. Now, what was it?

Hanako closed another scroll and put it next to the one she had closed before it. By maintaining the order in which the scrolls had been left, it would be relatively easy for Emily to resume where she had stopped, even if the scrolls were no longer open.

Ah, yes, Hanako remembered.
Cloud of Sparrows
. She said it aloud to practice the shapes of the words in her mouth, and to hear the sounds, the better to remember them.

“Cloud of Sparrows,”
Hanako said, and was quite pleased with herself. She had spoken the English words very clearly, she thought.

“Hello?” Emily said, and looked up from behind a table at the far end of the room. She had apparently been seated on the floor.

“Excuse me,” Hanako said. “I didn’t realize you were here. You were not at your desk, so I came in to clean up.” She bowed and began to leave.

“No, don’t go, Hanako,” Emily said. “I was about to find you anyway. Look at this.” She indicated the small trunk next to her, leather-covered, with a faded painting on its topmost surface.

“Ah,” Hanako said, “you have opened a new box of scrolls. How exciting for you.”

“They’re very different from the others. Even the trunk they came in is different. Is this a Japanese design?”

Hanako looked at the dragon curling like angry red smoke around the mountains of blue ice.

“No,” she said. “It is closer to the Chinese style, but wilder, more barbaric. Perhaps it was made by the Mongols.”

Emily nodded. She looked worried, or perplexed, or perhaps merely tired. Though Hanako had known her for several years, and had met other outsiders since then, she still could not always tell what emotions showed on their faces. Unlike the Japanese, outsiders often did not seek to conceal their feelings, and it was this very lack of intentional control that made their expressions so difficult for Hanako to understand. Too many facial signals appeared at the same time, among them those of an unbearably inappropriate nature. Sometimes, she would be with Emily when one of her American friends came to visit. The naval officer, Robert Farrington, or the rancher, Charles Smith. At those times, she would often see displayed on the men’s faces emotions of a kind so intimate, she blushed to see them. Emily, it seemed, did not recognize the display, since she continued with the conversation as if nothing were amiss, and was neither insulted, angered, or embarrassed herself. Hanako wondered, not for the first time, if they even understood each other.

Now Emily was apparently thinking about many different things, which would account somewhat for the confusion in her facial expression, for when she next spoke it was about a different matter entirely.

She said, “Do you know about Go, Lord Hironobu’s bodyguard?”

“Of course,” Hanako said, relieved that Emily’s attention had moved away from the scrolls. They could only be read by the Great Lord and those in the line of succession. Lord Genji had made an exception in Emily’s case. She could read them. Hanako could not. “He is one of the great heroes of our clan. Without him, Lord Hironobu would have died in childhood, and there would never have been any Great Lords of Akaoka.”

“Was Go a Mongol?”

“Oh, no,” Hanako said, shocked at the outrageous suggestion. “I’m sure he was not.”

“Where was he from?”

“From? He was from Japan.”

“Where in Japan?”

Hanako thought for a moment. “I don’t recall ever being told anything about his childhood. Except that he could ride a horse almost before he could walk.” She smiled. “But, of course, that is what is said in fairy tales. Otherwise, he is always spoken of as Lord Hironobu’s bodyguard. He was the lord’s bodyguard when the lord was a child, and he was the lord’s bodyguard at the end.”

“The end,” Emily repeated. “What was the end?”

“They died together in battle,” Hanako said, “holding off a Hojo army so that the lord’s infant son could escape and live to exact a just revenge.” This, too, was a famous episode in clan history. “This son, Danjuro, became the second Great Lord of our domain. While barely out of boyhood, he helped destroy the Hojo regency.” A chilling thought suddenly occurred to her. Before she could stop herself, she asked, “Does
Suzume-no-kumo
say otherwise?”

Emily shook her head. “No, it says exactly what you say.”

“Ah.” Hanako was very relieved. Not infrequently, in every clan, those above knew something other than what was told to those below. In a clan such as this one, led by generations of prophets, above and below could be very different indeed. Now that she had raised the matter of the scrolls, it would be best for her to leave before the subject came up again. She bowed to her friend. “I am sorry to disturb you, Emily. I will leave you to your work now.”

“I need your help, Hanako.”

Hanako hesitated. “I will be happy to do all I can, so long as I am not asked to read any scroll or hear more about what is in them.”

“These are not the ones that you can’t read.” Emily offered the scroll in her hands to Hanako.

Hanako bowed again, but did not reach to accept it. “I cannot.”

“It’s not
Suzume-no-kumo
.”

Emily had made great strides in her understanding of the Japanese language during her time here. Hanako, however, was far from confident that Emily could distinguish what was and what wasn’t part of the secret clan history. If a scroll came from one of these trunks, how could it not be a part of this history? To refuse to take it now would be extremely impolite. Yet to accept it could mean violating a fundamental rule of the clan. It was best to avoid insult whenever possible. Hesitantly, she took the scroll. At the first indication that Emily was mistaken, she would immediately cease reading.

Her first glimpse of the flowing lines of phonetic hiragana script and the almost total absence of complex kanji ideograms told her that Emily was right. No one would write the clan history in so informal a manner. But when she read the first line, the mention of Lord Narihira and the well-known misguided prophecy of the roses made her stop.

“I cannot, Emily.”

“This seems to be a kind of diary,” Emily said. “Gossip, not history.”

“Whatever it is, it speaks of Great Lords and prophecies,” Hanako said. “It would be wrong for me to continue.”

Emily smiled. “Does no one here ever speak of the prophecies? Is Lord Genji never the subject of gossip?”

Hanako returned Emily’s smile. Of course, she was right. Within the Okumichi clan, prophecies and the thoughts and actions of the lord were constant subjects of conversation, argument, and speculation. This was not correct behavior. But human nature being what it was, could there be any other result? Hanako resumed reading. At the end of the first passage, she couldn’t keep from laughing.

“Yes,” Emily said, “I laughed there, too. I would translate it, ‘
When heaven gave men command of the world, the gods above were surely displaying a most mischievous sense of humor
.’ ”

“Yes, that is correct, I think.”

“A woman wrote this,” Emily said.

“Beyond any doubt,” Hanako said. “The handwriting, the style, the subject matter, all are very feminine.” She read a little more and smiled, at ease now that she was confident she wasn’t reading any forbidden material. “She’s telling about a love affair, apparently an illicit and tragic one.”

“Among other things.”

“I wonder how it got mixed in?”

“It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say it was mixed in.” Emily opened the lid of the trunk with the red dragon and the blue mountains. “These are all in the same style.”

“Then the trunk itself was placed among the others in error.”

“I wonder,” Emily said. She moved the layer of rough cloth aside to reveal fine silk intricately embroidered with a pattern of colorful roses against a field of billowing white clouds and a sky of the brightest blue. “Aren’t these what your clansmen call American Beauty roses?”

“Yes, they appear to be,” Hanako said, feeling uneasy once again. “I think they must be, since the scroll mentions them by name.”

“They were originally planted by Lord Narihira,” Emily said.

“Yes.”

“And when was that?”

“In the eighteenth year of the Ogimachi Emperor,” Hanako said.

“What year by the Western calendar?”

Hanako calculated quickly. “I believe it would be 1575.”

Emily nodded. “That’s what I thought, but I was sure I had miscalculated. It’s very easy for an outsider to lose track of the proper sequence of emperors in the Japanese calendar.” She contemplated the picture on the trunk. “It has taken me two weeks to read it. I finished it yesterday. Since then, my mind has been on nothing else.” She seemed about to say more, but remained silent.

Finally, Hanako asked, “Why did you think you had made an error in dating?”

“Because of the roses,” Emily said, “in the narrative and in this cloth.”

“Yes?” Hanako didn’t understand why Emily seemed so perturbed. The most common symbol of the clan was the sparrow dodging arrows from the four directions. This appeared on the official Okumichi battle flags. Almost as frequently depicted during the last two hundred years were these roses. They could be found on banners, kimonos, designs on armor, on the blades and hilts of swords. There was nothing mysterious about their appearance in the writings of clansmen or clanswomen, or on a piece of silk such as this, used to wrap scrolls.

“The roses were planted in 1575,” Emily said, “so it would be impossible for anyone writing before that year to speak of them.”

“That is true,” Hanako said.

“Yet they are prominently mentioned in these scrolls,” Emily said, “which the author says she wrote in the fourth year of the Hanazono Emperor.”

Hanako quickly went through her memory of Imperial chronology. She said, “That cannot be. Hanazono 4 is 1311 in the Christian calendar.”

Emily said, “I must go to Cloud of Sparrows Castle.”

Hanako was horrified. How could Emily even think of it? The castle was three hundred miles away. Between them was a countryside filled with increasingly violent anti-foreign samurai, chief among them the so-called Men of Virtue. Attacks against outsiders had become distressingly commonplace of late. No women had been targeted. Things had not yet deteriorated so far. But Emily was notorious as a guest of Lord Genji, and he was at the top of the Men of Virtue’s list of domestic enemies.

“What reason is there for such a journey?”

Emily looked straight into Hanako’s eyes. She said, “We are friends. We are true friends.”

“Yes,” Hanako said. “We are true friends.”

Emily looked at her for several more long moments before she turned to the trunk and began removing the scrolls. When they were all out, she lifted the silk cloth from the trunk and held it up. Hanako saw that it was a kimono.

“Do you notice anything about it?” Emily asked.