Autumn Bridge (33 page)

“It is much easier to believe you will return soon,” Hanako said, “than to believe Emily will bear our lord’s child.”

“You will watch over her nonetheless?”

“Without fail.” Yet even as Hanako said these words, her thoughts were for Heiko’s child-to-be, not Emily’s. While she had laughed over the fortune-teller’s prediction, she had not doubted its accuracy. Those whom the gods gifted were not always as one expected them to be. Lord Genji himself was an example. Could not the foreign card reader in Yokohama be one as well? Hanako was confident she would welcome her friend back to Japan before many seasons had passed. After that, how long could it be before the arrival of the heir everyone expected? If it was more than a year, Hanako would be very surprised indeed.

After Hanako finished speaking, Emily was silent for a long time.

Finally, she said, “I did not appear in Genji’s dream.”

She could not bring herself to say vision, so suggestive as it was of blasphemy. No one since the prophets of the Old Testament had seen the shape of things to come. By believing that Genji had done so, Hanako was committing a heretical act of damnation. Now was not the time to fix upon doctrinal matters, however, no matter how significant. That would have to wait.

“Yes,” Hanako said.

“Then how does anyone leap to the conclusion that I am involved in any way?”

“Because of the locket you wear around your neck. The one with the fleur-de-lis. In the vision, Genji sees it around the neck of his child.”

“That’s hardly proof.” Emily touched the locket tucked away beneath her blouse. “It might not be the same locket. And even if it was, there are any number of ways it could get to a child other than mine.”

“What are those ways?” Hanako asked.

“Well, for one, I might give it to Genji, and he then would give it to his child.”

“Will you give it to him?”

“I must admit, I hadn’t planned on it.”

“But it’s possible?”

Inside the heart-shaped droplet of gold was a miniature portrait of a beautiful young woman with ringlets of golden hair. She was Emily’s grandmother, whom Emily had never met. Everyone who saw it thought it greatly resembled Emily herself, though whenever Emily looked at it — and she did at least once a day when she said her evening prayers — it reminded her of her mother. She had died tragically when Emily was fourteen. There were only two things she kept after her mother’s death. A copy of her mother’s favorite novel,
Ivanhoe
, and the locket with the miniature within the golden heart. They were all she had to remember her by.

“No,” Emily admitted. “It is very precious to me. I cannot imagine giving it away to anyone. In any case, it seems a rather flimsy thing upon which to base such a profound conclusion.”

“It isn’t just the locket,” Hanako said. “It is the locket and the other vision.”

“The other vision?”

“Yes,” Hanako said. “Yours.”

“That was no vision,” Emily said. “The young woman was there.”

“And, by coincidence, the manner of her appearance matches exactly the prediction in the scroll?” Hanako opened the scroll and read aloud. “
We will meet in Mushindo Abbey, when you enter my cell. You will speak, and I will not. When you look for me, you will not find me.
Did it not happen exactly that way?”

“We have not found her
yet
,” Emily said. “But then, we have not looked very hard. Tomorrow, we will have Taro help us investigate in the village.”

Hanako continued reading. “
When you look for me, you will not find me. How is this possible? You will not know until the child appears, then you will know without doubt
.”

Emily shook her head. “That makes no sense. The references must be to two unrelated events.”

“I disagree,” Hanako said. “She is saying, ‘How is it possible that you two will meet?’ And she answers, ‘You will know how it was possible when the child appears.’ ”

“By that you mean when I supposedly give birth?”

“Sooner, I think. You measure the age of a child from the time of birth. We consider the child one year of age when it is born, counting the year it is carried by the mother.”

“Oh. Still, how would I see what is not there merely by being with child?”

“Throughout the centuries, the lady has been rumored to appear many times. But only to those of her lineage.”

“There,” Emily said. “You are contradicting yourself now. If that is so, then it is impossible for me to have seen her today, or to see her ever. No matter what happens in the future, I will never be her descendant. I will live and die a Gibson.”

She felt great relief. Though she had been insisting that she had seen a real person, she had been, until this moment, quite unsure. It had been unsettling to see a woman in a way that so closely matched what the scrolls predicted.

To her surprise, Hanako did not share her relief. Instead, she looked more worried than ever.

“If the child is Lord Genji’s,” Hanako said, “then it is of Okumichi blood. While you are carrying the child, the lady’s blood is within you.”

Emily’s cheeks colored. “I am not with child, Genji’s or anyone else’s.”

“No, you are not,” Hanako said. “Not yet.”

Kimi was so excited by what she heard, she wanted to go and tell the other girls right away. The present position of the guards made immediate departure impossible. She would have to wait where she was until they moved on. The floor of the abbot’s hut creaked above her as the two ladies moved about. She could hear bedding being laid out. The day had been a strenuous one for them. Not surprisingly, they had decided on an early night.

Except when she had been flustered, Lady Emily had spoken in Japanese. Her grammar and vocabulary were excellent, much better than Kimi’s, which was to be expected. Kimi spoke Japanese like an unschooled peasant, which she was. Lady Emily had learned the language in palaces and castles through conversations with noble lords and ladies. Her American accent was noticeable, but not severe. Fortunately, only a small portion of her words had been incomprehensible.

There. The guards were continuing their patrol along the inner wall. Kimi waited for another minute after they were out of sight, then she crawled out from the space beneath the hut, crept in careful silence until she was far enough away, then ran to find her friends.

“Are you sure they said Lady Emily would have Lord Genji’s child?” one of the girls asked.

“Yes,” Kimi said, “I’m sure.”

“Because Shizuka predicted it?”

“Shhh!” said several of the girls at once. “If you say her name, she’ll think you’re calling her, and she’ll come!” Everyone huddled a little closer together in the hut they shared.

“No she won’t,” Kimi said, pushing the nearest girl away from her. “Unless you are an Okumichi, and if you are, what are you doing in this wretched village? Go home to Cloud of Sparrows, where you belong.”

“Kimi’s right. Everyone knows she only appears to her descendants.”

“I heard Crazy Odo saw the lady so often, that’s why she became insane. Crazy Odo is no noblewoman.”

“If you grew up in this village like I did,” Kimi said, “you would know why Crazy Odo saw what she did. Her mother was seduced by one of Lord Genji’s ancestors. His great-grandfather, I think it was. My grandmother knows, or used to. She’s senile now and doesn’t even know herself.”

“So she is an Okumichi, too.”

“I don’t believe it. Why would a samurai who can sleep with beautiful ladies want a dirty little peasant?”

Kimi said, “What makes you think a samurai is any better than a farmer at keeping his silly little plow in only the right furrows?”

The girls all laughed merrily.

“Shh,” Kimi said. “The guards will hear us.”

“If Crazy Odo is an Okumichi, then any of us could be, too. We had better not say the lady’s name.”

“Shizuka, Shizuka, Shizuka,” Kimi said. “Shizuka, Shizuka, Shizuka.”

“Stop, Kimi!”

“Shizuka, Shizuka,” Kimi said. “Shizuka, Shizuka, Shizuka—”

Everyone held their breath.

“You see?” Kimi said. “It’s fun to dream of being a lady instead of a farm girl, but we are what we are, aren’t we? Lord Genji isn’t going to come and take us away with him because we’re his cousins.”

“Exactly,” one of the girls said, regaining her confidence.

“Ha! You were as afraid of saying the witch’s name as the rest of us.”

Kimi said, “Do you want to hear what I have to tell you or not?”

“We do, we do!”

When Kimi finished relating all that she had heard, one of the girls said, “I don’t understand. Is Lady Emily pregnant or not?”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? She’s going to sleep with Lord Genji. She hasn’t yet.”

“Then there’s no baby in her stomach?”

“That’s what it means when you’re not pregnant. There’s no baby in there.”

“But if there’s no baby, then there’s no Okumichi blood inside, either. If only those of the blood can see the lady, how did Lady Emily see her?”

“For Shizuka, where the blood will be,” Kimi said, “it already is.”

“I don’t understand. How can something that is going to happen in the future already have happened six hundred years ago, and also happen now? That makes no sense at all.”

Kimi said, “Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. Do you understand all the words of the Buddha? All the sayings of the Zen Patriarchs? Or even one word of them?”

The girls laughed. One said, “The Zen Patriarchs always spoke in puzzles. How could we understand anything they said?”

“Just so,” Kimi said, “life itself is a puzzle for us below. Only those above, like Lord Genji, understand everything.” She had everyone’s attention now. She paused dramatically, then said, “Time is a prison for us. Not for Shizuka. The past and future are all the same to her. So if something is going to happen, then it has as good as happened for her.”

“I told you she was a witch!”

“She wasn’t a witch,” Kimi said. “She was a princess. A beautiful princess from a kingdom on the other side of China. She knew the magic that princesses there all know.” She remembered the place the two ladies had mentioned. It had such a beautiful, faraway sound.

“The Kingdom of the Blue Ice Mountains and the Red Dragon River,” Kimi said.

Shizuka ran from her cell as fast as she could. Since she had been behaving herself more or less like a normal person for more than a month, the Reverend Abbess Suku had ordered that her door no longer be locked. That was extremely fortunate, for if she could not have gotten away from the ghostly demon who spoke to her, she would surely have returned to her former state of madness. Oh, no. What if it had followed her? She was afraid to look.

She was more afraid not to look. She turned. And, to her great relief, saw no one.

This demon, like a fair number of the specters who appeared, had eyes and hair different from those of the nuns around her, and more exaggerated contours of face and form. She had come to understand that these were visitations of a distant time, either past or future, but not the present. Such people were not here now. She had learned to suppress the actual from the possible. She thought she had learned how to do it perfectly well.

But this one had seen her!

This one had spoken to her!

What did it mean? Her thoughts and emotions were too stirred up to permit clarity. She needed to immerse herself in meditative calm. Her cell frightened her too much. She proceeded to the main meditation hall and took a place close to the altar, where the Buddha’s protection was thought to be strongest.

The most fiendish of men, the most cowardly, the most treacherous, none of them think of themselves as villains. They believe themselves to be heroes accomplishing impossible tasks against overwhelming opposition.
They convince themselves of this by seeing only what they wish to see, robbing words of their meaning, forgetting the real and remembering the false. In this way, they are not so very different from true heroes.
What is the difference?
True heroes are on our side.
Fiendish, cowardly, treacherous villains are the heroes of our enemies.
AKI-NO-HASHI
(1311)