Autumn Bridge (60 page)

She spoke with a calmness that belied her complete absence of equanimity. It was no stand of pines, mountain stream, or valley prospect that had captured Hironobu’s interest. His eyes did not wander periodically to the gateway as they spoke. He never looked that way even once. Only by constantly thinking of it could he so perfectly avoid it. To the Abbess, this was in itself proof of his true desires.

“Shikoku’s wildness is exaggerated in the telling of it,” Hironobu said.

“What of your domain? Won’t your enemies make mischief during such a long absence?”

“Not with Go in charge. No one would dare.”

“And what of Go himself?”

“He has protected me and guided me like a second father since my earliest childhood. If I cannot trust him, I cannot trust the sun and the moon to stay in the sky, or the earth to remain beneath my feet.”

“Earthquakes frequently rend our land,” the Abbess said. “Perhaps there is a lesson there.”

Hironobu laughed. “Obviously I am no poet. My imagery doesn’t quite match my meaning.”

Since Hironobu would not leave, the Abbess did the only thing she could. She assigned nuns to keep constant guard on the gateway of the temple and the hallway leading to Shizuka’s cell. Shizuka was never left alone. At night, she was locked into her cell.

The days passed without incident, then the weeks. The sound of chanted sutras never ceased. The Abbess began to think her suspicions had been excessive.

She met with Hironobu once a week outside the walls of the temple. They spoke only of Lady Kiyomi. Hironobu seemed much at ease. Perhaps the forests here were closer to the creation than those of the more populated parts of the realm. Perhaps the blessings of the gods would protect them all.

One night, she woke to find herself already sitting up in her bed. A freezing cold sweat soaked her clothes. Her body burned with fever. She had no memory of a nightmare, only a sense of dread that did not fade away. She rose quickly and, without changing her clothes, rushed to Shizuka’s cell. The cold autumn night knifed through her wet kimono and her feverish flesh straight to the innermost marrow of her bones.

The nun on guard outside the cell sat in the lotus posture. But her head lolled off to one side, and a soft snoring marked the coming and going of her unconscious breaths.

The door to the cell was ajar.

Shizuka was not within.

The Abbess ran out of the temple, through the courtyard, out the gate, and straight to the lodge Hironobu had built in the densest part of the forest between Mushindo Abbey and the winter stream that was yet in this season no more than a fall of smooth rocks.

Hironobu was not there. Nor was Shizuka. Nor were any of the lord’s samurai.

The Abbess looked in every direction. She saw no trails, no signs of recent passage. In despair, she threw back her head, and her sight went skyward.

The faint crescent of the new moon cast eerie beams her way.

The Abbess saw nothing. All around her, she heard many voices.

“She will die,” someone sobbed. “Then what will become of us?”

“We will continue on Buddha’s Way.”

“What are you saying? Without the Reverend Abbess Suku, there is no Way. Lord Hironobu and Lord Bandan will abandon us.”

“She’s right. Mushindo is far from their domains. It is only because of the Reverend Abbess that they have any interest in such a distant place.”

She remembered looking up at the night. She opened her eyes. She was in her own room, with her nuns gathered around her bed. Many were in tears.

“Reverend Abbess!”

“Shizuka,” the Abbess said.

“It is the middle of the night, Reverend Abbess. She is in her cell.”

“Show me.” She tried to rise and found it took more strength than she had. Two nuns practically carried her from her room to Shizuka’s. The nun who had been asleep was wide awake.

“Let me see.”

The nuns lifted her up to the tiny observation window. Shizuka was asleep on her side, facing the wall.

“Who brought me to my room?”

“Reverend Abbess?”

“From the woods. Who brought me back to the temple?”

The nuns looked at each other.

“Reverend Abbess, we heard you cry out in your room, so we came. You were feverish, halfway between consciousness and sleep, and could go in neither direction. We have been sitting with you for hours.”

Here was trickery. Trickery, torture, and deceit. The nuns were innocent. They were not part of it. They were only being fooled. Hironobu had been bewitched. Shizuka was using her newfound dark powers to escape from this holy place and make mischief in the world. The Abbess was not taken in. She knew she had been in the forest. She had not imagined it. Under Shizuka’s spell, Hironobu had carried the Abbess back to her room. Cloaked in the witch’s invisibility, they were seen by no one. This was also why, when the Abbess went to Hironobu’s camp, she had not seen Shizuka or Hironobu. They were hidden by a spell.

“She’s dead,” she heard a nun say.

“No, she’s fainted again,” another said.

“Is it the plague?”

“There are no signs of it. I think it is a brain fever. My cousin had it. He went mad and never recovered.”

The Abbess saw nothing. She concentrated her attention on her hearing. She listened as the sound of distant sobs faded away into silence. She continued listening for a long, long time, but heard not so much as the beating of her own heart.

Later that night — or had that night passed and another come? — the Abbess awoke. Instead of her previous agitation, she felt a great calm. The solution had come to her unbidden. There were two ways to insure that Shizuka did not escape. The first was to kill her. This the Abbess could not do. All disciples of the Compassionate One were sworn to abjure the taking of life, human or animal. She must follow the other course.

She slipped out of her room. She could not go to the meditation hall, for the sutras were still being read for Lady Kiyomi. She went to the kitchen and folded herself into the lotus posture. She sat in meditation until the first faint light signaled the imminent yielding of the hour of the rabbit to that of the dragon, then rose and went to Shizuka’s cell. From the kitchen, she brought with her the long knife she used to slice vegetables.

The Abbess would save Shizuka from the curse. She would slash away her beauty, for without it, Hironobu would not want her, nor would any man. Shizuka would remain in the abbey where she belonged. The Abbess would cut out Shizuka’s tongue, for she had begun to speak, and a witch can utter only lies. Shizuka would remain speechless, as she should. The Abbess would blind her, for sight had only brought her delusion. Blind, she would return to her former agony, but she would no longer be misled. The Abbess would take care of Shizuka as she always had, with patience and compassion, until the end of their days.

This was as it should be. The Abbess’s heart was steady, without doubt, and so was the hand that gripped the knife.

“Reverend Abbess.”

The nun on duty outside of Shizuka’s cell looked at her fearfully as she approached. The nun’s eyes flitted back and forth from the Abbess’s face to the knife. She stood.

“Reverend Abbess,” she said again.

The Abbess did not answer. She went past the nun, opened the door, and entered the cell. She strode into the darkness to the bed of the sleeping girl, knelt, and whipped away the coverlet.

Shizuka was already awake. She looked up at the Abbess and said the second word she ever spoke.

“Mother,” Shizuka said.

The Abbess stumbled back. She felt hands gripping her. She heard exclamations. The knife fell from her grasp.

They were just outside the entry gate of Mushindo Abbey. All the nuns were there. So were Lord Hironobu, Shizuka, and many samurai mounted on fine warhorses. The Reverend Abbess sat quietly and listened to the conversation. Was she there or seeing it in a dream? She wasn’t sure. So she kept silent and listened.

“It is fortunate that you were here when the tragedy occurred,” said a nun.

“I am grateful I was,” Hironobu said.

“So much has happened in a hundred days,” the nun said. “So much to celebrate, so much to mourn. But is this not true of every step on Buddha’s Way?”

“I’m glad she was well enough to attend the wedding,” another nun said. “She seemed to enjoy it.”

“I wonder if she will ever regain the power of speech,” another said.

“How sad,” the first nun said, “that she should lose it just as you gain it, Lady Shizuka.”

“Yes,” Shizuka said. “It is very sad indeed.”

A nun raised a box wrapped in white cloth and offered it to Hironobu.

“May Lady Kiyomi forever enjoy the peace of the Compassionate One,” she said.

The troop prepared to depart. Hironobu helped Shizuka into the saddle of a horse before mounting his own.

The nun said, “May you be blessed with health and prosperity and every treasure of family life, my lord, my lady.” All the nuns bowed.

The Abbess rose to her feet.

She said, “May you and all your blood be cursed with beauty and genius forever.”

“Reverend Abbess!”

Hironobu said to Shizuka, “I am sorry for her. If there were more we could do than secure her care, I would.”

“Her curse—” Shizuka said.

“She’s mad,” Hironobu said. “Beauty and genius are blessings, not curses.”

Shizuka said nothing. She looked at the Abbess and their eyes met. Neither looked away as the travelers departed. Hironobu may be ignorant, but the Abbess knew Shizuka understood the truth, because it had afflicted them both.

Beauty and genius were curses.

The Abbess no longer knew whether she was an old woman or a maiden, a dreamer or a lunatic, or whether any of these distinctions mattered. Questions without answers consumed her energy night and day. She never uttered another word.

The following spring, she died in her sleep. The Reverend Abbess Suku, who had been Lord Bandan’s beautiful daughter, Lady Nowaki, had not attained her thirty-second year.

As he waited to be received, Tsuda reflected on the enormous changes that had occurred in so short a time. This city was itself a prime example. When he was a young man, it was Edo, the capital of the Shogun whose clan, the Tokugawa, had ruled Japan for two and a half centuries. Then they had seemed likely to rule it forever. Now not only were the Tokugawas gone, so was the entire ancient office of Shogun, and Edo as well, replaced by Tokyo. It was more than a name change. Tokyo was the new capital of the Imperial family, which had resided in Kyoto for a millennium. The Emperor Mutsuhito was the first to reign from Tokyo, and the first to actually rule from anywhere for six hundred years.

Tsuda’s own life was an equal example of change on a smaller, individual scale. He had been born a peasant in distant Akaoka Domain. His talent for constructing buildings of pleasing design had attracted the attention of the Great Lord of the domain, Lord Genji, and he had been awarded an important contract, the building of a Christian chapel. Tsuda’s other talent, that of placing his structures in fortunate locations, was a credit to his serious, even religiously dedicated, practice of feng shui. It was the conjunction of the two that had led to his present elevated position as associate, advisor, and business partner of his former lord. In determining the location for the chapel he was to build, Tsuda had discovered a mysterious trunk decorated with a wild and barbaric depiction of blue mountains and a red dragon, and containing scrolls of an even more mysterious nature. He still did not know what the scrolls signified, though they were widely believed to be the legendary, prophetic, magical, long-lost
Autumn Bridge
writings. Whatever they were, the discovery had changed his life.