Sowing Ghosts 4.4

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[Continuing chapter 4]

Mother stared at him for a moment that seemed to promise no end, and Hiroki was unable to speak, so astonished was he at her presence. The fingers of his right hand clenched and opened, clenched and opened again, and when he realized that what they wanted was to be wrapped around the hilt of his dagger he was horrified.

Then the gate of memory gave way and he saw the face of his dying wife, and then the face of the son his mother had taken away from him, thoughts he had forbidden himself to have throughout the years of his wandering. The impulse to strike her down, to obliterate this woman the way she had obliterated his former life — his former self — was so strong that he found himself offering a prayer of thanks to the gods for the rule that forbade warriors to wear their swords inside a lord’s house.


When the present world forced its way back into his mind he realized that he had found his mother in a samurai house, a place she would never have willingly entered. What was more, she seemed not to have known him at all. The stare she gave him was not one of wonder, or fear, or even recognition. It was her normal stare, the sour angry one she wore whenever presented with something of which she disapproved.

What are you doing here? He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t asked the question aloud. Then she asked the question for him.

“Who are you, and why have you intruded here?” She seemed to be looking down at him though he towered above her, and for a moment he saw himself as she must: an uncouth provincial warrior, wearing the crest of some unknown and vulgar clan.

“This person is Yoshino Hiroki,” he told her, bowing formally. “I was sent her to examine the — the body.”

Mother glared, still showing no sign of recognition. She was dressed in a simplified variant of court style, but the silk of her uchikake long coat was wildly patterned in shades of yellow, orange and green. Her white-powdered face was as round as Hiroki remembered it, but the lines around her eyes were deeper now and the smudges of her painted eyebrows were nearly swallowed by the wrinkles on her forehead. “Who do you serve, samurai?” She made the word sound an insult — which, to her mind, it undoubtedly was.

“I serve the Lord Tanuma of Kozuke Province,” he told her in as placid a voice as he could manage, “but I was instructed to come here by Arms Master Lord Miyoshi Takahashi.”

The name seemed to make her even more angry. “It is a little late for him to be showing concern for this lady,” she said, her voice as sweet as vinegar. “Still, this is his house and I am merely a woman. So you will do as you wish. There is no reason for me to have to watch you, though.”

He had to know. “Might one ask who you are, and why you are here, my lady?” Before she could respond he added, “And was it you who found her this way?”

“You are impertinent.” She clenched her teeth on her next words, and Hiroki could see the calculation going on behind her eyes: it was a look he was uncomfortably familiar with. Having apparently decided she had to say something, his mother told him, “I had an appointment with Lady Tomiko. We were to have tea. Of course I was not the one who found the body, idiot. Do I look like a servant to you?”

“My apologies,” he said. “I did not wish to offend, only to learn.” She had not, he noted, given him her name.

“Learn? The lady has been murdered and the world turned upside down. What more do you have to know?” She shuffled to the door in the bent-backed way of an old woman, but Hiroki was not fooled. She had walked this way twenty years ago when she felt it necessary in order to get her way in some matter between them, or between her and Hiroki’s father. “Show me out,” she demanded of the startled servant who had been standing on the other side of the sliding door.

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