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[Concluding chapter 6]
“Would you permit me to buy you some new kimono?” Propping himself on one elbow, Hiroki traced a fingertip of the opposite hand along the innermost of Katsumi’s under-kimono. It was most pleasant, the way she shivered slightly when he increased the pressure of fingertip against the soft, worn raw silk. “Shiro wants to buy new clothes and I will accompany him. And I would like to give you something.”
“I thought you would never ask, my lord,” she replied with a smile. “You see? Already I am learning to respond to gentlemen of culture as a courtesan of quality would.” After a very brief struggle she giggled. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said when Hiroki’s finger edged past the fabric and onto her skin. She shifted a little so she could face him without having to turn her head too much, something her hairstyle did not easily permit.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked. “It seemed to me you were—somewhat unhappy when you got here tonight.”
“I am,” he said. “And I was. Thank you.” He thought about what to say, about how much he could afford to say. “I have not found the capital to be a restful place.”
“As opposed to the way it was when you lived here?” She reached up, drew a finger along the line of Hiroki’s jaw. It felt strange, the callus of the finger unyielding against him. Will she ever be able to afford to let her fingers soften? “There is no point in you denying it to me, my lord. And you can trust me to stay silent about this, if you wish it. I may be uncultured—for now—but I am not uncivilized.”
“It is odd, I agree, what I have been feeling here. This time.” He smiled at her in a way he hoped was reassuring. It will be good to be able to talk, a little, about things after so many years. “It is not as if the city or the world were any less upside-down ten years ago. Though I admit that having no one, today, strong enough to rule the city or the world does nothing to ease one’s spirit.
“No, I think that what has happened to me is that I have learned more about silence than I knew before, and I am having trouble reconciling this knowledge with—well, with the capital and all these people and all this fighting now.”
“Silence? You have lived in temples? You do not strike me as the holy type, my lord. I mean no offence,” she added, flushing a little.
“I mean the silence of the mountains.” He closed his eyes and the face of his teacher filled his mind. “I lived, for some years, with a yamabushi in Echizen Province. He had no interest in people—I was never sure why he accepted me as a pupil—but knew everything anyone could want to know about plants and animals, weather and water. And he understood the value of silence. The value of it, and the virtue of it.”
“A mountain priest? From what I’ve heard you say, my lord, you do not think much of Buddhism.”
“Nor did he.” Hiroki laughed, remembering. “What he had to say about Zen will probably keep him on the Karmic Wheel for eternity. Or would, if he believed in that.” He paused, lifted his fingers from her. Shifting the under-clothing to cover her, he said, “It was in the mountains that I really became aware of the kami. And while I know that most shrines now are managed by Buddhist temples, I also know that some shrines retain their original ties to the spirits of the world. It is those shrines, the ones in which Shinto is pure, that give me the strength of mind I need in my work.
“And it’s those shrines I haven’t been able to find in the capital.”
“I favour the Gion Shrine myself,” Katsumi said, “but independent of the Buddhists it most surely is not.”
“Nor was it in my grandfather’s time,” Hiroki told her. “It’s an odd thing. Missing the mountains, that is. It has been at least five years that I’ve been serving my Lord Tanuma, and I hardly ever thought about the silence. Until now. This week.”
“I’m not sure I could stand that sort of silence,” she said. Sitting up, she straightened the various layers of kimono she wore. “It would be interesting to know what secrets a yamabushi sensei could teach, though. If I weren’t a woman, of course.”
“I couldn’t tell a man about such secrets either,” he said. Hiroki had noticed, when he was much younger, that while men almost never speculated about having been born women, many of the women he knew had wondered about what it would be like if they were not women. His mother had taught him, very painfully, that it was unwise to mention this to the women in question, and so he said nothing more to Katsumi about the impossibility of her wish, and simply gave what he hoped she would perceive as a sympathetic smile.
She shook her head as if to clear it; the thick black hair piled on top moved as a single, solid unit. “What would the silence do to help you in this situation, my lord?”
“If nothing else, it might make it easier for me to keep straight in my mind all of the information I have collected and am supposed to collect. Before all of this began to happen to me, I was sure I was an intelligent man.”
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