[Continuing chapter 13]
“I look terrible, don’t I?” Katsumi grinned up at Hiroki, her face pale but her mouth determined. “Without my good looks, where will I be?”
“There is nothing wrong with your good looks,” Hiroki said, relieved to find her joking even if the humour was forced and an inadequate veneer over her pain. “I see they were coward enough to use arrows, at least at first.” The worst of Katsumi’s wounds was to her left calf: an arrowhead and part of the shaft had gone straight through the fleshy part. Even if the main body of the muscle was undamaged she could well have a limp for the rest of her life. We match now in our infirmities, he thought, and refused to dwell on any other ways in which they might be matched.
“Well, they were brave enough to come after me with swords eventually,” she said. “Which was a mistake, though I hope they don’t learn from it. Gardening tools can’t kill with a single blow, Lord Hiroki, but if an entire block is aroused against you, all that’s required is for one lucky blow to disarm a warrior or knock him down, and then numbers will prevail no matter how noble the warrior.”
“I have to confess,” Hiroki said, kneeling beside her, “that I was very impressed with the way your neighbours drove them off.”
“It happens a lot more now,” she said, and Hiroki nodded, remembering what Saburo had told him. “Did you know that it was our fire-prevention committee?”
“Your what? You mean you were defended by firemen?” He remembered about the fire-watch organizations; even his own neighbourhood had been required to have one. But watching for fires was all they did. Back then, anyway. “When we spoke of this before, you talked of neighbourhood associations.”
“Every block in the city has the responsibility to protect itself against fires,” Katsumi said. Her breathing was a bit more shallow now, and Hiroki decided to leave her alone. Soon. “When the shōgun ran away last year, and we realized that there wasn’t going to be anybody protecting the city, it was a simple step for the fire-watch teams to start watching for crime and criminals too. That’s why we talk of neighbourhood associations now: they do more than they used to.” She took a deep breath.
“If you people aren’t careful, we of the city are going to discover that we can govern ourselves as well as protect ourselves. And then you might as well not bother coming back into the capital at all. Am I not right?”
“It would only be what we deserve,” Hiroki said, suddenly seeing his departure from Kyoto two decades ago as abandonment and not escape. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant vision.
“I trust you are being well looked after,” he said, desperate to change the subject. She closed her eyes, then slowly nodded her head. They hadn’t given her a wooden pillow, but in her current state she didn’t really need one: she had no elaborate hairstyle to protect. The only thing preventing Hiroki from seeing the hair she had been so willful about not letting down in his presence was the futon that covered all of her but her face.
“I have never had so much space in my life,” she said after a pause. “You have no other women here?” He’d had her put in the women’s quarters, of course, with Saburo’s wife as nurse. Saburo himself would sleep in the servants’ quarters with Jiro.
“We’re an embassy from the provinces,” he said, laughing. “Why would we bring women with us?”
“To entertain you with poetry, perhaps?” She giggled, but weakly.
“You can read poetry to us once you are recovered. That’s all the entertainment my superiors will require,” he told her. He waited a moment, then pressed on: “Do you have enough strength, do you think, to tell me more about what happened?”
“How much strength does it take, Lord Hiroki, to tell you what should be obvious to you? Somehow the scar-faced man found me out, even though I was as careful as you commanded. I don’t know how he did it; I only know he couldn’t have learned from me or from Inaba. I sent Inaba away yesterday; he should be somewhere in Settsu province by now.
“Anyway, the scarface man brought a half-dozen fighters to our neighbourhood. And he caught me in front of the shop, which is the only reason the coward was able to stick my leg the way he did.
“Saburo’s son was trying to help me back into the shop when they shot him down. And then they made the mistake of trying to get close enough to finish me off with their swords. Do you suppose he was trying to take my head? How romantic that would have been.” She laughed in a way that proclaimed how unromantic she found the concept.
“I imagine they did want to be able to confirm that they’d killed you,” he said, as little amused as she. “Such bravery — the stuff of a tale.”
“Well, nobody is going to celebrate their performance today,” she said. “I picked up the hoe the boy was carrying when they killed him, and I knocked down the first man who came at me before he knew what I was doing.” She stared up at the ceiling, as if remembering her actions. “I made a mess of his face once he was down. And by that time the block organization had come out of their houses, and so the scar-faced man was only able to nick me a couple of times before he ended up running for his life.”
“You fought like Tomoe Gozen,” he told her, “and you should be proud of what you did. I will certainly be sure to tell everyone about this.”
“Who did I fight like?” She lifted her head, smiling.
“Tomoe Gozen was a woman of the Minamoto clan,” he told her. “During the later years of the Gempei War she put on armour and joined her lord in the field, even fighting from horseback. Her favourite weapon was the naginata, and I imagine she used it just as you used that hoe today.”
She released her breath in a sigh and settled back into the futon, looking content if worn. “Thank you for telling me this,” she said. “For some reason I had been afraid that you would be disappointed in me for letting that man find me out.”
“Never,” he said. “My only disappointment is that you have been wounded in my service. I will do all I can to repay that debt — starting with the delivery of every book of poetry I can lay my hands on.
“And then continuing with ensuring the death of the man who attacked you.”
Next Characters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13
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