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[continuing chapter 16]
Hiroki did not completely believe that his mother was in fact meeting with the abbess until he heard her voice, as bitter and querulous as ever, rising over the gentler sounds of bird and cricket from the garden beside the abbess’s quarters.
“No I will not be interviewed by them,” she said, in a tone and at a volume that any normal person would consider wholly inappropriate for use in a temple, much less a nunnery. “My affairs — my work — are none of their business. Send them away.” Hiroki shifted on the stone bench, the acid voice stirring up a set of horrible memories.
After a brief, shattering silence the birdsong resumed — only to be overridden again: “They are lying, and I cannot believe you could be so taken in. Who would dare to threaten me? I speak for the imperial household, woman, and you must not forget that.”
“I don’t have to hear what the abbess is saying to know what that conversation is about,” Shiro said in the low, not-a-whisper voice Hiroki had taught him, and Tetsuo, to use in order not to be overheard. “The lady thinks she can outfight warriors.”
“She could certainly out-shout them,” Tetsuo said, grinning. “Are you sure we have to save this lady, Hiroki?”
“Believe me, if I could learn what she knows without saving her, I would let a thousand brigands boil her for soup,” Hiroki said, and meant it. “I confess, I don’t know what I’ll do if she refuses to see us.”
The nun who had brought them here emerged from the building, her placid nature considerably ruffled now. “You are absolutely certain that there is a threat to the lady’s life?” she asked Hiroki.
In reply he took the note from his sleeve and opened it before her. “The brushwork is appalling,” he said, “but you ought to be able to understand the point I’m trying to make. The first person mentioned is dead; the second is gravely wounded and may not live. The third, you will see, is the woman we are trying to speak with.”
The nun’s face paled as she read. “May I take this in with me?” she asked, looking up at him after she had finished the note.
“I would rather not give it up,” Hiroki said, “but if that is the only way I can persuade the lady to talk with me then I suppose you must.”
Watching the nun retreat to the abbess’s quarters, Hiroki felt a sort of nakedness. That note is the only solid evidence I have, he thought, even if it doesn’t tell me much. I cannot afford to lose it.
After a moment’s indecision he got to his feet. “You two wait here,” he said. He was nearly at the building’s veranda when his mother’s voice rose again. “I tell you these are all lies. I am of noble birth — there is Fujiwara blood in me, I’ll have you know — and I will have nothing to do with this or any other provincial rabble.” A pause, presumably for the nuns to attempt, in their quiet way, to make her see reason. “I will happily die rather than accept help from the likes of them.” He heard a crash as some piece of pottery met its end against a kettle or iron teapot.
He had just stepped onto the veranda when his mother emerged from behind the wooden shutters. “Get out of my way,” she shouted, “and don’t you dare touch me.”
There aren’t enough coins in China to pay me to touch you, he told her, keeping his anger stopped up inside him. He wondered what she would say if he revealed himself to her, then decided it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. If anything she’d be even more rude.
“I had hoped you would be reasonable, great lady,” he said, exaggerating with care the formality of his words and tone. He took a small amount of pleasure in the way her painted eyebrows wrinkled as her eyes widened. “This affair may well touch on the government, so it is not just you in danger here.”
“The only government I recognize is the emperor,” she snapped. And does the emperor grow the rice you eat? Hiroki asked her in their silent, non-conversation. Is it the emperor who protects this temple? He realized that he was stepping onto treacherous ground now — Nobody seems to be demanding that rice be grown, or protecting the people today — and so in response he simply bowed, allowing just a hint of court behaviour to show.
If his mother recognized this she did not acknowledge it. And when the abbess and her companion appeared on the veranda, his mother turned her back on him and said, “I will order that this man be arrested if you do not remove him from my sight immediately.”
The abbess smiled, rather thinly, at him and said, “If you would walk with me a moment, sir.”
“Don’t you let him talk you into foolishness, woman,” his mother called after them.
“Gods,” Hiroki said, following the abbess into the garden, “are they all like that in the palace these days?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Some of them are worse.” She laughed, and Hiroki admired her ability to keep her Buddha-nature in the face of such provocation.
“I have run out of ideas,” he said. “Somehow I have to get her to talk to me, but if that note can’t persuade her—”
With a rustling of beads the abbess reached into her robe and withdrew the note. “A very cold-hearted set of instructions, isn’t it?”
“Written by a person either irredeemably evil or utterly desperate,” he said. “And she will not see it.”
“What is it you wished to talk to her about?”
“I have to know why she is here, and what is — was — her connection to a samurai woman named Miyoshi Tomiko.”
“Is that all?” The abbess smiled and patted Hiroki’s forearm. “In that case, let me finish my meeting with her in peace. I will tell the lady you have been dismissed. Then, when she has gone, I will explain things to you.” A look of great sadness fluttered over her face and vanished.
“I will not be divulging any secrets. Not now.”
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 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16
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