Sowing Ghosts 17.4

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[continuing chapter 17]


“Maids do not have possessions,” Jitsuko told him, her voice rough with sleep. “I have none; Aki had none. There is nothing to show you.” She stood in the veranda of the women’s quarters, shivering with the cold but otherwise unmoving.

“Not even an ink-stone and a brush?” Hiroki asked her.

She started backward, and in the light of his lantern tears sparkled on her cheeks. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” She sank to the floor, prostrated herself. “How did you know this?” She tossed her head such that her hair flowed around his feet. “I did not want to lie, master. Please, tell me — will I be killed?”


Hiroki was disgusted with the unconstrained emotion, but took care to step back from her without hurting the woman. It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t been brought up properly. “I see no reason why you should even have to be questioned in this matter,” he told her. “Just show these things to me, please.”

“She said it was her ‘secret lover’s’ gift,” Jitsuko said, getting to her feet. “I just assumed this man was an invention, something she created to make herself important. Because Lady Tomiko had a real secret lover.” She sniffed loudly, wiping her nose.

“Yet this ‘invention’ was teaching Aki to write,” Hiroki said. “Did you not wonder about that?”

“What use is writing to women,” she asked, “and especially to maids? I just thought she was playing at it, making ugly images with a brush and ink. Certainly she did not know how to read.”

“Oh, I knew that,” Hiroki said softly. “Had she been able to read she would not have died.”

“Gods and Amida Buddha protect me,” Jitsuko said, eyes pinched shut. “Everything is disaster.”

“And yet we still live,” Hiroki said, tiring of the woman. “The ink-stone and brush, please.”

She took Hiroki into a large, dark room. The light of his lantern revealed a series of futon-wrapped shapes on the floor. Some of them stirred, but nobody spoke or rose. “She kept them in here, tucked under the fireplace,” Jitsuko said, kneeling at the depression in the floor in which an iron fire-basin was set. She moved her hands carefully, though the fire had clearly died some time ago. “They were in a — what?” Too late, Hiroki thought. “They’re gone,” Jitsuko said. Her voice rose to a wail. “Who could have found them?”

“I imagine I know who found them,” Hiroki said, now heartily tired of maids in general and Jitsuko in particular. “I am sorry to have awakened you to no purpose, and release you now. Go back to bed before your crying wakes all the others.” Snuffling noises and a cough or two from out of the darkness suggested he was already too late in this regard as well.

“Wait,” she said. Hesitating for a moment, she set her hand on his sleeve and tugged. “Come outside, lord,” she said, “and give me a moment. I do have something you might want to see.” Before Hiroki could say anything in response, Jitsuko disappeared back into the maids’ room.

When she reappeared she clutched a sheaf of papers in her rough fist. “I found her trying to burn these,” she said, “and sent her off on some errand. Then I rescued what I could from the brazier. It’s a shame to waste even cheap paper, you know.” She handed the paper to Hiroki. “I was going to save them to press cherry-blossoms,” she said.

“Hold the lantern,” Hiroki said, and began to look at the papers. They were definitely Aki’s; the girl had been practicing the same phrases over and over. He breathed in sharply when he finally understood what the characters were supposed to mean. “This — is interesting,” he said. Then he saw the final paper in the stack, and it was only with an effort that he kept from shouting.

“Far from being punished,” he told Jitsuko, “I am going to see that you are rewarded in some fashion. If not by your master then by mine.”

“What is it?”

“It is something much, much more useful to me than an ink-stone or brush could be,” he said. So it seems ghosts do not see everything from their place on the other side of the veil of existence. The onryō said nothing of this.

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    Chapter 17