Heaven's Net Is Wide Lian Hearn (leveled readers .TXT) 📖

a wider, more level road that led up a slight slope. At the top of the slope, almost hidden by the driving rain and the dark cedars, was a small building with curved roof and deep eaves. Four horses, one a pretty mare, backs to the wind, were tethered beneath a barely adequate shelter roofed with straw that shook in the gusts of wind, shedding stalks and chaff like huge raindrops.

He stopped at the steps and removed his sandals and hat, sodden as they were. Despite the rain, the doors were all open. He stepped up onto the veranda and looked in.

The rain streamed from the eaves and splashed up from the ground, enclosing the building like a living curtain. Lamps were lit inside, but the main room of the temple was empty, the floor bare boards. It seemed hardly used: a wooden statue of the Enlightened One sat on a small platform; in front of him vases held fresh flowers, the yellow-flowered silver leaf and branches of red-berried sacred bamboo. There were few other decorations or artifacts, only, below the rafters, votive pictures of oxen and horses.

He called softly and heard her voice speak to her companion Sachie, heard the woman get to her feet and approach the doorway. She turned and whispered back into the interior room.

“It is he.”

He made a sign to Sachie, fearing she would speak his name but she said simply, “Come in. We are expecting you,” and bobbed her head. He remembered her as an elegant and refined woman of high rank, but now she looked younger and less polished, and the clothes she wore were plain, cut like a man’s. The interior room was matted, and he hesitated on the threshold, not wanting to sit down in his wet, muddied clothes.

Lady Maruyama sat by a small lamp, but it was too dark inside to see her face. She stood and approached him. She, also, was in men’s clothes, made from dark cloth, her hair tied back with cords. In contrast with Sachie, her garments made her look older, taller, in every way stronger, but they could not dispel the mystery of her long hair or the new spareness that grief had brought to her face, revealing the beauty of the bones beneath the white skin. Her look was frank; her gaze direct and open.

“I am so glad to see you. Thank you for coming all this way. You must be tired. And you are wet through. Sachie, can we provide dry clothes?”

“I will ask the groom,” the woman replied and went quietly from the room through the worship hall to the veranda. After a few moments she returned with a dry robe that smelled faintly of horses, as if it had recently been unpacked from a saddle pannier.

Shigeru went with Sachie to the other side of the hall, where there was a similar space divided into storerooms and an office with matted floor. The temple’s records were stacked in moldering piles, and a cracked inkstone lay abandoned on a low writing table.

“Does no one live here?” he asked.

“The local people believe this temple to be haunted,” she replied. “They won’t come near it. Priests are driven mad here. They kill themselves or run away. No one will disturb us; and if anyone sees us, they will think we are ghosts.”

She brought a bowl of cold water to the veranda, and he washed his face, hands, and feet.

“I will prepare something to eat,” she murmured. After she had gone, he stripped off his clothes, dried himself, and put on the borrowed robe. It had been made for a smaller man. He tied it as best he could, put Jato into the sash, and his knife inside the breast. It was becoming colder, and despite the dry clothes, his skin was beginning to tremble.

He returned to the matted room, and Lady Maruyama indicated that he should sit. She must have brought some furnishings with her on the packhorse, for there were crimson silk cushions on the floor that surely did not belong to the temple; a sword lay next to her.

“Thank you for your message,” he said. “I was very sorry to hear of your son’s death, and so soon after your husband.”

“I will tell you about it later,” she replied. “You have also suffered terrible loss.”

“I felt you understood, better than anyone,” he said.

She smiled. “I hope you did not lose everyone you loved.”

“No,” he replied, after thinking about it for a moment. “My brother still lives, my mother, my teacher. I have at least one friend. I have a lot to thank you for,” he added. “If you had joined Iida last year, the Otori would have been completely destroyed.”

“We had made an agreement. I gave you my word. I will never enter into an alliance with the Tohan.”

“Yet our acquaintance, Arai Daiichi, is now serving the Noguchi, whose name has come to mean ‘traitor’ throughout the Middle Country.”

“Arai had no alternative. He was lucky not to be forced to take his own life. I believe he is biding his time, as you are. We keep in touch as much as we can, through Muto Shizuka.”

“It was she who betrayed us to Iida,” Shigeru said. “Presumably, Arai does not know, since they are still together and she has borne him a son.”

“You are angry about that!”

“I am angry about many things,” Shigeru said. “I am learning patience. But I would not trust the Muto woman not to betray us again. Do not tell Arai about this meeting.”

Sachie came quietly into the room with a tray on which stood two bowls filled with a kind of stew, mostly vegetables, with egg stirred through it. She returned in a few moments with a teakettle and cups.

“It is very plain,” she apologized. “We had to bring everything with us on the horses. But Bunta will go and find more food if the rain stops tomorrow.”

“I should return to Misumi tomorrow,” Shigeru said.

“Then let us eat quickly,