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

still laughing when the knife entered his heart; the pain flooded through him, the sky darkened, his lips formed the words of parting. He began the journey on which he in his time had sent so many others. His last thought was of the girl and for the warm body in which-though he did not know it-he had left a part of himself.

2

These were the years when the warlord Iida Sadayoshi, who employed so many members of the Tribe, including Kikuta Kotaro, was engaged in unifying the East of the Three Countries and compelling minor families and clans to submit to the triple oak leaf of the Tohan. The Middle Country had been held for hundreds of years by the Otori, and the current head of the clan, Lord Shigemori, had two young sons, Shigeru and Takeshi, and two discontented and ambitious half brothers, Shoichi and Masahiro.

Takeshi had been born the year Lady Otori turned thirty-two; many women were already holding their grandchildren by that age. She had been married to Shigemori when she was seventeen and he twenty-five. She had conceived a child almost immediately, giving great hope for a swift guarantee of succession, but the child, a boy, had been still-born, and the next, a girl, lived only a few hours after birth. Several miscarriages followed, all water-children consigned to the care of Jizo; it seemed her womb was too unstable to carry a living child to full term. Doctors, then priests, were consulted, and finally a shaman from the mountains. The doctors prescribed foods to strengthen the womb: sticky rice, eggs, and fermented soybeans; they advised against eating eel or any other lively fish and brewed teas that were reputed to have calming properties. The priests chanted prayers and filled the house with incense and talismans from distant shrines; the shaman tied a straw cord round her belly to hold the child in and forbade her from looking on the color red lest she revive the womb’s desire to bleed. Lord Shigemori was privately advised by his senior retainers to take a concubine-or several-but his half brothers Shoichi and Masahiro were inclined to oppose this idea, arguing that the Otori succession had always been through legitimate heirs; other clans might arrange their affairs differently, but the Otori, after all, were descended from the imperial family, and it would surely be an insult to the Emperor to create an illegitimate heir. The child could of course have been adopted and so legitimized, but Shoichi and Masahiro were not so loyal to their older brother that they did not harbor their own ideas about inheritance.

Chiyo, the senior maid in Lady Otori’s household, who had been her wet nurse and had brought her up, went secretly into the mountains to a shrine sacred to Kannon, and brought back a talisman woven from horsehair and strands of paper as light as gossamer and holding within it a spell, which she stitched into the hem of her lady’s night robe, saying nothing about it to anyone. When the child was conceived, Chiyo made sure her own regimen for a safe pregnancy was followed: rest, good food and no excitement, no doctors, priests, or shamans. Depressed by her many lost babies, Lady Otori held little hope for the life of this one; indeed, hardly anyone dared hope for a live child. When the child was born and it was a boy and, furthermore, showed every sign of intending to survive, Lord Shigemori’s joy and relief were extreme. Convinced the boy was born only to be taken from her, Lady Otori could not nurse the child herself. Chiyo’s daughter, who had just given birth to her second son, became his wet nurse. At two years old the child was named Shigeru.

Two more water-children were consigned to the care of Jizo before Chiyo made another pilgrimage to the mountains. This time she took the living baby’s navel cord as an offering to the goddess and returned with another woven talisman.

Shigeru was four when his brother was born. The second son was named Takeshi. The Otori favored names with Shige and Take in them, reminding their sons of the importance of both the land and the sword; the blessings of peace as well as the delights of war.

The legitimate succession was thus secured to the great relief of everyone, except possibly Shoichi and Masahiro, who hid their disappointment with all the fortitude expected of the warrior class. Shigeru was brought up in the strict, disciplined way of the Otori, who valued courage and physical skill, keen intelligence, mental alertness, self-control, and courtesy in grown men and obedience in children. He was taught horsemanship; the use of sword, bow, and spear; the art and strategy of war; the government and history of the clan; and the administration and taxation of its lands.

These lands constituted the whole of the Middle Country from the northern to the southern sea. In the north, the port of Hagi was the Otori castle town. Trade with the mainland and fishing the rich northern seas made it prosperous. Craftsmen from Silla on the mainland settled there and introduced many small industries, most noteworthy the beautiful pottery: the local clay had a particularly pleasing color that gave a fleshlike luster to the pale glazes. Yamagata, in the center of the country, was their second most important city. Trade was also conducted in the south from the port of Hofu. Out of the Three Countries, the Middle Country was the most prosperous, which meant that its neighbors were always eyeing it covetously.

IN THE FOURTH MONTH of the year after Kikuta Isamu’s death, the twelve-year-old Otori Shigeru came to visit his mother, as he had done once a week since he had left the house he had been raised in and gone to live in the castle as his father’s heir. The house, which was built of wood, with verandas all around it covered by deep eaves, was located on a small point near