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

Shizuka knelt and set the tray on the floor. Yuki knelt down beside her, waited with hardly concealed impatience for Shizuka to help herself, then took a rice ball and crammed it into her mouth. Almost immediately, she leaped to her feet again and announced that she would bring tea and, running from the room, collided with her mother. Seiko just managed to rescue the tray, laden with tea and cups; she placed it on the floor and gave her daughter a slap.

“Go and tell your father his niece is here,” she screeched. “And walk, like a girl should!

“She drives me mad,” Seiko said to Shizuka. “Sometimes I think she is possessed. Of course, her father spoils her. He wishes she was a boy and treats her like one. But she’s not going to grow up to be a man, is she? She’ll be a woman, and she has to know how to behave like one. Take my advice, Shizuka: If you have children, make sure you have sons.”

“If only one could choose,” Shizuka said, without smiling. She took the bowl of tea and drank.

“Seedlings can be thinned out,” Seiko commented, referring to the practice common among villagers of leaving newborn infants to die, especially if there were too many girls already.

“But all the children of the Tribe are valued,” Shizuka replied. “Girls as much as boys.” She felt suddenly cold and feared she might vomit; a year ago she had been given a brew of herbs by Seiko in this very house. All the fibers of her body trembled at the memory.

“If they are talented. And obedient.” Seiko sighed. They heard Yuki’s footsteps, pounding like a pony across the yard. The little girl stopped abruptly and stepped out of her sandals onto the boards of the veranda with exaggerated decorum. She came into the room, bowed gracefully to Shizuka, and said, using formal language, “My father will attend on you presently.”

“There,” Seiko said approvingly. “You can behave nicely when you want to. Be like your cousin. See how pretty Shizuka looks, how elegant her clothes are. Do you know, she has captured the heart of a mighty warrior with her charms. You would never know she has the ruthlessness and the fighting skills of a man!”

“I wish I were a boy!”Yuki said to Shizuka.

“To tell you the truth, I wished the same thing at your age,” Shizuka replied. “But if it is our fate to be born into a woman’s body, we must make the best of it. Be thankful you were born into the Tribe. If you study and train hard, you will have a better life than any woman of the warrior class.” And if you are obedient and do exactly as you are told.

“I am to go away this summer,” Yuki said, her eyes glowing. “I am going to my grandparents in the secret village.”

“You will have to behave there!” her mother told her. “Your father will not be there to run to every time you don’t get your own way.”

“It will be the making of her,” Shizuka said, remembering the years she herself had spent in the Tribe village, Kagemura, in the mountains behind Yamagata, developing her talents and learning all the skills of the Tribe. “She has a great future ahead of her.”

Even as she spoke, she wished she could take back the words. She felt a premonition, as if she had tempted fate. She feared that Yuki’s life would indeed be short.

“Be careful,” she said, as she heard her uncle step onto the veranda.

“She doesn’t know the meaning of the word,” Seiko grumbled, but she took Yuki’s hand gently and caressed her before leading her from the room. In that moment Shizuka saw that Seiko, for all her criticism, loved her daughter as deeply as her husband did.

“Welcome, Shizuka. It’s been a long time,” her uncle said, using the customary greeting perfunctorily. “You are well, I hope.” His gaze swept over her and she felt he saw everything about her. She gazed at him in the same way, her eyes trained to detect the slightest changes in expression and demeanor, to read the language of the body, particularly hard in Kenji’s case as he was so adept at disguising his own self and assuming any number of other roles.

“We’d better go within,” he said. “No one will overhear us or disturb us there.”

There was a concealed room in the center of the house, behind a false wall released by turning one of the decorated bosses in the rafters. Kenji lifted the wall aside effortlessly and replaced it from the inside. It fell into place with hardly a sound. The room was narrow, the light dim. Kenji sat cross-legged on the floor, and she knelt opposite him. He drew a small package from the breast of his robe and placed it on the floor.

“This is an exceptionally important document,” he said. “I’ve just brought it myself from Inuyama. It contains a letter from Sadamu to Noguchi Masayoshi. I’m not supposed to know its exact contents, but naturally I’ve opened it and read it. You are to give it to Kuroda Shintaro and to no one else. He will hand it on to Lord Noguchi.”

Shizuka bowed slightly. “Am I allowed to know what the message is?”

He did not answer her directly. “How are things between you and Arai?”

“I believe he loves me,” she said in a low voice. “He trusts me completely.”

“It’s very satisfactory,” Kenji said. “Of course, no one knew this would happen when you were sent to Kumamoto, but it couldn’t have worked out better. Well done!”

“Thank you, Uncle.”

“And you? I trust you are not going to lose your head over him?”

“Maybe there is some danger,” she admitted. “It’s impossible not to respond when such a man loves you.”

Kenji snorted disparagingly. “Be careful. He may turn against you as suddenly as he fell for you, especially if he feels deceived or affronted by you.