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

hat, and he carried a stick crowned with tassels of pale white straw, but despite his religious garb, he had the same warrior-look as the guards at the gate. Shigeru followed him into the dark interior. A few lamps burned smokily inside before the statue of the god. Shigeru knelt, took Jato from his belt, and dedicated it silently to Hachiman. He began to pray. The Tribe maintain a shrine, he thought with fevered logic. They must also revere the gods and honor the dead.

“What is the name of the deceased?” the priest murmured.

“Not one, but many,” Shigeru replied. “Let them just be known as warriors of the Otori clan.” How many? he wondered. Four thousand? Five thousand? He shuddered again, wishing he had been one of them. The chanting started; the smoke stung his eyes and he let them water, the moisture running unchecked down his cheeks and his newly shaven chin.

When the ceremony was over and he rose from his knees, he realized many people had come silently into the cave and knelt or stood with bowed heads around him. He thought they did not know who he was, but it was clear they felt a certain sympathy for his sorrow, seeing him as a solitary warrior, masterless, now grieving for the deaths of companions and friends.

He did not think it was a pretence-if it was, it was both elaborate and cruel-and he was moved and puzzled, realizing that the character and customs of the Tribe had more depth and subtlety than their roles of spy and murderer would at first suggest.

He went back to the lodging place, Kenji a couple of paces behind him.

“It was good of so many to pray with me,” Shigeru said. “Please thank them for it. But why did they do it?”

“They are Otori, after a fashion,” Kenji said. “Their home is the Middle Country. They’ve heard of the battle by now. The losses are reported to be very heavy; maybe some of the dead were friends, even relatives. No one knows yet.”

“But to whom do they owe allegiance? Whose land is this? To whom do they pay tax?”

“These are interesting questions,” Kenji replied smoothly and, yawning, changed the subject. “You may have been taught by Matsuda to survive without sleep indefinitely; I need sleep now. How’s your head, by the way? I can give you the same brew I gave you before, for Matsuda.”

Shigeru declined. They used the privy on the far side of the village, where the waste could be thrown directly down to the fields below. Back in the cave, he took off his outer garments and slipped beneath the hemp quilt, placing his weapons under the mattress. The quilt smelled of smoke and some herb that he could not identify. He fell asleep almost immediately but awoke burning and unbearably thirsty. It was light: he thought it must be the next morning, was seized by a terrible sense of urgency, and began to get up, groping for his sword.

Kenji woke instantly and groaned. “Go back to sleep.”

“We must get going,” Shigeru replied. “It must be long past daybreak.”

“No, it will be dark in an hour. You’ve hardly slept at all.” He called to the woman, who came after a little while with water and a cup of the willow bark tea the Fox had given Shigeru when they first met.

“Drink it, will you,” Kenji said with exasperation. “Then we can both get some sleep.”

Shigeru gulped the water, its sweet coolness slaking his parched mouth and throat. Then he drank the tea, more slowly. The willow bark dulled the pain and suppressed the fever for a while. When he woke again, it was dark. He could hear the others breathing deeply as they slept. He needed to urinate and got up to walk to the privy, but his legs would not obey him, buckling under him, pitching him forward.

He heard Kenji wake and tried to apologize, was sure that the woman was his mother’s old servant Chiyo, and began to explain something to her but forgot almost immediately what it was. The woman brought a pot and told him to piss in it, just as Chiyo had done when he was a child. She brought rags soaked in cold water, and she and Kenji took it in turns to cool his body as sweat poured from him. Later, the fever turned again to shivering; she lay next to him, giving her body’s warmth to him. He dozed and woke, thought she was Akane and that he was in the house beneath the pines in Hagi, before the battle, before the defeat.

Between them they would not let him die. The fever was intense but short-lived: as the head-wound healed, it burned itself out. Two days later he began to recover, desperate with anxiety to return to Hagi but more rational and able to accept that he needed to regain his strength before traveling on.

The woman, whose name he never knew-Kenji addressed her familiarly as “older sister,” but that was how he would speak to any woman the same age or a little older than himself-spent the day in various household chores, her hands never idle. In the lethargy left by the fever, Shigeru watched her, fascinated by the skill and frugality of her daily life. She told him a little about the organization of the village: it was made up of three families, who unlike the lowest class of peasants all had surnames: Kuroda, Imai, and Muto. Most decisions were taken cooperatively, but the headman was always from the Muto family-a relative of Kenji’s. In the East they would be Kikuta, she said, but in the Middle Country the Muto were the leading family.

Kikuta: the name was familiar. Surely his father had said the woman he had been infatuated with-or bewitched by-had been called Kikuta. The conversation came back clearly-all the griefs and disappointments of his father’s life.

“And if the headman dies without adult sons, his wife or his daughter takes