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

either woman for days: now longing for Akane swept over him. He gazed toward the house beneath the pines, half expecting to catch a glimpse of her, but the gates were closed; the house seemed deserted. As soon as matters were under way in the castle, he would send a message to her. He would go to her that night. And he must speak to Moe as soon as possible to find out what had happened to her father and brothers. He feared they were dead, since the Yanagi had borne the brunt of the Tohan’s first onslaught while being attacked on the right-hand flank by their supposed allies, the Noguchi.

Endo Chikara and Miyoshi Satoru greeted him in front of the castle, welcoming him home and expressing their condolences for his father’s death. In contrast to the frenzy in the town, their mood was somber. No one could pretend that the Otori did not face complete disaster. They rode over the wooden bridge together; in the first bailey Shigeru dismounted and strode toward the entrance to the residence.

When they stepped inside, Endo said, “Lord Kitano will arrive tomorrow. He brings the Tohan demands.”

“Summon the elders and my uncles,” Shigeru replied. “We must discuss our position before we meet Kitano. My mother will also attend our meeting. Tell me when they are all assembled. In the meantime I must talk to my wife.”

Endo spoke to one of the maids and she disappeared along the veranda, returning a few moments later and whispering, “Lady Otori is waiting for you, Lord Otori.”

The room was dim after the brilliant sunshine, and he could not see Moe’s expression clearly as she bowed to the ground, then welcomed him. But the stiffness of her body and her stilted speech disclosed to him her grief for the dead and, he suspected, her disappointment that he was not among them. He knelt in front of her, able now to see her reddened eyes and blotched skin.

“I am very sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid you have suffered a great loss.”

“If you call the death of my father, all his sons, all our warriors, a great loss-yes, I have,” she replied with profound bitterness. “My marriage bound my family to you, to your rashness and foolhardiness. They would have done better to copy Kitano and Noguchi. Our house is wiped out. Our land is to be taken from us and given to Iida’s warriors.”

“This is still to be negotiated,” Shigeru said.

“What negotiation will bring my family back? My mother will kill herself rather than leave Kushimoto. They are all gone save me. You have destroyed the Yanagi.”

“Your father was loyal to my father and to me. Your family were not traitors. You should be proud of them.”

She raised her eyes to his face. “You have also suffered a great loss,” she said with a mock concern. “Your mistress is dead.”

He had thought she would express some formal condolences for his father’s death and, briefly, did not understand what he heard. Then he realized the depths of her hatred for him, the intensity of her desire to hurt him.

“Akane,” she went on. “The courtesan. She killed an old man and then killed herself. Apparently, so the gossip goes, Masahiro visited her with the news of your death: it must have driven her out of her mind.”

She continued to stare at him, almost triumphantly. “Of course, Masahiro had been in contact with her all winter. He must have slept with her often while you were away.”

His rage was so intense he wanted to do nothing but kill her. He fought against the wash of red that set the muscles in his arms and hands afire. He felt his fists clench and his face contort with new intolerable pain. Akane was dead? She had been deceiving him with his own uncle? Both seemed equally unbelievable and unbearable. Then he remembered the stories about her former lover, Hayato-the gossip in the town when the man was killed on Masahiro’s orders, his children condemned and then spared, thanks, everyone said, to Akane’s intercession.

“You must be very tired,” Moe said in the same artificial voice. “And I see you were wounded. Let me prepare you some tea.”

He knew if he stayed in the room a moment longer he would lose control. He stood abruptly, saying nothing more to his wife, thrust his hand toward the door, tearing the paper screen as he forced it open, and rushed toward the garden. The wall brought him up short. He crashed his fist down on it as though he could split the stone, and tears spurted from his eyes like fountains.

He stood gazing out to sea across the bay. Scarlet azaleas splashed the green of the opposite shore. The waves murmured against the huge seawall and a slight breeze came off the sea, drying the tears on his cheeks. After the one first surge, he did not weep again, but felt the heat of his fury subside and transform itself into something else, no less intense but controllable: an implacable resolve to hold onto what was left to him.

There was no one to whom he could talk, no one with whom to share his grief. Only Kiyoshige would have understood, and Kiyoshige was dead: he would never talk to him, never hear him laugh again. He himself was surrounded by people who hated him-his uncles, his own wife. He had lost his father, his closest friend, his most trusted adviser, Irie Masahide-and Akane, who would have consoled him, whom he would never hold again.

Endo Chikara came to him to tell him that the meeting was assembled. Shigeru had to put aside his grief and rage and face his uncles with composure. Now more than ever he was grateful to Matsuda and the monks at Terayama for the rigorous training that had taught him self-control. He greeted his uncles with no indication of his true feelings, received their condolences and inquiries calmly, scrutinizing their faces carefully but discreetly, assessing their