Autumn Princess, Dragon Child Page 9

  In the same cave from which Risu and Nyorin had come galloping, the monkey hunters had left a packhorse with two baskets, and another smaller basket, which contained fruit, loquats and apricots. The boy fetched water from the stream in a bamboo flask, put his hands together and said a prayer over it, and gave it to Yoshi so he could drink. Then he fed him fruit, cutting small slices with a sharp knife and putting them in his mouth. The other men did the same with Shiro and Kemuri, holding them on their laps.

  The monkeys were not so distressed that they could not eat; indeed, the food calmed them and they allowed the men to put them on the horse, one in each basket. Yoshi was lifted onto the horse’s back, where he sat between the baskets, gripping the mane with his tied hands.

  It must have been quite dark inside the baskets, for Shiro and Kemuri went quiet, as if they had fallen asleep. The boy walked beside the packhorse, the tame monkey on his shoulder, and told Yoshi the names of everything they saw, rock, stream, tree, sky, speaking slowly and clearly as if he were teaching him. After a while Yoshi repeated a word, horse, and the boy shouted in delight.

  “He can talk! He can talk!”

  Yoshi continued to say the words after him, and there was something quite funny about learning to speak again, not in the polite, complicated language of the court, but in the direct slang of the riverbank people. He started laughing with every word, and the boy laughed, too, and then the men joined in, feeding him words he suspected were rude, arse, cock, balls. Saying them made him feel like a different person, stronger and older.

  “Sarumaru,” the boy said, pointing at his own nose. “My name is Sarumaru.”

  “Kinmaru,” the older man said, and the younger one, “Monmaru.”

  “Yoshi.” He could not point to himself as his hands were tied, but he bobbed his head up and down.

  “We will call you Yoshimaru.” The boy laughed. “We all have children’s names. We don’t cut our hair, we never grow up. We are children of the road.”

  Yoshi liked the sound of that. He remembered seeing Sarumaru at Majima and wanting to be him. All the time he had been practicing acrobatics in the forest with the wild monkeys and the two horses, he had been pretending he was that boy. Now he had met him, and was going to live with him. He was young enough to believe in the magic of his own thinking. It made him laugh again.

  “Children of God,” Monmaru said, and drew something quickly in the air with his index finger. The others murmured as if they were saying a prayer.

  They traveled on through the day, resting in the shade for a while when it was hottest. Yoshi’s hands were untied then and, afterward, no one seemed to think they should be tied again. There were few people on the road, though they saw farmers in the distance working in the fields, bringing in beans and rice. Most of the paddies were already harvested, and crows gathered in them, picking up every last grain, every insect left exposed. Herons stalked on the banks, looking for frogs. Now and then Yoshi caught a glimpse of gold and black plumage and knew the werehawk was following him. He was not altogether happy about it. Kon was too closely connected with his former life and knew who he really was. Though most people would not understand the werehawk, maybe someone would, maybe the Prince Abbot, who, Yoshi knew, was his most dangerous enemy.

  In the afternoon they came to the crossroads where the ghost had not let Risu and Nyorin go any farther, and Shikanoko had summoned it back from the shores of the river of death and into the foal. He remembered the mask, how it had transformed Shikanoko into a supernatural being. He shivered again.

  “Usually we would go from here to Rinrakuji,” Sarumaru said. “The monks there always used to welcome us and watch our performance. Then they would give us food and shelter. They were good people and truly devout. But the temple was burned by the Miboshi in the early summer and has not been rebuilt.”

  “And when it is rebuilt the Prince Abbot will install his monks there and bring it under the sway of Ryusonji,” Kinmaru said gloomily. “The Prince Abbot does not approve of us or our monkey brothers.”

  It will never occur to him to look for me among them, Yoshi thought.

  That night they camped under the stars. Yoshi was used to this—he often slept in a tree with Shiro and Kemuri and he loved being outside at night, listening to the insects and the night birds, talking to the rabbit in the moon, and gazing at the vast sweep of stars, wondering why some shone more brightly than others, where they went in the day, what lay behind the dome of the sky.

  Monmaru lit a fire of green wood and fragrant leaves to keep away mosquitoes. It was only partly effective, the insects whined around their heads, but none of the three tried to swat them. They either brushed them away or watched them as they pierced the skin to suck blood.

  “So does the Secret One feed us,” Kinmaru said, and again Monmaru drew the sign in the air.

  “We have taken a vow not to kill,” Sarumaru whispered to Yoshi later. “All beings desire to live, just as we do, and the Secret One has a plan for each life. Who are we to interfere? Our deaths, and everyone else’s, are ordained by him and already written in his book. If we interfere with that, we are destroying the harmony and beauty of his great design and letting evil into the world.

  “Men fight and kill endlessly. When they are not engaged in battle, great lords hunt for sport, taking thousands of birds and animals in a single day, decking themselves out in the plumage and fur of the slaughtered, fletching their shafts of death with feathers taken from the dead, so heron kills heron, pheasant, pheasant. Even monks and priests, who claim to follow the Enlightened One, kill for their esoteric rituals, using monkeys’ skulls and wolves’ hearts. But there is another kingdom, alongside this world in the midst of which we live, both within and without it, where there is no killing, no blood-soaked earth. By refusing to take life, we bring it into being.”

  Yoshi listened, without saying anything, but in his heart he knew it was in this kingdom that he wanted to live.

  “You understand everything, don’t you?” Sarumaru said.

  Shiro and Kemuri whimpered in their baskets. Sarumaru’s monkey, whom he called Tomo, sat next to them, occasionally pushing a piece of fruit under the lid, chattering to them reassuringly. Yoshi wondered if they would ever trust Tomo, after he had deceived them so shamelessly. He had seen the monkeys in the forest outwit one another, either in play or to steal a piece of food, but he had not expected one of them to dissemble so successfully, at the command of a human.

  He nodded in reply to Sarumaru’s question and smiled tentatively at him.

  “So, you haven’t lived with the monkeys all your life? You were brought up among people. Where did you come from?”

  “I don’t remember,” Yoshi said.

  “I was brought up in the village of Iida,” Sarumaru said. He didn’t seem tired at all; he was prepared to chat all night. “My family sold me to the acrobats when I was a child. I don’t remember much about it. I had a lot of brothers, some older, some younger. Everyone blamed me for everything; they would take it in turns to give me a beating. I tried to run away, I remember that, but someone always came after me, my father or my older brothers, and then I would get two beatings, one on the spot and one when I got home. I still cried when I left. I didn’t know any better. But Mon and Kin have always been kind to me, and now Tomo is my best friend. People laugh when we perform together; they love our act. And when I hear them clap, I’m saying to my brothers in my heart, ‘You couldn’t do this in a thousand years!’”

  “You must forgive them,” Kinmaru said.

  “Mmm, I do forgive them, but I can’t help feeling pleased all the same.”

  “Stop chattering and let us get some sleep,” Monmaru said wearily.

  Saru gave an exaggerated sigh and seemed to fall asleep, but a little later he said suddenly, “My oldest brother was very clever. He could use an abacus and even read and write a little. He went to Miyako and worked in the house of a great lord. But I don’t know what happened to him after
that. One day I’ll go and find him and I’ll say, ‘Look, older brother, Taro, look what I can do. You never imagined that back in Iida, did you?’”

  “Go to sleep!” the two older men said simultaneously, and then both laughed.

  “Come here, Tomo,” Saru said, and, clasping the uncomplaining monkey in his arms, he settled down. With his other arm he pulled Yoshi close to him. He did not say anymore, awake, but Yoshi heard him call out in his dreams.

  Two days later they came to Aomizu, where Aki and Yoshi had said goodbye to Kai and the women of the boats, at the end of the third month. He had thought about Kai every day since then and wondered if he would meet her again now, hoping he would, hoping she would not give him away, but he couldn’t see any of the beautifully decorated boats or the musicians or the elegant lady who had talked to him so strangely about pollution.

  They went to a house by the lakeside where the other monkeys of the troupe had been left, in a yard at the back. Some women lived there—perhaps they were the older men’s wives, though Yoshi never really knew for sure—with three or four very young children. The house was noisy; the women shouted and sometimes burst into song, the babies cried, the toddlers were always falling over and sobbing, the monkeys screamed from their enclosure, especially when they saw the new arrivals.

  Shiro and Kemuri were kept in a separate cage. They moped and fretted, and Yoshi spent a lot of time with them, comforting them and feeding them tidbits. There always seemed to be plenty of these; the acrobats received many gifts for their performances, and the merchant guild, which oversaw the markets around the lake, provided the house and looked after the families.

  Gifts were of food and rice wine, lengths of cloth, gold statues, lacquer bowls, and sometimes even copper coins, which no one was quite sure what to do with. They seemed magical and slightly dangerous in their power to transform goods and transfer ownership. They were usually buried in the yard, as a charm to keep the monkeys safe.

  But despite the charms and the tidbits, Yoshi worried about Shiro and Kemuri. “They’re so sad,” he said to Sarumaru. “They want to go back to the forest. We should take them back.”

  “It’s good that they are sad,” Saru said. “That way they’ll come to depend on you and me, and that makes them easier to train. They’ll get over it; they’ll forget their old life and this will be all they know.”

  Like me, Yoshi thought. Already memories of his early childhood were fading. Perhaps he really had died on the riverbank, and now he had been reborn into a new life. Nothing seemed real before the morning when Shikanoko had intended to kill him, the horses had saved his life, and he had lived in the forest with Akihime and the monkeys.

  The acrobats had traveled throughout the summer, attending the great festivals as well as the fifth-day markets, held on the fifth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth of each month. Now as the typhoon season began they stayed close to home, training the new monkeys and practicing with the old.

  Training was slow, but the men and Saru were patient. They were never cruel, though they would reprimand any misbehavior with a sharp word or a tap on the culprit’s paw, just as they did with the toddlers, who, Yoshi saw, were also being trained to learn the same tricks and be as attentive and obedient. Shiro and Kemuri were smarter than the children and learned more quickly. This seemed to please them, and they began to seek rewards and to treat the toddlers like younger, less intelligent monkeys, with a mixture of concern and scorn.

  They still squealed with delight and ran to cling to Yoshi whenever they saw him, but they also came to love Sarumaru, as all the monkeys did. They competed for his attention and tried to please him, not only for the rewards but for his words of praise, the way he scratched their heads and let them climb all over him.

  Saru developed an act where he would appear among the crowd, covered in monkeys, a walking fur creature with six faces. Children ran screaming, as if from an ogre, only to run back in delight as Saru peeled off the monkeys, one by one, and sent them somersaulting into the air.

  The first typhoon of the year came roaring across the lake, dumping rivers of rain from its dark, heavy clouds, turning day to night, flooding the roads around the lake, and tearing roofs from the flimsy dwellings. When it was over everyone set to, cheerfully, to dry out clothes and bedding, repair houses, clean mud from walls and floors. Typhoons were a part of life, to be dealt with like everything else, with the mixture of good humor, patience, and gratitude that was the acrobats’ way.

  At the end of the ninth month, when the storms had cleared and the fine weather of autumn had set in, they began to get ready to take to the road again. The monkeys were excited; the women seemed sad and relieved at the same time; the children cried because they wanted to go, too. Saru told Yoshi they would take him, Shiro, and Kemuri.

  “We will go down to the Rainbow Bridge for the fifth-day market, then back here for the fifteenth. That way, if you don’t like it, or the new monkeys get upset by the crowds, you can stay here with them until we come back for the winter.”

  “I will like it,” Yoshi said, “I know I will.”

  “You have to be prepared for anything, think on your feet, turn a bad situation into something good. All eyes are on you: people waiting for you to make them laugh, many hoping you will fail so they can jeer at you. It takes a bit of getting used to. And sometimes the monkeys just don’t want to perform. They are in a bad mood or they don’t feel well, it’s windy or the crowd is hostile. Then you have to make the best of that as well, not freeze up or show that you’re flustered.”

  “You make it sound hard, but it looks so easy,” Yoshi said.

  “Wait till you see me in a real crowd,” Saru boasted.

  Yoshi opened his mouth to say he already had, at Majima, but then he thought better of it. He did not want to say anything about his past. He just wanted to be the boy who had grown up with the monkeys.

  That night the old man who had visited the women’s boat, the day Akihime and he had left it, came to the house to share the evening meal. Yoshi pretended he hadn’t seen him before, but he remembered him well and all the things he had said. He kept his head lowered and stayed at the back of the circle. The old man prayed before the start of the meal, the others responding in low, reverent voices. Then he served food to each of them, as he had done before, as though he were one of the women, not an old priest who deserved respect. Yoshi felt the old man’s keen eyes on him, but he did not speak to him until the end of the meal, when he began to say the words of blessing for the departure.

  Kinmaru, Monmaru, and Saru, who were leaving the next day, shuffled forward and knelt before him. Saru reached out behind him and pulled Yoshi alongside them.

  “He is coming with us,” he said. “And he needs blessing more than anyone, for he is alone in the world, apart from us.”

  Yoshi knelt, keeping his head down, and felt the old man’s hands rest lightly on his hair.

  “May the Secret One guide you always,” he said quietly. “You have taken a different path from the one set out for you, but it will lead you back to the same place, in the end.”

  I hope not, Yoshi thought. I want to be a monkey boy like Saru. I don’t want to be emperor.

  8

  SHIKANOKO

  “If you wait for winter to be over, months will be lost,” Kongyo said to Shikanoko. “But act now and take Kumayama and it will be you the snows protect.”

  He had made the same argument several times since he had arrived at the hut and found Shika and the boys there. “You are not going to stay in the forest forever. You may as well leave now. Besides, we cannot survive another winter in Kuromori. We must either escape or take our own lives. You would have us fighting for you, seventy men.”

  “Half-starved,” Shika said, with scorn.

  “Desperate and capable of anything. Hungry not only for food but, even more, to avenge Lord Kiyoyori.” Kongyo clutched his belly. The hare meat had been too rich for him and had given him the gripes. He had had to das
h off into the bushes several times and now his face was pale and, despite the chill of the winter afternoon, sweaty.

  “You’re in no condition to travel,” Shika said. “Rest another day. Let your horse recover, too. I will discuss your suggestion with the boys.”

  He wondered what Kongyo made of them. The older man had seen them all now, though he could not tell them apart. He had expressed surprise to Shika that they looked so ordinary. They had lost the striking beauty of their early months and now resembled the thin, half-grown boys found in any small village of the Eight Islands. It pleased Shika. He could see it made them less conspicuous. They had become unremarkable. They blended into the forest and he was sure they would blend into any surroundings in the same way.

  “I think I will lie down,” Kongyo said, “but not in that accursed hut.” Cold had driven him the previous night to sleep there among the skulls, masks, and bones, the animal skins and the feather cloaks, but he complained of nightmares the next morning.

  “The hut is not accursed,” Mu said. “It is something you don’t understand, but there is no need to fear it.”

  The warrior looked astonished to be addressed in this familiar way.

  “Nightmares are messages from the gods, like dreams, like the one you yourself said you had,” Mu said. “You should be grateful for them. No harm will come to you, unless Shikanoko commands it. Go and lie down inside. It’s too cold out here. Ku will keep you company and the dogs will keep you warm.”

  Shika was surprised by Mu’s words, too. They were more than he had ever heard Mu say at one time and there was something strange about them. He realized Mu was copying Kongyo’s intonation and vocabulary, as though he were absorbing them directly from the older man’s brain. The boys were like the forest leeches, the tiny monsters that Shisoku, and now Kuro, tried in vain to replicate, that sucked blood and consumed earthworms whole.

  Ku led Kongyo into the hut, followed by two real dogs and three fake ones. After a few moments the boy came out again and joined Kiku by the fire.