Chapter Text
~
Ten days after the ship at Hitachi and five before the reconstruction began, she received a letter from Doa in a gleefully deliberate hatchet job of formal calligraphy:
MY dEAR rIN, i have practic ed cALLIgRAPHY as you sEE. I WAS sendin g you poTAToes and the drAWing I maDe. this helps me not Fighting. thEY are DRawings of HOME, knifes, people I CUt in The oLD dAY, and yyou!
toshu cCAMe to sEE us. he saID, the sEA in wintr is BEAutiful.
~
She wrapped herself in a robe and went outside to look at the two swordlengths of ground between the courtyard steps and the dark entrance to the dojo. The soil was dry and papery like moths’ wings where she and the moonlight touched it. She was sifting it through her fingers little by little, thinking, when she heard a clunk, clunk noise from the northernmost gate and went to the entrance to find a girl splitting the doorjamb to pieces with a beautiful side-swing.
The girl shouted, “Please forgive my negligence, but I am almost finished!” She wiped her brow. She had no thumb and two bullet holes in the back of her hand.
There was nothing to be done about it. Rin kicked at the sod floor where the builders hadn’t yet laid down hardwood and considered her options.
“That looks very painful,” she tried.
“Oh, no!” cried the ghost. “Ojo-san! Please don’t spend your valuable concern on me! A few callouses here, see, and the axe handle feels just like a baby’s rattle! Well, it hurts, but that's how you know you're alive!” There were bullet holes in her throat, shining like beetles. She was in soft reconnaissance clothes and one of the holes had gone right through the mesh lining over her heart. There was a slight bamboo-grove whistling which turned out to be the wind through her exposed ribcage.
“I could never quite get the hang of that,” admitted Rin.
“I would absolutely take it upon myself to show you, ojo-san, if I didn’t have someplace to be! And all of this to chop to kindling first.” She indicated Rin’s doorjamb split to angular planks at her feet. “But—if you please! Maybe I might trouble you to let a humble woodcutter know who lives here?”
That, thought Rin, was a very good question.
“You know, I don’t know,” she said. “Not really.”
“Well, it’s a shame! All this dust, of course they’d be in want of an odd-jobs girl. I could be of service any which way. Are you versatile, ojo-san? I honor my upbringing by being versatile!”
“I,” said Rin, “Well, I suppose.”
“Please say it proudly, then!”
It was welling up already, blood from a minor cut and about as embarrassing. “I honor my upbringing by being versatile!” she yelled.
For such a serious ghost she really had a very charming laugh, thought Rin, and the next moment hated herself.
“Someone taught me that,” said the ghost. “Someone I didn’t expect. Maybe you know.”
The spring night was cold and remote. There were a few stars, blown wide against their field of vision, but set far apart and so subtle to the sightline that finding them was like chasing the sound of windchimes. Rin huddled, didn’t answer. She watched her execute that long, languid side-swing a little more. Its explosiveness only in the moment before the blade bit into the knots. Then she said, “I’m—trying to build a—wall. But I don’t think the soil is very good for laying a foundation. Could you—would you mind—”
In the courtyard, the woodcutter pushed three fingers knuckle deep into the soil and hummed at the back of her teeth. “My father’s house looked like this,” she confessed cheerfully. “A beautiful shoin-zukuri house. Though I never saw it. But I am sure that it did. A wall, through such a terribly comely courtyard?”
“I can see the old dojo entrance,” said Rin. “From wherever I stand.” The ghost was watching her courteously so she hunched her shoulders, and said, “Someone—came here once. And stood in that doorway with his back to us, as if he was our honored guest, as if—look. I brought my parents’ sword home. All I want to see when I stand here is what we have. What we still have.”
The ghost didn’t lower her dark, lightless eyes.
“A little charcoal will ready your soil to build,” she said. “All there is to do is burn it fresh.”
They brought the rough planks from the doorjamb in from the garden and piled them in the courtyard forming a haphazard character on the ground. Under the mildew of old paint, the vegetal bite of cedar, and below that lime where the wood had initially been treated to gird the first iteration of her home. They worked quickly, sloughing the dampness from their hands on their clothes. In Rin’s chest she felt a flickering fluttering as though her heart was there, under the ghost’s cupped palm where she struck a match on her steel shoulderplate and then lit the fire in the heart of the woodpile.
“Let it burn until morning.”
“Morning? But—I’m sure I’ll fall asleep! Won’t you stay with me?”
“No, ojo-san. I was too early, and now I am too late.”
“But the the house…! I wouldn’t—if the house burned down…”
“Ojo-san!” The ghost was opening and closing her eyes very fast. “This is something I never thought about! An outrage—the house burning down!”
Silvery quick she snatched one of the steel plates from her shoulders and cast it onto the pile. The flame skittered snakelike up the metal arch and disappeared into the curve of her lifeline. Her nails lit up like mother-of-pearl as she detached another, and then another, from her shoulders, from her elbows and gauntlets, from her knees, and finally she offered her back to Rin, wordlessly, and Rin saw the steel trident insignia between her shoulderblades.
The moment she touched it a soft blackness expanded across the ghost’s skin so quickly it swallowed up the bullet holes, the serious mouth with its earnest laugh, the calloused hands that had protected her from the hard axe-handle and a harder life. Rin turned to toss the piece onto the fire and when she looked back there was nothing there but the axe, cockeyed in the dirt.
An exhaustion she hadn’t felt since she was a child knocked her feet out from under her. When her eyes flew open again the daylight was breaking; she was up to her ankles in a sweet-scented ash, her garden overrun with it from her sandals to the stones at its edge: charcoal the color of the leaden winter sky, its mirrored density, the lengths of ground now in her name under a field of silver dust unrecognizable as the moon.
~
She went to see Hyakurin and the Itto-Ryu’s wounded ace. Before she went she put Doa’s letter in her satchel and then ran back two shopfronts to leave it at home. On reflection she buried it in the garden, under the charcoal, and stubbornly didn’t think about anything taking root.
When she got to Hyakurin’s house Makie was there, swaddled in her bandages and with her head held steady in a brace. This she craned her neck out of to peer at Rin’s grimy hands, and then she smiled.
“Courtyard…work,” seethed Rin, “I’m, if you don’t know—I’m renovating my family’s house. It’s just—in the eastern quarter of town, outside, um, Minato. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there or if you just spent your time, kind of, kind of living in that shack where we met you in—never mind.”
“A very lovely house,” said Hyakurin loyally.
“I have no doubt!” said Makie. “Even this house is very lovely, as it were.”
“Sweetheart, you’re fucked up twenty ways to Suwa, but you’re not concussed," said Hyakurin, “which, by the way, is the only thing that’s not going on with you at the moment—it’s a warehouse. You’ve been chained to a storeroom wall so you don’t make a break. Very lovely—like the Shogun’s pasty ass.”
Makie was doing something intensely disturbing where she pulled apart her bandages, peered into the bullet wounds, some partially gangrenous, and smiled beatifically as though coming into contact with esoteric secrets of the universe in this process. “Indeed…you are not wrong. I have never stayed in such an unpleasant place.”
“Say that again!” exploded Hyakurin. “It may be a dump, but it’s my house, you ungrateful—“
“Hyaku-san,” said Rin, “could I—could I talk to Makie-san for a moment?”
At the time—at that time—she had disengaged the dagger from his rib cage and pulled back and that was when something trailing blood had shot past her, streaking down the dock losing ribbons of shredded cloth and hurtling over the edge into the sea after him. They hadn’t dredged him up but it took another few minutes to retrieve Makie, who had fainted at first contact with the saltwater in her bullet wounds.
They’d taken her back to Edo in chains and blankets, variable order, one around the other depending on what echelon of bureaucracy her jailor hailed from, but on the road she didn’t notice either and by the time Rin got to see her she was sitting pretty in both, docile as you please with the fingers of her gloves sewn shut to prevent her from picking her bandages open. She’d smiled at Rin, offered an apology that she couldn’t bow, as it had been so long. Then she’d said—quite conversationally: “And where is he?”
Now she stopped fiddling with the bandages and tucked them out of place under her wrists, presumably out of courtesy at Rin’s attempts not to gag.
“Renovating a house,” she said. “It’s quite some responsibility to take on.”
“No more so than anything else I’ve done.” Or haven’t done. As it were.
“So he told me. It is more than I could do in the service of something similar I intended, once.” Makie was rewrapping one of the bandages like wrap tape for a fight. "Well...you saved my life, my dear girl, so now, I also have a responsibility...to validate your decision..."
"Um..." There was no way to respond to this, much less with what she’d come to say. She tucked her hair behind her ears in panicked selfconsciousness, shook it out again.
“Hyaku-san is really nice, you know!” Her knees were already beginning to hurt in seiza at the edge of the tatami. “She took you in so you wouldn’t have to stay at a machi-bugyo hospital, and they’re terrible, take it from me, that’s what they were calling that jail they kept Manji and Isaku in. It’s lucky you’re here with her instead! You shouldn’t tease her by agreeing with everything she says.”
“I am not teasing her. I genuinely agree with everything she says.”
“And Makie-san, she says you haven't even been sleeping, you definitely shouldn’t—wait, er—really?”
“Is that so surprising?” The bandages covered the bullet holes in her body. It was nothing like the ghost in Rin’s garden, with her gaping wounds gone unnoticed. Everyone had seen Makie’s wounds. Everyone knew why she was here.
Now she propped herself onto her elbows, shoulders swallowing up her lovely, tilted throat, “As you may deduce from my captivity, I am a fairly agreeable person.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. Also, as it happens, she reminds me of someone.”
“You—should we call them? To see you?”
“No. We were all children together once, that is all.” She started pulling apart the bandages again. “And now we are not together, nor children.” She turned over and waved to Hyakurin, skulking near the doorway, in a picturesque fashion as though regaling her from a boat. "I wish I had my shamisen..."
This seemed alarmingly poignant. "Oh! Do you—should I ask Hyaku-san to get one for you?"
"No. She confiscated it after I sang her a ballad of my own composition. Its theme was the futility of dreams in this world."
"I...see. Should I...get it back?"
Makie seemed charmed. "No, no. What a dear girl. I did not truly enjoy it. As with many things, my own talent caused me to despair and tire of it..."
It was all getting surreal. She couldn’t come to ask it and then not ask it. The letter with what Makie couldn’t have known, buried in the garden, but here she was, and—she had to ask. “Makie-san. Did you—think he was alive? Was that why you went into the water?”
Her elbows folded up, like the inverted knees of a bird; she lay her head back down. Hyakurin had sprinkled rice around her pillow the way you did for geisha, so they’d keep their head straight and avoid ruining their hairstyles. There wasn’t a single grain in Makie’s hair now.
“I did not think anything,” she said. “I saw an opportunity, I went without thinking. No matter what happens. That is how a swordswoman moves.”
“I’m afraid I don’t—know what you’re talking about.“
“I asked you long before, the first time we met.” She turned over burrowing her cheek in the reed of the mat. A silence came down between them, private as a screen. “Then, you did.”
~
toshu cCAMe to sEE us. he saID, the sEA in wintr is BEAutiful.
If he were alive—
No. No.
She had burned the ground fresh. She had asked the ghost to do it.
She was waiting. Soon a wall would go up. There was going to be a wall.
~
They had been going up one of the lower side-trails of Haku-san and she’d seen him double over with a cramp next to a creekbed clotted with the velvety lilies common to the area. She had yelled to stop so she could cut another walking-stick for herself. He’d scoffed at her and went to lie on his elbows by the creek. In a habit that had disgusted her on sight he scooped up a handful of the cool mud to make a plaster for his fever.
It was early sunset. They’d been able to see the small Kaga hamlet surrounding the Kenrokuen, visible here and there in chiaoscuro as they embroidered a trail through the trees. Its whitewashed walls visible against street stalls already dark so they could only estimate at the geography, what business people who had nothing to do with them might conduct there, untouched by the urgency of their escape. With that shedding of extraneities they came higher into purer air and for once it didn't feel the way it always did, the world leaving her behind.
The cold wrapped closer like wading in water. As the land sloped up these little towns too fell away, and every time it happened she remembered how far she was from home.
A raspy coughing sound brought her back from the edge of her thoughts and she went to go prop him up so he didn’t anticlimactically strangle himself and die. He was mumbling to himself telling a story. When she ducked her head to listen he glared at her and tried to turn away.
“Fine, suit yourself,” she said. “Mutter away like an old man, see if I care—“
“Don’t call me that!”
It surprised them both. They stared at each other; they looked away. Rin wrung out the edge of her sleeve.
“If you’re going to sit there—“ she tried again, “if you’re going to just lie there, like an—like an—an aqua slug—I’m going to go astride the trail a little way.”
“Why?”
She pointed through the trees to the hamlet. “We passed the Kenrokuen about midday. There’s a well here somewhere, where this peasant farmer once found some gold dust while washing some sweet potatoes from Haku-san—”
“You find that enjoyable? Something that happened before you were born?”
“Excuse me? Is there a problem with that?”
“It is not something I understand, so I asked you.”
“It—that isn’t the point.” It had startled her, that was all. “Don’t you know the story?”
“I know the story.”
She hadn’t actually expected it and kicked the loose dirt at her feet in consternation. “What, you stopped for storytime in the middle of your busy lifestyle of murdering and pillaging?”
He took a cloth out of his satchel and wiped the mud plaster away. His hair was stuck in his headdress, getting muddier; she considered it mutely for a moment, then reached out and disentangled it. His skin burned along the meat of her palm.
“Someone I knew worked the fields once. He was homesick often. We did have storytime—as it were.”
Rin put the cloth in her satchel. “That is unhygenic,” Anotsu muttered, and wilted against the tree. The axe lay next to him in the dirt catching and holding the sunset.
There were bars of tangerine light on both their faces. Laddering into the forest and up to the peak of Haku-san that glowed beaconlike in the distance. She thought of the story; the gold dust in the pan of clear water like what they’d doused their waterskins in on the way up, bitter and tasting too strongly of some kind of mineral. How it must have looked and felt to the fingers, and the moment of panic before realizing what it was but Kaga and the land had immortalized the moment of discovery anyway, claimed that man’s small triumph for its own.
“Where is he,” she said. “The—one who worked the fields. You killed him? His family?”
“Gone. He will not come back.”
“Oh.”
One of the bars of light was in his eyes. It seemed to bother him and he winced turning his head away, putting his hand up. So weak. She could put the cool cloth on his face again and it would give him relief. She could put it around his neck and pull it taut.
“Well,” she said, and stopped. “Well, it was probably your fault.”
He laughed. It sounded like he was choking. She snatched up her waterskin and took it to him dribbling the cloth a little, then a little more. She’d seen her mother feed kittens the same way. It made her feel weak herself, enough that she left the cloth in his fingers and knelt against the tree on the other side, closing her eyes.
When she opened them he was getting to his feet and tying the axe around his torso with one of her obi that he’d repurposed as a makeshift bandolier. His trembling fingers hefting and situating the knot. She watched, and then she stopped.
“What are you doing?”
“If you can find the well before the sun sets,” he said, “we won’t lose any time. Take the higher path.”
“You're—" she realized it as she said it, "—interested."
"Why should that be so strange? If you are."
"You want to see it! You want to see if it's real!"
He considered. “So I do.”
They took the higher path, closing in from either side on a trail that was the bleached color of fine ocean gravel and felt like bone on her feet. They hadn’t found the well but they came upon a clearing of open grass where there had been a signal tower once and now was only a burned-down ground as though people had sought this spot out for bonfires. The grass there was a tea-colored thatch and shirred like silk. They had knelt at the same unbidden moment to touch it and she remembered his face: the eyes, hooded with the same color.
"Will it settle you?" he'd called. "Returning home. Remaking your life with what you wanted."
She put her hand in her hair against the night wind coming on, chopping around her like shallow waves. She thought about it.
"You tell me," she said. "Aren't you further along than I am?"
When the cold look went out of his eyes they were known to her. The curiosity beating there same as her own. She had wondered suddenly if it were the first time he, too, had ever traveled to another han. Had seen all of this for the first time. Held in his glance she was conscious of the earth beneath with its hidden gold, all the stored heat of the day.
~
She had planned to spend all the nights in the grand bedroom where her parents had spent theirs, proper for the mistress of the Asano dojo, but for the past fortnight she’d picked up a habit of padding out to the edge of the courtyard where the ghost had visited her, and there she often fell asleep. In Hyakurin's house Makie was still jolting awake restless, but she, Rin, was ready for ghosts. If someone was a ghost, it meant they were dead.
Sometimes you wanted to see your dead. To inter them. To establish yourself apart from them.
She dreamt of what it meant to be old. Her parents hadn’t been, her father’s students hadn’t been close. The closest she remembered was Abayama’s watchful eye at Anotsu’s back—that awful sea-green yukata—and after that Habaki stonefaced over his daughter, a girl whose face Rin hadn’t seen; to her bemusement Manji when he used to ask for unfashionable kinds of comfit years out of fashion, geezer type flavors made with linseed and anise. Makie leaning over Hyakurin’s washbasin would periodically speak of an old father and Hyakurin’s fingers on her hair would go gentle and fearful when she did. Master Sori in his stylish cut-piece yukata walked the streets with his paintings tied with whatever came to hand, cloth, twine, rope, chain, and no one thought to apply the moniker to him.
Perhaps there had been old men at the peripheries of most of their stories. Not hers, surely.
His anger, separated from her by time, went clearer like the landscape of the Kaga mountainside seen from its great height. With enough time to do so now—the rest of her life—she held it pooled in the decanter of her memory, swilled its surface looking for the ripple that had struck her. She wouldn’t have called him that if she’d met him now.
Then, one morning, she broke awake with a crick in her neck and there was a screen springing out of the ground where she’d stood on the night they’d burned the door down. About knee height. From where she was lying down it covered her field of vision with a dull white glow like moonlight.
It cleaved the courtyard in half. She'd gotten what she'd asked for and couldn’t see the far dojo entrance at all. Here was something she hadn't seen, in all the nights of traveling: her home, reclaimed.
~
There were enough people at the market that her aimlessness could be camoflaged as some more dense, pigmented iteration of what it was. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation to float after so many years of fighting forward through iron tide. She picked her way through the crowd. She bought dried apricots for herself. She bought some matcha to go with them, wrong for the season, too cold. She bought a length of cloth she didn’t have any plans for yet but surely would. Perhaps she would make a canopy out of it, for the top of the tokonoma alcove.
“Not gonna flatter your complexion,” someone said, “maybe something a little redder? I dunno, always been shit at the seasonal…color thing.” She looked over her shoulder and saw Magatsu squinting at the brocade. When she glared at him he bobbed the impatient peasant bow he’d always had and went splotchy pink.
“You!” she said, and then, “I don’t like red.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And this color would look fine on me! Look, with an underrobe of—“ she considered “…m…aybe red. I’m not—saying I’m going to get it, though. I’m just keeping the possibility open. It may or may not even have anything to do with you, though I appreciate your…cultural…experiment.”
He held up his hands in surrender. The metallic sunlight flickered from behind a cloud; she shaded her eyes and noticed he wasn’t wearing the stupid mask. It wasn’t flattering. He had a mouth so extraordinarily sulky it was impossible to take him seriously after seeing it. Mock me, that mouth said. Make me do menial chores for you. She took it up on the offer, made a decision, slung her basket over his forearm.
He followed her. She guessed rather uncharitably that he hadn't been made for it after all, following.
“Did you—“ she was going to ask if he wanted some of the matcha, which she was now unable to drink. She was shivering all over. “Did you go to see Makie-san?”
“I work out in the fields now. What makes you think she’s in need of a farmer? Odd jobs, on the other hand, she’s never had a head for—carpentry, maybe—”
“Please don’t do that! You don't—you don't have the right.”
He didn't wince, and this told her that he knew. He held her gaze for a long, lucid moment and then he turned away again and she realized her hands were full of things she didn't understand the use for anymore. “Sorry, sorry. We didn’t see much of each other near the end anyway.”
“Really?”
“Kinda conservation of resources? When Makie’s around, not a lot a beat-up country boy’s gonna be able to do for you, is there?” He picked up a lacquered tray and put it back down again in apparent horror when it clacked forebodingly. In a setting like this he looked so ill at ease it was impossible to bring him to mind kneeling down in that graveyard, pulling his mask down to hiss at her to keep a tight lid on any antics. She found this vaguely unfair.
"A beat-up country boy? Is that how you live with yourself after doing all those horrible—in fact, I won't dignify them by calling them horrible, though they were—all those ridiculous things!?"
He reared back, affronted. "Well, beg your pardon, sweetheart, but who was it exactly who got us tied up with those frankly psychotic government—"
"They were after you to begin with because of that man's stupid philosophical ravings! Don't call yourself a beat-up country boy! Just leave it at beat-up, because that's all I remember!"
He was still following her, angrily rearranging the things in her basket to make room for a sheaf of scallions she shoved into his chest. These he shook the water from before bundling them expertly into the basket. "You'd better watch it, woman," he said darkly, "I've got a real short fuse these days, and in my time I've been known for many a—what? Look, I can't tell if you're complimenting me, but, I guess, thanks—"
“The point is," shrieked Rin, "I saw Makie-san, and I got the impression she would have liked to see you! You know, since—“ She stopped. It occurred to her with a frisson of horror that she didn’t know if he knew. “…Since someone you know—“
The sulky mouth inverted itself. He was grinning. She remembered how Manji had always called him ‘kid,’ rucked up that preposterous hair; she’d assumed it had something to do with Manji being an old curmudgeon as she did for most proclivities of Manji’s but now she saw them: the lines of youth. Like the punched-out paper figures people made at the new year, setting them alight with their hopes.
“Nice try, Rin."
“S…sorry.”
“Are you?”
She gave it the thought it deserved, and the answer. “I would…like to be. I guess.”
“Much obliged, you’re gonna make a regular charity case out of me. It’s a little, what’d he call it, emotionally manipulative to make it hard to stay angry at a—“
“Are you?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Angry.”
He whistled tonelessly for a few moments. She looked at him, the sun filamenting the edges of his hair; she thought she’d prefer to remember him that way, his face as uncertain as she felt as it decided how to look. Was this how he’d looked, when he had told Anotsu the story about the well?
Instead of answering her, he said, “You heading back to some flea-infested inn with Manji?”
“N…no, actually, we’ve—parted ways. When I’m in town I live at my family’s—my house. The old—“ she looked at the cloth in her basket, thought of the folded-up interior design plan with its space for the tokonoma, the seating area, the low tables for guests, the wall most of all, the dividing line between where they had come and what they hadn’t yet taken. The things she had held in herself since starting out on the road, and now she poured these things into her mind very gently, one at a time, until she felt the peace clack into place like the movement of a deer-chaser. “The new mutenichi-ryu dojo.”
“Got it,” said Magatsu, “Well. Lady of the house. That’s sweet, that’s. That’s pretty sharp. Looks well on ya.”
“Thank you. I’m sure you don’t mean that.”
He scratched his neck. “No,” he said dully, “can’t say I do.”
The screen was coming down again, the paper-thin silence there had been with Makie. Rin bit her lip.
“Would you—would you walk me home? If you don’t have, um, a previous engagement?”
“Me?”
“I might—have an odd job. You know…carpentry.” She pulled a braid over her shoulder fretfully. “Please come, after all, you—you do know where it is.”
~
They went by way of the planked paths from the market over the barley fields in the easternmost quarter. The sun had flickered so tensely, now put itself out behind a cloud. Long and violet flung out like banners their shadows avoided one another on the ground.
At her home, he stopped to toe off his sandals and clap them together once loudly as if entering consecrated ground, probably some custom from his rural upbringing; she thought that she respected that, an old custom. She couldn’t remember if he’d done it the first—time—or if she’d only been too young to watch for it.
In the two days since the screen had taken root it’d grown larger than any real screen would have been and cut through the courtyard like the prow of a ship. There were no joins where the planks had separated and grown into finger-sized crossbeams. The hinges were wooden. The knots had peeled off to form oiled grooves and on the floor she could see them curled small and larval where they’d fallen. The wood had retained the silvery glow of the charcoal.
“I don’t want to break it,” said Rin, “it’s, um—but surely it folds? That’s what I don’t understand, there are hinges, but it doesn’t fold.”
Magatsu said “tsk!” and went behind the screen on the other side of the courtyard. Rin sat down and dangled her feet. She put her chin in her hands.
Water? she thought about offering. Something else? And then sharply: no, no. Nothing. You are not here, in my home, for the first time.
“Tell you what, Rin, I’m going to oil these hinges,” he called, “resin from the wood’s nice—beautiful wood, grain like milk—patient woodcutter, whoever did it—but it’s not enough. You’re gonna need to let it sit, and then give it a try. Do you have wax? For, um, your hair?”
“Um—yes! Yes, I have it! Can I help?”
“No. Gets in my way when someone does. Spitball me a dollop—"
"Please don't be vile in my dwelling—"
"—hand me a dollop, and that’ll do it. I had a friend, used to do this for her with her hairwax all the time when she had a problem with the deadbolt on her proper door, which was all the time because like everyone else I know, she was shit at taking care of herself. Shoulda done it one last time. Shoulda made sure it would—“ he missed a step, swore, “–lock.”
Rin blurted, “Do you want some water?”
The sun was angular enough now that she could only see him darkly through the wooden structure, here and there and she thought of the Kaga towns through the trees on that journey. Their intermittence, the fact of their persistence. “Magatsu-san,” she said. “Would you—there’s this story, you know it, about the farmer Togoro, who grew sweet potatoes on the steps of Haku-san, in. In Kaga. And then he found—“
“Yeah, I know what he found.”
“Could you tell me the story?”
The movements from the other side stopped. “Rin—“
“Please,” she said. “I've spent a long time thinking about. What I'd say to you, when I met you and Makie-san again, and it's all wrong, I'm angry at you, too, and all I can think of is—we tried. He and I. We looked for the well.”
She could see his resting fingers on the crossbeams, curled as though around the hilt of his sword. They flexed once, twice. She’d slept outdoors for as long as he had, perhaps, could imagine the odd ache in the joints that never quite went away with the cold. Then he began to work on the screen again. She could smell the acrid scent of her hairwax from the other side. She closed her eyes.
“Listen here,” said Magatsu, “there was, there was this sweet potato farmer—“
She stretched down, putting her head between her knees. She wrapped her hands around her ankles. The tension in her back reminded her of bowing but that wasn’t it. The old story unspooled above her and she was there again, in Kaga. She thought Magatsu must have been somewhere of his own, somewhere before her. She listened hoping for clues but there was nothing, only the steady old tale he’d learned the same way she had, told the same way her parents had, for the first time in years echoing through her old, new house. Nothing had changed, everything had. These were all things that had happened before either of them—any of them—were born, and here they were: still in thrall to them.
She'd told Anotsu he understood already but it was only partly true; she was understanding too. Why he had asked what would settle her. She was where he'd been now, on the path, and he was dead or not dead but still, as always, ahead of where she was.
When she tasted the resentment at the back of her teeth it felt so familiar to her, after the nights of unfamiliarity, she might have thought it was longing.
You should have been happy, she thought. Her mouth wet with that resentment as though it were a sweetness. You should have shown me I would be happy.
“Hey, Rin,” said Magatsu, quietly but she’d been listening. She’d been with him every word of that mountain way. That drawing up of memory, heavy like wellwater, before the discovery. “Yeah. You asked, and—yeah, I’m angry. Makie must be angry. Thing is, it's not the same as what you felt when we did—that to you. We let him do it, and you didn’t. That’s how the dice fell. I know—god help me, I know, I walked away, I—but he was—that's how I feel, you know?”
“I know.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffed and tangled her fingers in the silver charcoal. “I know.”
~
The second ghost came that night, not the one she needed to see to know if someone had visited Doa in the south, and told her the sea in winter was beautiful. This one was another girl with a frieze of hammered-gold hairpins in her hair, some ends inward as though poked in last-minute. Her sleeves trailed on the floor, siphoning up the silver dust. She was hunched over the screen with a makeup tray and a long diagonally-cut brush, squinting at something on the canvas, and when she saw Rin she screamed and told her she’d given her a fright.
“You must be a ghost!” she exclaimed. “You look so pale! Neesan, maybe you died of consumption?!”
Rin glanced at the multiple stab wounds gaping apart in the girl’s three-layer kimono and decided that a guest was a guest and courtesy was a characteristic of a civilized if possibly less than stable mind. “Um, maybe. Is the screen folding, did you check?”
The girl laughed. “Neesan! Why did you ask for it if you wanted it to fold? It’s just like this now. It’ll be like this.”
It had grown longer, spread around the ajar dojo shoji door in the shape of a hook. It was so tall it blotted out any sight of the dojo at all.
“What are you doing, then?”
She held up her makeup tray. “Painting. See, here—at Yukimachi, I had a pattern like this on my screen. A great cedar tree, even in the winter. I never liked flowering trees. I like the kind that stay the same. Tai-niichan used to oil the hinges for me so it would unfold and there would be, you know, proper distance between us. Tai-niichan was very stupid…” She sucked on the end of her brush. “Kage-san bought it for me. He was always buying things for us. I think it was because he had nothing to spend his money on. He taught me how to write. Tai-niichan never practiced, but like I said, he was stupid.”
Rin touched one of the crossbeams of the screen pulling the canvas taut. The girl smiled at her and went on with her idle painting. They were long studious strokes like a young girl’s doing her makeup should be and looked nothing like a tree, only a meaningless profusion of lines. Watching the girl it was impossible not to think of her as a child practicing her calligraphy in this same way. If she’d had a childhood, or if any of them had.
Rin stepped back, and then she saw: it was calligraphy, the name Ren over and over again, stroke upon stroke. That hardscrabble girlish handwriting that spoke of careful memorization, intense practice sessions snatched from between periods of whatever else duty demanded.
“He did,” she said, remembering what she’d heard. An Itto-Ryu motto written on an inner castle wall, where she and Doa had set their traps. “Eventually.”
“Did he?” said the girl, and smiled. “I’m pretty tickled to hear that. I thought he could learn to do something different.”
“I wish I could be as...optimistic as you.”
They’d never gone to Yukimachi but she remembered the woman whose leg Shira had amputated and her certainty in her disguise. Now with the clean set of years between those early horrors and herself she could picture it: girls like this one, sitting on the colored mats common to brothels with his brushes in their hands, to whom people like Magatsu hadn't been criminals but only men scrabbling for something different as they scrabbled themselves. They must have known him as well, must have given him tea or soup, learned his small preferences and like she did the habits he’d picked up on some road before they’d met. The way before sleep he tapped his axe on one side and then the other to dislodge the ghost of god knew what sin from the hardened steel he believed he and his blade had become. These women that she shared memories with, who were gone now but like her and like him had also been fossilized within the nautilus of winding years before them, decisions they hadn't made but took responsibility for. People they hadn't known but had taken on the task of loving.
The house bore down on her suddenly as though it had a corporeal weight. She realized at once and with astonishment how little she’d made of it: the fact of someone left alive who shared your memories.
“Kage-san,” she said. She thought distantly that she might have been close to tears.
“You can meet him,” said the ghost brightly, “I brought him, walking, walking, walking, from the south. Go behind the screen. Don't be afraid. Someone stabbed him, but now he's just asleep.”
She kissed her fingertips and blew on her calligraphy lightly, solidifying the white slashes on the canvas. Then she braced herself against the screen and pulled. It slid out, a duplicate inside itself. On and on she pulled it until the entire courtyard, and the entire house had been delineated in half. When Rin went to the other side there was nothing there but starlight, and a traveler asleep.
~
They had come to a place near a shallow lake where someone had moored dozens of charcoal-scuffed skiffs and forgotten them in the fog. They shaded their eyes and called to one another that it would be enough to support their weight from one end to the other if they didn't stay on one at the same time. Rin went first, lighter, easier on her feet. The skiffs clanked and shifted under her feet as though they skated over vast planes of ice. She turned halfway across, and saw him swaying uneasily transferring his weight from one sandal to another.
She doubled back and held out her hand.
"Come on," she said, "take—"
He took a step, and then another, then nearly tipped into the lake. She couldn't help herself: she smiled.
He scowled at her and raked his fingers agitatedly through his hair out where it was damp with the salt and fog. Then to her amazement he smiled back. It was small but had that paradoxical open slyness that children's did, nothing like what she'd filed in her memory. She stopped immediately.
"Well," he said. "An avenger and a dangerous fugitive, drawn up short by a lake of boats. It doesn't reflect well on our Edo."
And indeed here they were travelers in a foreign place; people would see them together, and name them as people with the same home. "We'll think of something. You keep—keep your head about you, just take care of your fever."
"It may be difficult without a tether."
She sat down cross-legged on one of the boats and thumped the wood in front of her until he followed suit. They took their robes out of their satchels, him producing another of the sea-green monstrosities from seemingly nowhere, and she knotted them together while he held one end steady and stared out into the lake, to the far shore clotted with reeds and the horizon that was always white in the shadow of Haku-san. When they stood up she tugged the makeshift rope and felt his answering pressure on the other end. She ducked her head and pressed ahead into the fog.
They crossed the lake like that, the rope steadying him as he held it, her drawing it forward when she felt his presence on the other side steady. She let it out and drew it back. The water's lapping against the sides of the skiffs felt like punctuation. She was ushered forward, she was halted. In the city she often forgot the fact of the wilderness, waiting outside cupping Edo proper like a pearl, but here it seemed appalling that she had ever lived like that, without knowing how much of the world was not the space she inhabited within it. It was hard to tell if he felt the same way but she liked the idea that she had brought him to this place where he too had never been.
He didn't seem anything like a traveler. Only another person pensive, his image clear and then withheld through wreaths of cloud, nothing of him terribly real except the answering pressure at the end of her rope. At one point one of her kimono unfurled, revealing a few daggers she'd forgotten to remove; she saw him look at them for a long time before moving forward again.
On the other side he did take her hand, finally, when he stepped back onto the land. She could feel the fever in his fingers.
Instead of thanking her, he had said, "How easily you go, when nothing dogs your footsteps."
You draw me forward, she didn't reply. You, who cut my tethers.
~
He slept for several days. Someone south had cleanly dressed the wound she'd made; when she placed her hand flat there she felt the heartbeat fingers-widths from where she'd expected it. She supposed Isaku. A blood transfusion from his changed physique likely hadn't hurt matters. She wondered if he had recognized the dagger. She wondered, incidentally, if he was real.
On the third day he woke up briefly to gesture to his belongings in the corner and mutter to her to open the red cloth sack. She found some potatoes of different sizes with oddly involved descriptions in Doa's preposterous calligraphy, and various bizarre drawings of herself and other subjects done in an uneven young woman's long-and-short calligraphy brush. This was probably the sort of stupid gift Anotsu Kagehisa had found appropriate to give Doa.
She set the drawings aside and thought to herself about buying different colored ink sticks and charcoal when she went to see Master Sori. Inexpensive ones, that would grow with Doa's skill. Not too shabby, so she would know Rin took her seriously. Not too much of anything. Just enough for where she was, a girl on her path, keeping a promise. As she thought of this her breathing grew more measured. She stopped scrabbling with her fingernails at her floorboards for purchase.
Anotsu slept on his back as he had the day she'd met him on the outskirts of Edo, near the drawbridge to the palace. As he had then he turned his head slightly to the side, offering her a vein that made it easy to take his pulse. She did often. There was a flap in the screen that O-Ren had cut and she followed it through and back to check on his presence, only a progression of breaths on the darkened, forgotten side of the house.
She stayed awake on her side, listening. The screen rising between them silver and honey-colored in its wood and canvas. The building of it slow but now she knew she had been lied to and lying, it was not yet a wall. Not yet a door. Only the delineation she had been making for what felt like her entire life, that their ghosts were still making, those women on the other side of her story: this is what you took from me. This is what I have.
~
What would she have done with an unexpected store of gold? Her mother used to use her hands in the telling of the story to illustrate drawing up well-water, a motion neither of them had ever tried themselves. Hand over hand, the invisible bucket came up, full of its gold, cluttered with pieces she'd thought must have looked like ryo in the marketplace. Ready to use. Her mother's fingers on her forehead in her memories of it, peaceful as they both understood the story was coming to its end. The gold was there. From now on the farmer would return home, build it bigger and better, buy cloth for his daughters and his wife, look out at his home scaffolded with that invisible wealth and know it to be the life everyone dreamt of.
In Magatsu's version of the tale the bucket came up filled with golden dust. The inflection of his voice told Rin starkly that as a child he must have imagined it in greater detail than she ever did, that sort of windfall. Again and again the farmer plunged his hand into it and took it out, the future within his grasp but untenable to his fingers. Through a sieve made for rice finally he strained it and even then so many pieces were lost in the river. He'd stood at the bank, and watched them wash back into the snowmelt of the mountainside. He'd stood at the bank, with more than he'd dreamed of in a lifetime between his fingers, and wondered why still he felt that indescribable absence.
~
She came back from her work at Master Sori's the next week to find him awake finally, awake and eating from a jar of pickles she'd stored on the other side of the house, where the screen created a coolness. When he saw her he drew a hand across the back of his mouth and indicated the ground in front of him.
She stood there, one hand on the screen. Blood beating in her fingertips.
"Stay there," she said. "Don't. Don't come to this side."
"If I wanted to, I could not. Your house—" he gestured to the screen, "has me here."
"What are you talking about?"
He stood up and walked towards her, to the border of the screen between the shadowed side where he was and where she stood. When he came near he stopped at the edge of the shadow and put his hand out, stopped as though by glass. Something about it did not surprise her.
"And you're well just—staying here."
"I didn't plan to stay anywhere." He'd only eaten with two fingers and now he drew out a handkerchief and cleaned them meticulously. "I didn't plan to be alive."
"Then—then are you?"
He slouched back against the wall, just as Makie had, stretching his throat in the same peculiar way. Perhaps they had learned it from one another. When they were children together.
"You should answer that."
She said, "I have a life now. I'm trying—to build a life. No," she turned it over, tried it again. "I'm trying to take back my life. That you took from me."
"Of course. Do so." He closed his eyes. Before she saw the same thing she had in them on that day in Mito, the blankness she had thought was the snow but now was clear had been something else.
She took a step towards him, then another. At the second she hadn't known, but by the third it was clear to her what she had been going to do and she slid down next to him, back against the wall. His head dropped down, a sheaf of his hair touching the open collar of her robes.
They sat there mutely, in the lee of the screen, and looked out into the sun-scored brightness of her house beyond it. She was conscious of her floorboards. The unyielding of them without ceremony. The ground supported you because it resisted you; there was nothing more complicated to its push and push back.
"Your decor is primitive," he mumbled. "I think...the renji...uninspired. Some unimagination I expect...of samurai households."
"Wow, really? Because I'm not from a samurai household or anything." He was seizing in a pincer grip and letting go of the edge of her sleeve, as though it'd never occurred to him what it might be for. "Well, I've thought of having them torn down...widen Doa's window...but maybe I won't...I'll have to see." She pulled the other edge of the sleeve taut, holding it clotheslined between their fingers.
"Why are you here."
"You—you tell me," he said, too dully to tell if there was a cadence there or not. If they were remembering the same thing. "Once lost. Can it be taken back?"
She shrugged a shoulder to shift him away and got up. When she motioned for the pickle jar and he gave it to her; she shook it and thought it was typically stupid of him, if that was what he'd been eating for the past few days. He must have realized now that someone so bad at managing himself could hardly chart the course of a country, or anything else more fine-grained than that.
"Makie-san survived," was what she said. "She's alive, and Magatsu-san. What do you want. Should I—"
A terrible, longing light flashed in his eyes before he covered them with his hand.
"Thank god," he muttered, and then with all the accumulated courtesy of years, "as well, thank you."
~
She broke awake with her thoughts running to confused, momentous dread somewhere around the fifteenth hour. When she got to the screen room he was still sitting against the wall, blank-eyed. The night wind, sieved through the courtyard, jittered the ropes at his headdress.
"Doa said the same thing you did," she said. "About the renji." His complete nonreaction could have meant anything. She understood what it was like not to be surprised by someone; it meant you were, had been, thinking of them. That you couldn't lose track of them, on the road or in a darkened house or on the snow-salted, impersonal expanse of the sea. In another fortnight she would have, for a guest, a table to lay, a brazier to light, futons to unroll and weight down and scent with the lavender water and charcoal she'd been allowed to hold vials of, as a child, while her mother laid out her welcomes. Had he arrived then it would be a different story. Not a place where things had happened, a place where things would happen, auxiliary, really, to the difference between a living being and a ghost.
She ran a hand up her shoulder, stippled with goosebumps. She rested her temple against the screen.
"This is a household now," she said. "If you came on your own, don't you think you don't deserve to demean it? Don't sleep that way."
~
The house enforced their singular rule: he stayed in the place he'd marked indelibly that night, so many years ago now, and she sat across from him as they had in Kaga and slid his food across to him on a woven mat when he asked for it. Bathwater became a problem but he found a cleared space in the old dojo where the boards had been torn up and there was a woven rain cape laid out on the floor, some student's old hiding place for trysts or letters from home probably, and she would roll an old sake barrel filled with water to his part of the house.
She never stayed. The screen kept its purpose.
The part of the screen that bisected the courtyard was often drenched with spring rains, and when she went out in the mornings she saw him using his kimono to wipe down the runoff on his side of the divide, disgusting enough that she brought him cloths. They cleaned it every morning on both sides of the divide. It was a bit of housekeeping he could do with his tired body; he mended well, to her surprise, and was careful with canvas like a child who had been told not to touch it.
These labors were theirs, done together, yet no one could see them. Hyakurin or Tatsu would come by and chide Rin for leaving half the screen uncleaned. They would look past it and there was no Anotsu; he could have been elsewhere in the dojo or he could have vanished. If Doa had seen him—if Doa could see him—she must have been the only person who had.
The sea had changed him. He didn't talk of the world anymore or the outside, but the narrow way he had in Kaga which was somehow more exotic than his grand proclamations had ever been. The minutiae of food and chores, the small twinges in his missing arm which he couldn't help worrying at childishly, not like someone like Manji at all.
She told him about the same things. Little finds at the marketplace. The difficulty in finding the proper wood for tables, iron wrought properly for braziers. How dry charcoal left her fingers. That was almost like handling a sword but she never said so.
By night they lay on either side of the divide and listened to that same rain undo their progress of the day. Deer-chasers clicking overtime in the garden and the clacker and gush of so many raindrops. There was a watered light held on the screen that when she looked over played submarinean on his face. They woke whenever they wanted, slept whenever they wanted. They were not bound to any responsibilities. The sea had changed them.
~
"The thing is...what I wanted to tell you—"
"Look," said Hyakurin in an undertone, "watch, now. Any second. Acts like quite the samurai lady around here, doesn't she, but you look into those big gorgeous eyes and you know she wouldn't know what to do with a mon's worth of patience unless it it was...oh, I don't know, armed and trying to waste her on the Mito way, probably."
"Big gorgeous eyes."
"Figure of speech, little Rin."
There was an edge of delight to her voice. They watched. Presently Makie set her pipe down, pushed the game board away from herself, and smiled. Her eyebrows tented together upward as though holding up her own forehead was simply too taxing and whoever had unjustly asked it of her should now regret the results. "Hyakurin-san..." she said, trailing off meaningfully.
When this failed to yield anything she lowered her eyelashes for added gravitas. Hyakurin smirked at her. Makie indulged in this interaction fondly, as though trading change with a favorite vendor, and said, "Won't you help this convalescent woman? Look, these battered fingers...how they shake..."
She pinioned her hand demonstratively over the game board in such a manner that two or three of her yarrow stalks conveniently slid back into her zone.
Hyakurin scooted her stool back over and whooped with delight. "You cheating snake! You're playing against yourself and you're still worse than I was! Look at that, look at this stone over here. How could you think that'd be a good move? It's all unguarded, would you just go wading into a melee without any backup?"
"Yes," said Makie.
"Ah, I forgot I was talking to the magical wunderkind here. Even you need a little juice once in a while, honey, which is why you could stand to go to sleep in the night instead of creeping around my house like a wraith—"
"Itto-ryu...whatever works, as they say."
"You aren't itto-ryu—"
Without a change in expression Makie set down the yarrow stalks, swept out her forearm, and knocked the gameboard off the table into her lap. She got up and hobbled away on her crutch. Rin went to her hurriedly but she only pet her cheek and pushed past her, fighting for the perimeter of the house, the pale watered cutouts of twilight on the floor.
When Rin looked over her shoulder Hyakurin was picking up the gamepieces with a closed, coldly patient face. She went to her and knelt, hitching her kimono out of her way, to scoop the little stones out of the floorboards.
"I'm sorry," she said stupidly.
"Don't be. I told you, not a whit of patience and I'm glad she doesn't. It was my mistake."
"I don't...I don't see how."
"You wouldn't, little Rin, and I hope you never have to, but there it is," she raked her hair back savagely. Over by the window Makie was hunching over the crutch, dragging her feet on another round about the warehouse. "It was a stupid thing to say. You think I stopped being a mother because my children—"
She cut herself off. Makie had closed her eyes but she wasn't asleep. Only overwhelmed by whatever she was holding in her mind, careful not to spill the idea or memory. The light on her face looked like it did in Rin's house, on Anotsu's face. Like the sea.
"But she needs to be able to hear it," said Hyakurin. Bell-like, her voice expanded in the space, its high ceilings, its dust. "She needs to listen. Buy clothes for herself. Lose at games...sleep, dreamlessly, the way you do when you find your companions. The way you fell asleep in my arms when you found me in Mito, you precious thing." The game was collected now, she folded the board at its hinges and drew the little silken bag that held the pieces shut. "Because it's true now. You tell yourself something's destroyed, how else are you gonna know it's time to rebuild?"
Rin had chafed instantly when she'd said she couldn't understand, but now she saw the old fatigue in Hyakurin's face, the new iteration that bent Makie's shoulders like a bow and she thought of Doa, so far, talking of boarding a ship. Come and find me, when we're not young and don't have SO many things to do, she'd called from the road, you get that, right, Rin? And Rin had.
"What was it you wanted to tell me about?" said Hyakurin.
At her house she called out that she was home without thinking about it. When she came to the other side Anotsu was pacing around by the renji in such an echo of Makie's movements that she was startled; stood there without saying anything for a long while. She thought it wasn't restlessness that moved him.
"She's healing," she said. "She can hold a pipe, and play a game." She stopped. "She's so bad at it, though. Did you know that?"
He set his hand on the renji, tender to her house, the timbers of his connection to the outside. Wonderingly, he smiled.
~
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
They were sitting on either side of the room. He was patching holes on his kimono, held between his knees, with a lurid acid-green linen that made the color of the yukata more wretched. She had laid out the brocade cloth she'd bought for the tokonoma altar and was marking it with chalk. Her father's Chinese sword lay on a table between them, her mark of respect not to let it touch the floor but the screen had grown through it and she'd been forced to move it back to her side of the house until the new year's cleansing ceremony, when she could enshrine it in the dojo room.
"No." He smiled. "Do you want it to?" Even then he'd been the same, obtuse as ever in the simplest things but knowing without having to ask what she was talking about. He caught her staring and beckoned. She crossed to his side of the screen and knelt. "It's healed quite well. See."
He held her palm as gently as he ever had, placing her knives back into it. It was not a considerate gentleness but one too attentive as though he was wary of her. He guided her hand over the jut of bone where the arm had been. As he'd said the break was clean, and she could feel skin like old wood behind the thin cloth of his sleeve.
"I wasn't talking about that."
"I supposed as much."
"You did not suppose, and you don't—look. Were you really going to do all that? Go across the sea and—raise people who would come back to—"
"Finish what I started. No," he looked, for a moment, delighted, but in an awful way, a sneering self-mocking expression she hadn't seen outside of—she hadn't seen outside of this place. "No, finish what I could not even start."
"You didn't want that."
The certainty seemed to catch him off guard. He was silent for a while. When he was thinking hard he regained a little of the old intensity; she liked seeing it here, in her house. Put to a different purpose than it had been all his life.
"I am tired of changing in ways I did not choose," he said eventually. "I keep on becoming different. Not everyone can be like—you."
"Me?" It startled her. "I just wanted to end everything here. But I changed." She thought about it. "I killed you. I don't know if you died, but—I killed you."
"You saved me."
She looked away. Her fingers had sought something to hold; without thinking she had interlaced them with his, still resting on his shoulder. She thought dimly that she wanted to see the person who had crushed the busu tablet in his fingers without thinking a year ago. That kind of brazen confidence for something impossible, in the face of unimaginable odds.
Choose life, Doa had said, quoting him, and now his eyes were dull as the sea, and she had an armful of brocade cloth that wouldn't fit, anymore, the shape of what she thought it was.
"They diverged too sharply, our paths and responsibilities," he said. "It is not the same. Having lost something."
"Hey, don't compare your lousy arm to my life. Even your sword arm, pardon me, axe arm."
They laughed. The sunlight on her floors was a shade of itself, that old cruelty of spring light without heat. Though his gaze was still distant he kept his fingers laced tightly with hers, staunching the old wound. She didn't take them away.
~