Ama Gozen: The Graveyard (2)

 

The nun came in after full dark, from the direction of the grave. Her lips were moving as she came through the door, and they stopped when she saw the girl at the hearth.

She said nothing about the afternoon. She knelt and lifted the pot off the fire, spooned millet into a bowl, and set the bowl on the mat by the girl's knee. Then she sat back on her heels on the other side of the fire. In the corner, Gorō had gone to sleep sitting up, his back to the wall.

The girl ate. When the bowl was empty she set it down and folded her hands on the bundle in her lap, and sat very straight. The nun watched the fire.

A coal cracked and spat onto the earth beside the girl's knee. The nun reached across to brush it away, and before her hand got there the girl had the bundle up off her lap and against her chest. The nun brushed the coal back into the fire and sat back on her heels.

Below the house, something moved in the reeds.

It was a long sound, heavy, a slow pushing through stems, and after it a breath let out through a wide nose, and a splash. The girl's hand went to her sleeve and stayed there.

The nun did not look round.

"That's alive," she said.

The girl's hand didn't move.

"Most of what makes a noise in the dark is alive," the nun said. "And whatever's alive out there is listening for you a good deal harder than you're listening for it."

The sound came again, farther off.

"And what isn't alive?" the girl said.

The nun put a stick on the fire and watched it catch.

"That makes less noise," she said.

After a while the girl's hand came away from her sleeve. She looked at the door. "I'll go at first light."

"The east road's hot by midday," the nun said. "Start early."

Her knees cracked as she shifted on her heels. She went on looking into the fire.

"There was a girl in Kiso," she said.

The girl waited. When nothing more came, she said, "What girl?"

"A girl. In Kiso, in the mountains of Shinano, where the rivers come down cold enough to stop your breath." The nun turned a stick in the coals. "Her father kept horses. And above her father's house there was a ridge where nobody went."

The girl sat with her bundle. After a time she lifted the cord from around her neck, and the sandals with it, and set them on the earth by the fire, side by side. The bundle stayed where it was, against her chest.

 

          *

 

Under the rope the ground was soft. Tomoe's first step went in to the ankle and came out with a sound she felt in her teeth. She stood on the other foot and waited for the breathing to answer it.

It didn't. Nothing did.

She went on, testing the ground with her toes before she gave it her weight. The ground was never the same twice. It was soft, and then it was a hump of turf, and then something hard and round that rolled under her foot and that she didn't stop to think about. The graves were closer together than they had looked from the rope. She found that out by walking into one. It came up against her shins, a low swell of earth, and she went over it onto her hands and knees in the mud on the far side.

Her right hand had closed on something. A stone, smooth and cold, the size of a quail's egg. One of the stones off the top of a grave.

She put it inside the fold of her robe, against her skin, where it lay like a piece of ice, and got up.

Then she smelled it.

It came on the air from her left, from lower on the slope, rank and warm. Old blood, and something under it she knew and couldn't place. She couldn't place it because she had never smelled it here. Anything she knew from the stable was wrong here, among the dead, where it had no business to be.

That was when she saw the light.

It was down in the hollow where the spring came up, past the last of the graves. It was small and pale, low to the ground, no bigger than the flame of a lamp. It moved. It went a little way along the rushes, slowly, at about the height a lantern would be carried by someone short, and then it stopped. She knelt with the mud cold on her knees and watched it. It came no nearer, and it didn't go out. It hung over the wet ground and burned without flickering, and there was no one holding it that she could see.

 

          *

 

"What was it?" the girl said.

She had drawn her knees up. The fire had sunk low, and beyond the doorway the reeds were black.

The nun reached for a stick and held it without putting it on. "Marsh light, some said. Fire that comes up out of wet ground in the autumn, and burns in the hollows with nobody near it." She turned the stick over in her fingers. "Others said a lantern in the village below the ridge. Someone going home late."

"Which was it?"

"There was a lantern in the village most nights," the nun said. "And the hollow was always wet."

She laid the stick on the coals. The girl watched the doorway for a while, and then pulled the bundle in closer against her chest.

 

          *

 

Then the breathing came, and it was close.

It was close enough to feel. A push of warm air across the back of her neck, from behind her and above, on the uphill side, away from the hollow and the light, and a smell with it, and then a scrape right beside her, hard, a stone dragged on a stone.

She didn't turn fast. Something in her knew not to. She turned the way the old men turned their heads when a hawk was over the yard, slowly, all of her at once.

There was a dark shape against the stars. It was bigger than a man. It rose and fell with the breathing. It didn't come at her.

Down in the hollow, the light went out.

To know what it was, she would have to touch it. There was no other way to know in that dark. She thought of the threshing floor in the morning. She thought, very plainly, of her own hand going out into the dark and something closing on it.

She put out her hand.

Her fingers found hair. Short hair, coarse, crusted stiff, over something warm that flinched away from her palm. The flinch ran away from her hand down the whole length of it. Under the hair, warm flesh shook against her fingers.

A horse.

She had time to know it. Then the horse knew her.

It went up. It went up and back with a sound she had never heard a horse make, a scream that went into her and stayed there, and something hard lashed the air beside her head. All along that side the fence cracked and gave, like a bundle of dry sticks snapped across a knee. She was down in the mud. The horse was down too, or half down, plunging, and rope was singing and sawing somewhere above her, and under the roar of its breath came a wet, tearing sound that was the rope going into its leg.

A hand closed on the back of her robe and dragged her clear.

"Tomoe."

It was Kanehira. He hauled her back over a grave and crouched across her with his arm against her chest, between her and the plunging dark. They lay in the mud and listened to the horse fight the rope until it stopped fighting. Then there was only its breathing, loud and fast, and the creak of the fence where it hung.

"You came in," she said.

"Somebody had to see who ran first." He was breathing hard himself. "It was everyone. You can tell them."

"It's caught."

"I know."

"It's been caught three nights."

"I know. We'll go down. At first light Father can send men up with ropes." He had got his feet under him. "Come on."

She didn't get up.

The horse was standing now. She could make out the shape of it against the stars, head low, one foreleg held off the ground and something dark wound round it that ran away into the broken fence. It swung its head toward them and away again. Each time it shifted, the rope dragged, and it made the sound again, quieter, down in its throat.

At first light it would still be here. The men would come up with ropes and poles, and they would see the leg. Last winter a plow ox had gone through the ice at the ford and broken a leg. She had watched the men do it, quickly, and the ox's legs had gone on moving in the straw afterward.

"Give me your knife," she said.

Kanehira didn't move.

"If you go near it," he said, "it'll kill you. It nearly did. I'm not telling you a story."

"I'm not going near it yet."

She got up onto her knees, and let her breath out.

She let it go slowly, all of it, until there was nothing left in her and the cold came in to fill the place where it had been. She held the emptiness a moment. Then she said the word.

She said it low. She had said it before, to the stable horses, to the old mare that bit, to a colt that wouldn't go into the boat at the ford. Nobody had taught it to her, and she had never given it any thought, any more than she thought about how to swallow. She said it into the dark toward the horse, and she felt Kanehira's arm go still against her shoulder.

The horse's ear came round.

She saw it against the stars, the ear turning and then the head after it. The breathing slowed. It came down, and down again, and stopped catching at the top. The foreleg stayed where it was, held up off the ground, but the rest of the horse went quiet all at once, until nothing moved in the shape against the sky but its sides.

She stood and held her hand out behind her, without looking, for the knife.

After a moment Kanehira put it in her palm, hilt first.

She walked to the horse. She walked to it at an even pace, the knife held down along her leg and her other hand out where it could see it. She put her hand on its shoulder. It shivered once, under her palm, and stood. She slid her hand down the leg, past the knee, to the rope.

"Wait," Kanehira said.

He was beside her. She hadn't heard him come. He crouched, and his fingers went over the rope where it wound round the leg, quick and sure, the way he went over a girth before every ride and over every knot he ever trusted his weight to.

"Here," he said. "There it's only twisted. Cut where you were going to, and you'll cut the leg."

She cut where he showed her.

The rope came away in three pieces, stiff with blood. The horse stood on three legs with its head low and let them do it. When the last of the rope was off, it set the foot down, carefully, and lifted it, and set it down again.

 

          *

 

They brought it out at first light. By then they could see it.

It was a mare, young, a dun no darker than dry grass, with a black stripe down her back from the mane to the root of her tail, as if someone had drawn it there with one stroke of a brush. Her ribs showed. Blood had dried black down the near foreleg, and there was a long cut across the shoulder where the fence stakes had caught her. Her eyes in the gray light were very dark and very wide. They went to Tomoe and stayed there.

She followed them. Nobody led her. Tomoe walked to the gate and the mare walked behind her, lame, her nose a hand's breadth from Tomoe's back. Kanehira walked a little to one side and watched and didn't say anything.

Ishimaru was sitting against the gate post with his knees drawn up and his arms around them. He had been there all night. He got up stiffly, staring at the mare. Then he looked at Tomoe, who was black with grave mud from the knees down, and he started to laugh.

He laughed until his knees bent and he had to grip the post, and after a moment Tomoe was laughing too, standing in the mud with a wild horse at her back.

When he could stop, Ishimaru wiped his eyes with his wrist. He put his hand into the front of his robe and brought it out full of barley. It was the coarse grain from the stable bin, and it was warm from being held.

He held it out to Tomoe. Out of habit he clicked his tongue twice. The mare didn't look at him.

Tomoe took the barley and held it flat on her palm.

The mare stretched out her neck. Her lips moved over Tomoe's palm, soft and whiskered and careful, and Tomoe could feel the breath of her warm on her wrist, and the small hard grains being gathered up one at a time. The sun was coming. Steam had begun to lift off the mare's back in the cold, and in the low light it wavered, so that the black stripe down her spine seemed to waver with it.

"What'll you call her?" Ishimaru said.

"Kagerō."

He snorted. "That's not a horse's name."

"It is now."

At the edge of the cedars she looked back once. Down in the hollow, low over the rushes, the light was there again, small and pale in the gray of the morning. Then the trees closed behind her, and she went down after Kanehira with the mare at her back.

 

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