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sunshades and lotions to lighten the skin: how stupid and frivolous all that
seemed now.
'Your father is Otori Takeo, who we call the Dog.' He laughed in the sneering
way she loathed. Suddenly she hated him again, and despised herself for the
eagerness and ease with which the cat surrendered to him. 'My father and I are
going to kill him.'
He leaned away, out of the lamp's glow, and brought out a small firearm. The
light glinted on the dark steel barrel. 'He is a sorcerer, and no one has been
able to get near him, but this weapon is stronger than sorcery.' He glanced at
her and said, with deliberate cruelty, 'You saw how it dealt with Muto Taku.'
Maya made no reply, but she looked clearly and with no sentimentality at
Taku's death. He had been killed
fighting, with a kind of honour; he had betrayed no one; he and Sada had died
together. There was nothing to regret in his death. Hisao's baiting did not
touch her or weaken her.
'Lord Otori is your father,' she said. 'That's why I tried to kill you, so you
would not kill him.'
'Akio is my father.' Doubt and anger showed in his voice.
'Akio treats you with cruelty, abuses you and lies to you. He is not your
father. You do not know how a father should behave towards his children.'
'He loves me,' Hisao whispered. 'He hides it from everyone, but I know it's
true. He needs me.'
'Ask your mother,' Maya replied. 'Didn't I tell you to listen to her? She will
tell you the truth.'
There was another long silence. It was hot: she could feel sweat on her
forehead. She was thirsty.
'Be the cat again, and I will listen to her,' he said so quietly she could
barely hear him.
'Is she here?'
'She is always here,' Hisao said. 'She is tied to me by a cord, as I was once
tied to her. I am never free from her. Sometimes she is silent. That's not so
bad. It is when she wants to talk - then the sickness comes over me.'
'Because you try to fight the spirit world,' Maya said. 'It was the same for
me. When the cat wanted to appear and I resisted it, I was ill in the same
way.'
Hisao said, 'I have never had any Tribe skills. I'm not like you. I don't have
invisibility. I can't use the second self. Even witnessing these things makes
me slightly sick. But the cat doesn't. The cat makes me feel good, powerful.'
He seemed unaware that his voice had changed and
taken on a hypnotic quality, laced with an appeal that she could not resist.
Maya felt the cat stretch and flex with longing. Hisao drew the supple body
close to him and ran his hands through the dense fur.
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'Stay close to me,' he whispered, and then, more loudly, 'I'll listen, Mother,
to what you have to say.'
The flames of the forge and the lamplight dimmed and flickered as a gust of
warm, fetid air blew suddenly across the dirt floor, stirring up the dust and
making the shutters rattle. Then the lamp flared up, burning more brightly,
illuminating the spirit woman as she drew close, floating just above the
ground. The boy sat without moving; the cat lay beside him, its head beneath
his hand, its golden eyes unblinking.
'Child,' the mother said, her voice trembling. 'Let me feel you, let me hold
you.' Her thin fingers touched his forehead, stroked his hair, and he felt her
form close to his, the faintest of pressure as she embraced him.
'I used to hold you like this when you were a baby.'
'I remember,' he whispered.
'I could not bear to leave you. They made me take poison, Kotaro and Akio, who
wept with love for me while he obeyed the Master and forced the pellets into
my mouth, and watched me die in agony of body and spirit. But they could not
keep me from you. I was only twenty years old. I did not want to die. Akio
killed me because he hated your father.'
His hands worked in the cat's fur, making it show its claws.
'Who was my father?'
'The girl is right. She is your sister; Takeo is your father. I loved him.
They ordered me to lie with him, to make you. I obeyed them in everything. But
they did not
realize I would love him, and that you would be born from a love of such sweet
fierceness, so they tried to destroy us all. First me; now they will use you
to kill your father, and then you too will die.'
'You are lying,' he said, his throat dry.
'I am dead,' she replied. 'Only the living lie.'
'I have hated the Dog all my life; I cannot change now.'
'You do not know what you are? There is no one left in the Tribe, in all the
five families, who can recognize you. I will tell you what my father told me
in the moment of his death. You are the ghostmaster.'
Much later, when she had returned to her room and lay sleepless, watching the
darkness pale slowly into dawn, Maya relived the moment when she had heard the
spirit speak those words: her spine had chilled; her fur had stood erect.
Hisao's hand had gripped her neck. He had not fully understood what it meant,
but Maya recalled Taku's words: the ghostmaster was the one who walked between
the worlds, the shaman who had the power to placate or incite the dead. She
remembered the voices of the phantoms that had pressed around her on the night
of the Festival of the Dead, on the shore in front of Akane's house; she had
felt their regret for their violent and untimely deaths and their demand for
revenge. They sought Hisao, their master, and she, as the cat, gave him power
over them. But how could Hisao, this cruel and crooked boy, have such power?
And how would Akio use him if he discovered it?
Hisao had not wanted her to leave him. She felt the strength of his need for
her, and found it both enticing and dangerous. But he did not seem to want
Akio to
know, not yet . . . She did not fully understand what his real feelings were
towards the man he had always believed to be his father: a mixture of love and
hatred, contempt and pity, and fear.
She recognized the emotions, for she felt the same towards him.
She did not sleep, and when Nori brought her rice and soup for the morning
meal she had little appetite. Nori's eyes were red, as if she had been crying.
'You must eat,' Nori said. 'And then you are to get ready to travel.'
'Travel? Where am I going?'
'Lord Arai is returning to Kumamoto. The town of Hofu is in ferment. Muto
Shizuka is fasting in Daifukuji and being fed by birds.' Nori was trembling.
'I shouldn't tell you this. The Master is to accompany him, and Hisao too.
They are taking you, of course.' Her eyes filled with tears and she dabbed at
them with the patched sleeve of her robe. 'Hisao is well enough to travel. I
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should be happy.'
Be thankful he is going away from you, Maya thought. She said, 'Shizuka is in
Hofu?'
'She came to bury her younger son, and they say she has lost her mind. People
blame Lord Arai - and accuse him of being involved in Taku's death. He is
furious, and is returning home to prepare his troops for war, before Lord
Otori gets back from Miyako.'
'What nonsense you talk! You don't know anything about these things!' Maya hid
her alarm with anger.
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