Cadoc’s fist struck the wall. Plaster cracked and fell. “How could she? How?”
“Ah, ‘twas easy. You wove the snare for her.” Rufus patted Cadoc’s shoulder. “Don’t feel bad. You’ll swindle yourself another chest o’ gold inside a ge-ne-ration.”
“Why?” Cadoc leaned against the wall, face buried in arm.
Rufus shrugged. “A whore be a whore.”
“No, but she—immortal—I offered her—“ Cadoc could not go on.
Rufus’ mouth drew tight, invisibly in the gloom. “You ought to could see. You can think better’n me when you put your mind to it. How long’s she been what she be? Four hundred years, you said? Well, now, that be a lot o’ men. A thousand a year? Maybe less these days, but likely more than that earlier.”
“She told me she, she takes as … much freedom from the life … as she can.”
“Shows you how fond she be of it. You know the sort o’ things a lot o’ fellows want from a whore. And all the times a girl gets roughed up, or robbed, or kicked out, or knocked up and left to handle that however she can—leave it on a trash heap, maybe? Four hundred years, Lugo. How d’you s’pose she feels about men? And she’d never’ve got to watch you growing old.”
VIII Lady in Waiting
RAIN FELL throughout the day. It was very light, soundless, and lost itself in the mists that smoked over the ground; but it closed off the world like sleep. From the verandah Okura looked across a garden whose stones and dwarf cypresses had gone dim. Water dripped off the shingles above her and filmed the whitewash of the enclosure wall. There sight ended. Though the broad south gate stood open, she barely glimpsed the avenue outside, a puddle, a leafless cherry tree. Fog had taken away the minor palace beyond. All Heian-kyo might never have been.
She shivered and .turned back toward her quarters. The two or three servants whom she passed by were bulky in wadded garments. Her overlapping kimonos kept some warmth of their own and the carefully matched winter colors preserved a forlorn elegance. Breath drifted ghostly. When she entered the mansion, twilight enfolded her. It was as if cold did also. Shutters and blinds could hold off wind, but dankness seeped through and braziers availed little.
Yet comfort of a sort awaited her. Masamichi had been kind enough to allot her a sleeping platform to herself in the west pavilion. Between the sliding screens that marked the room off, a pair of chests and a go table hunched on the floor. She had a fleeting fancy that they wished they could creep under the thick tatami that covered the platform. No one else was about, so its curtains were drawn back. By the flicker of a few tapers, futon and cushions lay as black lumps.
She opened the cupboard where her koto stood. It was among the heirlooms not yet removed; its name was Cuckoo Song. How right for such a day as this, she thought: the bird that is the inconstant lover, that can bear word between the living and the dead, that embodies the ineluctable passage of time. She had in mind a melody well-liked when she was a girl. Afterward she had sometimes played it for her men— those two among her lovers whom she truly cared for— But no, she remembered that the instrument was now tuned for a winter mode.
A maid came into the section, approached, bowed, and piped, “A messenger has arrived from the noble Lord Yasuhira, my lady.” Her manner took it for granted. The liaison between Chikuzen no Okura, lady in waiting in the household of Ex-Emperor Tsuchimikado, and Nakahari no Yasuhira, until lately a Minor Counselor to self-re-proclaimed Emperor Go-Toba, went back many years. Her own name for him was Mi-yuki, Deep Snow, because that had been his first excuse for staying the night with her.
“Bring him.” Okura’s pulse quivered.
The maid left. She returned as the courier showed himself on the verandah. With the light from outside at his back, Okura could not only see through the translucent blind that he was a boy, she made out that his brocade coat was dry, his white trousers hardly sullied. Besides wearing a straw cape, he must have gone on horseback. The least of smiles touched her lips. Deep Snow would preserve appearances until the end.