As the elders had instructed her, she knelt on the mat near his feet. His look searched her. “You do that otherwise than any woman I have seen before,” he murmured, “and you talk differently, too.”
“I am but newly in these parts, Master.”
“I mean that you do not talk like a lowlander who has picked up some of the highland form of speech.”
“I thought I had learned more than one Chinese tongue well, as long as I have been in the Middle Kingdom,” broke from her.
“I’ve been widely about, myself.” He shifted to the idiom of Shansi or Honan, though it was not quite what she remembered from the wealthy, populous northeastern provinces and he used it rustily. “Will you be more at ease talking this?”
“I learned it first, Master.”
“It’s been long since I— But where are you from, then?”
She raised her face toward his. Her heart thuttered. With an effort like reining in a wild horse, she kept her voice level. “Master, I was born across the sea, in the country of Nippon.”.
His eyes widened. “You have come far in your search for salvation.”
“Far and long, Master.” She drew breath. Her mouth had gone dry. “I was born four hundred years ago.”
“What?” He leaped to his feet.
She rose too. “It is true, it is true,” she said desperately. “How could I dare lie to you? The enlightenment I seek, have sought, oh, that was to find someone like myself, who never grows old—”
She could hold back the tears no more. He laid his arms around her. She clung close and felt how he also trembled.
After a time they drew apart and, for another while, stared at one another. The wind boomed outside.
A strange calm had fallen on her. She blinked her lashes clear and told him, “You have only my word for this, of course. I learned quite early to be nobody that anybody was … much concerned about or would … especially remember.”
“I believe you,” he answered hoarsely. “Your presence, you, a foreigner and a woman, that speaks for you. And I think I am afraid to disbelieve you.”
A laugh sobbed. “You will have time aplenty to make certain.”
“Time,” he mumbled. “Hundreds, thousands of years. And you a woman.”
Old fears awoke. Her hands fluttered before her. She forced herself to stand where she was. “I am a nun. I took vows to Amida Butsu—the Buddha.”
He nodded, against straining muscles. “How else could you travel freely?”
“I was not always safe,” she wrung out of her lips. “I have been violated in wild lands of this realm. Nor have I always been true. I have sometimes taken shelter with a man who offered it, and stayed with him till he died.”
“I’ll be kind,” he promised.
“I know. I asked … of certain women here … But what of those vows? I thought I had no choice before, but now—”
His laughter gusted louder than needful. “Ho! I release you from them.”
“Can you?”
“I am the Master, am I not? The people aren’t supposed to pray to me but I know they do, more than to their gods. i Nothing bad has come of it. Instead, we’ve had peace, lifetime after lifetime.”
“Did you … foresee that?”
He shrugged. “No. Myself, I am—maybe a thousand and a half years old. I don’t remember just when I came here.”
The past took possession of him. He looked beyond her and the wall, he spoke low and rapidly:
“The years blur together, they become one, the dead are as real as the living and the living as unreal as the dead. For a while, long ago, I was mad, in a waking dream. Some monks took me in, and slowly, I’m not sure how, slowly I grew able to think again. Ah, I see that something like that .t happened to you too. Well, for me it still is often hard to be sure what I truly remember, and I forget much.
“I had found, like you, the safest thing was to be a footloose religious person. I only meant to stay here a few years, after they’d made me welcome. But tune went on and on, this was a snug den and foes feared to come, once word of me had drifted about, and what else, what better, was there? I’ve tried to do my people no harm. I think, they think I do them good.”