Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(11)

“Here, Kuniko.” She handed the wet silk rag to the other maid, whose face was a mask, and then turned back to me. “Now let me see how you can read.”

Smoothly and so quickly that I didn’t even see it happening, she plucked the brush from my hand. Holding it like a knife between her middle finger and thumb, she picked up fresh ink and poised to write on yet another sheet of beautiful, clean rice paper. She looked up, catching me with her gaze, as if to say, Are you watching carefully?

Like me, she pulled her sleeve back, but where my action had been a simple grab to keep my sleeve from trawling through the ink, hers was precise and elegant, like the motion of a dancer.

Her hand barely moved, but the brush slashed a character onto the paper—the phonetic hiragana, ku (く). Then came a sinuous curve—the phonetic katakana, no (ノ). Finally, another, horizontal slash—the Chinese kanji ideogram ichi (一).

She placed the brush down with the same deadly elegance, and looked up at me again. “Well?” she asked, indicating what she had written.

I was perplexed. I understood all of the pieces, but they made no sense. Otō-san said you weren’t ever supposed to write katakana, hiragana and kanji in a single word. I turned my head, thinking perhaps that if I looked at it upside down I might understand it.

“Well,” I said, “the first mark is ku, which means nine. And then there’s no, which is... of? Or on, or sometimes from. And then that line looks like the kanji character meaning one.” Then I sat back a bit, and the word came into focus, like an offshore island appearing through clearing fog. “But the whole thing... If you put the three strokes together it could be the kanji character for woman (女).”

Lady Chiyome smiled again, the frightening smile. “Yes, my squirrel, yes. A kunoichi is a very special kind of woman indeed.” She looked to her two maids, and then back at me. “Perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will be such a woman yourself some day.”

I stared at her.

“I have one last question for you, child.”

“Yes, my lady?”

She picked up the brush and swirled it in a small bowl of water to clean it. Taking out yet another sheet of paper she said, “This morning, you told me that you could see the paper that Lord Imagawa and his commander were looking at.”

I nodded.

She fixed me with a skeptical stare. “To have seen it from that distance, you’d have had to be a falcon, not a squirrel.”

“But... I saw it, my lady.”

“Hmmph. So you say. Do you think you could reproduce what you saw?”

Now it was my turn to frown once more. In my mind’s eye the image was clear—the large blocks of green, with the smaller blocks of red and blue surrounding them. Lines like arrows sticking out of them. I nodded again.

She pushed the box of colored inks toward me and held out the brush once more. “Keep your tongue in, this time.”

I sucked my tongue in. “Yes, Chiyome-sama.” Then I reproduced the drawing I had seen as best I could.

When I looked up, Lady Chiyome’s eyes were wide. “Are you sure this is what you saw?”

“Yes, my lady.”

She grunted and turned to Kuniko. “We’ll need to get out of here as quickly as possible tomorrow, Kuniko.” Then she waved a hand at me. “Go to bed, girl. We will be traveling again in the morning.” She favored me with a grin in which there was very little of lightness. “Pleasant dreams, Risuko.”

My dreams that night were anything but.





6—Tea and Cakes


A rumble woke us all the next morning. It sounded like a peal of distant thunder. But Mieko and Kuniko were already on their feet before I could sit up and wipe the sleep from my eyes.

“What is it?” I asked Emi, who was rubbing her eyes next to me. “It’s awfully cold for thunder and lightening, isn’t it? And it doesn’t feel like an earthquake....”

Emi shook her head and scowled. We both listened carefully as we pulled on our clothes—mine still slightly damp from the night before, smelling faintly of stale shoyu and burnt rice.

Another low rumble shook the morning silence. From where I had been sleeping near the kitchen, I could see a grey, thin light leaking beneath the outer kitchen door.

We began to fold away our bedding with a sense of uncertain urgency. I was about to ask again what that rumble might have been, when a new sound broke the silence and explained everything. It was a sharp, high crack. Musket fire. And not very far away, from the sound of it.

My legs went cold and I dropped my bedroll.

The battle had come to us.

Kuniko appeared at the front door, her face as stony as ever. To the younger Little Brother, she barked, “Go guard the rear gate.” To the older one, she said, “Come with me to guard the lady.” Then she and Mieko exchanged a look. It said: the lady’s maid and the four children would have to fend for ourselves.

I caught Emi’s eye, and I could see she shared the dry panic that was squeezing the breath out of me. Even Toumi looked pale and shaken.

There were several more gunshots, and the deep rumble sounded again—cannon fire.

Mieko turned to us, standing there in her thin robe as if she were waiting to sit for a portrait and not waiting for a battle. “Aimaru,” she said, a hoarseness to her voice the only sign that she was nervous, “Aimaru, you take these young ladies to the kitchen. I will guard this door. You should be safe enough in there.”