And then it was time. One of the shadows took a candle and motioned her to follow. There were sighs and whispers from the others. The flame threw shadows on screens, grotesque distortions of female forms with elongated bodies and misshapen heads, thin, clawlike hands gesturing, reaching.
“Hurry!”
She obeyed and began to walk, her own shadow gliding along beside her, a companion until it, too, was swallowed by the darkness.
She followed the flickering light along a corridor with floors so highly polished that they looked like black ice. The flame of the candle split in two, dancing both above and below the black ice until she no longer knew which light she followed. The cold crept up through the silk socks on her feet. She shrank away from it, shrank into herself trying to vanish into insubstantiality.
Someone was singing – a male voice – the tune strangely familiar but dreamlike. She floated toward it like a petal on a stream.
When she had almost achieved the state of not-being, two wide doors parted before her and she came into a large room. On a raised platform in front of painted screens, a man sat at a desk. He was the one singing. Between snatches of song, he made notations on a scroll.
“The girl, Your Majesty,” said her guide and knelt.
With that simple announcement, Oba no Toshiko, fourteen years old, rematerialized and became “the girl.”
The singing stopped.
Oba no Toshiko’s knees turned to water. She collapsed in a rustle of silks and lay face down on the black ice, wishing it would melt and swallow her.
“Ah, Lady Sanjo!” said the male voice. And then, “Yes. The wild goose. So she is here. It is good. You may leave.”
Leave? A wild hope kindled and was instantly extinguished when he said, “Come here, little goose. Let me look at you.”
For a moment, she toyed with a foolish thought: What if she pretended a fainting spell? Or better yet, death? From an excess of awe.
But she remembered that she was Oba no Toshiko, daughter of warriors, and got to her knees to look up at him.
For a Son of Heaven he looked quite ordinary. Not handsome at all. A broad face and small eyes that studied her. He smiled, and she saw that he was her father’s age and had bad teeth.
“Come closer,” he said again, waving a hand, and she got to her feet. Somehow the fact that he looked so ordinary gave her knees the strength to support her as she crept up to the dais. He made room beside himself, and she sat down on the high, thick grass matting.
“Do you know any imayo?” he asked.
She was startled. Imayo were popular songs sung by women of questionable virtue. Of course she knew them, but a lady could not admit to such knowledge. She shook her head.
“Ha, I thought so.” He sighed, rinsed his brush in the water container, and laid it aside. “I had hoped,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. Do you know why I called you the wild goose?”
“No, sire.” He, too, smelled of aloeswood, and of something else, masculine and not unpleasant.
“On my recent visit to your father’s home, I saw you riding with your brothers. You reminded me of a famous poem.
As they lift their wings
Against starry skies.
The moon is counting each
Of the wild geese flying
On this autumn night.”
She looked at him in wonder, remembering. Her father had been entertaining visitors from the capital. Her oldest brother, proud owner of a new horse, had wanted to try him out, and so they had all got on their horses and raced through the valley.
“You were there and saw me?” she asked, her eyes wide and her voice breathless at the memory of that perfect night of galloping hooves, of flying free on the wind that lifted her long hair and her horse’s mane and molded her clothes to her body. Yes, there had been geese that evening. They had raced the geese and each other, she and her brothers.
He smiled, nodding. “We watched the moon from the veranda. The geese passed over, flying south, and there you were, following them. You wore something white and looked like a ghostly bird skimming the earth.”
She chuckled.
“I have never seen a woman ride like that,” he said softly.
She heard admiration in his voice and suddenly felt warm. “It was not very ladylike,” she said with a small gasp. Then she remembered where she was and why, and suddenly the fear was back and the grief. Tears welled up and she turned her head away.
He reached out to touch her cheek. Cupping her chin, he turned her face to him. “Are you unhappy about the arrangement, little one?”
She looked at him fearfully. “I . . . don’t know what to think. I don’t belong here . . . I . . .” and to her horror, she burst into violent weeping.
He took his hand away and said nothing for a long time. When she had calmed down a little, he pressed a paper tissue into her hand. “You are tired from your journey,” he said. “Go and rest, little wild goose. We shall talk again.”
Imayo
The Emperor watched her run away across the glossy surface, sleeves billowing and skirts hissing along the floor. She burst through the door to the gallery and disappeared.
He was disappointed, even a little angry. Her flight reminded him again of the soaring geese and the white-robed girl skimming across the night-darkened fields on the back of her horse, but the gorgeously robed and painted creature who had crept in and fearfully ascended the dais to sit stiffly beside him was nothing like that memory. Except for her reluctance, she was like all the rest, those young women who had been brought to him through the years, as indistinguishable from each other as dolls or as the hundred representations of the Kannon in the Sanjusangendo temple.
He bedded many palace women, some more than once, in case he might after all discover some hidden talent, some unique trait. Most could play an instrument, or talk amusingly, or tell stories, or compose little poems. That sort of thing was common enough among noblewomen.
None of his carefully selected wives and concubines had proved to have special gifts either. And yet, from the time he had been a mere boy, he had hoped to find a soul mate -- a talented musician or a poet -- as his companion, a woman whose passion matched his.
It struck him that not one of the ungifted had been a very passionate lover either. Mostly, they had lain beneath him, rigid, their eyes squeezed shut, biting their painted lips -- and when he had left them, he had never felt more than the mild distaste that follows a mediocre meal.
He sighed and called, “Otomae, you can come out now.”
A soft rustle, and a small gray nun’s figure appeared, mouselike, from behind one of the painted screens. She sat down beside him where the girl had been. He regarded her fondly. “Well?”
Her wrinkled face broke into a smile. “Bravo, Your Majesty.”
Otomae’s voice was still the most beautiful of voices to him and filled his heart with pleasure. Her narrow face, framed by short white hair, was almost equally dear. He shook his head. “Ah, Otomae, how can you say that? I have been grossly duped. She knows nothing of imayo.”
His beloved Otomae was no nun. Far from it. In her younger days she had been a street entertainer, one of the singing and dancing shirabyoshi, and at times a prostitute. When her fame had reached his ears, he had still been a young man and she already middle-aged. She never became his lover, but she was his teacher and the closest thing to a soul mate he had ever found.
“She is very young and frightened,” said Otomae. “I think you shocked her when you asked if she knew imayo.”
He sighed. “It is far more likely that Kiyomori and her father lied.”
Reaching for a narrow box made of black lacquer painted with golden reeds, he took out a flute – an ordinary bamboo flute, old but with an incomparable sound. It was the only one of the imperial treasures he had kept after his abdication.