The wind blew through the broken screens, and howled in the rotting eaves.
«How can I find peace?» he asked the oldest of the women.
«There is peace in the grave," she told him, «and a momentary peace in the contemplation of a fine sunset.»
She was naked, and her breasts hung like empty bags upon her chest, and on her face she had painted the face of a demon.
The onmyoji scowled, and tapped his fan into the palm of his hand impatiently.
«Why do I have no peace?» he asked the youngest of the three women.
«Because you are alive," she told him, with her cold lips. The onmyoji was most afraid of the youngest of the three women, for he suspected that she was not alive. She was beautiful, but it was a frozen beauty. If she touched him, with her cold fingers, he shuddered.
«Where can I find peace?» he demanded of the woman who was neither young nor old.
She was not naked, but her robe was open, and down her chest curved two rows of breasts, like the breasts of a she–pig or a rat, her many nipples black and hard as so many lumps of charcoal.
She sucked the air in through her teeth, and held it in, and then, after too long a time, she exhaled. And she said, «In the Province of Mino, many, many long days of travel away from here, to the north and the cast, on the side of such and such a mountain is a small temple. It is of so little importance that it has but one monk tending to it. He is afraid of nothing, and he has the peace you desire. Now, I can weave it so that when he dies you will gain his strength, and you will fear nothing. But once I have woven, you will have only until the next full of the moon to cause his death. And he must die without violence, and without pain, or the weaving will fail.»
The onmyoji grunted, satisfied. He fed her several small delicacies with his own hand, and stroked her hair, and told her that he was satisfied with this.
The three women withdrew into another part of the tumbledown house, and when they returned again it was almost dawn, and the sky was beginning to lighten.
They handed the onmyoji a square of woven silk, pale as moonlight. On it was painted the onmyoji and the moon, and the young monk.
The onmyoji nodded, satisfied. He would have thanked them, but he knew that one must not thank creatures of their kind, so he placed their payment on the floor of their house, and hurried home, to be there before daybreak.
Now, there are many ways to kill at a distance, but most of them, even if they do not involve direct violence, involve the infliction of pain.
The Master of Yin–Yang consulted his scrolls. Then he sent his demons to the mountain where the monk lived, to obtain for him things that the monk had touched. (That was where the fox had overheard them.) And here, and now, the onmyoji sat in front of the little table, with the lamp upon it, and the lacquer box, and the key. One by one, he added a pinch of the substance in the little porcelain plates to the fire of the lamp — a pinch for each of the five elements. And the final pinch was from the last thing the demons had stolen from the monk: it was from the plate with nothing in it, which contained a scrap of the monk's shadow, that the demons had stolen from him.
With each pinch of powder the onmyoji added to the flame, it burned higher and brighter; and when he added the final pinch of nothing, which was the monk's shadow, the flame burned so high it filled the onmyoji's chamber with light, and then it was gone, leaving the room in darkness.
The onmyoji kindled a light and was pleased to observe that on the silk square that covered the table there was an unpleasant stain, as if something dead had been lying there over the face of the young monk.
He observed this with satisfaction. Then he went to his bed and slept the night peacefully, and without fear. He was, for that night, content.
In the monk's dream that night, he was standing in his father's house, before his father had lost his house and all he owned in his disgrace, for his father had had powerful enemies.
His father bowed to him, and the monk remembered, in his dream, that his father had died by his own hand, and he also remembered that he, the monk, was still alive. He tried to tell his father this, but his father indicated, without words, that he could not listen to anything his son could tell him.
Then he produced from inside his robe a small lacquer box, and he held it out for his son to take.
The monk took the enamel box, and his father was no longer there, but he gave no thought to this, for the enamel box took all his thoughts (although, in his dream, he thought he saw the flick of a fox's tail through an open door).
He knew there was something important inside the box. There was something he needed to sec. But the box resisted all his efforts to open it, and the more he tugged and pried the more frustrated he was.
When he woke he felt troubled and discomfited, wondering if the dream was an omen or a warning. «If it was an evil dream," said the monk, «then may a Baku take it.»
Then he rose, and went out to bring in water, and began his day.
On the second night the monk dreamed that his grandfather had come to him. although his grandfather had died, choking on a mochi, a small rice cake, when the monk was little more than a baby.
They were standing on a tiny island that was little more than a black rock in the sea. His grandfather stared out to sea with blind eyes. The sea birds wailed and cawed over the howl of the sea–wind and the splash of the spray.
His grandfather opened one old hand, to reveal a small black key. Slow as a mechanical toy he put his hand forward. The monk took the key from his grandfather. A seagull screeched three sad descending notes, and the monk would have asked his grandfather what they signified, but the old man had gone.
The monk held the key tightly. He looked about for something that the key would fit, but the island was barren and empty. The monk walked about the island slowly, seeing nothing.
And then it came to the monk that he was being watched, in his dream, and he looked around him, but there was nothing in his dream, save for the distant seagulls and a tiny figure on a distant cliff which might, the monk thought, have been a fox.
He woke with his hand closed about a nonexistent key, still feeling that the eyes of a fox were upon him.
The dream was so real that, later in the day, as a cold wind tumbled the first red and orange leaves from a maple tree into the temple's tiny vegetable garden, where the monk was tending the white and yellow gourds that grew in profusion, he found himself looking about him for the key, and only slowly realising that he had never touched or seen it in the waking world.
That night the monk expected another dark dream. As he closed his eyes he heard something at his door. And then he slept.
But for the first part of the night, he dreamed of nothing at all. And in the second part of the night he dreamed he was standing upon a bridge watching carp swimming placidly about a fishpond, and one of the carp was purest silver, and the other carp was purest gold, and it made the monk happy to watch them.
He woke, certain that the dream was a good omen, and relieved that the days of dark dreams were done with, and he smiled and was happy as he climbed from his sleeping mat.
The monk's good mood remained until he stumbled over the body of the fox, her eyes closed, stretched out across the threshold of the temple.
CHAPTER FOUR
At first, the monk believed the fox was dead. Then, as he squatted beside her. he perceived that she was breathing, so shallowly and slowly that one could scarcely tell that she was breathing at all, but still, she was alive.
The monk took the fox into the little temple, and set her down beside the bra zier, to warm herself. Then the monk said a silent prayer to the Buddha, for the life of the fox, «For she was a wild thing," thought the monk, «but she had a good heart, and I would not see her die.»