​See more of his cool shit here

Like dead boughs thrust into the ground, the coppice wood had shed its green wreaths and given up its majesty, a blasted subject of winter under snow that lay glittering like milled salt.  A pair of figures walked together through its midst; a fair woman in a hooded mantle of ticked white fur, tied over a dress of plain black wool, her companion's breeches and weary indigo tunic suited more to the desert than the snow, though heat and cold were alike to him in their irrelevance.  Helaine regretted the shallow drag of her hem upon the perfect white despite their following a spoor that had churned it elsewhere to marbled, frozen sepia and laced it with the smell of stale clothes and sweating desperation.  They proceeded at a pace befitting the course of their conversation rather than the urgency of any chase.  In following behind, she tested him, altering her pace by subtle degrees and satisfying herself that he was attending to her as well as the notional purpose of their foray.  

“You were sleeping when I awoke.” she observed, stepping over a fallen branch.  “Your eyes were closed, at least.  I wish I had known you long enough to tell if it is the season or my company that moves you to such a measure.”    

“It is the season.” Kala'amātya replied.  She had become accustomed to his use of abridgment against investigation, and was no longer discouraged by it.

“You’re certain?”

​“When I am weary of myself or my companions, I ride for the horizon.”  

Helaine paused and lifted the mantle on her shoulders.  Her breath became a pall of steam that curled back about the trim of her hood.

“Sage advice.” she admitted, watching him disguise his own bare footfalls in the confusion left by the harried beast, so that they were indistinguishable amid the riven mud.  His black braid was knotted at his nape to keep it clear of the lunate wood and dappled horn slung across his shoulder; her speculation could not resolve it into any utile shape, though she had guessed its purpose.  A long receptacle of leather, dyed deep green, hung from his hip, full of thick, dark-shafted arrows.  “You have not yet told me anything of the East.” she reminded him.  “A swineherd’s daughter knows more of Cathay than I.”

“What would you know?”

​“What is the first difference that strikes you?”

Her companion devoted himself to the problem.

“That it surpasses the West, both in freedom and constraint.”
“And what else?”
“There is no shame accorded the flesh, nor to acts of desire... they are considered wholesome enough to attract official exhortation, a far greater deterrent than hellfire.”
“Why then do the merchants return with such prudish tales?”
“They confuse shame with discretion.”  Over the bare heads of the trees a flight of fractious crows, black satin cyphers against the sky, croaked and clapped at one another as they passed by.   
“I have heard that women are collected like tulips by princes and burghers alike... whoever can bear the cost of the venture.”
“It is common enough outside the Christian kingdoms.”
“I cannot imagine success in such an exploit.”
“The ancients remarked that you amass the haram you deserve.  Anyone envying a house of fifty concubines need only return a day late and a gift short.”  

They smiled to each other briefly, and she lifted her sleeve to her face, breathing warmth against it.

“And you have contrived this arrangement on your own behalf?”
“I attempted, and greatly desired, to live alone inside a town upon my exile, but was soon enough convinced that I had erred.” he replied.  “What is a house without women, the women asked of me.” 
“As well they might.  These women... were they not slaves?"
"Some."
"Where does one purchase the most beautiful girls?”
“Why do you ask?”  His guard, lying latent, rose at her inquiries like the stiffly-drawn posture of some rankled beast rising from repose.
“Idleness...” she admitted.
“Byzantium, Cordoba, Tripoli.  In these times, the bazar excels the suq.” Kala'amātya related.

​Helaine's gaze departed him toward the most distant trees.

“Strange sport, to choose flesh from a yard amid cattle beasts."  She slid her hands into her cloak.  "It is no easy thing to live as a chattel."
“It is not my taste to lie with slaves.”
“You think yourself above such practices...”  

The contention earned her the full measure of his stare. 

“I was born the least of a race raised to serve another's will, and I do not flatter myself on that account.  But I care not for whatever I might compel from someone to whom I am fearful or loathsome... and I am both, more often than not.”   

Helaine perceived the offence she had given and regretted it.

“Thus I know you to be something other than a male of my own race, and far more than the stars of your birth.” she told him.  
He was not sure how to receive the commendation amid the defence he had already ordered; his eyes found hers briefly before he returned them to the trail.

"Your friend does not believe it."
"Petrouchka regrets far more than my regard for you."

They walked on, climbing a slow rise over which the trail laboured visibly.

"What of your husband?" Kala'amātya asked.  
"What of him?"
"He does not treat you kindly when he learns I am gone.”

His knowledge of this private trouble was greeted with a frown.

​“Do not concern yourself with him.  He has loathed the sight of me since finding the sign upon my face...”  Helaine touched a hand to the black line on her forehead.  “Though I own that his people did contract for me in ignorance of it.  He does not lately brave the threshold.”
“I will dispatch him for you.”  

She shook her head.

​“It would please his family too well.  It suits my purpose to have him drunk and foolish and fearful in town, where he can best be heeded.”  The memory of her betrothal aroused unwelcome reminiscences, and she was glad of the hood that shaded her face.  That she had not convinced him of the merit of her designs was declared by the set of his shoulders as he walked before her.  “Men have taught me to cherish their dread over all other forms of their regard." she reminded him.  "Even Petrouchka would allow that I had no great love of either sex, before your advent.”  That he was again affected was a thing he struggled mutely to disguise, and they walked for some time in silence.  "I can only wonder what you were seeking when you brought yourself to me." 
“A wrathful, unquiet spirit.”
“Such is your curse.” she chuckled.  “Do the unquiet spirits of your haram await you somewhere, lamenting the alluring horizon?”
“The women of my Bukhara house had their throats cut in my absence, and since then I have kept none who will suffer on my account.”
“I am sorry for them.  But I treasured the notion that I had charmed you from the trees, when in fact you merely adjudged me sufficiently formidable and infamous...” she said with a smirk as she lifted her skirts to step across a fallen sapling.  “You do woundeth vanity, Kala'amātya.”

They had followed the path of man and beast to the edge of the wood, where it crashed over the cusp of a tall bank sloping to the edge of a frozen river, the trees on its far side a dark redoubt against the sky.  The ice-choked water had formed a blank and tacit plain footed with great swathes of windblown, frost-scoured floes.  Her companion drew the length of wood over his shoulder, slid twisted rawhide from his belt and strung the span, transforming the nameless instrument into the recurved bow that he had carried since his service in the Eastern steppe.  Thus configured, it was two thirds as tall as he; she reached out and took it from him, finding herself barely able to draw the stiff line between the two siyah, her fingers burning with the effort.

“Infamy is not the whole of my requirement.” he replied, belatedly. 
"I would give much to know the rest of it." 
"I cannot think why."
"Because I may call the dead from a fathom of earth, but after three seasons, and though you honour my bed, I awake to find you dreamless, I partake of food you will not taste, and I question devils on your account who shrug at my demands as though already beholden to you.  I am not accustomed to elusion."  She watched him select seven arrows and set them head-first into the snow, shaking her head at her own confoundment.  "Do I please you, Kala'amātya?  What would you have from me?"  

He looked to her from inspecting the crane feather fletches, and spoke with oracular candour.

“You please me, and my tastes are simple.  We are all Narcissus... in you, I find myself.”  

She handed him the bow, her cold hand closing on his own; all the disparities between them, the colours, shapes and origins, could not belie his answer.

“I never thought to say this, in this flesh nor any other, but I would have you if it blackened the ground beneath me.” Helaine told him.  "If not you, then no one."  

He considered the elegance of her unpainted face, the echoing simplicity of the slender black insignia upon her forehead.  Her lies were sweeter than her honesty, the latter like the taste of his own blood in his mouth, but infinitely dearer to him.

“Then it is well that we are suited.”

Where the frozen bank and ruined reed beds met the water, five fur-swathed figures were too engrossed in the speedy commission of their task to perceive their discovery.  Having cut the muddy trail through the wood in driving the stolen cattle beast, they had slaughtered it where it had fallen, cast in the uncertain river ice, hacking at its steaming flesh with blood-slicked axes while its legs still kicked and stuttered.  The poachers holed the carcass and dragged its entrails over the snow preparatory to their division, the colours matching the stench arising from them, swept back up the bank toward the trees.  Two men began to quarter the hind legs with swords while another stuffed a sack with the rough, warm chunks of meat tossed back toward him, scolding the crows that had drifted down from the trees to stand behind them like an audience of minor devils.  

“It would please me to see why you are so feared.” Helaine suggested.

“It is superstition.” he replied modestly.  She smiled at the arrangement of his arrows, and drew the last two from the row, tucking them beneath her mantle.  Turning from her, Kala'amātya plucked the first arrow from the snow and nocked it swiftly, adjudged the breeze and drew the rawhide to his jaw, a taut clap sounding as he released it, all the more sinister for its stiff attenuation.  She raised a hand against the sky and followed its arc with her gaze, watching it bow its fatal head toward the ground.  The impact was a thing she almost felt in her own flesh as it punched into the spine of the tallest poacher and dropped him face down into the bloodied snow, where he thrashed, his cries turning his companions toward him.  One by one they arose from their crouches, frozen in place by the mysterious throes that had grasped their fellow; Kala'amātya sent an arrow into the neck of the youngest, a tall, blonde boy in a goatskin cloak, and another through the chest of his father, felling them beside the heifer.  

“You will remain here into summer?” Helaine inquired, kicking the snow from her skirt.  At the foot of the slope the fallen trio were abandoned by the remaining poachers, who sheathed their swords and began to surge through the drifts along the edge of the river, their deep blue cloaks flapping on their backs.  A shaft drove through the thigh of the foremost, slowing him to a standstill in time to see his companion pierced at the hip, screaming shrilly and dragging the disabled leg in his desperation to escape the unseen archer.  

“I am betrothed to the Duc d’Orleans from May.  We are to chastise Huguenots for their unchristian conduct.”

“But I have fed you all this winter... surely I and not Gaston should have the benefit of that.  I shall write to him and have you released from this odious duty.  Were I less infamous, you might have something of a care for my welfare in your absence.”  She handed back the superfluous arrows.  “Your brother’s wife would murder me, given the chance.”   

“Petrouchka Belyaev would hang and quarter me."

"Would you not feel the same?" she reminded him.

​"I would... and therefore favour discretion.  And I fear I would not survive my attempt to subject you to the auspices of a fond protector."  Kala'amātya turned another of his rare smiles toward her, and she replied in kind.  "Though after so long unlamented, it is a fine thing to be missed.” he confessed, manually directing her attention to the second brace of victims.  “Militia scouts.” 

“It seems I have fed them too.” Helaine observed, noting that while the first trio were tenant farmers, the other pair wore the winter garments issued by antagonistic magistrates.  He slung his bow in favour of his shoto blades, each as long as his forearm and as bright as shards of mirror glass.  

“How would you have them?”

She raised a hand and tapped her chin.  

“Take a hand and an eye from each.  I will call up the wolves... if either of them stumbles home they’ll have a tale to tell, if nothing else.”  

Down by the river his living victims espied him as he descended the bank, and made a desperate change of course, scrabbling over the frozen reeds and out onto the ice, where they scurried and toppled over, driving the arrows into their flesh.  Passing the dead lying in silent arrangement around the heifer, he paused to wrench the shafts from their stiffening flesh and replace them in his quiver.
​

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

Mine flowered for the first time this year with the stalk emerging in late autumn/early winter, snaking slowly upward to become a brilliant coral red spike in mid-spring, which was appreciated by the local honeyeaters.  The stalks apparently branch in time to form a more spectacular candelabra-type arrangement.

My overall impressions of Aloe rupicola are moderate size, attractive foliage, decent growth rate, cold-hardiness, undemanding cultivation (mine's in a shitty plastic pot with proprietary cactus mix) and ready flowering.  It doesn't seem to suffer any of the spotty fungal leaf pathologies that afflict a number of other aloes in this humid coastal situation, which is an important bonus.  The one thing it does not seem to appreciate is massive amounts of harshest midday sunlight, presumably because it has evolved as a semi-understorey species in open hill scrub in its native clime; mine is happiest in half day shade and/or filtered sunlight, perhaps even looking its best in these conditions.  

​A recommended species for those with neither the room nor the climate to accommodate the larger tree aloes and one that would look particular striking and serpentine planted in groups.

another from the ordeal by roses series featuring Yukio Mishima

it's difficult to capture or convey the protean syntax of dreams even though I think it might be the
only language that truly matters.  The written word so often fails; images come so much closer.

“He rode back through China, the Kyzylkum, Poland and then Germany with Paris in mind, but er... never made it that far.  It happens to the best of us.” William concluded, glancing at Susan, who watched the fire.  She reached across to partake of his cigarette.  

“I told you not to let me smoke.” she scolded.  "What happens to the best of you?"
“Girl trouble.  Helaine de Marchand... countess, bas bleu... sociopath... hardcore witch queen with a thing for sullen white meat.  You know how you run into those one or two people in your life, who you don’t need to explain anything to?  They just dig you and all your evil ways, basically because they’re as fucked up as you are, if not more?  And you just go at each other because you’ve both been so starved of any kind of affection or... er, comment dit-on cela en anglais?  What’s that thing, when you sympathize with someone, but it doesn’t start with S?”
"Empathy?” 
“Yeah... you know, when you finally strike some sort of empathy and you get sucked into one another's hideous shit and things just spiral horribly downward in an endless smoking tailspin...?”  

Susan shook her head.

“Not really, no.”
“Well, Helaine was that, for Kala'amātya.  He went from forty-below with teflon attachment issues, to total obsession with her.  It did not end well.”  
"Now your brother's really going to kill me." she observed.
"What he doesn't know you know can't hurt him."
"Until he knows." she murmured, lying back down.  "I don't want to talk about that anyway."  She inched over the gleaming silver compound and kissed the hollow where his neck began, already certain of its effect; she watched it cause him to draw breath as the sensation darkened the colour of his eyes.

"I probably should have asked you this before I slept with you, but... you can't actually do anything... strange, can you?"
"You mean do I have powers?"
"Not powers... I mean extra... different... abilities..."
"Just say powers."
"Shut up.  I mean like... if you bit someone, hard, would it start to digest them?  Can you burrow into the ground really quickly?  If you fell out of a plane, would you actually die?"  He shrugged.  "If I cut your head off, would that be fatal?"
“Someone did cut my head off once.  At the battle of… well, the fall of Bukhara, really.  This fucking huge Iranian came along and whacked it right off.  Whomp, phutt.”  She flicked his ear in disgust but he refused to qualify the claim.  "I only have ghetto powers, Christabel.  All I can do is... see in the dark... remember account numbers... take a good beating... get it up forty eight times in twenty four hours, especially in winter.  And hold my breath for an hour and twenty six minutes.  I can't play the fucking harp or get away with cravats or envenom randoms."  

"It feels more like two hours." Susan smiled, somewhat obliquely.  He picked up her right leg, bending to grasp her thigh with his teeth and murmuring an ode to its tender qualities as he sucked the frail skin behind her knee while she writhed and exclaimed at the almost insupportable sensation.  It was through the fingers she pressed to her eyes that she perceived the staring of a white face, painted by the glow of the flames and floating between enclosing fur and dark, abundant hair; Petrouchka's thirsting intent held Susan still, until she was reminded of the spectacle they offered and pulled the cloth beneath her arms.  The vampyre's mouth opened in the dark shape of a smile as she walked around the flames, its colours gleaming in her gaze like two swamp fires.  

“Darlink...” she told William.  “I am thinking... you are still owing me five thousand American dollars.”  He looked at her blankly.  “I know.  How I can forget such things?”

“I thought you gave that to me out of the kindness of your heart.”  

"Pozhaljsta... there is no kindness in my heart.”

“Do you know how many arseholes I’m going to have to kick the shit out of to get that kind of money?” he sighed, watching the visitor lean her elbows against the floor span.  “One.” he smiled to both womens' frowns, using the dawamesk plate to preserve his modesty while passing Susan her alienated clothing.
“Is good that you can laugh still under crushing weight of guilt.” Petrouchka remarked.  
“You pull me out of an important meeting to tell me you're broke?”
“I don't like to have nothing, Sachiin... she know this name?"  He nodded.  "Good.  I sell what things I have, but still, it run away like water.  You don't think it will happen with you, but this Bailiss in Prague, he finish us, I tell you..." she asserted while he knotted the ikat at his waist and began to groan as though her familiar insistences would prove fatal; Petrouchka pressed on with her complaint, turning toward Susan.  “And if he tell one thing to you, be sure to make him tell it all."

"About that..." he interjected.  "I haven't actually told Kala'amātya that Christabel's in as yet, so zatk'nis when he's around."  

Petrouchka inspected what remained of her pale fingernails.  

“You talk to Auberjonois?  He come here, soon.”

“He won’t.” he muttered.  She glanced at Susan again; her warm, plush skin glowed in the firelight, replete with all the delectable qualities the vampyre cherished, the latter’s cheeks drawn in by the action of her tongue.  

“You have met this wolf, Auberjonois?  You must meet.  If I could love, I would love wolf.  They are so rough and dirty.  Quelle sauvage."  William glanced back at her with a private smile that matched her own, the vampyre expressing a purring little laugh at the intimate exchange.  “And what have Sachiin told you?  That he have these scar from falling on to rose bush?” she chuckled.  “You know what he do for all this time?  Fighting, for money... then waste money, whoring... then more fighting, to pay whore.”  In cataloguing his depravity Petrouchka seemed to discover more of her regard for him, and turned a smile that might have been fond if it were not for the intolerable irony leant to it by the condition of her face.  “Alas for old, old days.  Gideon will come... we should see each other, while we are still here to see.”

“Yeah well, Rana’s here to see.  And no, I don’t know how or why, so don’t ask... just watch your back.”

​“No!  Horrid woman!  Suka!  Stupid, crazy mule!  Do you know the worst thing of these people?  Is not what they do, but what they make us do.  Think of your brother.”  It was the fervid energy of the vampyre's denunciation that led William to study her more closely; satisfied of something, he interrupted, sliding down from the castle toward the fire.

“Who was it and where are they now?” he sighed, as though she had already confessed, using her language to keep the charge from Susan's ears.  Petrouchka shrugged and touched her collar again, following suit.

“I think was criminal.  Knocking on door, oh please, I must be using your telephone...” she related, pleased to have been of service to the household.  “I put in Kala'amātya's car.  No mess.  Is good there, do you think?”
"Nyet." he muttered.  Susan picked up the plate, frowning at their exclusive discourse while William dumped a bucket of water over the fire.  "Do we, or do we not have a fucking security guard?"  
"I don't see him." Petrouchka offered.  
"Fall in, Belyaev.  This fucking hole's not going to dig itself." he called over his shoulder, the dark cloth and the design upon his back muting his white shape into crypsis amid the gloom beneath the trees.

While William and his houseguest disappeared into the garage in pursuit of their secretive task, Susan took her plate into the kitchen, shouldering the door that opened into the darkness she expected and a figure she did not.  It stood motionless in the midst of the chequered linoleum with its arms by its sides, face smeared to disquieting anonymity by the night-blind spot in her gaze.  Slowly she reached back for the light switch, waving her hand at the unseen wall, then dropped the plate already half-forgotten in her grasp.  Lilian's eyes flickered a deep, stained black in fractured inverse with the blinking florescence overhead; she did not flinch at the shards of porcelain that struck her bare feet, but stood at the heart of a shapeless volume that twisted and condensed around her, as though required by the light to return substance to her shape.  The crash brought William and Petrouchka from the garage so expeditiously that it redoubled Susan's start, and she knelt quickly to collect the fragments from the floor, loath to look again at Lilian.  

The vampyre paused as though struck by the same force.  Susan glanced up from the creature's polished little shoes as she advanced slowly, naysaying uncertainty wrestling with some obscure and baffling delight that seemed to raise her almost from the ground.  Her arms extended, then retracted to her breast, where they trembled and came together beneath her mouth.

“Non...” she breathed, still staring wildly, looking to William when he moved too late to warn her.  “Helaine... ce n’est pas vrai!  Where have you been?”  Seizing the blonde woman's hands, the vampyre brought them to her dead cheeks and kissed them as though she were a lost sister.  Lilian's gaze fell to the stranger's features, studying their bittersweet arrangement amid the smiling graveyard pallor.  

“Je ne sais pas.” she murmured.  

Pink-stained tears welled deeply in Petrouchka's eyes though Lilian's remained blankly pale and utterly remote.  The sight of them seemed finally to overcome the vampyre, to refract the unguarded effusion and she stepped back, her lost hands like white stars as they reached to close her collar against her throat, then fled the room.  William caught Susan's arm, retreating with her into the hallway.

"What's wrong with her?" she hissed, wide-eyed in the darkness.  He lifted his hands to his head and leant against the wall, grasped by the same obscure distress.

"This cannot be happening..."  He leant back on the panelling for a moment as though requiring support.  "Christabel... you didn't see this, and don't say anything to Frost... go and find Belyaev..."  She opened her mouth to object.  "Do you want to go in there and talk to her?" he whispered, gesturing to the kitchen.  The proposition dropped her hands from her hips and Susan set off quickly in pursuit of the less onerous task, leaving him to steel himself to face the other.  

Lilian stood before the refrigerator, its interior light blurring her outline and conspiring with her indifference to his presence.  He leant against the counter, waiting and watching her amid an almost pensive apprehension.  When she looked to him it was as though in laconic reply, a glance offered over her shoulder that contained neither surprise nor reproach.

"Laissez-moi." she said briefly.  He could not bring himself to do so and she looked at him again, and William granted her request rather than hear it repeated.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce
​

duotone B&W

I was standing on the steps halfway up to the top garden the other day when something large and dark swished by my head.  It was a Magpie, Cracticus tibicen, unrelated to the Old World Corvidae version you might be familiar with.

We don't often see them here.  They are denizens of open farmland and only occasionally vagrant to our adjoining township.  This one landed on the hillside next to us and stalked beneath the trees, looking for foundling chicks and treating R's attempt to photograph it with frosty contempt.

There is something deeply and inexplicably sinister about these birds, far more so than the crows and ravens I met in Australia.  They are accomplished mimics and soon master anyone afforded the dubious privilege of their adoptive company, bending them to their inscrutable avian will.  I have tremendous respect, if not too much affection for them.  

​Watching this one stride between the pools of shade beneath the trees was like spying on a shapeshifter satisfying its appetites in an alternate form.

The evening padded in on tender feet, as still as the boles of the trees lining the path like the distorted figures of a lavender opium dream, the feeble sun setting behind them.  The old woman marked Kala'amātya's figure as a tall blur against the darkening ground.  

“Why did you travel to Honshu?” she demanded unexpectedly.
“It lies furthest distant from the kingdoms beyond Persia.” he admitted.
“Tokogawa tells the bushi that you were sent to serve him by the gods.”
“Tokogawa may be shogun, but in Edo, I bow only to sword smiths and oiran.”

The woman scoffed, then continued her interrogation over the shoulder of her ward.  

“What great evil have you committed that you may not stay where you were made?”
“Many, countless evils.  But I shun my brother and his wife... she is lost, he wanders with her, and I can not abide it.” he said, unable to think of any reason to conceal the nature of his misfortune.  
“You abandon your brother?  Where is your loyalty?”

He shook his head.

“I no longer ask this of myself.  You speak of duty, and that is fear of sanction, and my elders in their wisdom ensured I could honour nothing of that nature.”

The crone murmured again at his apostasy.

"In asking nothing of yourself you will be answered in kind, and please them well who wish no more for you.  What a wretched thing you are... even the mountain would not take you, and I do not wonder at it."



Nightfall found them at the winged gates of a temple.  The low buildings beyond, of dark wood on a darker stone, lay deserted, their yard inundated by the rain, nodding stands of arrow bamboo hemming water in which their reflection was shattered by the horse's hooves.  Beneath their eaves the dormitory halls held a deep rubiginous hue, the colour thickening the gloom.  Lightning flashed against their backs, gleaming white along the polished walls as Kala'amātya followed them into shelter, his cold skin crawling in the still, charged air.  He guessed that flood and landslides had kept the temple’s order from returning to their home and the rendezvous they had contracted with the shogun.

Peering fruitlessly into the darkness, the old woman flinched at the clapping of iron-shod hooves against the floorboards; ignoring her complaints, Kala'amātya removed his kit and saddle from the personable equine’s back and directed the animal toward the corner furthest from the door, where it nodded to sleep on three hooves.  Heat from its damp flanks soon warmed the chamber and the matron quit her grumbling dissent, sitting with the girl, who had slumped against the wall beside the door.  He arranged his blades and naginata on the boards and began to unlace his armour.  

“I did not know who I brought to this place.” he confessed to the girl as she watched him.
“What does it matter now?” she murmured.
“Thus speaks the great favourite of a great man.” declared the matron.  “Nor did you think of right and wrong before you were undone.”
“Tokogawa required that I take this chair into Cataya and leave it at this temple.  This I have done.”  The matron made no reply, kneeling by the wall, her white hair fraying from the side of her chignon and falling, unheeded, before her milky eyes.  “It is my thought that he has charged you with further instruction, honourable mother.” Kala'amātya added.  She maintained her obmutescence and he looked around at the sound of the girl’s breathing, her smooth face creasing with the effort of concealing the unwelcome rhythm that had obviously begun some time before.  Wind slammed the unfastened door against its frame; the horse squealed, and the girl turned toward him when he knelt beside her. 

“You will leave now!” the old woman exclaimed on perceiving her condition.
“You are blind.” he reminded her.
“You are a demon!” she retorted, stiffening as she raised her voice above the wind.  The girl reached down through her robe, withdrawing a hand that brought with it the sharp, dusty smell of amniotic fluid, stained a deep tea-brown.  She looked up at him.
“I know you can bring children forth..." she gasped.  "You aided Umi, and Fumiko’s sister... this child does not fare well...”  Again he lay his hand against her body, the infant's distress beating through its mother's flesh, a desperate petition.
“It does not.” he conceded.


Despite the dire interdicts of his own people, long association had drawn him into intimate familiarity with feminine ordeals, compelling him to deliver the diverse issue of bandit girls and seige-bound chatelaines into their uncertain tenures.  The cascade of signs and processes and the timbre of the girl’s exhausted screams were by no means unfamiliar, though he rued their implications along with her aunt’s unrelenting pessimism.  The infant would not emerge though the girl had striven on her haunches until her brown eyes rolled into her head and her sweat-slick arms slid through his hands as she slumped back in agony and despair.  He eased her legs from beneath her through the thickening pool of blood into which she had collapsed, bundling her discarded robe under her head and draping her with his own.  Her stomach was tight and coldly slippery beneath his hands, devoid of movement; the matron shuffled closer on her knees, repeated the inquiring gesture and sat back.

“Better that they both should perish.  Misfortune will follow them always.” she assured him, her dry voice weighted with puissant finality.  "Leave her to her fate."  She pressed a narrow scroll on him; the cylinder was still faintly warm, drawn from somewhere in her robe, and inscribed with the shogun’s seal.  He set the missive aside and returned to the half-insensate girl.

"Suki, if you do not labour now, I must use my knife to bring it forth, and that fails more often than it succeeds.” he advised, kneeling by her shoulder and ensuring that she understood.  At her word he drew her back onto her haunches, taking her weight with both arms and legs as she set her back against him and closed her hands upon his wrists, her chaperone expressing in vehement terms the abdication of her familial commitments.



Thin, slip-textured silt welled between his fingers as he smoothed the surface of a small clay mound, kneeling in the mud alongside the temple gates.  Birds performed a stilted aubade from the cover of the ginko boughs, as though they were yet to be convinced of the morning’s worth.  Dawn pervaded the mist with the pallid ghosts of brighter colours and brought back rain to cloak the mountainside; it had soaked the torn silk of the little corpse’s shroud as it had lain beside the grave that he had fashioned for it.  Kala'amātya knew only one rite germane to the inhumation of a stillborn and spoke the words of the forgotten language slowly.  Summoning the impetus to return to the flooded courtyard, he stood waiting beneath the eaves while the water drained from his clothing and pooled around his feet.

The white silk mon of her grandsire’s house glowed against the black sleeve of the hitatare he had given the girl to wear.  She lay awake beneath the saddle cloth, the older woman still sleeping with her back to them.  

“I am happy she did not live.” she told him without looking up.  “A girl is never welcome.”

“My mother would have given her two sons twice over for a daughter.” he replied.  Kala'amātya sat against the wall beside her and brushed the yellow dust from his hands.  “I have read the scroll.  Tokogawa says that you are to be left in this place to serve the monks.  Your aunt was to have returned to Honshu with your bearers, but it seems that she is destined to remain here with you.  Your grandfather has abdicated in favour of your uncle... Hidetada has decreed that no foreigner may enter Honshu, so I am no more welcome than you.”  Though she did not reply, the slow, pained sound of her breathing underscored sentiments born in loss, and prospects as colourless and unremitting as the day outside.  

“You are the cause of this.” she murmured.  "You are salted ground... a desolator, and I was warned of you."

He gazed at her unheeding form without replying, then left her side to take up his belongings before returning to the girl once more, sliding the odachi from his shoulders and laying them on the boards beside her.  If her gaze perceived the curving weapons, their scabbards lavished with glowing, semiprecious colour in the cloisson feathers of fighting birds, hilts bound with dark shagreen, they did not move her.

“Stay here until you are well.” he told her, bending low so that his advice could remain confidential.  “But do not live your life in this place.  Go south, to court... the odachi will make a dowery, should you wish to find a husband, or go to the north, buy slaves and horses, and a good bow.”  She withdrew beneath the striped cover, tears sliding over her pale face.

"Do not counsel me, yōkai." Suki replied, wiping at her eyes beneath the blanket.  

The rain slowed as he rode out under the temple gates alone, starting along the narrow trail that led toward the dark heart of the mountains.
                                     ​

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
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