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  Spinning Silk

  T. Cook

  Copyright © 2018 by T. Cook

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  1

  We ran barefoot over the narrow strand of elevated soil between the green fields of the mature rice crop—nostrils pulling the smell of sun-ripened earth, water-laden air beating our faces, the chime of cicadas in our ears, and the thrill of escape in our blood. Yoshi stopped as he approached a bend in the road and crouched low, hands upon his knees, for breath, yes, but also for screening behind the rice crop. I folded to a cautious knee beside him.

  A little distance beyond us at the crossroads marched a procession. Sturdy men heaved a train of red lacquered palanquin carriers draped in gold brocade. Catching the light of the sinking sun, the silk shone like the aura of an immortal. (I didn’t yet know the difference, and would have accepted a mystical explanation of them.)

  But Yoshi pointed his finger to a white banner emblazoned with a green sheaf of rice grain and I recognized the seal. Only royalty. And yet, the sight of them was profound to my untrained eye.

  I counted the palanquins, seven in all, some borne by four, some by eight sturdy men. Soldiers went before and behind, and a serving woman followed alongside. They traveled in a perfect line, which snaked across the narrow and rutted country road in a hypnotically fluid unity.

  “Where are they going?”

  “To Whitegrain ancestral land for the Tanabata Festival.”

  I knew only enough of this festival to be sure its revelry had nothing to do with me, and I nudged Yoshi. “Tell me the story.”

  Yoshi glanced away shyly, his browned skin reddening with even the thought of a legendary beauty, but he cleared his throat to speak.

  “Orihime was a beautiful weaver so masterful, her fabric delighted even the gods. So the deities transformed her into a dove to bring her up to the heavens. But one morning, a flute song called Orihime back to the earth. The player was Hikoboshi, a lonely cowherd. They fell in love and would have run away together, but the gods coveted Orihime’s fabric and wouldn’t let her.”

  Yoshi lowered his voice to a whisper and I bent my head nearer to hear him. “The lore says the two have risen to the skies as the stars Vega and Altair. They meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. And when the gods send rain to the Milky Way to prevent their union, Orihime rides over the floodwaters on the backs of magpies.”

  “Orihime,” I repeated, sympathies pricked. “So much work.”

  At that moment, one of the palanquin bearers lost his footing, stumbled, and broke his fall on one sturdy knee. A bare hand threw back the palanquin’s draping and gestured sharply. A soldier then stalked forward and struck the already felled bearer’s back with the shaft of his spear.

  Yoshi drew a slow breath. “Pretty, aren’t they? Even in their cruelty.”

  I hushed him, but made no argument. The Whitegrain Shogunate was equal parts beauty and severity, and I didn’t know which awed me more.

  Then I glanced up at the rising moon and remembered my own peril. “I’ve got to go back,” I said and pivoted toward the house, but Yoshi caught the sleeve of my robe.

  “Make a wish, Furi. It’s Tanabata custom.”

  “I can’t.” Among peasants, expressing wishes was never encouraged, and I strangled mine before they could ever be fully formed.

  Yoshi frowned. “Let me, then.” He paused and met my stare with his grave black eyes, as if there were some moment to a wish’s superstition. “Someday you’ll wear the silk you reel from the silkworm cocoons.”

  The idea was so outrageous, I might have laughed in his face, but also seditious, and too dangerous, even for a smile. “What a lie!”

  “It’s my wish,” he insisted.

  My face burned. “Then you wish me arrested and executed,” I said, and flung off his arm.

  Yoshi stared at me for a long moment, as if making up his mind whether to speak. At last, he took a breath. “I know something.”

  My brother liked a game, but he didn’t seem to be teasing. He led me away from the road and into a field. We crouched low, soiling our bare feet in the soft mud, our bodies swallowed whole by the rice plant’s long green blades.

  From beneath his robe, Yoshi pulled a piece of dazzling red fabric and unfolded it before my wide-eyed stare. In my ear, he whispered a strange story. His warm breath tickled even as his words stunned.

  He told me I was an abandoned child, nameless and without family, but not without legacy. Mother Ishiyama had sold my infant swaddles for a considerable price—all but this one, which he had taken from his mother’s chest, and displayed to me for evidence of his tale.

  The fabric glowed like fire itself. The weave was delicate, and I could draw the piece easily through a ring no wider than my little finger. I had never seen anything so fine, and shouldn’t have seen it then. So I hid it with breathless urgency—not inside my apron pocket, but under my clothes against my bare skin. Peasant farmers might lawfully cultivate the worms and sell the silk, but wearing it was the exclusive right of the ranking nobility.

  Before this day, I had no reason to wonder to whom I belonged—no notion of how the mysteries of my identity would impact the strange and sorrowful events of my life. I had hardly enough awareness to wonder it even then. But soon the truth would force itself upon me with the violence of an assault.

  * * *

  Mother met us returning to the farm together, the evening shadows darkening the already hard-set angles of her face. Yoshi’s hand tightened around mine. I knew Mother looked askance at Yoshi’s spending time with me. My brother’s attention always seemed natural, but everything changed if we were truly unrelated, as he had so lately tried to make me understand. Suddenly, I knew how his mother saw her son’s affection for me, and why she dealt with me as she did.

  “Go inside, Yoshi. Furi! Come with me.” Mother Ishiyama grabbed me roughly by one braid. Yoshi stood mute, but his eyes plead for me, and I couldn’t hold his silence against him.

  She pushed me ahead of her toward the out building where we separated the worms from their silken cocoons. She opened the door, lit a lamp and then gestured to the large cedar barrel overlaid with a piece of damp canvas.

  “You will stay in here, and never come out until you’ve finished it all.” Then she slammed the door behind her.

  The thunk of the bolt closing in the lock jolted me to focus. Did she mean to keep me here day and night until I had reeled all of the cocoons’ silk? Though I often reeled the silk, many hours at a stretch, confinement through the night was a new punishment.

  I pulled back the canvas draping, peeked inside, and caught my breath. It brimmed with cocoons, concealing their young drowned victims within. A large cocoon might contain as much as four hundred jou of raw silk. The complete reeling of this much silk fiber would consume the better part of three days and nights for an experienced worker.

  But Mother expected more from me. I could work fast and she knew it. As proof of her confidence, she had left me enough oil in the lamp to last me the length of one short night. If I didn’t finish, she would be displeased, and perhaps keep me here in the dark for another day.

  I reached into my apron pocket for a soft bristled brush and dragged it gently along the exterior of a cocoon until I found the loose end of the strand. Finding it,
I pulled until I could wind the end around the four-pronged reel.

  Reeling raw silk is a tedious process, but I excelled at it. I was sensitive to the fibers’ strength and knew exactly how much pressure they could bear, and my fingers were far more dexterous than was common. I could manage the spinning of the reel, the guiding of the threads, even the drawing of my breath in one patient rhythm.

  Minute by minute, hour after hour, the night passed in one swift, unbroken motion—reel rotating recklessly, without a second’s fraction wasted. I focused my energy, settled into my rhythm, and by dawn, I knew I would finish ahead of even my mother’s early rising.

  And so Mother Ishiyama found me seated, posture erect, blinking into the stream of morning light flooding past her when she wrestled open the broad shed door. Ten full reels stood proudly beside me. But I wasn’t smug; I wasn’t even really awake, still caught in the trance of motion that had carried me through the night.

  Mother Ishiyama was surprised, though she covered it quickly. She might even have been pleased, but she covered that entirely. Instead, she took me by the arm and dragged me out of the shed to the washing basin at the well behind the house.

  “Clean yourself up. It’s a disgrace for anyone to see you in this shape. I couldn’t get a sick ox in exchange for you.”

  I stood mute beside the well, head down puzzling out what she had meant by ‘anyone’.

  At last I realized: Mother was thinking of me as though I were a pig at market. And ‘anyone’ was about to arrive with a string and a collar.

  2

  Even above the ambient murmur of the feasting silkworms, I heard every word of their negotiation from my place in the loft. Mother Ishiyama had welcomed a woman she called Madame Ozawa to the farm from a village not a day’s journey away. Yunmai Prefecture, where we lived, was a destination for most millers at least once a year, and Madame Ozawa made the journey here regularly to buy silk for her small, but reputable mill. This explained her journey to Yunmai, but it didn’t altogether explain her personal visit to the Ishiyama farm.

  “She is not mine, you understand. Nor is she any relation.” Mother’s voice spoke coolly of me.

  “Well, how did you come to take her?”

  “It is rather a mystery. I awakened one morning nearly ten years ago, to the cry of the babe abandoned at our door.”

  “Is that so? One hears of such abandonments, but…”

  “One does not hear of this kind. She was not bundled in a regular woolen blanket, but silks fit for an empress!”

  “What? You do not think her…?”

  I fingered the piece of red silk Yoshi had lifted from Mother Ishiyama’s chest.

  “No indeed. Not without any family to accept and rear her!”

  “Yes, of course not,” Madame agreed. “So, you’ve been taking care of her ever since without support from the family?”

  “Not a cent!”

  “What a burden!”

  “Indeed she has been. I’ve had only a few useful years labor from her. However, she is quite useful now, and I would not let her go after all of the work I’ve put into her, except…” Mother lowered her voice, but I heard what she said. She said I was trying to allure her only son, which was a lie! Mother resumed her normal speaking voice. “You will have to keep a close eye on her, of course, but she can be taught.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “She responds to a good whipping. And don’t let her thin frame fool you; she was made for work. Anything you give her—she can take it all and more. On my honor, she has never failed to complete even the most exacting task,” Mother said, “provided she is well supervised with lock and key, of course.”

  “I have just the instrument for her.”

  “Then can we agree on the price?”

  * * *

  Madame Ozawa paid almost nothing for me in terms of the going rate for an Otoppon born servant. Mother sold me for three quarters the price of a foreign child slave. (I didn’t know this at the time, but a slave never forgets her selling price, and no matter how closely she guards it, the number always seems to leak out to be used against her.) And thus my adoptive mother sealed my fate for the lowest ranking position in the Ozawa house for many years to come.

  3

  My service in the Ozawa mill was a conundrum, at once demeaning and empowering. I would be forever scarred by the shame with which Madame lorded over me all my years there. And yet, I would forever exult in the wings of flight with which she unknowingly furnished me. She couldn’t help herself from teaching me to weave after discovering my skill with every other task of work she gave me. And once having learned the art, I was never the same. But every attempt to liberate the creativity inside of me came with a price.

  * * *

  Most of Madame’s guests had departed for the night, but a stubborn few loitered beneath the naked branches of the winter garden, half drunken, but still gracefully silhouetted by the glowing stone lanterns illuminating the combed gravel walks.

  Cook yawned wide. “You will have to finish cleaning up without me. I’m going to bed.”

  I blinked at the kitchen, cluttered with towers of porcelain bowls, pots, and fragments of food among the scattered abalone shells. Leftovers from Madame’s feast. “But there is so much work left!”

  “You can manage it. Crush the shells out in the compost heap tomorrow morning, but you had better take them out to the garden right away or they’ll draw bugs. I go.”

  Cook disappeared to our sleeping quarters, leaving me staring at an empty abalone shell and its watery iridescence under the low lamplight. Pretty, even in the cluttered kitchen. I smiled as an idea took root. At once, the workday’s fatigue evaporated.

  I piled shell after shell into my cotton apron and heaved them down the veranda steps and along the gravel path back to the garden spring. Kneeling beside the pool’s edge of bare earth, I dug my fingers deep into the soft black clay. It would do nicely. I found a mochi mallet from within the garden shed and brought it down with a mean crack on the shells, and then raced to the kitchen for another load.

  When I had finished breaking the shells up into fragments, I separated them by light and dark, stared at them, and sorted them again by color and intensity, leaving myself five piles of mother-of-pearl tiles organized by light and color. While I worked, a vision emerged in my mind’s eye, sufficient in clarity to propel my fingers to expert speed and precision.

  Within the hour, I had begun working out a seascape mosaic along the pool’s border of earth. By moonlight, the iridescent tiles gleamed white against the black earth, wreathing the pool in soft light. I worked deep into the night, and smiled at the glowing design with the lunar reflection’s ethereal effect. I shivered, not with cold, but the thrill of a vision born inside my head. It tickled me with its foolishness, if not outright madness. I hadn’t the heart to shut it out. Nor could I quite silence the tendrils of a strange but warm southern current whispering:

  The gods will descend from their heavens to bathe in your garden pool!

  I lingered in the pale layers of mirrored light and before realizing it, fell asleep.

  The dreams I dreamed in those early morning hours by the side of my moon glowing mosaic! I would never confess them, but held them precious. They must be, or I would never have risked them.

  * * *

  Madame’s daughter clucked her tongue as she stood over me where I crouched in the kitchen, drying the last of the porcelain from the prior night’s dinner.

  “Furi. Go to mother in her parlor.” She paused, the smug pleasure in her voice evident. “I think you know the reason.”

  Madame’s summons came without surprise. I knew she would notice the mosaic. Madame didn’t need much provocation to punish me. My posture, the length of my neck, even the straightness of my gate irritated her. Any sign of dignity was an insult to her conviction of my inferiority, and she hated the sight of me.

  “I’ve been waiting.” Madame’s warm breath blew a frosty clo
ud into the morning air as she knelt beside the table.

  I knelt and bowed my forehead to the floor. “I am sorry, Madame. It was rude of me to let you wait.”

  As penance, she let me wait for a long moment with my head upon the tatami floor before she finally spoke. “What have you done?”

  I knew, or at least guessed, but it was never a good strategy to appear savvy. “I have so many faults. I haven’t guessed for which you have called me this morning.”

  I kept my forehead planted steadfastly upon the floor, but I could feel her cold eyes twitch in irritation.

  “It was your mess I saw at the garden pond.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “You stole the shells. You will pay the price. And you will clean them all up before guests arrive this afternoon. Now stand…and disrobe.”

  I stood, untied my robe, and let it drop. As my clothing pillowed lightly around my ankles, my skin prickled against the assault of the winter air, but this was not a novel sensation. Madame’s lashings were routine enough—at least, they had been common enough this winter, and I stoically bared the fresh scars from my last instance of disobedience.

  Madame’s lip curled in disgust at my injured skin. “You are such a disgrace,” she muttered as she raised the switch.

  * * *

  It was unusual for a merchant woman to possess grounds on the scale of Madame’s garden, but the Ozawa mill was many generations old, and more prosperous than most, though the garden’s glory had faded in my time.

  The walls of Madame’s property stretched many jou around the house and mill. The rich black earth nourished up aged and stately plum, persimmon, and maple trees. Fine conifers grew about the spring, though they had long outgrown the sculpting of a master. And most of the further growth crowded in a tangle of unruly wood and branch to the edge of the property. Still, I thought the grounds pretty and ample to the inspiration of a poet.