Jiritsu slides out a dogwood scroll-tube from his inner clothing. ‘Some few men of power in Nagasaki, Enomoto does not own. Magistrate Shiroyama may yet prove a man of conscience… and abbots of rival Orders shall be eager to know the worst, and this…’ he frowns at the scroll-tube ‘… is worse than the worst.’

‘Then Acolyte-sama intends,’ Otane asks, ‘to go to Nagasaki?’

‘East.’ The aged young man struggles to locate her. ‘Kinten shall follow.’

‘To persuade Acoltye-sama,’ she hopes, ‘to come back to the Shrine?’

Jiritsu shakes his head. ‘The Paths are clear about those who… turn away.’

Otane glances at her unlit butsudan alcove. ‘Hide here.’

Acolyte Jiritsu looks through his hand at the fire. ‘Stumbling in the snow, I thought, Otane of Kurozane will shelter me…’

‘This old woman is glad…’ rats scrat in the thatch ‘… glad you thought so.’

‘… for one night. But if I stay here two, Kinten shall kill us both.’

He says this without drama, as one stating a simple fact.

Fire consumes wood, thinks Otane, and time consumes us.

‘Father called me “boy”,’ he says. ‘The tanner called me “dog”. Master Genmu named his new acolyte “Jiritsu”. What is my name now?’

‘Do you have any memory,’ she asks, ‘of how your mother named you?’

‘At the slaughterhouse, I’d dream of a… motherly woman who named me Mohei.’

‘That was surely her.’ Otane mixes tea with the powders. ‘Drink.’

‘When Lord Enma asks my name,’ the fugitive receives the cup, ‘for the Register of Hell, that’s what I shall tell him, “Mohei the Apostate”.’

Otane’s dreams are of scaly wings, roaring blindness and distant knocks. She wakes in her bed of straw and feathers stitched between sheets of hemp. Her exposed cheeks and nose are pinched by the cold. By cracks of snow-blue daylight, she sees Mohei, lying curled by the dying fire, and remembers everything. She watches him for a while, uncertain whether he is sleeping or awake. The cat emerges from the shawl and pads over to Otane, who sifts their conversation for delirium, delusion, clues and truth. Why he ran away, she understands, is what threatens Miss Aibagawa…

It is written in that dogwood scroll. It is still in his hand.

… and perhaps, Otane thinks, he is Maria-sama’s answer to my prayers.

He could be persuaded to stay a few days until the hunters give up.

There’s room to hide in the under-roof, she thinks, if anyone comes…

She sighs out a plume of white in the cold air. The cat puffs littler clouds.

‘Praise Deusu in Heaven,’ she recites soundlessly, ‘for this new day.’

Pale clouds uncoil, too, from the wet nose of the dreaming dog.

But wrapped in the warm foreign shawl, Mohei is stiller than still.

Otane realises he is not breathing.

XV The House of Sisters, Mount Shiranui Shrine

Sunrise on the Twenty-third Morning of the Tenth Month

The three bronze booms of the Bell of the First Cause reverberate over roofs, dislodge pigeons, chase echoes around the Cloisters, sluice under the door of the Newest Sister’s cell and find Orito, who keeps her eyes shut and begs, Let me imagine I am elsewhere for a moment longer… but the smells of sour tatami, greasy candles and stale smoke deny her any illusion of release. She hears the tap, tap, tap of the women’s tobacco pipes.

During the night, fleas or lice feasted on her neck, breast and midriff.

In Nagasaki, she thinks, just two days east, the maples will still be red…

The manju flowers pink and white, and the sanma saury fat and in season.

A two-day journey, she thinks, which may as well be twenty years…

Sister Kagerô walks past the cell. Her voice stabs, ‘Cold! Cold! Cold!’

Orito opens her eyes and surveys the ceiling of her five-mat room.

She wonders which rafter the last Newest Sister used to hang herself.

The fire is dead, and the twice-filtered light has a new bluish whiteness.

First snow, Orito thinks. The gorge down to Kurozane may be impassable.

With her thumbnail, Orito makes a tiny nick in the wood skirting the wall.

The House may own me, she thinks, but it shan’t own Time.

She counts the notches: one day, two days, three days…

… forty-seven days, forty-eight days, forty-nine days…

This morning, she calculates, is the fiftieth since her abduction.

‘You’ll still be here,’ Fat Rat mocks, ‘after ten thousand notches.’

Its eyes are black pearls and it vanishes in a furry blur.

If there was a rat, Orito tells herself, it didn’t speak because rats don’t.

She hears her mother humming in the passageway, as on most mornings.

She smells her servant Ayame’s toasted onigiri rice-balls rolled in sesame.

‘Ayame isn’t here either,’ Orito says. ‘Stepmother dismissed her.’

These ‘slippages’ of time and senses, she is sure, are caused by the medicine Master Suzaku concocts for each Sister before supper. Hers the Master calls ‘Solace’. She knows the pleasure it brings is harmful and addictive, but unless she drinks it she shan’t be fed, and what hope has a starving woman of escaping from a mountain shrine in the middle of winter? Better to eat.

Harder to tolerate are thoughts of her stepmother and stepbrother waking up in the Aibagawa Residence in Nagasaki. Orito wonders what of hers and her father’s belongings remain, and what has been sold off: the telescopes, their apparatus, books and medicines; Mother’s kimonos and jewellery… It is all her stepmother’s property now, to sell to the highest bidder.

Just like she sold me, thinks Orito, feeling anger in her stomach…

… until she hears Yayoi, next door: vomiting; groaning; and vomiting again.

Orito struggles out of bed and puts on her padded over-kimono.

She ties her headscarf over her burn and hurries into the passageway.

I am no longer daughter, she thinks, but I am still a midwife…

… Where was I going? Orito stands in the musty corridor partitioned from the Cloisters by the rows of sliding wooden screens. Daylight enters through a lattice carved along the top. She shivers and she sees her breath, knowing she was going somewhere, but where? Forgetfulness is another trick of Suzaku’s Solace. She looks around for clues. The night lamp at the corner by the privy is extinguished. Orito places her palm on the wooden screen, stained dark by countless winters. She pushes, and the screen yields a stubborn inch. Through the gap she sees icicles, hanging from the Cloister’s eaves.

An old pine’s branches sag under snow; snow encrusts the seated stones.

A film of ice covers Square Pond. Bare Peak is streaked by veins of snow.

Sister Kiritsubo emerges from behind the pine’s trunk, walking along the Cloisters opposite, trailing her withered arm’s fused fingers along the wooden screen. She circumnavigates the courtyard one hundred and eight times. Upon reaching the gap, she says, ‘Sister is up early this morning.’

Orito has nothing to say to Sister Kiritsubo.

Third Sister Umegae approaches up the inner corridor. ‘This is just the beginning of the Kyôga winter, Newest Sister.’ In the snow-light, Umegae’s dappled stains are berry-purple. ‘A Gift in your womb is like a warm stone in your pocket.’

Orito knows Umegae says this to frighten her. It works.

The stolen midwife hears the noise of vomiting and remembers, Yayoi…

The sixteen-year-old woman bends over a wooden bucket. Gastric fluid dangles from her lips and a slop of fresh vomit is pumped out. Orito breaks the ice on the water-bowl with a ladle and carries it to her. Yayoi, glassy-eyed, nods at her visitor to say, The worst is over. Orito wipes Yayoi’s mouth with a square of paper and gives her a cup of the numbingly cold water. ‘Most of it,’ Yayoi hides her fox’s ears with her headband, ‘went into the bucket this morning, at least.’