The Prayer Room falls silent. The sutra is over.

Don’t let it be me. The waiting is unendurable. Don’t let it be me.

Abbess Izu strikes her tubular gong. The chime rises and falls in waves.

The Sisters press their head against the tatami mat in obeisance.

Like criminals, Orito thinks, waiting for the executioner’s sword.

The Abbess’s ceremonial clothes rustle. ‘Sisters of Mount Shiranui…’

The nine women all keep their foreheads on the floor.

‘The Goddess has instructed Master Genmu that, in the Eleventh Month -’

A fallen icicle shatters on the Cloister walkway and Orito jumps.

‘- in the Eleventh Month of the Eleventh Year of the Kansei Era -’

This is not where I belong, Orito thinks. This is not where I belong.

‘- the two Sisters to be Engifted in her name are Kagerô and Hashihime.’

Orito smothers a groan of relief but cannot quieten her pounding heart.

Won’t you thank me, the Goddess asks Orito, for sparing you this month?

I can’t hear you. Orito is careful to keep her mouth closed. Lump of wood.

Next month, the Goddess laughs like Orito’s stepmother, I promise.

Engiftment Days usher holiday mood into the House of Sisters. Within minutes, Kagerô and Hashihime are being congratulated in the Long Room. Orito is dumbfounded at the sincerity of the other women’s envy. Talk turns to the clothes, scents and oils the Goddess’s choices shall wear to welcome their Engifters. Rice-dumplings and azuki beans sweetened with honey arrive for breakfast; sake and tobacco are sent from Abbot Enomoto’s storehouse. Kagerô’s and Hashihime’s cells are decorated with paper ornaments. Orito feels nauseous at this celebration of obligatory impregnation and is grateful when the sun shows its face and Abbess Izu has her and Sawarabi collect, air and beat the House’s bedding. The straw-filled mattresses are folded over a pole in the Courtyard and, in rapid turns, struck with a bamboo beater: a faint fog of dust and mites hangs in the cold bright air. Sawarabi is a sturdy daughter of peasants from the Kirishima plateau but the doctor’s daughter soon lags behind. Sawarabi notices, and is kind enough to suggest that they have a short rest, and sits on a pile of futons. ‘I hope you aren’t too disappointed that the Goddess overlooked you this month, Newest Sister.’

Orito, still catching her breath, shakes her head.

Across the Cloisters, Asagao and Hotaru are feeding crumbs to a squirrel.

Sawarabi reads others well. ‘Don’t be afraid of Engiftment. You can see for yourself the privileges Yayoi and Yûguri are enjoying: more food, better bedding, charcoal… and now the services of a learned midwife! What princess would be so pampered? The monks are kinder than husbands, much cleaner than brothel customers, and there are no Mothers-in-Law cursing your stupidity for giving birth to daughters but turning into Jealousy Incarnate when you produce a male heir.’

Orito pretends to agree. ‘Yes, Sister. I see that.’

Thawed snow falls from the old pine with a flat thud.

Stop lying, Fat Rat watches from under the Cloisters, and stop fighting.

‘Really, Sister,’ Sawarabi hesitates, ‘compared to what blemished girls suffer…’

The Goddess, Fat Rat stands on its hind legs, is your gentle, patient mother.

‘… down there,’ Sawarabi says, ‘in the World Below, this place is a palace.’

Asagao and Hotaru’s squirrel darts up a Cloister pillar.

Bare Peak is so sharp it might be etched on to glass with a needle.

My burn, Orito cannot add, doesn’t diminish the crime of my abduction.

‘Let’s finish the futons,’ she says, ‘before the others think we’re idling.’

The chores are done by mid-afternoon. A triangle of sunshine still lies over the pool in the Courtyard. In Long Room, Orito helps Housekeeper Satsuki repair nightgowns: needlework, she finds, numbs her longing for Solace. From the Training Ground across the Precincts ebbs the sound of the monks practising with bamboo swords. Charcoal and pine-needles rumble and snap in the brazier. Abbess Izu is seated at the head of the table, stitching a short mantra into one of the hoods worn by the Sisters at their Engiftment. Hashihime and Kagerô, wearing blood-red sashes as a mark of the Goddess’s favour, are applying each other’s face-powder; one of the few objects denied even to the highest-ranked Sisters is a mirror. With ill-concealed malevolence, it is Umegae’s turn to ask Orito whether she has recovered from her disappointment.

‘I am learning,’ Orito manages to say, ‘to submit to the Goddess’s will.’

‘Surely the Goddess,’ Kagerô assures Orito, ‘shall choose you next time.’

‘The Newest Sister,’ observes Blind Minori, ‘sounds happier in her new life.’

‘It certainly took her long enough,’ mutters Umegae, ‘to come to her senses.’

‘Getting used to the House,’ counters Kiritsubo, ‘can take time: remember that poor girl from Goto Island? She sobbed every night for two years.’

Pigeons scuffle and trill in the eaves of the Cloisters.

‘The Sister from Goto found joy in her three healthy Gifts,’ states Abbess Izu.

‘But no joy,’ sighs Umegae, ‘from the fourth one, which killed her.’

‘Let us not disturb the dead,’ the Abbess’s voice is sharp, ‘by digging up misfortunes without reason, Sister.’

Umegae’s maroon skin hides blushes, but she bows in consent and apology.

Other Sisters, Orito suspects, remember her predecessor hanging in her cell.

‘Well,’ says Blind Minori, ‘I, for one, would prefer to ask the Newest Sister what it was that helped her accept the House as her home.’

‘Time,’ Orito threads a needle, ‘and the patience of my Sisters.’

You’re lying, you’re lying, wheezes the kettle, even I hear you’re lying…

The sharper her need for Solace, Orito notices, the worse the House’s tricks.

‘I thank the Goddess every single day,’ Sister Hatsune is restringing her koto, ‘for bringing me to the House.’

‘I thank the Goddess,’ Kagerô is working on Hashihime’s eyebrows, ‘one hundred and eight times before breakfast.’

Abbess Izu says, ‘Sister Orito, the kettle sounds thirsty to me…’

When Orito kneels on the stone slab by the pool to dip the ladle into the ice-cold water, the slanted light creates, just for a moment, a mirror as perfect as a Dutch glass. Orito has not seen her face since she fled her old house in Nagasaki; what she sees shocks her. The face on the pool’s silvered skin is hers, but three or four years older. What about my eyes? They are dull and in retreat. Another trick of the House. She is not so sure. I saw eyes like those in the World Below.

The song of a thrush in the old pine sounds scattered and half forgotten.

What was it, Orito is sinking, I was trying to remember?

Sisters Hotaru and Asagao greet her from the Cloisters.

Orito waves back, notices the ladle still in her hand and remembers her errand. She looks into the water and recognises the eyes of a prostitute she treated in Nagasaki at a bordello owned by a pair of half-Chinese brothers. The girl had syphilis, scrofula, lung-fever and the Nine Sages alone knew what else, but what had destroyed her spirit was enslavement to opium.

‘But Aibagawa-san,’ the girl had implored, ‘I don’t need any other medicine…’

Pretending to accept the Contract of the House, Orito thinks…

The prostitute’s once-beautiful eyes stared out of dark pits.

… is halfway to accepting the Contract of the House.

Orito hears Master Suzaku’s carefree laughter at the gate.

Wanting and needing the drugs take you the rest of the way…