Read Online Thousand Shrine Warrior by Jessica Amanda Salmonson - Free Book Online

then gave the big boy some rice balls and told him to stay in the kitchen to eat them.
    The bikuni had left her sandals by the door. She had removed her hat and carried it under her right arm; in the right hand she carried her sheathed longsword, for it was rude to wear any but the short one inside a house. The young woman failed to indicate a place to leave hat and sword. In fact, she had not as yet made any kind of formal greeting or introduction. Rather, once the slow-witted youth was settled down, the young woman indicated by posture that the bikuni should follow her toward another room. The bikuni did so, taking hat and sword along.
    Only their toe-socks were between soles of the feet and the cold, hardwood hallway. The two women passed several doors. Then the younger knelt before a certain door and asked permission to enter. No one answered, but she slid the door open, then bowed to one side of it, allowing the bikuni to enter first, stepping foot on the soft tatami matting of the room.
    Inside, an old man lay on his deathbed, a thin futon mattress beneath him, another on top of him. To one side of the bed there were three family members with mournful expressions. Nearest the head of the dying man’s bed was a man perhaps twenty years younger, but still elderly. Beside him, there was a woman as ancient-looking as the man who was dying, undoubtedly the reposing man’s wife. Near the foot of the bed was a young man wearing a peasant’s field jacket, and this was most unexpected, except that the bikuni recalled that the young woman had been attacked by samurai who had learned of her involvement with a peasant youth. His mere presence in the samurai house was a punishable crime. Yet it appeared as though the family accepted him, however fugitively, as their son, inviting him even to the deathbed of the family patriarch.
    It was clear, too, that it was a small family on the verge of extinction. There were no young sons present. If the foolish fellow in the kitchen was the family heir, then essentially there was no family heir. The aging father appeared to be a widower, for he had no wife nearby. The entire clan might well be embodied by two grandparents (one of them dying), a father, a slow-witted son, a daughter, and an unofficial son-in-law whose blood would not allow the family name to be carried on. No peasant could be adopted into samurai lineage except by the most unusual of circumstances. The family had a cowed look because of all this, as though only recently aware of the extent of personal, and clan, mortality.
    The bikuni had an uneasy feeling, for she began to suspect why they had brought her here in quiet. When the grandmother, father, and peasant youth saw the bikuni enter, they bowed with faces to the floor, although they did not owe a bikuni such obeisance. When the old, old woman’s face looked up at last, her eyes were wet and shiny, and her creased expression was one of gratitude, but the bikuni had done nothing to merit such a look.
    The man at the head of the patriarch’s deathbed, soon to be the family’s patriarch himself, was immeasurably sad as well. He looked as though the weight of the world were upon his shoulders. He said to the bikuni,
    â€œI am Kahei Todawa, a low-ranking samurai in the service of Lord Ikida Sato, presently under house arrest for misspeaking myself as regards the Lotus Sutra. It is the measure of Lord Sato’s goodness that I was not executed. Please forgive the shyness of our invitation. It is not really that we are ashamed to invite you here. We had very little time to prepare, having only seen you pass the other way a short time ago, and realizing you would be turned away and would pass our house on your return.”
    â€œPlease don’t feel embarrassed for my sake,” said the bikuni, settling on her knees near the foot of the deathbed, setting her sword and bamboo hat at her side. “I am aware that Lord Sato has decreed only the holy