The Harsh Cry of the Heron by Lian Hearn Page A

she
had fallen into the swollen stream and been trapped on the slippery rocks, and
Tomasu had heard her from the fields and come running to pull her out, scolding
her and comforting her.
    But Tomasu had not
heard her this time; nor had her father, already dead; no one had heard her and
no one had ever come to her aid again.
    Many children, not
only among the Hidden, suffered in a similar way when Iida Sadamu ruled in his
black-walled castle at Inuyama; nor did the situation change after Inuyama fell
to Arai. Some lived to grow up, and Madaren was one of them, one of the large
number of young women who serviced the needs of the warrior class, becoming
maids, kitchen servants or women of the pleasure houses. They had no families
and therefore no protection; Madaren worked for the woman who bought her, the
lowest of the servants, the one who rose first in the morning before even the
roosters were awake and could not lie down to sleep until the last customers
had gone home. She thought exhaustion and hunger had dulled her to everything
around her, but when she became a woman and became briefly desirable in the way
young girls usually do, she realized she had been learning all the time from
the older girls, observing them and listening to them, and had become wise
without knowing it in their favourite - indeed their only - subject: the men
who visited them.
    The pleasure house
was possibly the meanest in Inuyama, set far from the castle in one of the
narrow streets that ran between the main avenues, where tiny houses rebuilt
after the fire clustered together like a wasp’s nest, each clinging onto the
next. But all men have their desires, even porters, labourers and night soil
collectors, and among these are as many who can be made fools for love as in
any other class. So Madaren learned; at the same time she learned that women
who are ruled by love are the least powerful beings in the city, more dominated
even than dogs, as easily discarded as unwanted kittens, and she used this
knowledge shrewdly. She went with men that the other girls shunned, and took
advantage of their gratitude. She extracted gifts from them, or some- times
stole, and finally allowed a failing merchant to take her with him to Hofu,
leaving the house in the early morning before dawn and meeting him at the misty
dock-side. They boarded a ship carrying cedar wood from the forests of the
East, and the smell reminded her of Mino, her birthplace, and she suddenly
recalled her family and the strange half-wild boy who had been her brother, who
infuriated and enchanted their mother. Tears filled her eyes as she crouched
beneath the lumber planks, and when her lover turned to embrace her she pushed
him away. He was easily cowed, and no more successful in Hofu than he had been
in Inuyama. He bored and infuriated her, and eventually she went back to her
early life, joining a pleasure house a little higher in class than her first
one.
    Then the foreigners
came with their beards, their strange smell and their large frames - and other
parts. Madaren saw some power in them that might be exploited and volunteered
to sleep with them; she chose the one called Don Joao, though he always thought
he had chosen her: the foreigners were both sentimental and ashamed when it
came to matters of the body’s needs: they wanted to feel special to one woman,
even when they bought her. They paid well in silver; Madaren was able to
explain to the owner of the house that Don Joao wanted her only, and soon she
did not have to sleep with anyone else.
    At first their only
language was that of the body: his lust, her ability to satisfy it. The
foreigners had an interpreter, a fisherman who had been plucked out of the
water by one of their kind after a shipwreck and taken back to their base in
the Southern Islands, for they themselves came from a land far away in the
west: you could sail for a year with the wind behind you and still not reach
it. The fisherman had learned their language: he