Thomas Harris - Hannibal Rising

The mastiff saw him and thumped her tail twice without getting up.

From the bathhouse came the sound of a Japanese lute. Hannibal went to the music. A dusty window glowed with candlelight from within. Hannibal looked in. Chiyoh sat beside the bath plucking the strings of a long and elegant koto. She had lit the candles this time. The water heater chuckled. The fire beneath it crackled and the sparks flew upward. Lady Murasaki was in the water. In the water was Lady Murasaki, like the water flowers on the moat where the swans swam and did not sing.

Hannibal watched, silent as the swans, and spread his arms like wings.

He backed from the window and returned through the gloaming to his room, a curious heaviness on him, and found his bed again.

Enough coals remain in the master bedroom to glow on the ceiling. Count Lecter, in the semi-darkness, quickens to Lady Murasaki's touch and to her voice.

"Missing you, I felt as I did when you were in prison," she said. "I remembered the poem of an ancestor, Ono no Komachi, from a thousand years ago."

"Ummm."

"She was very passionate."

"I'm anxious to know what she said."

"A poem: Hito ni awan tsuki no naki yowaomoiokitemunehashiribinikokoroyaki ori. Can you hear the music in it?"

Robert Lecter's Western ear could not hear the music in it but, knowing where the music lay, he was enthusiastic: "Oh my, yes. Tell me the meaning."

"No way to see him on this moonless night. I lie awake longing, burning breasts racing fire, heart in flames."

"My God, Sheba."

She took exquisite care to spare him exertion.

In the hall of the chateau, the tall clock tells the lateness of the hour, soft bongs down the stone corridors. The mastiff bitch in her kennel stirs, and with thirteen short howls she makes her answer to the clock. Hannibal in his own clean bed turns over in his sleep. And dreams.

In the barn, the air is cold, the children's clothes are pulled down to their waists as Blue-Eyes and Web-Hand feel the flesh of their upper arms. The others behind them nicker and mill like hyenas who have to wait. Here is the one who always proffers his bowl. Mischa is coughing and hot, turning her face from their breath. Blue-Eyes grips the chains around their necks. Blood and feathers from a birdskin he gnawed are stuck to Blue-Eyes' face.

Bowl-Man's distorted voice: "Take her, she's going todieee anyway. He'll stayfreeeeeesh a little longer."

Blue-Eyes to Mischa, a ghastly cozening, "Come and play, come and play!"

Blue-Eyes starts to sing and Web-Hand joins in:

“Ein Mannleinstehtim Waldeganz still und stumm,

Es hat vonlauter Purpurein Mantlein um…”

Bowl-Man brings his bowl. Web-Hand picks up the axe, Blue-Eyes seizing Mischa and Hannibal screaming flies at him, gets his teeth into Blue-Eyes' cheek, Mischa suspended in the air by her arms, twisting to look back at him.

"Mischa, Mischa!"

The cries ringing down the stone corridors and Count Lecter and Lady Murasaki burst into Hannibal 's room. He has ripped the pillow with his teeth and feathers are flying, Hannibal growls and screams, thrashing, fighting, gritting his teeth. Count Lecter puts his weight on him and confines the boy's arms in the blanket, gets his knees on the blanket.

"Easy, easy."

Fearing for Hannibal's tongue, Lady Murasaki whips off the belt of her robe, holds his nose until he has to gasp, and gets the belt between his teeth.

He shivers and is still, like a bird dies. Her robe has come open and she holds him against her, holds between her breasts his face wet with tears of rage, feathers stuck to his cheeks.

But it is the count she asks, "Are you all right?"

HANNIBAL ROSE EARLY and washed his face at the bowl and pitcher on his nightstand. A little feather floated on the water. He had only a vague and jumbled memory of the night.

Behind him he heard paper sliding over the stone floor, an envelope pushed under his door. A sprig of pussy willow was attached to the note.

Hannibal held the note card to his face in his cupped hands before he read it.

“ Hannibal,

I will be most pleased if you call on me in my drawing room at the Hour of the Goat. (That is 10 a.m. in France.)

Murasaki Shikibu”

Hannibal Lecter, thirteen, his hair slicked down with water, stood outside the closed door of the drawing room. He heard the lute. It was not the same song he had heard from the bath. He knocked.

"Come."

He entered a combination workroom and salon, with a frame for needlework near the window and an easel for calligraphy.

Lady Murasaki was seated at a low tea table. Her hair was up, held by ebony hairpins. The sleeves of her kimono whispered as she arranged flowers.

Good manners from every culture mesh, having a common aim. Lady Murasaki acknowledged him with a slow and graceful inclination of her head.

Hannibal inclined from the waist as his father had taught him. He saw a skein of blue incense smoke cross the window like a distant flight of birds, and the blue vein faint in Lady Murasaki's forearm as she held a flower, the sun pink through her ear. Chiyoh's lute sounded softly from behind a screen.

Lady Murasaki invited him to sit opposite her. Her voice was a pleasant alto with a few random notes not found in the Western scale. To Hannibal, her speech sounded like accidental music in a wind chime.

"If you do not want French or English or Italian, we could use some Japanese words, like kieuseru. It means 'disappear.'" She placed a stem, raised her eyes from the flowers and looked into him. "My world of Hiroshima was gone in a flash. Your world was torn from you too. Now you and I have the world we make-together. In this moment. In this room."

She picked up other flowers from the mat beside her and placed them on the table beside the vase. Hannibal could hear the leaves rustling together, and the ripple of her sleeve as she offered him flowers.

" Hannibal, where would you put these to best effect? Wherever you like."

Hannibal looked at the blossoms.

"When you were small, your father sent us your drawings. You have a promising eye. If you prefer to draw the arrangement, use the pad beside you."

Hannibal considered. He picked up two flowers and the knife. He saw the arch of the windows, the curve of the fireplace where the tea vessel hung over the fire. He cut the stems of the flowers off shorter and placed them in the vase, creating a vector harmonious to the arrangement and to the room. He put the cut stems on the table.

Lady Murasaki seemed pleased. "Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style." She put the silky weight of a peony in his hand. "But where might you put this? Or would you use it at all?"

In the fireplace, the water in the tea vessel seethed and came to a boil. Hannibal heard it, heard the water boiling, looked at the surface of the boiling water and his face changed and the room went away.

Mischa's bathtub on the stove in the hunting lodge, horned skull of the little deer banging against the tub in the roiling water as though it tried to butt its way out. Bones rattling in the tumbling water.

Back at himself, back in Lady Murasaki's room, and the head of the peony, bloody now, tumbled onto the tabletop, the knife clattering beside it. Hannibal mastered himself, got to his feet holding his bleeding hand behind him. He bowed to Lady Murasaki and started to leave the room.

" Hannibal."

He opened the door.

" Hannibal." She was up and close to him quickly. She held out her hand to him, held his eyes with hers, did not touch him, beckoned with her fingers. She took his bloody hand and her touch registered in his eyes, a small change in the size of his pupils.

"You will need stitches. Serge can drive us to town."