David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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.’

‘Practice,’ Orito wipes the splashes of vomit, ‘does make perfect, then.’

Yayoi dabs her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Why am I still sick so often, Sister?’

‘The vomiting can sometimes continue right up to the birth…’

‘Last time, I yearned for dango candy; this time, even the thought of it…’

‘Each pregnancy is different. Now lie down for a little while.’

Yayoi lies back, puts her hands on her bulge, and withdraws into concern.

Orito reads her thoughts. ‘You still feel your baby kicking, don’t you?’

‘Yes. My Gift…’ she pats her belly ‘… is happy when he hears you… but… but last year Sister Hotaru was vomiting late into her fifth month and then miscarried. The Gift had died several weeks before. I was there and the stench was…’

‘Sister Hotaru had not, then, felt the child kick for several weeks?’

Yayoi is both reluctant and eager to agree. ‘I… suppose not.’

‘Yet yours is kicking, so what conclusions can you draw?’

Yayoi frowns, allows Orito’s logic to pacify her and cheers up. ‘I bless the Goddess for bringing you here.’

Enomoto bought me, Orito bites her tongue, my stepmother sold me…

She begins rubbing goat fat into Yayoi’s distended belly.

… and I curse them both, and shall tell them at the next opportunity.

Here is a kick, below Yayoi’s inverted navel; below the lowest rib, a thump…

… adjacent to the sternum, a kick; over to the left, another stirring.

‘There is a chance,’ Orito decides to tell Yayoi, ‘you are carrying twins.’

Yayoi is worldly enough to know the dangers. ‘How sure are you?’

‘Reasonably sure; and it would explain the prolonged vomiting.’

‘Sister Hatsune had twins at her second Gifting. She climbed two ranks with one labour. If the Goddess blessed me with twins-’

‘What can that lump of wood,’ Orito snaps, ‘know about human pain?’

‘Please, Sister!’ Yayoi begs, afraid. ‘It’s like insulting your own mother!’

Here come fresh cramps in Orito’s intestines; here is the breathlessness.

‘You see, Sister? She can hear. Say you’re sorry, Sister, and she’ll stop it.’

The more Solace my body absorbs, Orito knows, the more it needs.

She takes Yayoi’s foul-smelling pail around the Cloisters to the slop barrow.

Crows perch along the ridge of the steep roof, eyeing the prisoner.

‘Of all the women you could acquire,’ she would ask Enomoto, ‘why rob me of my life?’

But in fifty days the Abbot of Shiranui has not once visited his Shrine.

‘In time,’ Abbess Izu answers all her questions and entreaties, ‘in time.’

In the kitchen, Sister Asagao is stirring soup over a huffing fire. Asagao’s disfigurement is one of the more arresting in the House: her lips are fused into a circle that also deforms her speech. Her friend Sadaie was born with a misshapen skull, giving her head a feline shape that makes her eyes appear unnaturally large. When she sees Orito she stops speaking in mid-sentence.

Why do those two watch me, Orito wonders, like squirrels watch a hungry cat?

Their faces inform her that she is uttering her thoughts aloud again.

This is another mortifying trick of Solace and the House.

‘Sister Yayoi is sick,’ says Orito. ‘I wish to take her a bowl of tea. Please.’

Sadaie indicates the kettle with her eyes: one is brown, one is grey.

Beneath her gown, Sadaie’s own pregnancy is becoming visible.

It’s a girl, thinks the doctor’s daughter, pouring the bitter brew.

When Acolyte Zanô’s stuffed-nose shout rings out, ‘Gates opening, Sisters!’, Orito hurries to a point in the inner corridor midway between Abbess Izu’s and Housekeeper Satsuki’s rooms and slides open the wooden screen. From this position, just once, in her first week here, she saw through both sets of gates into the Precincts and glimpsed steps, a cluster of maples, a blue-cloaked master and an acolyte in undyed hemp…

… but this morning, as usual, the acolyte on sentry-duty is more careful. Orito sees nothing but the closed outer gates, and a pair of acolytes bring in the day’s provisions by handcart.

Sister Sawarabi swoops from the State Room. ‘Acolyte Chûai! Acolyte Maboroshi! This snow hasn’t frozen your bones, I hope? Master Genmu’s a heartless one, starving his young mustangs into skeletons.’

‘We find ways,’ Maboroshi flirts back, ‘to keep warm, Ninth Sister.’

‘Oh, but how can I forget?’ Sawarabi brushes her middle breast with her fingertips. ‘Isn’t Jiritsu provisioning us this week, that shameless slug-a-bed?’

‘The acolyte,’ Maboroshi’s levity vanishes, ‘has fallen into sickness.’

‘My, my. Sickness, you say. Not just… early-winter sneezes?’

‘His condition,’ Maboroshi and Chûai begin carrying supplies into the kitchen, ‘is grave, it seems.’

‘We hope,’ cleft-lipped Sister Hotaru appears from the State Room, ‘that poor Acolyte Jiritsu is not in danger of death?’

‘His condition is grave.’ Maboroshi is terse. ‘We must prepare for the worst.’

‘Well, the Newest Sister was a famous doctor’s daughter, in her previous life, so Master Suzaku could do worse than ask for her. She’d come, and gladly, because…’ Sawarabi cups her mouth to her hand and calls across the courtyard to Orito’s hiding-place ‘… she’d die to see the Precincts, so as to plan her escape, wouldn’t you, Sister Orito?’

Blushing, the exposed observer beats a tearful retreat to her cell.

All the Sisters except Yayoi, Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki kneel at the low table in the Long Room. The doors to the Prayer Room, where the gold-leafed statue of the pregnant Goddess is housed, are open. The Goddess watches the Sisters over the head of Abbess Izu, who strikes her tubular gong. The Sutra of Gratitude begins.