Hashihime: What the River Keeps

Episode One The Empty Place In the years when the capital was young, a woman washed her husband's robe and found a strand of hair that was not her own. It lay across the wet silk, black until she lifted it into the morning light. Then it showed a reddish gleam, like the inside of a chestnut shell. Her own hair had no such colour. She knew this because her husband had once held it against his face and praised its darkness. In those days he had found many reasons to praise her. The woman was called Asa. Remember that name a little while. There will come a time when almost no one remembers it. She wound the stranger's hair around her forefinger. Such a little thing. A breath might have carried it away. Yet she stood with it until the water cooled around her wrists and the servant waiting beside her dared to ask whether the robe had been damaged. Asa shook her head. She laid the hair upon the washing stone and watched the next pour of water take it. Her husband, Masanori, was a man of sufficient rank to spend his days near men of greater rank, and of sufficient charm to make this seem an occupation. He owned a fine horse, wrote a graceful hand, and remembered the preferences of anyone who might advance him. He could recall which incense pleased an official after hearing it mentioned once. Lately he had forgotten that his wife disliked the cold. Their house stood south of the capital, within hearing of the river in heavy rain. It had belonged to Asa's father. The garden was narrow, the roof troublesome, the western shutters swollen every wet season. When she married, Masanori had spoken of rebuilding the gallery. He had been speaking of it for eleven years. Once, during their first winter, he had climbed onto the roof himself. Asa had waited below with a lamp, furious at the danger, laughing whenever he looked down. Afterwards she had rubbed warmth into his feet. She remembered the weight of one bare heel in her palm more clearly than she remembered her father's funeral. Let it be understood that she had loved a man, not merely an idea of one. He had been tender. His laughter had filled rooms that now seemed too large. When a fever nearly killed her, he had sat through two nights feeding her water from a spoon. The cruelty that followed did not abolish those nights. It made them harder to bear. After finding the hair, Asa began to notice the silences around his absences. His steward stopped speaking when she entered the storehouse. A groom looked at the ground when she asked why the horse had returned with pale sand on its legs. Her servant Sayo, who had been in the household since girlhood, took to bringing her breakfast earlier, as though food might reach some hurt that speech could not. Masanori had explanations for everything. Duties kept him late. An acquaintance was ill. A discussion had continued past the hour when it was prudent to travel. When Asa asked where he had slept, he touched her cheek before answering. She began to dread that touch. It was the little kindness he placed before a lie, like a clean cloth over something spoiled. For several weeks she searched for fault in herself. She changed the incense in her sleeves. She wore the pale green robe he had admired in spring. She listened more closely when he spoke of his disappointments, though she could have recited them without him. One night she waited with her hair unbound across the bedding. He complained that the lamp smoked. The shame of that night remained hot long after the lamp was out. There are people who will tell you that jealousy comes upon a woman suddenly, a madness without a cause. Such people have often benefited from her patience. Asa did not become monstrous when she suspected. She became industrious. She made herself pleasant. She swallowed questions until her throat ached with them. And when she could no longer swallow, she rose before dawn and followed the steward. He travelled to a house east of the river, carrying a lacquered box beneath his arm. Asa knew the box. Her mother had kept winter incense in it. The catch was shaped like a crane with one bent leg. From behind a roadside willow she watched a maid admit him. Beyond the open gate lay a garden raked into flowing lines. Fresh shutters gleamed beneath the eaves. At the gallery stood a woman wearing a robe of persimmon silk. Her hair, caught by the sun, shone brown at the edges. Masanori came out behind her. He held a comb. Asa saw him slide it into the woman's hair with the absorbed care of someone completing a poem. The woman turned her head towards his hand. He bent and kissed the place below her ear. For a moment Asa could not understand how her body remained standing. Surely something so thoroughly broken should have fallen. Yet her knees held. Her fingers gripped the willow bark. Somewhere a cart wheel creaked, and a vendor called, and the ordinary world continued with an obscenity that she would never forgive. She walked home without knowing she was walking. A blister burst beneath her sandal. She felt the wetness and thought, absurdly, that she had stepped in rain. When Masanori returned that evening, Asa had placed the pale green robe between them. She asked him whether he had ever meant the promises made in that room. He was irritated before he was ashamed. She saw it pass across his face, that brief resentment of a man whose comfort has been interrupted. Then he grew careful. The other woman was called Kinu. Her family had useful connections. The arrangement was complicated. Asa was making herself unhappy by looking at it too narrowly. She listened while he explained that men in his position could not be expected to order their lives around one woman's feelings. He spoke as though she had misunderstood a matter of household accounts. But he had made promises no position required him to make. He had held her in that very room and sworn that she would never be put aside. She had not invented those words. She had built her life around them because he had asked her to. When she reminded him, he looked towards the garden. Then came the thing that did more harm than his admissions. He smiled faintly. He said she had always felt too much. Asa struck him. The sound was small. She had imagined, in some distant childhood conception of anger, that a blow would empty the heart. Instead her rage doubled. Her hand stung. He seized her wrist hard enough to bruise it, and the steadiness of his expression frightened her more than a shout would have done. He left before midnight. The next morning the steward came with two porters. They were taking the better screens, the winter bedding, three chests and the bronze mirror from Asa's mother's room. Masanori, the steward explained, intended to consolidate the household. Asa could remain until arrangements were made for her lodging elsewhere. Her father's house had been pledged for a debt. The papers bore Asa's seal. She had entrusted it to her husband the previous autumn, when he offered to settle a dispute over the fields. Now the steward laid the agreement before her with the solemn delicacy of a man presenting a death notice he had helped to write. She asked whether Masanori had sent any message. The steward said her husband hoped she would preserve her dignity. Behind him the porters lifted the mirror. For an instant Asa saw herself carried sideways through the room: a woman kneeling very straight, with a dark bruise around her wrist. Then the reflection was gone. That evening she sat beside the place where the bedding had been. Sayo brought rice. Asa pushed it away. Sayo brought hot water. Asa watched the steam vanish. Towards dawn the servant laid a folded garment beside her. It was an old winter robe, patched at the elbow. She had hidden it before the porters came. At this small loyalty Asa began to weep. She wept until her stomach cramped and her face swelled, until the sound was no longer a woman's grief but something low and torn, dragged through a throat too narrow to contain it. She wanted him back. This was the humiliation beneath all the others. Even knowing him, even hating him, she wanted to hear his step and discover that the world had been restored. Sayo remained beside her. She did not offer reasons. She did not tell her that time would heal what a living man had chosen to do. When the crying ended, Asa asked where a prayer went if the gods refused it. Sayo said she did not know. In the days that followed, neighbours arrived with advice. One urged acceptance. Another spoke of taking religious vows. A cousin suggested that Asa's distress had made the separation inevitable, though the distress had followed it. Each person departed relieved to have said something. Asa remained in the emptied house, surrounded by their usefulness. She tried praying for peace. The words tasted false. She did not want peace while Masanori slept comfortably under her winter quilts. She wanted him to lie awake with his heart battering his ribs. She wanted him to hear laughter beyond a wall and understand that it had once belonged to him. She wanted to take from him something for which there was no replacement. Far north of the capital, beyond the crowded roads, stood the shrine at Kifune. Travellers spoke of the power dwelling there, a power that knew the ways of water. They said desperate prayers could reach it. Asa listened. On the night before the new occupants were to take possession, she walked through her father's house. She touched the pillar marked with her childhood height. In the kitchen she found the heavy iron trivet that had supported the cooking pot. Everything of beauty had been taken. This blackened thing remained. She set it beside the door. Then she took the old robe Sayo had saved and put it around her shoulders. She left the servant enough coin to reach her sister's village. Sayo caught her sleeve, but Asa gently opened the fingers one by one. She did not yet look like a creature anyone should fear. At the gate she turned once towards the house. The rooms were dark. No footstep hurried after her. No one came to explain that there had been some terrible mistake. Before dawn, she was on the northern road. She went to ask the god for a body that could do what her heart desired.

Episode Two The Iron Crown For seven nights Asa knelt where the mountain water sounded beneath the roots. By day the shrine received other petitioners. They came with sick children, with fears for the harvest, with gratitude for a danger survived. Asa watched them place their offerings. She envied the simplicity of a wish that did not require another person's suffering. She had brought no fine silk. Masanori had taken it. She had brought no polished mirror. Masanori had taken that also. She offered the only thing still entirely hers: the determination to remain. Rain worked its way through the old robe. The skin of her knees broke. When she stood to drink, her legs trembled so violently she had to lean against a tree. Once an attendant left food beside her. By morning insects had claimed it. At first she asked that Masanori suffer as she suffered. Then she considered how a man like him might endure grief. He would find another woman to comfort him. He would make a noble account of his wounds. Even his punishment might become a means of securing tenderness. On the third night she asked for his death. On the fourth, she withdrew the request. Death alone seemed almost generous. She wanted him to understand whose hands delivered it. On the fifth night she prayed to become an oni while she still lived. An ogre. A thing with strength beyond the reach of men, with teeth that could open the breast containing his faithless heart. She thought of the hand with which he had held her wrist. She imagined breaking its little bones separately. The pleasure of imagining it frightened her. She returned to the prayer. By the seventh night the rain had stopped, but the sound of water grew louder. It seemed to rise through the ground beneath her knees. The shrine buildings disappeared into mist. The trees became dark pillars in a room without walls. Something listened. The old tales do not agree upon the face of the power that answered her. Some give it a god's splendour. Others say no face appeared. I was told long ago, Asa saw only water standing upright where no water should have stood, and within it a depth that had never received the sun. Her prayer was returned to her without the comfort of words. She saw a woman kneeling. She saw the woman rise with a mouth that would not close. She saw blood carried between wooden bridge piers. Beyond those things lay a span of years so vast that the grief of one abandoned wife should have dwindled to nothing. Yet in the vision that grief remained fresh. Asa understood enough to be afraid. She did not understand enough to stop. The knowledge of the rite entered her like cold water poured into an empty vessel. She must remake her outward shape. She must go south to the Uji River. Beneath the bridge, where the current tore against the piers, she must surrender herself for twenty-one days. A human creature could not survive it. That was the purpose. She might still have risen and walked away. The mountain did not hold her down. At dawn, a bird shook rain from a branch above her, and the small sound was almost unbearably ordinary. Asa watched it fly towards the waking valley. Then she bowed until her damaged forehead touched the earth. She returned to her father's house after dark. The new household had not yet arrived; repairs had delayed them. A stranger's sandals waited in the entrance. Asa stepped over them. In the kitchen she found the trivet where she had left it. She cleaned neither the soot nor the grease. With a stone she worked the legs apart until they would stand above her head like the points of a crown. The blows sounded through the empty rooms. From a neglected store she took pigment used for painting, and from the hearth she took ashes. She mixed the red with water and rubbed it into her skin. It settled in the cracked places around her nails. It made a wound of her face. Her long hair she divided into five knots, binding them stiffly until they rose like horns. She fastened burning brands to the upturned iron legs. The last flame she carried clenched between her teeth, fire licking at either end. When she lowered the iron onto her head, its weight bent her neck. She straightened. The heat tightened her eyelids. Resin spat against her cheek. She had once spent half a morning choosing the proper shade of a sleeve for her husband's return. Now she stood in a deserted kitchen, painted red, with fire around her face, preparing to become the answer to his absence. On the road to Uji, a carter saw her and abandoned his ox. A drunkard laughed until she turned towards him. Then he crawled into a ditch and covered his head. She passed a shallow pool. Within it walked a monstrous woman crowned in flame. But under the paint and the iron, Asa was still human. The torch burned her mouth. Her feet bled. Beneath her resolve some small, disgraced part of her still imagined Masanori seeing her distress and running to put out the fire. At the bridge she descended the bank. Water closed around her ankles, her knees, her hips. The current caught the old robe and pulled it tight against her legs. She went farther until the river reached her breast. The flames should have died when she bent beneath the crossbeams. Instead they shortened and turned pale. In their light the underside of the bridge resembled a roof over a house that had been waiting for her. She hooked her arms around a pier. The river began its work. On the first day it was merely cold. Cold filled her joints, hammered her teeth together and made her thoughts small. She could remember only the need to hold on. On the second day the skin of her hands turned white. By evening it wrinkled and loosened around her fingers. She watched a flap peel back from one knuckle, revealing a dark seam beneath. On the third day something struck her leg. A fish, she thought. Then another. They worried the softened flesh at her ankles. She kicked them away until her strength failed. Afterwards she stood still while small mouths took what the water had loosened. She did not sleep as living people sleep. She fell into intervals without time and woke with her own name disappearing down the current. Once she saw Masanori on the bank, holding out a dry robe. His expression was so familiar that she began to release the pier. Then he smiled, and river mud poured between his teeth. She gripped the wood again. By the seventh day, she no longer shivered. Her nails had lifted from their beds. Beneath them grew curved black points that scraped grooves in the pier. The loose flesh of her hands tore away in pale gloves. What remained was red and ridged, too thick to bleed as human skin bled. Pain did not diminish. It became spacious. There was room inside it for each year of her marriage. She remembered waiting during a summer storm. She remembered his arm beneath her head. She remembered the steward saying dignity. Every memory arrived whole, dragging its weight across her nerves. On the ninth day Sayo found her. The servant had followed rumours of a burning woman. She stood upon the bank with a bundle of food clutched to her chest. At first she could not see clearly beneath the bridge. Then Asa raised her head. Sayo made a little sound and bit it off. Asa wanted to hide her face. Shame moved through her with a force almost equal to hatred. She tried to lower the iron crown, but it had sunk into the swollen flesh of her scalp. When she pulled, something tore with a moist, fibrous sound. Sayo waded in. She was not praying. She was not armed. She simply came towards the woman she had known, holding out both hands. For one moment Asa loosened her grip. She pictured a hut somewhere beyond the capital, a bowl of rice, work enough to tire her body. Masanori would continue living. He would never properly understand. That was the price of the life Sayo offered: a future without satisfaction. Asa could not bear to buy it. She struck the surface with her changing hand. Water rose between them like a wall. Sayo stumbled backwards. Asa opened her mouth to tell her to leave, and the sound that emerged made birds lift from the far bank in a single black cloud. Sayo left the food upon a stone. For three days she returned. On the fourth, a flood covered the path and she could come no farther. Asa watched the bundle rot. On the thirteenth day her jaw began to change. It opened with a click she felt behind her ears. Then it opened farther. The muscles along her throat stood out like cords. Teeth loosened, fell, and were replaced by longer teeth pushing through the raw sockets. One grew crookedly through her lower lip. She caught it between two claws and pulled until it snapped. The broken root remained alive. It throbbed to the beat of her heart. On the sixteenth day the knots of hair split. Horn pressed through the scalp beneath them, lifting strips of skin. Blood ran into her eyes and clotted there. She rubbed against the pier until she could see. The red pigment was gone. The red remained. On the twentieth day she heard a man above her swear devotion to a woman crossing the bridge. The promise entered Asa's skull like a hook. She knew nothing of the couple. Yet she wanted to climb between the planks and tear the words out of his mouth before they could ripen into deceit. She understood then that her anger had begun to travel beyond the man who made it. Still she held on. When the twenty-first dawn broke, the river fell silent around her. Water continued to rush past, but she no longer heard it with her ears. She heard through the pier, through the bank, through the drowned stones below. Everywhere the current touched, some part of her could listen. Asa released the wood. Her feet found the riverbed. Her back straightened. The crossbeam above her cracked against the rising crown. She had asked for strength enough to take her husband's heart. Now she could hear it beating on the other side of the river.

Episode Three The Other Woman The first man to die was the steward. He had crossed the bridge at sunset after drinking more than he intended. A damp wind rose from the water. Halfway across, he noticed a woman standing beside the railing, her sleeves drawn over her hands. He recognised Asa before she turned. She looked much as she had looked when he presented the agreement for her house. A little thinner, perhaps. Her hair lay smoothly down her back. There was no crown, no redness, no wound upon her mouth. Had he looked at the planks, he might have wondered why the shadow beside her bore three tall points. But he looked at her face. He had always believed a woman's face told him everything worth knowing. Asa asked where her husband was. The steward sighed. He had expected the question. Masanori had gone north on business, he said. He did not know when he would return. From beyond the eastern bank, Asa heard the steady beat of her husband's heart. It moved within the house where Kinu lived. The lie brought an astonishing sensation. Hunger opened beneath her ribs, sudden and intimate. She had eaten nothing for weeks, yet this was the first appetite she had felt. She stepped closer. The steward backed against the rail. Something had changed in her expression, although he could not have said what. Then he noticed water spreading around her feet. It seeped uphill between the planks. She asked whether he had known what the seal would be used for. He tried to explain that a servant did not question his master. Asa remembered the satisfaction in his careful voice when he told her to leave. He had enjoyed being the person with authority over her. Now he would make that authority disappear by calling it obedience. Her fingers closed around his jaw. The borrowed shape of her hand split at the knuckles. Red flesh showed beneath. Black claws entered the soft hollows under his chin, and the steward's feet slid on the boards as she lifted him. He was heavier than anything she had ever carried. She felt no strain. All her life she had feared the consequences of laying a hand upon a man. Now his whole struggling body weighed scarcely more than a wet garment. She could have set him down. Instead she pulled. The lower jaw came free with a crack and a tearing of the flesh beneath his ears. His tongue jerked in the open ruin. He tried to scream, but the blood interrupted him. Asa watched his eyes understand what was happening, and for several heartbeats she was satisfied. Then the satisfaction vanished. The steward remained dying in her hand. He did not become Masanori. His pain did not move backwards through time and spare her one night of grief. The work she had begun demanded finishing, and she crushed his throat because his remaining sounds offended her and lowered the body into the river. Its blood passed between her fingers like warm threads. Beneath the bridge the current caught him and turned him face down. She watched until his robe disappeared. Only afterwards did she notice a small packet lying where he had fallen. Inside were roasted chestnuts. On the paper, in an uneven hand, someone had drawn a little bird. She did not know who had given them to him. She would never know. She pushed the packet into a gap between the boards, where she did not have to see it. Kinu's house stood bright with lamplight. Masanori had left shortly before Asa reached it, summoned by a messenger from a neighbour who had heard a scream at the bridge. His heart receded towards the northern road. Asa could have followed it. Instead she looked through the shutters. There was her mother's incense box. There were her winter quilts, airing on a stand. The bronze mirror stood beside a lamp, its surface holding a wavering portion of the room. Kinu sat before it, undoing her hair. The comb slid free. Asa recognised it now: pale wood carved with reeds, the gift Masanori had brought home after their fifth year together. He had told her he commissioned it especially. When it disappeared that winter, she had blamed a careless servant and spent a miserable afternoon regretting the accusation. Beyond the shutters, her claws lengthened. She entered by the garden. The doors were barred, but moisture swelled through the wood beneath her touch. The latch softened as though it had spent a hundred years underwater. She pushed it aside. Kinu turned towards the sound. Asa wore her human face. She had discovered that desire could arrange her flesh as easily as a hand arranged cloth. To be the woman Masanori had abandoned required only that she remember herself however, maintaining that memory hurt. Kinu rose, frightened by the stranger's silence. She was younger than Asa had first thought, but a grown woman, with tired shadows beneath her eyes. At close quarters she seemed less like a rival from a fevered imagining and more like someone interrupted while preparing for bed. Asa told her whose house had paid for these comforts. The words came slowly. Her mouth wanted to open in another direction. She kept it human by concentrating upon the comb. Kinu listened. At first she denied nothing because she appeared not to understand. Then she sank back onto the cushion. Masanori had told her his wife had left him. He had described Asa as cold, proud, incapable of affection. The property, he said, had been settled by agreement. There was more. Kinu had been widowed before meeting him. Her family had pressed her to accept his protection. She had feared becoming dependent again. He had promised she would never regret trusting him. The same promise. Asa looked at the young woman's hand, lying open upon her knee. No triumph rested there. No deliberate cruelty. Masanori had merely carried his lies across the river and placed them in a second pair of hands. For a moment the room steadied. Kinu offered to send for Asa's possessions. She would leave before he returned. She spoke quickly, but there was anger under the fear now, an anger Asa knew. When she reached for a travelling chest, her sleeve slipped back and revealed a bruise on her upper arm. Asa almost touched it. Had she done so, perhaps the tale would have turned. Two betrayed women might have carried what they could from the house and left a faithless man to sleep among his empty promises. But Kinu turned towards the mirror to remove the comb's broken tooth from her hair. She made the little sideways movement Asa had seen in the garden, baring the place below her ear. The remembered kiss filled the room. Asa knew Kinu had been deceived. Knowledge remained clear within her. It did not extinguish the image of Masanori bending his head. She wanted that kiss to have nowhere in the world to rest. She wanted the skin he had kissed destroyed. The woman in the mirror changed first. Kinu saw the reflection rise behind her, red and enormous, with iron buried in its scalp. She turned before the hand reached her throat. Her terror was not the steward's terror. It held bewilderment. She had believed, for a breath, that they were on the same side. Asa saw that belief die.. The first blow drove Kinu against the mirror stand. Bronze rang against the floor. The second tore the flesh below her ear. Blood washed over Asa's wrist, hotter than river water. Kinu caught the monstrous hand with both of hers. Her fingers were warm. They held on as though appealing to the woman inside it. Asa knew she could stop. She forced her claws deeper. When she withdrew them, something pale and stringy came with the blood. Kinu collapsed against the fallen mirror. Her breath made a thin bubbling sound, and Asa waited for relief with the concentration of a starving creature waiting to be fed. None came. Kinu's gaze moved towards the travelling chest. Kinu’s hand opened upon the floor. Then the room held only the little hiss of the lamp. Asa crouched beside her. She put two fingers against the torn throat, absurdly seeking a pulse she had meant to stop. She could have pressed cloth to the wound moments earlier. Now there was nothing to press back into place. The burning crown appeared above her head. Its flames showed in the bronze mirror, but her human reflection would no longer return. She lifted the comb. A few strands of chestnut-dark hair clung to its teeth. From the corridor came a footstep. An elderly maid stood at the threshold holding a basin. When she saw the body, then the creature beside it, the basin struck the floor. Water ran into blood marbling the floor beneath her. Asa turned, hungry again. The maid tried to retreat, but her legs failed. She sat down hard, raising her hands before her face. Asa could hear a heart fluttering behind those hands. She could end it effortlessly. This time she held still. The maid crawled away. Asa listened to the scraping of her knees until the sound reached the outer gate. She had spared someone. The small fact was real. It did not restore the woman at her feet. Outside, the household began to wake. A shout rose near the servants' rooms. Asa gathered the quilts, thinking without reason that she ought to take them home. Remembering, she let them slip from her arms. She no longer had a home. She left them soaking in Kinu's blood. By dawn the maid's account had passed through three streets. By noon it had reached the markets. People spoke of a red woman with burning horns, of water running out of locked rooms, of a jawless corpse caught among reeds below the bridge. Someone called the creature Hashihime, the princess of the bridge. The name travelled faster than grief ever had. By evening it was spoken in houses where no one had troubled to learn Asa's name. She heard it from beneath the bridge and understood what had happened. A neglected woman had become worthy of attention only when she became a thing to fear. Far away, Masanori's heart beat rapidly within a shuttered house. Fear had reached him at last. Asa listened for pleasure in the sound. What she heard instead, faintly and for the first time, was a second heartbeat moving inside her own.

Episode Four The House of Paper Prayers The second heart did not beat in time with hers. It hurried when she thought of the comb. It faltered when she remembered the wound beneath Kinu's ear. Once, as dawn thinned the darkness under the bridge, it stopped altogether. Asa felt the stillness spread through her breast. Then it began again. There would be no finishing that death. She pressed her claws into her own chest. Beneath the thick hide something shifted away from them. The pain was fierce, but pain no longer promised release. She could tear herself open and remain alive to feel it. By the next night she heard the steward also. His breath rattled somewhere behind her tongue. When she opened her mouth, a little of his last blood came with the river water. She had thought revenge would remove people from her life. Instead she was becoming a place where they remained. Masanori had taken refuge with a wealthy relative in the capital. Doors were guarded. White papers marked with prayers hung above the entrance and along the gallery. Servants carried bowls of salt. A ritual master had been summoned, a grey-haired man whose quiet manner irritated the frightened household. Masanori wanted assurances. The old man asked questions. He had heard the account of the surviving maid. He wished to know what promises had been broken, what property taken, what anger allowed to grow unanswered. Masanori admitted to a quarrel. Then to an estrangement. Only after the questioning continued did he acknowledge that he had used his wife's seal without telling her why. Even then he spoke chiefly of her temperament. The ritual master did not offer to decide which life deserved protection. His work was to keep a murderous spirit from entering a house full of people. He instructed everyone to remain within the marked boundaries. He asked that nothing belonging to the dead woman be concealed from him. Masanori corrected him. His wife, he said, had not been reported dead. The old man looked up. It was then, the people in the room became properly afraid. Asa reached the house after midnight. She could follow her husband's heart across the city now, through sleeping streets and gardens silvered with dew. It drew her with an intimacy she despised. Once she had known his step among a dozen footsteps. Now the inside of his body called to the inside of hers. She approached in the shape he remembered from their early marriage. The effort stretched her pain across an old, familiar frame. She made her hands slender. She smoothed the broken mouth. Around herself she drew the appearance of the green robe. At the gate a guard saw a woman he had been warned to exclude. He raised his spear. Asa looked at him, and beneath her borrowed face the jaw began to lower. He fled into the courtyard. She followed until her foot touched the threshold. Fire struck through her bones. It had no colour and gave no light. It simply occupied her, from the roots of her horns to the tips of her claws. She fell backwards against the gatepost, scraping away the human shape. The paper above the door stirred though the air was still. Inside, the ritual master began to recite. His voice was low and unhurried. It did not challenge her. It continued, and its continuance pressed against her more strongly than a shout. She struck the door. The wood held. She struck again until the hinges screamed, but the unseen boundary remained. She could see Masanori through a gap in the shutters. He knelt beside a lamp, hands folded so tightly the knuckles blanched. His terror should have delighted her. Instead she saw that his hair had gone untended, and some wretched remnant of habit made her want to smooth it. She drove her forehead into the door until the iron crown rang. Behind her, shutters opened along the street. People watched from the protection of their houses. At the far end of the lane a man laughed once, a sharp involuntary sound made from fear. Asa turned towards it. She could not reach her husband. This man stood where no prayers guarded him. Hunger presented him as an answer to the difficulty. She crossed the lane before he could close the shutter. His hand was still upon it when she caught his arm. Bone broke beneath her grip. He cried out, and from deeper in the house another person called his name. It was an ordinary name. A name that had never appeared in Asa's grief. She stopped with her mouth against his wrist. His fear smelled warm. The broken arm twisted in her fingers. She knew that if she bit down, another heart would begin inside her, another death would go on happening without end. She released him. He fell away from the window, leaving blood along the sill. She could still hear his crying when she returned to the guarded house. The ritual master had seen. He spoke through the closed door, telling her that a choice remained wherever she could still refuse a killing. Asa hated him for finding a place in her that could be addressed as human. She asked for her husband. The old man did not surrender him. Nor did he say she must forgive. He asked her to leave the threshold and let the living attend to what could still be repaired. Beyond him, Masanori shook his head. Asa saw that movement. He was refusing before he knew what repair might cost. She withdrew before dawn, leaving deep gouges in the gate. In the gutter lay a strip of her borrowed green robe. When the sun reached it, it became riverweed. The following evening Sayo came to the house of paper prayers. News of the attacks had reached her sister's village. She brought no weapon, only the old winter robe, which she had recovered from the bank after the flood. She had washed it. The mended elbow remained the same. The ritual master let her enter. From Sayo he learned the wife's name. From Sayo he learned that she had once tended sick servants herself, that she remembered the anniversaries of deaths, that she had been ashamed when she wrongly accused a maid of stealing a comb. None of this excused the bodies. It explained the living person who had preceded them. He made two figures from straw and paper. Upon one he wrote Masanori's name. Upon the other he wrote Asa's. Between them he stretched a red thread. They were vessels for the bond through which her rage found him, he explained. He would draw that bond into the thread, then sever it. The rite might loosen her pursuit long enough for her remaining human will to prevail. It could not revive the dead. It could not make innocence of murder. Sayo agreed to call Asa to the outer gate while he worked. Masanori listened from behind a screen. A bond could be drawn into a figure. Harm could follow a bond. He attended to these details with the same quick understanding that had once served him in matters of property. When Asa arrived, Sayo stood just inside the boundary holding the robe. She called the old name. The sound reached deeper than the ritual master's prayers. Asa's enormous body bent. For a moment the horns withdrew beneath black hair. Her face reassembled itself around the memory of a woman receiving rice from a faithful hand. She reached towards the robe. Inside the house, the red thread tightened between the figures. The ritual master lowered his head and continued the recitation. Masanori watched the figure bearing his wife's name tremble upon its mat. He took it. Before anyone could stop him, he pushed it into the brazier. Asa burned. The flame travelled through the red thread and entered her human shape. Blisters rose along her arms. Her mouth opened upon a scream that shattered a hanging lamp. The ritual master seized Masanori's wrist, but the straw was already blackening. At the gate, Sayo stepped forward by instinct. Asa lashed out at the pain. Her claws struck Sayo across the shoulder and threw her against the post. The robe fell between them. Blood spread over its washed folds. The sight brought Asa back to herself. She crouched over Sayo, unable to touch her without showing the hands that had done it. The servant was breathing. Three wounds crossed her shoulder, deep but clear of the throat. Asa tried to press them closed. Her claws slipped in the blood. The ritual master pulled the burning figure from the coals. He cut the thread. Across the courtyard Masanori retreated, horrified by the failure of his cleverness. Asa looked through the gate and saw him. He had watched her burn. He had not once asked her to stop hurting. He had been waiting to see whether she would die. Something in her ceased to reach towards him. The old man came for Sayo. Asa allowed him to lift her across the boundary. Then she picked up the winter robe and laid it where the servant could see it when she woke. She returned to the river before sunrise. For two days Masanori remained within the guarded house. On the third he learned that the steward's body had been found, that questions were being asked about the stolen seal, and that his relative would no longer pay for the guards. The ritual master refused to turn a protective rite into an execution. Masanori began to consider escape. That night a messenger brought word that a horse and escort waited beyond Uji Bridge. The note bore his own household mark. He had arranged such favours before. He wanted desperately to believe that one had remembered him. He slipped out after the lamps were lowered. Halfway across the bridge stood a woman in green. Masanori stopped. Then she lifted her face, and he saw Kinu smiling at him from the darkness.

Episode Five What the River Keeps Masanori knew Kinu was dead. He had seen the cloth covering her face. He had paid for incense, though less than her family requested. Yet the first thing he felt upon seeing her was relief. For one foolish breath he believed that some part of his trouble had been undone. Then she turned her head. The wound below her ear opened, and blood ran down the green robe. He stumbled backwards. Behind him a length of railing broke free with a sound like a tree splitting in frost. It fell across the way he had come. The bridge shuddered beneath his feet. Kinu's face loosened. The eyes remained a moment after the cheeks had changed. Her mouth moved soundlessly, as though it still had something to explain. Then Asa stood where the younger woman had been. Masanori began to plead. He used the voice with which he soothed disappointed creditors. There had been misunderstandings. He had meant to make provision for her. He had not known how deeply she was suffering. Asa listened. The river listened through her. She had written the message herself, copying a hand she had watched for eleven years. A frightened runner had carried it for the promise of silver. Masanori had accepted the household mark because it was familiar. He had accepted the rescue because it was what he wanted. Once, she too had mistaken those things for truth. He offered to return the house. He offered money he did not possess. When he saw no softening in her, he spoke of the winter when she had been ill. He reminded her of the water he had fed her, spoon by spoon. The memory passed between them. Asa felt the spoon against her lips. She remembered being too weak to hold the cup. In that memory he was gentle, and no subsequent cruelty could make the gentleness untrue. Her body faltered. Masanori saw the change and reached for it. He stepped closer, calling her beloved. The word had lived in her for years without being spoken. Hearing it now hurt with a sweetness so appalling that she almost lowered her hands. Then his gaze moved towards the open bank beyond her shoulder. Even as he invoked their love, he was measuring the way past her. Asa let the human face fall. Her jaw extended until the lips tore at the corners. The horns rose, wet with the blood of the shape she discarded. Iron stood buried among them, its three pale flames bending towards Masanori though the wind blew the other way. He fell to his knees. For the first time, he said he had been wrong. Asa waited. He went on speaking, but every admission ended with a request that she spare him. He could not offer the truth without trying to purchase something with it. She took his right hand. This was the hand that had lifted water to her mouth. This was the hand that had pressed her seal into an agreement she had never seen. Its palm was damp. A little scar lay beside the thumb, from the winter he climbed onto the roof. She remembered binding it. She bent his smallest finger backwards until the joint parted. Masanori's scream rolled along the water. She broke the next finger, then stopped. The pain was his, but the memory rising through it belonged to her. A lamp below the eaves. His bare foot in her lap. She had imagined that hurting him would destroy these things. Instead each injury called another tenderness out of the dark. Rage broke through her with a force that shook the bridge. She seized him by the throat and drove him against a pier. His ribs cracked. He hung in her grasp, trying to breathe through the place where her thumb pressed. Beneath his robe his heart beat furiously, the heart she had followed through streets and dreams. She put her free hand against it. The first claw entered between two ribs. He arched away, but the wood held him. She spread her fingers. Flesh parted with a soft, resistant tearing. Blood poured over her hand and down the pier, and the smell filled her with an appetite she could no longer distinguish from disgust. Masanori looked into her face. At last there was no calculation in him. Only terror, vast and helpless, of a kind she had begged the darkness to give him. She had her wish. She drove her hand deeper. The heart moved against her palm, slippery and stubborn. She felt it trying to continue, as innocent of the man's choices as a bird beating against a shutter. For a moment her fingers hesitated around it. Then she closed them. His body jerked. Blood came from his mouth in one dark rush. His damaged hand caught her sleeve with a child's blind insistence, and slowly lost its grip. Asa held him long after the weight changed. The river carried the blood away. The crown burned. From the eastern bank came the first birdcall of morning. She waited for peace. It did not come quietly. It did not come imperfectly. It did not come at all. Instead his heart began again inside her. Asa dropped the body. The sound it made upon the planks was small, almost domestic. A sack set down. A bundle of winter clothes. She stared at it while the new heartbeat settled behind her ribs, finding room beside Kinu and the steward. She had taken him into herself where no abandonment could remove him. The primal scream that followed was heard in houses far from the river. People woke with their hands over their ears. Dogs burrowed under floorboards. Along the bank, fish surfaced with their pale bellies showing. When the scream ended, Asa was crouched beside the corpse, trying to remember what she had intended to do after revenge. There had been nothing. She had imagined the killing so often that it had become a country in which she expected to live. Now she had reached it and found no shelter. By noon the bridge was deserted. By evening Sayo came. Her wounded arm rested in a sling. The ritual master accompanied her as far as the western bank, then remained there. She carried the old winter robe over her good arm. Asa watched from beneath the broken span. She wanted the servant to leave. She wanted her to come closer. Both desires hurt. Sayo stopped where the blood darkened the wood. She did not approach Masanori's body. She looked down between the beams and called Asa's name. The creature beneath her began to weep. No clear tears came. Water ran from the raw corners of her eyes, carrying silt. She tried to make herself small enough to climb onto the bridge without frightening the woman above. Her shoulders would not narrow. The iron would not lift from her head. Sayo laid the robe upon the railing. She had brought it because nights by the river were cold. That was all. She did not pretend that a robe could cover what Asa had done. She did not say the dead had deserved it. Asa reached upwards. Then she heard the servant's heart. It beat alone, steady despite her fear. Asa could feel the old hunger gathering around it. Sayo might marry. She might love someone else more. She might leave this bridge and never come back. The thought brought a flash of murderous jealousy so sudden that Asa's claws sank into the beam. This woman had crossed flooded roads for her. This woman bore wounds made by her hand. Still some part of Asa wanted to make departure impossible. Now she understood the full shape of the curse. Masanori had been its beginning. He could no longer be its excuse. Asa withdrew into the shadow. She asked Sayo to go. The words were scarcely words at all, but the servant understood. Still, she remained long enough to hear them a second time. Then she stepped away from the railing and returned to the waiting old man. Asa listened until Sayo’s heart had gone beyond the reach of the river. That night she dragged Masanori beneath the bridge. The current took his body, but what she had carried inside herself could not be washed downstream. She wrapped the winter robe around the pier and pressed her ruined face into the mended elbow. In time, people repaired the railing. They replaced the stained boards. They made offerings and spoke prayers, and those things helped the living to cross. They did not restore the woman. Asa remained where the river first remade her. There were nights when she held to the pier as she had held during those twenty-one days, forcing her hands to stay upon the wood while footsteps passed above. There were nights when she failed. Travellers saw a lonely woman beside the railing. Sometimes she wore a familiar face. A dead wife. An absent lover. Someone who had once turned away without explaining why. Those who approached heard water where there should have been dry boards. Some escaped. Some were found among the reeds. Some left nothing behind except a single sandal and a story their families could not bear to hear. Years passed. The house that had belonged to Asa's father burned. Another rose upon its stones. Sayo grew old in her sister's village, and when she died, the people preparing her body wondered at the three deep scars across her shoulder. No one living remembered the sound of Asa laughing beneath a roof in need of repair. Yet the bridge princess, as they called her by then, remained. Listen, then, to the curse of Hashihime, as this telling has carried it to your door. A wound was made in a woman, and she enlarged it until the world could enter. She asked for a body strong enough to punish betrayal and she received one that could survive every tenderness being torn from it. She asked never again to be helpless and she became unable to die of what she felt. Her victims remain within her. Their last moments return whenever her hatred calls them. Her husband cannot leave her now. He dies in her hand each time his heart begins again, and she remembers loving him each time she kills him. This is the vengeance she obtained. The bridges are dangerous because every crossing contains a leaving. She listens to farewells. She attends to promises. A boast of perfect love may draw her gaze; a cruel delight in another's abandonment may hold it. She does not weigh the hearts before her fairly. She has harmed the innocent, and innocence alone has never made a traveller safe from hunger. If you pass a dark river and hear someone weeping beneath the bridge, let the living beside you keep you company. Do not send them away to prove your courage. If a beloved voice calls from the water, look first at the person whose face it borrows. And if you are the one who has been betrayed, guard the small life that remains yours. There are griefs that seem to demand a body before they will loosen their grip. Hashihime has given hers, and the grip has never loosened. Remember Asa, who might have left the river with a faithful servant and learned, slowly, to wake without listening for one man's step. Remember Kinu, who reached for a travelling chest and did not live to close it. Above all, be wary of the hour when your own pain begins to sound like permission. A cruel wish may come back answered. What rises to fulfil it may wear your face long after you have ceased to recognise yourself. The river is still moving. If, when this telling ends, you hear a second heartbeat close beside your own, do not lean towards it. And do not promise it anything.