Chapter Text
The ashen twilight had already slipped down from the hills when Utahime looked back at the family manor for the last time. The windows of her father's bedroom were dark, and that meant nothing, because he had died three years ago, but even during his life his windows almost never lit up in the evenings: he didn't light the lamps, he sat in the dark, because he couldn't make a decision due to the problems of his family's dying line. That decision, like thousands of others, remained unmade until the very end.
Futoshi Iori did not die of illness in the ordinary sense of the word. He had no tumor, no consumption, no heart defect that doctors could name and enter on a certificate. The cause of death, which the family physician recorded in the book as "exhaustion of the nervous system," in reality looked like a gradual but steady fading of the ability to want to do anything. At forty, he could still manage affairs, albeit without enthusiasm. At sixty, he no longer opened letters from the elders. At sixty-five, he stopped leaving his study. Utahime remembered how in the last year of his life she would bring him breakfast on a tray, and he would look at the plate of porridge and toast with the expression of a man facing a mountain climb. He would take the spoon, hold it in his hand for a minute, then another, then carefully put it back, because the very process required a chain of decisions, and each of them came to him so painfully that it was easier not to eat at all. He lost weight; hunger was not a strong enough stimulus to overcome the fatigue of having to act.
He did not attempt suicide, he made no dramatic gestures, he wrote no suicide notes with apologies or accusations. He simply lay down in bed one day after lunch and did not get up the next morning. Nor the next. He lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, and the nurse Utahime had hired said he would blink sometimes, but never asked for water, never called out to anyone, never tried to sit up. After four days, he stopped swallowing his saliva, and it began to collect in his throat, making a gurgling sound with each breath. Utahime sat beside him, wiped his chin with a towel and spoke to him, told him about her new apartment, about the weather, about how the peonies had bloomed by the back door, though there hadn't been any peonies for three years because the garden had fallen into neglect. She did this because the silence in a dying person's room becomes a terrible burden, and its weight can be lessened just a little by the sound of one's own voice.
On the seventh day, he died. His heart stopped in his sleep, if, of course, one can call this half-wakefulness, this gray zone between life and the refusal to live, sleep.
Utahime did not feel for her father some pure, vast love like the kind shown in novels where a deceased parent turns into a saint. She loved him in a complicated way, with many reservations. She loved his hands, large, with short-trimmed nails, very warm, which he would run over the top of her head when she sat down next to him. She loved his rare laughter, brief periods, sometimes lasting a couple of days, when he would suddenly spring into motion: he might, for no reason, take her to the pond to feed the ducks, or start fixing the old bookshelves in the library, or even write a letter to the elders in a firm, clear hand, and then it would seem that everything could still be put right. But these periods became shorter and rarer, and then stopped altogether.
She could not despise him, although she probably had the right to, nor could she hate him, although many in her place would probably hate him for leaving her alone, with debts, with a crumbling estate, with a pile of obligations she didn't know how to fulfill. Instead, she felt for him a strange, almost painful emotion, akin to pity mixed with tenderness, the kind you feel for a sick puppy that can't get up on its legs, but you still stroke it because it's not to blame for anything. He was to blame, of course, for not wanting to fight, for his softness having turned into that very spinelessness which proved fatal. But this guilt was so deeply mixed with her own helplessness that she felt no anger.
That is why now, standing before the entrance to the cave, she felt a weary, doomed necessity to do at least something, because if she turned around now and went back into the house, she would lie down in her bed, turn her face to the wall and begin the same path her father had walked.
If she did not do this now, she never would.
The cave was located in the northern wing of the park, behind a hedge of thorny blackthorn that no one had trimmed for fifty years. There used to be a greenhouse there, then an icehouse, and even earlier, as her mother used to whisper, an entrance to the dungeons where the first head of the Iori clan made deals with the gods. The path had overgrown, but Utahime remembered every stone: as a child, she played here with her brother, until he disappeared without a trace one summer day.
The moon was just beginning to emerge from behind the clouds when her shoes stepped onto the crumbling steps. They were cut straight into the limestone, and the first step cracked under her weight, and Utahime almost fell, grabbing an iron rod sticking out of the wall. Her hand burned on the rust, her palm staining the color of withered roses. She automatically wiped it on her hem, leaving a brown smear on the black fabric.
The smell of rotting leaves gave way to dampness. Utahime lit a candle. The flame flickered, snatching a low vault from the darkness. The ceiling of the cave rose about three meters, forming a sort of dome, but the arch was rough, cyclopean, giant slabs lying on top of one another without mortar, held together only by gravity and ancient masonry. On them, Utahime made out time-chipped bas-reliefs: plants with snake heads, a sun devouring a moon, a figure in a cloak with raised arms. Something crunched underfoot; she lowered the candle and saw a scattering of bones. Small, bird or mouse bones, but one lay apart: long, with a thickening at the end, it reminded her of a human finger bone.
Her heart began to beat somewhere in her throat. Utahime crossed herself in the old rite, more out of habit instilled by her grandmother. But the sign of the cross did not help. The air pulsed like the lungs of a sleeping beast: now a quiet inhalation that drew the flame inward, now a long exhalation that dimmed the light almost to the wick.
"Damn it," she whispered.
On the far wall, a geometrically perfect quadrilateral appeared, slightly darker than the gray stone. Utahime stepped closer, ran her palm over it, and her fingers met carving. It was a tightly fitted door. Symbols ran along the edges of the door. Some she recognized from an old scroll of her grandmother's: an inverted star, a spiral, three waves. In the center was a shallow bowl, shaped like an open hand, with a hole at the very bottom.
The secret family contraption, as Utahime called this mechanism to herself, turned out to be annoyingly simple. Blood was needed. Her grandmother had once let slip: "The family key is in the blood, girl."
Utahime didn't hesitate. She stuck the candle into a crack in the wall, pulled a hairpin from her hair, and slashed the pad of her index finger. The blood didn't come at once, and she had to squeeze her finger, forcing out a thick, dark drop. It fell into the stone bowl exactly at the moment when the moon, through invisible fissures on the surface, reached its zenith. Utahime knew this because of a strange radiance that poured down from above: a pale green light flooded the cave, and every symbol on the door flared up in response.
The ground trembled beneath her feet, and then the door silently slid upward. Behind it opened a narrow passage, tall enough for a person, with a floor covered in something dry and rustling. Utahime raised the candle and saw dry rose petals. Thousands, tens of thousands of petals, which had not decayed in hundreds of years. They crunched under her shoes, crumbling into black dust.
She stepped inside, and at that instant the candle went out. The floor of petals disappeared from under her feet, and Utahime fell into the void with only one sensation: someone's cold hands caught her under the shoulder blades, keeping her from being crushed. She fell and flew at the same time, and through the rushing in her ears she heard an old, crackly, parchment-like voice: "Well, finally, my girl. And we were beginning to think no one would come."
She wanted to ask, "Who is 'we'?", but her tongue wouldn't obey. Instead, colored spots swam before her eyes, and the last thing she saw before losing consciousness was not a corridor or a cave, but a clear green sky and grass up to her waist, through which her brother, who had disappeared ten years ago, was running.
She did it.