Across the Nightingale Floor Read Online Free PDF

and I thought all horses might bear me a grudge for the pain I'd caused
that one. And I kept wondering what I would do when we got to Hagi. I imagined
I would be some kind of servant, in the garden or the stables. But it turned
out Lord Otori had other plans for me.
    On the afternoon of the third day
since the night we had spent on the edge of Yaegahara, we came to the city of
Hagi, the castle town of the Otori. It was built on an island flanked by two
rivers and the sea. From a spit of land to the town itself ran the longest
stone bridge I had ever seen. It had four arches, through which the ebbing tide
raced, and walls of perfectly fitted stone. I thought it must have been made by
sorcery, and when the horses stepped onto it I couldn't help closing my eyes.
The roar of the river was like thunder in my ears, but beneath it I could hear
something else—a kind of low keening that made me shiver.
    At the center of the bridge Lord
Otori called to me. I slipped from the horse's back and went to where he had
halted. A large boulder had been set into the parapet. It was engraved with
characters.
    “Can you read, Takeo?”
    I shook my head.
    “Bad luck for you. You will have to
learn!” He laughed. “And I think your teacher will make you suffer! You'll be
sorry you left your wild life in the mountains.”
    He read aloud to me: “'The Otori
clan welcomes the just and the loyal. Let the unjust and the disloyal beware.'”
Beneath the characters was the crest of the heron.
    I walked alongside his horse to the
end of the bridge. “They buried the stonemason alive beneath the boulder,” Lord
Otori remarked offhandedly, “so he would never build another bridge to rival
this one, and so he could guard his work forever. You can hear his ghost at
night talking to the river.”
    Not only at night. It chilled me,
thinking of the sad ghost imprisoned within the beautiful thing he had made,
but then we were in the town itself, and the sounds of the living drowned out
the dead.
    Hagi was the first city I had ever
been in, and it seemed vast and overwhelmingly confusing. My head rang with
sounds: cries of street sellers, the clack of looms from within the narrow
houses, the sharp blows of stonemasons, the snarling bite of saws, and many
that I'd never heard before and could not identify. One street was full of
potters, and the smell of the clay and the kiln hit my nostrils. I'd never
heard a potter's wheel before, or the roar of the furnace. And lying beneath
all the other sounds were the chatter, cries, curses, and laughter of human
beings, just as beneath the smells lay the ever-present stench of their waste.
    Above the houses loomed the castle,
built with its back to the sea. For a moment I thought that was where we were
heading, and my heart sank, so grim and foreboding did it look, but we turned
to the east, following the Nishigawa river to where it joined the Higashigawa.
To our left lay an area of winding streets and canals where tiled-roofed walls
surrounded many large houses, just visible through the trees.
    The sun had disappeared behind dark
clouds, and the air smelled of rain. The horses quickened their step, knowing
they were nearly home. At the end of the street a wide gate stood open. The
guards had come out from the guardhouse next to it and dropped to their knees,
heads bowed, as we went past.
    Lord Otori's horse lowered its head
and rubbed it roughly against me. It whinnied and another horse answered from
the stables. I held the bridle, and the lord dismounted. The retainers took the
horses and led them away.
    He strode through the garden toward
the house. I stood for a moment, hesitant, not knowing whether to follow him or
go with the men, but he turned and called my name, beckoning to me.
    The garden was full of trees and
bushes that grew, not like the wild trees of the mountain, dense and pressed
together, but each in its own place, sedate and well trained. And yet, every
now and then I thought I caught a glimpse of