Free The Samurai's Daughter by Lesley Downer

in place, straightened up and wiped his sleeve across his brow. Tomorrow, the seventh day of the seventh month of the old lunar calendar, was a holiday – Tanabata, the festival of the weaver princess and the cowherd. Even inside the high walls of the estate he felt the excitement and heard the noise from the road outside where people were putting up lanterns and hanging out huge paper streamers.
    That evening Nobu strolled out into the grounds. The trees were like ghostly black sentinels. He walked away from the house until he was swallowed up in the silence. A lone cicada let out a piercing whirr and mosquitoes whined around his head. He found an open space beside the lake and gazed up at the sky. The moon had not yet risen and a band of stars swirled across the vast black dome, from one side to the other: the River of Heaven. He thought of another moonless night and remembered his mother’s voice. He could almost hear her talking to him.
    Usually he tried never to think about it but now, despite himself, memories came flooding back. It had been a balmy night, though summers in the northern mountains were never as hot and sticky as in Tokyo. He’d been a little boy then, standing with his mother in the garden of their big house with Aizu Castle rising above them, huge and black, filling the sky, blotting out half the stars.
    ‘Look, little Nobu,’ his mother had said. He could almost smell her perfume and hear her cool northern tones. ‘Up there, all those stars – that’s the River of Heaven.’ He’d looked and seen a shimmering ribbon of stars cutting across the sky, even brighter up north than here in the south. ‘See those three big stars?’ He’d tipped his head right back and looked and looked until he made out three points of light marking a vast triangle to each side of the river, right at the pinnacle of the great dome.
    ‘The brightest one is the weaver princess,’ his mother had said, pointing. ‘And there in the opposite corner, across the River of Heaven?’ He’d followed her finger and picked out a star sparkling on the other side of the crowded swathe of stars. ‘The cowherd.’
    ‘What’s the third one?’ he’d asked.
    ‘That’s not part of the story,’ she’d said, laughing.
    ‘Tell me, tell me!’ She knew how he loved stories. Kneeling down, she took him on her lap and began, ‘Once long, long ago …’
    Once long, long ago, so his mother’s story went, the weaver princess lived in the celestial palace. She was the daughter of the king of heaven and spent her days sitting by the bank of the heavenly river weaving silks in all the colours of the rainbow to make clothes for the gods. Then one day her eyes fell on the handsome young cowherd who herded his cows on the opposite bank. They fell in love and married. But they were so engrossed in each other they had no time for anything else. The princess stopped weaving her beautiful cloth and the cowherd let his cows stray all over the skies. Finally her father, the king of heaven, had had enough. He decreed they should be punished. Henceforth they would be separated for ever, made to live on opposite sides of the River of Heaven and never see each other again. Then he relented. Perhaps the princess’s tears touched his heart. They could cross the river and meet just once a year, he said, on the seventh day of the seventh month.
    The lovers pined and yearned for the day they could be together. But when that day came they discovered there was no bridge. They gazed at each other across the river of stars, weeping. Just then a flock of heavenly magpies flew by. Seeing them weeping, they felt sorry for them and made a bridge with their wings so the two could meet.
    Every year thereafter they did the same. But when it rained the magpies could not come and the lovers had to wait another year before they could meet again. And that was why everyone prayed for fine weather at Tanabata. When it rained, his mother told him, that was the