Free The Plum Rains and Other Stories by Givens John

at the offer of his finger sliding into her and drew one scented sleeve up over her face. The silver-white haze of her night-wrapper lifted away as her legs came apart. Her thighs and belly were damp and warm in the summer darkness. She had found him with her hand and guided him inside her, andshe had asked him to go slowly and feel it with her and not hurry anything, the promise he was building with the woman he had been paid to deliver was being built by her back up to him, seeking him, grasping him as he held her, asking him not to rush the wordless questions he was asking her.
    The rogue samurai poked at his fire.
    She said she and girls like her had been raised among women who sat all their lives in empty rooms and waited for something that they knew would never happen. Younger ones called older women their mothers and were allowed to do so. Sometimes she pretended one of them really was her own mother, and she tried to model herself after the woman she’d selected. But she knew it was foolish. And fraudulent. And she soon learned to hide her feelings, and to force herself to accept not knowing.
    And did she ask you to help her?
    No.
    And did you think of doing it yourself?
    I thought of it…
    But because she didn’t ask it…
    She told me how their mothers were mocked as dreary by those who had displaced them, and their gardens and reception chambers and boudoirs had become so unfashionable that even the night visits of violators had dwindled away to nothing . Then one day it was announced that a maple tree judged to be the oldest and finest in the palace compound was to be viewed, and the divination of an unfavourable direction on the date selected meant that a circuitous route had to be followed in order to avoid provoking malign influences. The detour would pass directly along the main veranda-corridor in the part of the western chambers allocated to unwanted women. No event could have seemed more auspicious. The sliding doors on the inside edge of this corridor were replaced by hanging reed blinds with space left open at the bottom. The women configured theirmany-layered court robes in a manner befitting the season, and they practised arranging their sleeve-bundles artfully so that portions of the fabrics might be glimpsed under the blinds. They studied the effects of various combinations, hoping to arrive at a mixture of colours and textures that would stimulate the august curiosity and perhaps lead eventually to an inquiry.
    None of them slept well the night before the viewing, so filled were they with yearning. She said all were in place behind the reed blinds early, their sleeves positioned as had been agreed. Finally, they could hear the sliding feet of the seneschals on the polished wooden floors and the twanging of bowstrings in the garden as guardsmen saluted what for them could only have been dim shapes moving behind white paper doors. As the procession grew nearer, the women fell silent, their heads down, their hearts pounding. But just as the arrival began to occur, it was remarked by a trailing courtier that the weather was fine that day; and the august attention was awarded to the external side of the veranda-corridor in demonstration of an awareness of the source of the beauty of the afternoon glow. The procession passed by. Their display had gone unnoticed.
    She told me that after that, the tedium of normal days had returned; and in the weeks and months and years that followed, the women began dying, smothered by the necessity of doing the same thing at the same hour and in the same way, with no possibility for any change ever.
    And you were taking her back to that?
    Hasegawa said that was what he was being paid to do.
    She asked me once if there wasn’t some other way of managing things, and when I told her I would do whatever was required to deliver her to her destination, she closed her eyes and never said another word to me. Not even when the men following us found her.
    You mean she never