Snow-watching
It was late that evening when Minamoto no Hiromasa went to visit his friend Abe no Seimei. He had been detained by Court business, and he longed for the pleasant society of his friend. Seimei had sent him a note earlier that evening, suggesting that Hiromasa visit and that they watch the snow fall together, and Hiromasa had been delighted to agree. They would drink good wine, and Hiromasa would play on his flute, and they would discuss love and poetry and the gossip of the Court.
The men drawing his carriage crossed the bridge over the ravine, their feet thudding on the smooth wood, softened by a layer of fallen snow. The white flakes ran through the air beyond the thin barrier of the carriage's curtains, dancing like the wind itself given form. One of the men muttered something quick and harsh as the wind cracked like a whip, hard enough to make the curtains flutter. Would it be calm enough later to sit and watch the snow fall gently, or to admire the beauty of Seimei's garden in the still whiteness? Surely it would. Seimei was knowledgeable in these things. Just as he could cast out ghosts and summon spirits, he surely knew when the snow would cease to fall and the night would be calm again.
Seimei knew so much, and in comparison, Hiromasa understood so little. He understood one thing, understood it in his bones and blood, but he had no skill to tell Seimei what it was. The other man would smile at him with that fox-smile, and each time Hiromasa would laugh, and make a joke, and change the subject, and pour more wine for both of them.
"So beautiful," Seimei had said when Hiromasa played the flute to ease a dying woman's pain. "So beautiful," again, when they stood near the tomb, when the wind blew from the forest up towards the rocks, and when the woman in pale robes and black veils came up the slope towards them, the bell at her neck chiming as she walked, the green leaves swaying and rocking behind her like waves of the sea. "So beautiful," as they sat together in Seimei's garden, and he played the flute for Seimei himself, as the butterflies and the butterfly-girl danced with innocent delight in their own beauty, in the colours which spattered their wings.
How did you tell a man that he was beautiful? Hiromasa lacked the words for it. Seimei was the one who had words. Hiromasa had no skill in such things. When it came to his turn at drinking parties to recite a poem, he was aware of how much his extempore efforts lacked. Seimei could write poems that brought an ache of desire to the body, as swift and dancing as the snow beyond the curtains, but all Hiromasa had was words as frozen and as hard as the ice below.
Never mind. The evening would go as it always did, and that would be enough --
There was a scream from the forest which lay to the side of the path. "Hold!" Hiromasa called to his men, and flung the curtain wide open. Snow blew in, fine and cold against his face and hands, sifting threads of white across the black silk of his cloak. The ranks of cypress and pine trees to his right were a dark mass against the paleness of the storm; a woman stood there, at the edge of the forest, long hair falling to her feet and billowing in the wind, her kimono as pale as the snow, a hand pressed against her mouth as she looked at him, at his carriage.
"Madam!" Hiromasa called to her, shifting his position to clamber forwards and set one foot on the ground. She seemed a woman of noble standing. Perhaps she had been travelling and attacked by robbers, or visiting a shrine, or something else which would leave her alone on a snowy night. Other matters, stranger matters, would be Seimei's business, and would come to Seimei, not to Hiromasa, not like this. "Do you require assistance?"
She gave a gulping sob that went to his heart, and for a moment her hand moved away from her mouth as if she were about to speak.
"Madam!" he called again, stepping out of the carriage. The wind caught his sleeves and the skirts of his coat, cutting through the thick silk as easily as a swordblade. "I mean you no harm, but this is not a safe place -- "
She turned and ran away, the sleeves of her robe whipping behind her like pennants. Her black hair was a smudge of shadow against the whiteness of her clothing. A moment later she was lost among the dark tree trunks, the sound of her weeping trailing after her, audible even through the hissing wind.
He could not allow a woman to wander alone in the woods on such a night. The snow must have disordered her wits. It would be easy to catch up with her. "Continue on to Lord Seimei's house," he instructed the men. It was barely ten minutes walk, after all. "I shall follow shortly."
The bearers nodded, well-trained, and picked up the shafts of the carriage again. They settled into a jog down the road, and he turned to the forest, to follow the woman. She could not have gone far.
Under the trees there was stillness and darkness. The snow blew down into separate clearings, and between long lines of cypress trunks, filling them with empty white snowlight and wind. His feet crunched on pine needles, then on snow, then on pine needles again as he ran forward to where he had seen her vanish. "Madam!" he called again, his voice ringing in a sudden moment of quietness. "Madam, where are you?"
There she was, paused at the edge of a clearing. The snow cascaded down as though to envelop her, falling around her like starlight. She stood there for a moment, half turned to look at him, then staggered forward into the clearing and fell to her knees, drawing one sleeve up to shield her face.
"Madam," he said, and stopped at the edge of the clearing, not wanting to frighten her away again. "If you will permit me to assist you . . ."
She nodded, still weeping.
He walked forward into the clearing, his feet leaving deep obtrusive marks in the virgin snow, and went down to one knee beside her. Though he could not yet see her face, her clothing was of the very highest quality, and her hair was as rich and dark as that of a goddess. "Madam, if I may take your arm and help you to rise . . ."
She lowered her sleeve, and he gasped to see her face. There was no colour in her face at all, not even in her lips; her skin was like alabaster, like white jade, as perfectly pure but also as perfectly cold. Her eyes met his, and they were winter lakes, dark stone and bitter chill. She reached out to take his hand, and her flesh was like ice, so cold that they burned.
"I am winter," she said, each word like a drop of water that froze at that very moment. "I am the lady of the snow, Minamoto no Hiromasa, and once you have embraced me you will never desire another woman."
Hiromasa would have risen to his feet, but the cold ran through his veins and held him there, trailing weakness through his body.
And she was beautiful.
She smiled, the yuki-onna -- how could he not have known her before, not have seen that she left no footprints in the snow, not have heard that deep chill in her voice -- and brought her other hand to touch his cheek. "Touch my hair," she breathed. "Touch my face, kiss me, lie down with me and let the snow cover us both." She leaned to fold herself against him, her hair sifting to one side to bare the nape of her neck, and she was everything that was beautiful, everything that could be desired . . .
. . . anything but human. Anything but a little smirk of a smile that was as much mockery as it was amusement. Anything but the gesture of a fan, the movement of a hand, that had as much command to it as any soldier's grip on a sword. Anything but a voice to call him Hiromasa and laugh at his protestations about courting, about love. Anything but Seimei's eyes . . .
Hiromasa pulled away from her, though it took the last of his strength to do it, and fell back on his knees, supporting himself on one hand. The snow melted where he touched it, cold and wet against his skin. "No, madam," he said, simply. "No."
Nothing stirred in her face; no expression, no emotion, no human comprehension. She reached out to touch him again, her sleeve brushing against the snow but leaving it unmarked and smooth.
Seimei came out of the heart of the storm, with winds blowing around him that shook the snow and sent it tumbling away, the lining of his robe vivid purple against its white silk, his black hair loose and falling over his shoulders in constant wind-shaken motion. He was speaking, but his words were lost in the turbulence and shaking of the air, caught by the wind and hurled like arrows at the yuki-onna. She shrieked as though she were dying, rising to her feet and rippling backwards in a smooth flowing motion, like sea-foam, like an avalanche, and the wind tore at her robes and hair till she was nothing but fragments of snow whirling in darkness, parting, separating -- gone.
Hiromasa still did not have the strength to rise. He reached one hand up to take Seimei's, as the other man offered it. So pale, his skin, and yet so warm; his hands use the inkbrush so deftly and yet command demons and banish spirits, and these long fingers are like jade with a lamp behind them, so that the light shines through. He caught at Seimei's sleeve, drawing the onmyouji down to him, strong enough to grasp at this all too human warmth and this all too human desire.
Seimei's eyes watched him from behind the sealed curtain of his face. Not emotionless, no, not like the yuki-onna, but as perfectly still as a silk-screen painting, waiting to see what would happen next, and perhaps to be amused, to smile that little fox-smile . . .
He touched Seimei's face -- that human warmth, that delicate cheekbone, that soft column of a neck -- and kissed him, lips against lips, heat against heat, and can he feel what I feel, and Seimei was kneeling beside him in the snow now, and Seimei's lips were saying Hiromasa, Hiromasa, and there was an anger in Seimei's face that he had only seen once before, when raw emotion had come tearing out from behind that casual elegance, when Seimei had wept over him, that utter fury at being forced to admit to caring at all, and yet the affection itself, no, the desire, the living heat of body against body. The closeness as Seimei held him as much as he held Seimei, the texture of muscles and bone under the layers of silk, the warmth of skin below that, the body below that, and perhaps he didn't need words after all, he didn't even need to say that Seimei was beautiful, because Seimei seemed to hear everything that needed hearing --
-- he was lying under a floss silk quilt on Seimei's veranda, fully clothed, braziers burning on either side and wreathing charcoal smoke into the air, and the snow was still falling in the garden beyond, dancing on the wind, knowing nothing of age or death as it covered the world in whiteness. Seimei sat beside him, his own clothes in perfect order, his sleeves fanned out on either side so that they seemed to glow against the darkness of the wood.
"Hiromasa!" Seimei rounded on him. "How foolish of you, to go running off in the snow like that after illusions! When your men told me what you had done, I came after you at once. It was very noble of you, but truly --"
Hiromasa could feel his mouth curving into a foolish, apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, Seimei," he broke in. "I regret any inconvenience that I have caused you. I thought that I saw a woman, and I went to help her."
Seimei snorted. "Of course. Why should I have expected you to do anything else? You are a good man -- not that this makes my life any easier."
"Seimei." Doubt touched him with cold fingers. He thrust back the quilt, sitting up and settling his clothing properly. Surely what he had seen earlier, what they had done, had been real, had been the answer to his question. Surely he had found words of a sort, even if they hadn't been poetry. "Seimei, when -- that is, earlier, when we -- when I saw you, when . . ."
"You were watching the snow," Seimei said, and the white flakes danced behind him in a halo, reflecting in his eyes like jade. He smiled his fox-smile, human and mocking. "Only the snow."
"I should watch it more often," Hiromasa said, and turned his gaze away before he could be moved to say more. He knew, he knew, and if this snowflake was something that would melt if he tried to hold it, then he could let it go and wait for it to return to him again.
To one side there were small sounds of jug and cup and liquid, as Seimei filled a cup with hot wine. "Here," he said, offering it. "Snow-bound, I waited / With no other companion / Than wind in the trees."
"He whose friends come to find him / Need not fear night's loneliness," Hiromasa completed it, and smiled to see the sudden surprise in Seimei's face.
Perhaps, when he truly needed words, he could find something that would suffice.
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