Little Yokozuna Read online

  She jammed the heels of her sneakers into ruts in the ground, planted her sturdy little back against Q.J.'s back, and pushed with all her might.

  "Oof!" she grunted, and Q.J. rolled a quarter turn away from her, toward safety, but not without her head bumping on the ground.

  "I'm so stupid," said Libby, which anyone else could have told her she wasn't. She pulled off her sweatshirt and tried to put it under where Q.J.'s head would roll next. She planted her feet again and pushed, upward and outward with a terrific heave, and felt Q.J. roll away again, up onto her side and down onto her back.

  "Yes!" said Libby. Again she shoved her heels into holes in the uneven floor, and rolled Q.J. another halfturn onto her face again. Again she did it, placing the folded sweatshirt, planting her heels, lifting and heaving. Again, and again. She had no idea how many rolls it would take to get her sister to a safe place, so she did it many more times than seemed necessary. Over and over she rolled her sister, away from that awful hole, until it seemed she had never done anything else but plant her heels, lift, and roll, but still she did it again and again. It was to her complete astonishment that Q.J.'s limp body suddenly rolled up against an obstacle that Libby discovered with her hands was the crane stone.

  "Wow!" she said. "We've come a long ways, Q."

  For some obscure reason, she still was not satisfied till she had rolled, pushed, and pulled Q.J. into a position between the lantern and the little ridge of trees. She flopped down and laid her head on Q.J.'s warm stomach, exhausted. She felt a deep, weary satisfaction in what she had accomplished, and the fear and anger were almost buried away inside her, or had been burned off in the great effort.

  "We've done a good job, Q.J.," she said, and fell fast asleep.

  When she awoke, the cave was filled with red light. She sat up with a start and looked around her, but could see nothing strange but the light. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the first bend in the tunnel, perhaps from the ceiling shaft itself. She could see the opening, and it seemed less black than before, as if there were a source of light inside or above it. Then she saw the great rope.

  Swaying like a strangely deformed snake, the thickly knotted rope was hanging down from the shaft, and even as she watched, a pair of massive armored legs came swinging down it, followed by the rest of a horrible figure.

  "Oni," she said to herself, a hopeless fear surging up inside her. "The demon warrior." She sat as still as it was possible for a human being to sit, trying to will herself to be invisible, trying to silence the hammering of her heart in her chest, trying to stop all the breathing and beating and pulsing that her terrified little body insisted on doing.

  She noticed in a sort of detached way that the armor of this oni was not red and blue, like that of the one who had stolen Little Harriet away, but was black and gold and green. He crouched down in the passageway on his haunches, too tall to stand upright. Red light seemed to pour out of his helmet and through the stitches and chinks of his armor. He said something in a voice like crumbling stone.

  Libby froze. There was a burst of harsh laughter, and answering voices, and Libby realized that there were other huge warrior goblins, around the bend, out of sight. There was no hope at all, no hope, only a black wall behind her and cruel demons before her, but she felt from nowhere a strange thrill, almost painful, like happiness. She had no idea why. She felt the warmth of Q.J. through her back and drew strength from the company of her sister.

  One of the invisible demon warriors came into sight,

  at the bend in the tunnel. He was stooped over almost double, but the ghastly mask of his helmet was looking directly at her. Libby looked back, as if hypnotized.

  Later she wondered how long she had been smelling the sweet familiar evergreen breeze before it finally sank in what it was. Years later she still believed that the breeze had been in her nostrils for some time, and that it was this heartbreaking, piercing, lovely breath that had been giving her that strange and joyful hopefulness even in a cave filled with demon warriors. Now, though, she suddenly realized what it meant.

  The garden gateway was open again. The stone garden, which had dumped them here in this black cave, was now beckoning them somewhere else, anywhere else, away from danger.

  Staring back at the huge demon, she slowly moved her feet until they were propped against the crane stone of the garden. It was better leverage than she had ever had yet for the rolling of Q.J. The piney breeze was pouring over her shoulder, from beyond ihe little ridge of trees. All she had to do was get Q.J. over that ridge.

  She stared back hard at the demon warrior, who was still peering into the gloom of the garden end of the tunnel. She wondered if he also could sense that there was an open garden gateway here. She wondered if he could even see her. For some unknown reason, as a sort of reckless experiment, she stuck her tongue out at him. He didn't respond.

  Wedging her sturdy bottom as far under Q.J. as it would go, Libby gathered up her strength for the greatest and most important effort of her little life. "Oof!" she cried out as she heaved upward and backward. The demon warriors roared, hearing her. Q.J. rolled over once, to the top of the ridge, where the stone trees stopped her from going over.

  "Oh, please!" gasped Libby, leaping up and over the ridge herself. She grabbed Q.J.'s arm and tried to pull her over, which is the hardest thing to do with a heavy weight. Two, three, four, five, six goblin warriors came stooping around the bend, swords drawn. They still seemed to be having trouble seeing into the garden, but suddenly with another gravelly roar they leaped forward.

  "Oh, please!" wailed Libby, pulling on Q.J.'s arm with all her might. And even as she pulled, she felt the stone floor dissolving below her as the tiny garden enlarged and rushed outward expanding, to take her into itself and far away.

  CHAPTER 11

  Annie and Knuckle ball Almost

  Miss Kyoto

  It was on a lovely, dream-like Sunday in April when Kiyoshi-chan's father took his son and the two American children on an excursion to Kyoto.

  "It is the ancient capital of Japan," he said. "You must see it before you go back to Massachusetts."

  "And," said Kiyoshi-chan with a significant look at Annie and Knuckleball, "it has many, many temple gardens."

  "Yes, yes, yes," said his father, raising an eyebrow. "I know that you must see your gardens. I will close my market tomorrow so we can spend two days there. Sunday night we will spend with my sister in Uji."

  Annie and Knuckleball had finally given their whole story to Kiyoshi-chan's family, and though the father had laughed at the parts he couldn't believe in, the mother and old grandparents had taken it all very seriously.

  "We will show you gardens then," the father had finally said. "Until your parents come to get you. We will show you gardens and gardens and gardens until you decide to go home by airplane instead. Of course traveling by gardens is cheaper, but at least airplanes take off on a schedule." He laughed, not unkindly, but as if he thought of them as two rather nice lunatics.

  "Domo arigato gozaimashita," Annie and Knuckleball had both said. "You are being very kind to us."

  So they traveled to Kyoto by train, leaving by the first departures on Sunday morning. The children slept for the first part, laying their heads on each other's shoulders as the train rocked and rattled along, and as the aisles in front of them grew gradually more crowded with curious people. There were many stops, the next station often visible from the last, and the noise of hissing brakes, scuffling feet, and tinny announcements all mingled with the children's dreams and drowsy thoughts.

  They changed trains several times, once at a great booming, roaring madhouse of a station where they had to run up flights of steps, weaving through the crowd, and then down onto another platform, where they were jammed at the last second into a packed train by uniformed attendants.

  "I'm glad we don't have to do this very often," said Knuckleball, peering up at Annie from his place in the crush of bodies. "I can hardly breathe
."

  "I would think there would be a

  line to Kyoto from Tokyo," said Annie to Kiyoshi-chan's father. "The bullet train. Wouldn't that be faster, and less crowded?"

  He looked at her in a bewildered way, so she wondered if she had offended him. Maybe the famous bullet train was too expensive, and she had hurt his feelings by mentioning it? But then with a sick feeling she remembered the whole business about Yazu and Taiho and the rest, and she wondered weakly when the Shinkansen had first been built. She turned and looked out the window, trying to put it from her mind.

  As they left Tokyo behind the crush eased somewhat, and after another change or two they were able to get seats again, but on opposite sides of the train, and separated. Annie gazed out the far window, watching the tiled roofs, neat green fields, and dusty roads flowing by. There were bicycles everywhere, and men and women walking here and there with huge loads on their backs. In places there were children playing, but once there was a schoolyard full of uniformed children doing some kind of organized Sunday activity. The windows were open, so at each stop a rich complexity of smells poured in on the spring breeze, scents of sweet flower blossoms, wood smoke, and hot railroad tar, grease, and metal. There was something poignant in this unfamiliar blend of familiar odors, and Annie found herself excited by it, without knowing why.

  Kiyoshi-chan's father read his newspaper for hours, dozing occasionally while sitting straight up. Annie glanced over at his paper and tried to imagine someone being able to read such a complicated language so easily. She knew a few of the difficult kanji characters, and more of the simpler phonetic symbols, but it boggled her mind that anyone could read everyday news, sports articles, or the goofy-looking comics in such a complicated form of writing. It seemed like the sort of writing made only for poetry or mystical thoughts. Or maybe incantations for opening philosophical gardens, she said to herself. After trying to puzzle out a bit of it, she shook her head and looked back out the window.

  They arrived at Kyoto Station after a train journey of over five hours, and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, stiff and ready to see sights.

  "First we eat lunch," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, and untying a large silk wrapper, he passed around a bento to each one. Each bento was a box divided into compartments, filled with helpings of rice, vegetables, pickles, and small slices of fruit. They sat on the concrete ledge outside the station and ate. The sun was warm on their heads.

  "So how many temples are there in Kyoto?" asked Knuckleball, picking up a piece of fried pork with his chopsticks.

  Kiyoshi-chan's father said something, with his mouth full. Annie stared at him.

  "Excuse me?" she said. "How many did you say?"

  He swallowed. "Two thousand," he said, and smiled. He stuffed in another heaped mouthful of rice.

  "Two thousand!" she said. "Two thousand?"

  "Hai" he nodded, chewing. "Yes. Two thousand."

  Annie bit into a pickled radish and chewed several times. "And how many of these have gardens?" she asked.

  "All of them, of course," he said. "What is a temple without a garden?"

  "And are there other gardens in Kyoto," asked Knuckleball. "Besides the temple ones?"

  "Of course," said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "What is a home without a garden?"

  "How can we possibly see them all?" wailed Annie.

  "You can't, of course," he said. "But it only takes one to whisk you back to Boston, like a magic carpet."

  He chuckled, cleaning out the last grains of rice from his lunch and popping them in his mouth one by one with his chopsticks. "But regardless," he said, "if you want to see philosophical gardens, Kyoto is the place to come."

  Annie and Knuckleball looked at each other.

  "Then what are we waiting for?" said Annie. So it was that the Kyoto trip became a disaster. Like the worst sort of tourist they bolted from one place to another all afternoon, in fact until the evening became too dark to see a thing. Then they took a local train to Uji and stayed the night in the tiny home of Kiyoshi-chan's aunt, and were back in Kyoto before seven o'clock the next morning, zigzagging from one garden to another through all the length and breadth of the old city.

  Annie would regret this for years afterward, until she finally was able to return to the incredible city of Kyoto again, and to see it the way it was meant to be seen. They fled from temple to temple, garden to garden, shrine to shrine, hardly seeing the breathtaking clouds of cherry blossoms in full flower around them, never taking a moment to soak in the peacefulness of a dry, bright, sun-washed Zen garden. Years later Annie would still remember and regret the grim look that gradually settled on the face of Kiyoshi-chan's father and of Kiyoshi-chan himself, realizing that she and Knuckleball must have seemed those days like the very crassest kind of American sightseer. Though only the proprietor of a little country market, Kiyoshi-chan's father, like all Japanese, loved the beauty and metaphysics of nature, and was a minor poet in his own village. Not believing in their desperate need to find a garden gateway, he could only interpret their headlong rush through Kyoto as the greatest possible insensitivity to beauty, to delicacy, to sun and bloom and wind and tree.

  But Annie and Knuckleball could only think of lost Little Harriet, and they galloped from one place to another, towing their Japanese friends behind them. They looked everywhere for likely places, sniffing their way through the heavy scent of spring flowers for a familiar cool, piney breeze, stepping into bright shrubbery and behind stone pagodas and under twisted little evergreens, hoping against hope to feel the earth dissolve beneath their feet and to find themselves swept away on the trail of Little Harriet again. But the ground was always solid, and every hint of an evergreen smell turned out to be the smell of an actual pine or larch or cedar, almost lost in the overwhelming Kyoto riot of April flowers.

  They saw the Kinkakuji, or Golden Pavilion, and the Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion, both magnificent in their settings of ponds and trees. At the insistence of Kiyoshi-chan's father they took a moment to dip water and drink with a long-handled tin cup from the famous spring of the Clear Water Temple, Kiyomizudera. They saw the many-roofed pagoda of Daigoji, and the kilometers of red torn at the Shinto shrine of Fushimiinari.

  They saw the famous dry rock garden of Ryoanji, and at the Tendai temple of Sanzenin they saw but hardly noticed the lovely moss-mounded garden, with its shrubs sculpted into fat little heaps, like clusters of very docile green farm animals.

  After all this, Annie finally paused in one place. She never knew the name of it, but it was a deep bamboo grove, with the stalks of bamboo growing almost too

  tightly to walk between. The pointed leaves overhead were entangled together into a green roof, through which the Monday afternoon sun could barely filter. She looked into the grove and was caught, as if by a mystic power.

  "Come on, Knuckler," she whispered.

  "Yes!" breathed Knuckleball, seeing into the grove himself. "This is just the kind of place."

  They stepped into the grove, while Kiyoshi-chan and his father looked after them, puzzled. It was like stepping into an underwater world, the kind that comes to life in so many Japanese fairy tales of the realm of the Dragon King. Liquid green light flowed around them, the ground was soft underfoot, and the bamboo spoke in a hushed whisper, like the sound of gentle rain. They took each other's hands wordlessly. There was a breeze through the grove, not the piney mountain breeze they were looking for, but maybe related to it, somehow.

  Annie turned back toward their friends, whom they could barely see through the gently swaying stalks. "We have really not done well," she said. "We have to go talk to them."

  "OK," said Knuckleball, understanding.

  They emerged into the bright sunlight, where the man and the boy waited for them, wearing expressions of long but weary patience. The two American children bowed very low to them both, one at a time.

  "We have been very rude," Annie said. "We have been a little out of our minds. Please forgive us. We have hurt you, and
we are sorry."

  Kiyoshi-chan grinned, and his father bowed to Annie, insisting that no such apology was necessary. When he straightened, his face was eased of its frown.

  "Show us what you would like us to see," said Annie, "in the time we have left."

  So they went to just one more place, another nameless temple with a garden. There they sat as the shadows lengthened, watching three turtles on a rock, listening to the thock... thock... thock of a bamboo water pipe, which filled from a falling trickle and tipped, pouring its water into a stone basin. No garden gateway showed itself, but a great peace flowed around them, and Annie and Knuckleball both felt some of their distress fall away.

  "Everything will be OK," said Annie. "We'll find her yet."

  They left Kyoto just before dusk, and slept most of the way back to Kashiwa, despite all the jostle and jolts of the trains. When they got back to Kiyoshi-chan's little house it was like coming home, and in a short time his mother had a simple but steaming meal on the table, with bowls of tofu soup and heaped white rice.

  Kiyoshi-chan's obaa-san knelt beside Annie, her hands folded in her lap. "You must not have found it," she said, "or you would not still be here."

  "I was still trying to catch it in my net," said Annie. "I'm afraid that even if it was there I would have missed it. I was like a crazy woman."

  The old grandmother chuckled. "You seem to be sane again," she said. "Maybe you are ready to find it now."

  "Maybe," said Annie.

  The obaa-san looked at Kiyoshi-chan's father. "There is one more place you must take them," she said.

  He rolled his eyes. "Where is that?"

  "To the shrine of Sumiyoshi-no-Kami," said the old woman.

  "The god of poetry?" said the man.

  "And to its garden," said the obaa-san. "The Garden of a Thousand Worlds."

  "But that is six hours from here, in the mountains," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, with obvious reluctance. "I would have to borrow Sakamoto-san's car. And it is only one garden. Such a trip for one garden."