Read At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories for Free Online Page B

house.
    “No,” I shrieked and ran out onto the veranda. “Leave him here!”
    The man walked forward. I ran to the room where my husband was, burst in to where he sat with an emissary from the capital and his secretary. “Husband! Run!”
    “Wife?—” he said as I felt the veranda beside me shiver and dissolve. I fell to my knees. Yoshifuji jumped up, his sword sheath in his hands. I clawed at the Kannon’s robe as he passed me, locked my hands in his sword belt until he was pulling me forward with him. He did not even slow.
    “What are you—” my husband bellowed as the man prodded him with the stick in his hand. Yoshifuji jumped backward and pulled his sword free.
    I screamed. The sword shivered into a handful of dirty straw. My husband looked at it in disgust and threw it to the ground. The man prodded him again and Yoshifuji moved backward, through the house.
    “Leave him, please leave him, they mean nothing to him, I love him—” I begged and prayed as the man dragged me through our house, out into the gardens. My hands bled from the hard edge of the belt. If nothing else around us was real, I knew this was, this hot blood in my palms. Yoshifuji kept turning back, trying to help me. The man just jabbed at him again, and forced him stumbling on.
    The belt leather was slick with blood. My fingers slipped and I fell behind the man onto the dirt below the storehouse beside one of the support posts. The Kannon gave my husband one more jab, and he crawled out from our home and stood upright in his kitchen garden. I crawled after him but I knew it was too late already. I lay by the storehouse in my robes, blood on my hands, my long hair trailing on the ground.
    It was still dusk there, the thirteenth evening after Yoshifuji had come to me, his thirteenth year in my fox-world. Nearly everyone was in the garden huddled in little clumps and talking among themselves. Yoshifuji was two things in my eyes, like something seen and distorted through water: handsome in his dress robes, a little dusty now, still carrying an empty sword sheath; and covered with filth, casual robes stained and torn, holding a little worm-eaten stick: a man who had lived in the dirt with foxes.
    The boy was the first to see my husband looking around him.
    “Father!” he shouted and ran to Yoshifuji. “Is this you?”
    “Son?” my husband said hesitantly. “Tadasada?” I saw memory coming back to him, but the fox magic was strong enough to shape his understanding of things. “How have you not grown more while I was gone?”
    The boy threw his arms around the man. “Father, what has happened to you? You look so old!”
    Yoshifuji pushed the boy away. “It doesn’t matter. I am only here to send your mother back to her family. She is here, I presume? I was so desperate after your mother left to visit her relatives, and she was gone so long. But I met someone, a wonderful woman, and married her. We have had a lovely little boy. He’s growing much handsomer than you, I must admit. He’s my heir, you know. You’re no longer my first son, Tadasada: I love his mother so.”
    The boy looked up at a darkened room of the house. I saw a form there, robes shifting softly, and I realized it was Shikibu watching but too aware of the proprieties to come down and greet her husband in front of so many people. The boy straightened. “Where is this son of yours?”
    “Over there,” my husband said, pointing at the storehouse.
    They saw me then. “A fox!” one man shouted, and they all took up the cry: “A fox! A fox!” Men ran toward me and the storehouse, carrying sticks and torches.
    “Husband!” I screamed. “Stop them!”
    He hesitated, obviously confused. “Wife?” he asked unsteadily.
    “A fox!” the people yelled.
    “Please stay with me!” I held out my arms to him. He stepped toward me. The boy threw himself into Yoshifuji’s arms, overbalancing him.
    I looked up at the house again in the instant before the men caught up to