Blood Ninja

by Nick Lake

  But they couldn’t have, of course. Shusaku had been a samurai lord, and Kawabata had said that he was descended from ninja. They may as well have come from different worlds.

  Kawabata took a step back. “How will you conduct the grand initiation?” he asked. “After all, the rules clearly state—”

  “I know what the rules state. I and my fellow ninja will think of something.” A dozen or so men and women wearing the black hooded robes of the ninja stepped forward. Taro saw that they all wore masks over their faces. They bowed to Shusaku.

  “Well …,” said Kawabata, “if all the ninja are in agreement …” He hesitated, as if hoping one of them would break ranks, but they simply nodded. He raised his hands. “Fine. In that case …”

  Taro felt a surge of hope.

  “… we will test the boy’s skill. You say he is talented, Lord Endo. Let him prove it. Then we will welcome him with open arms.”

  Shusaku scowled, and Taro’s stomach lurched, as if he were falling. Kawabata’s request was clearly reasonable—the assenting murmur of the crowd confirmed it. “Very well,” said Shusaku through gritted teeth. “And the challenge?”

  Kawabata looked at Taro appraisingly. Taro knew that he was trying to think of something that would be difficult for him, maybe impossible.

  “The bow,” said the fat elder.

  Taro smiled inside. A peasant boy, even one who was the secret son of a lord, would not be expected to master the bow. They were expensive weapons, and few apart from the samurai had access to them.

  Shusaku only nodded, giving nothing away. Kawabata clicked his fingers and one of the villagers came forward holding out a long, elegant bow, and a quiver of arrows.

  Shusaku turned to Taro. “What do you think?” he whispered.

  “It should be all right,” whispered Taro back. He nodded at the cliffs. “The walls limit the distance he can ask of me. Even from one side to the other … Well, it would be a hard shot, but I can do it.”

  Shusaku nodded. Taro liked his openness, his trust in Taro’s opinion. “Very well,” he said. “The bow it is.”

  Kawabata gestured to one of the boys in the crowd. “You, fetch a small rider’s shield.” The boy disappeared into a cave. There was a long, silent moment, while Taro looked around him at the expectant crowd and the cliff’s blank, encircling face. Then the boy came running out again, breathing hard, and carrying a round wooden shield, about a forearm’s length across. He handed it to Kawabata.

  Kawabata put a hand on his wife’s shoulder again, and again Taro saw her flinch. He put a chubby finger under her chin, lifting her face. She looked up at him with wide, nervous eyes. “Since you feel so strongly that I should listen to Lord Endo,” he said, “perhaps you should provide the test of his young charge’s skill. You wouldn’t mind, would you? I’m sure the boy’s a good shot. After all, Lord Endo says so.”

  The woman hesitated. “As you wish, Husband-san,” she said finally.

  At this, a fat boy of about Taro’s age stepped forward from the crowd. Taro could see immediately from the shared facial features that this was Kawabata’s son. “Is this necessary, Father?” the boy asked. “Why don’t you just send them away?”

  “I will do as I like with my wife,” said Kawabata. “That is what love is for, is it not?” He turned to his son and smiled. “You would not defend her if you had seen her flirting with Lord Endo earlier, as if he were a samurai on horseback, and she an impressionable peasant girl.”

  The boy turned a hard, flat look on his mother, and stepped back. “As you say, Father,” he said.

  “Hold this, like so, just above your stomach,” said Kawabata, handing the shield to his wife, who accepted it with trembling hands. He showed her where he wanted it—below the neck, exposing both her throat and her lower belly. “Over to the wall,” he said, pointing to the far side of the crater. Taro felt a sickening tightness take hold of his stomach, as if a ghostly hand were gripping his entrails. Kawabata pointed behind Taro. “And you, over to the other side. Where you came in. You have one shot to strike the shield.”

  Shusaku gave Taro another searching look, but Taro only nodded. It was too late to back out now. And even if he did, then what? He couldn’t go back to the valleys, with men like Kira on his trail—the thin, cruel samurai who had killed that peasant only because the man had been taking some honey from a tree.

  He simply had to make the shot.

  Simply.

  He turned back and saw a crooked smile on Kawabata’s face. If Taro missed the woman … Well, he wasn’t skilled enough to join the ninja clan. But if he missed the shield and hit the woman … at this distance the shot would almost certainly not penetrate deep enough to kill her. But it would kill any chance Taro had of being accepted by this strange village.

  Arriving at the entrance to the cave, Taro turned and took hold of the bow. He drew an arrow from the quiver and notched it carefully into the string. Once, twice, three times, he lined up the shot and drew back the arrow, feeling the muscles in his arms and chest tighten, feeling the string go taut and the wood bowing flexible and strong against his body. He took a deep breath—held it. A movement of the chest or diaphragm at the wrong moment, and the arrow could fly wrong. Better to be still, to be as dead.

  As he watched, Heiko waved to him, then clasped her hands together, closing her eyes in a mime of peace and calm. He grinned.

  He could do this.

  Taro aimed straight at the woman’s face—compensating for the distance, but it was a hard thing to do nevertheless, a cold thing. She had tears running down her cheeks and he could just make them out from here—and let go. The arrow streaked into the air, arcing with a flash of silver beneath the painted stars and moon, tracing a trajectory so beautiful in its curve and symmetry that for a moment every breath in the crater remained in its owner’s lungs.

  Then the arrow struck home, and the woman fell back against the rock, before sliding to the ground.

  CHAPTER 37

  Lady Hana gripped the horse’s reins with one hand and swung her sword with the other. The dummy—a straw man in samurai uniform—fell backward, a diagonal slash across its armor. Hana grinned, slowing the horse. She twirled the sword in her hand, enjoying its weight and the way that it reflected the afternoon sunlight.

  “Very good, Lady Hana,” said Hayao. He was one of the samurai who had been assigned to watch over her during the day. They had to stay within the castle walls. Lord Oda had been quite particular about that. But Hayao understood Hana’s need to get out, to improve her skills. He had lent her his own sword, and helped her to put together the dummy. Then he had set it up in the stable courtyard, at the rear of the castle. The yard was just wide enough so that Hana could get a horse up to a decent canter, before having to turn around.

  The other samurai—a company of six had been detailed to Hana’s protection, doubling her usual guard—stood silently at the sides of the courtyard, or kept watch on the walls above. They never spoke to Hana or seemed to take any interest in her training. She frequently sparred with Hayao, or practiced her horseback sword skills, yet the other guards seemed indifferent to their exertions. This was unusual. Hana was used to having to sneak out to practice her sword moves, and fitting the time for training between her more refined pursuits.

  There had not been any such lessons for quite some time. And of the four-year-old Tokugawa boy, there had been no sign.

  It appeared, in fact, that Hayao had been ordered to help Hana train—though she had learned enough in her etiquette classes, and from her own painful experience, not to question her father directly as to his intentions. Certainly Lord Oda had taken little interest in his daughter’s lessons in calligraphy or poetry of late, and his previous disapproval for her unladylike activities and martial inclinations—as well as anxiety that she might somehow mar her looks or injure herself—seemed to have been replaced by an indulgence that bordered on the cavalier. The other day he had walked past when Hana was throwing kniv
es at a board, and he hadn’t even blinked. At the same time he seemed nervous and distracted, and it was not hard for Hana to work out that some new threat weighed on her father’s mind. A threat that had some bearing on her, perhaps? A threat so dangerous that the daimyo wished his own daughter to be able to defend herself against it.

  Yes, it seemed to Hana that perhaps her father now wished her to train, and this was why he had assigned Hayao to watch over her. This gave her a little frisson of fear, even as she was pleased with the new freedom. Was she in danger? Her father had never looked very kindly on her fighting before, though he had tolerated the bokken. Now she was learning to use a real sword, with a wicked razor-sharp blade. And Hayao encouraged her to test her ability ever more with each passing day—wielding the sword on horseback, engaging in hand-to-hand combat, learning to use a bow.

  “Turn the horse around,” said Hayao. “For this next exercise I’m going to fire blunt arrows at you. See if you can avoid them while cutting down the dummy.”

  Later that day Hana walked down one of the castle’s many corridors toward a small courtyard where roses grew. Hayao had been teaching her some punches and kicks that she wanted to practice in private—where she didn’t feel the unimpressed eyes of the samurai on her when she lost her balance and fell.

  She was passing a servant’s room when the sound of her father’s voice made her pause. She crept over to the door, puzzled. What was her father doing in a servant’s room? Lord Oda never noticed servants, unless to chastise them. And that usually ended with a beheading.

  Hana saw that the door was open a crack. Inside, she saw her father facing a man dressed all in black.

  “I thought Kira was looking for the Tokugawa boy,” said this man. Hana frowned. The Tokugawa boy? As far as she knew, he was playing in the courtyard of the castle, throwing rotten apples at passing traders and servants.

  “He is. That is not what I called you here for.” Lord Oda paused. “You will have noticed, I don’t doubt, what happened to your … colleagues. The ones who failed to take the boy from his village. I expect better results from you.”

  Village? What village? And was this Tokugawa boy the boy in the message that she had taken from the dead pigeon? The one who “still lives”?

  The ninja—for that was what he was, Hana realized with a shiver—nodded. “I never fail.”

  Lord Oda smiled. “So I heard. I only wish you had been there for the attempt on the boy. Perhaps then it would have met with greater success. What was it you were doing at the time?”

  “A pirate crew were preying on Portuguese ships trading with the shogunate in Kyoto. They had gotten hold of a man-of-war, which meant they had cannons and guns at their disposal. Not only that, but the pirates were many, and desperate, while the Portuguese trading vessels they attacked had lost half their crew on the journey from China, to disease and storms, and those who were left had lost any will to fight. The pirates seemed unbeatable. So the shogun’s advisers thought of me. They asked me to … remind the pirates of the shogun’s trade interests. It took me some time to find them, and when I did, they were far from shore. I had to board the ship from the water, alone. It was one of my more interesting missions.”

  “You delivered your message?”

  “In a manner of speaking. One of them raised the alarm, which was unfortunate. I killed every man on board.”

  Hana’s father grinned a distasteful grin. “Good. Because yours is the most important task of all. You must protect my daughter by night. By day, my own samurai will defend her. They will be there at night too, of course, but they will be vulnerable to … those of your persuasion. I need someone to make sure no ninja gets into this castle. And even if they penetrate the walls, they must not reach the fourth tower, which is where I will be moving my daughter.”

  Hana’s eyes widened. The fourth tower! That was where her father usually kept prisoners, men who had plotted against him or otherwise gravely offended him. It was the tallest part of the castle, and was protected by a circular staircase in the Portuguese style. In theory a single man could defend it. The staircase turned to the right as it ascended, meaning that a man stationed above could wield his sword in his stronger right hand, while an attacker would have to move his to his left. It had not escaped Hana’s notice that her father had made the tower impregnable to all but himself—for who but a left-handed sword saint could hope to fight their way up? This was Lord Oda’s way; he liked always to have insurance policies. The fourth tower would protect him and his family from attackers. But if for any reason he was outside and needed to get in, the tower was perfectly configured for his disability.

  Hana turned her attention back to the room, where her father was still talking. “Tokugawa will have heard by now what happened in Shirahama though he doesn’t know his son is a vampire, and I imagine the traitor who saved him would like to keep it that way. So of course, he’ll think that his precious son Taro is dead, since that fool of a ninja who turned him will try to hide him.”

  Precious son Taro? Hana had never heard of a Tokugawa son by that name. What was her father talking about?

  “How do you know the boy is a vampire?” said her father’s mysterious interlocutor. “You’re sure he’ll come at night?”

  “I’m sure,” said her father. “My ninjas saw him turned, on the hillside in Shirahama. They said he recovered from a dose of steel two hand-spans wide, right through the stomach.”

  “And you’re sure the ninja will hide the boy’s transformation?”

  “Yes. He’ll be terrified that Lord Tokugawa will never forgive him for making his secret son a vampire, instead of merely rescuing him as he was ordered.”

  “He’s probably right.”

  “Of course. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Tokugawa now believes his son to be dead. He has already killed one of his sons, and sent the other to me. To lose the last is unacceptable. If I know Tokugawa, he will not rest until our situations are rendered equal.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He will kill Hana.”

  Behind the door, Hana stifled a gasp.

  CHAPTER 38

  Taro’s breath came out in a rush that he didn’t know was a scream, and he was running across the crater floor, as Shusaku ran too …

  He got there moments after Shusaku, moments before Kawabata, who puffed heavily behind him. He dropped to his knees as he ran, letting his momentum carry him in a painful skid up to the wife’s body. She sat against the rock face, smiling, holding the shield in her hands. She passed the round target to Shusaku. Her face sagged with relief, and her mouth rose at the edges in a grin. Tears continued to fall.

  Shusaku held the shield above his head. Right in the middle was the shaft of the arrow, standing perpendicular to the wood. There was a collective sigh from the crowd.

  “Gods!“ exclaimed Yukiko, her voice carrying as usual. “He’s brilliant! Why didn’t you say?” she demanded as she bounded up to Taro. “Here I’ve been wasting my time wrestling with that lump”—she pointed to Hiro—”when I could have been learning the bow with you.”

  Hiro waved a dismissive hand. “The bow takes delicacy and grace,” he said to Yukiko. “You’d be hopeless at it.”

  She gave him a playful punch on the arm, and Taro felt a warm spreading gladness in his chest to have people on his side—more than one—and a place in the world. He smiled at Yukiko. “Are we … friends?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry about before. I was upset.”

  Heiko squeezed her sister’s arm and smiled. Then she gave Taro a little bow. “That was magnificent,” she said softly. “Certainly worthy of a daimyo’s son.”

  Taro blushed.

  Kawabata stood in the middle of the crater, glowering. He put an arm around his wife, who did not look at him. Then he pointed at Taro and Hiro, followed by the two girls. “Let us all welcome our new apprentices,” he said, with bad grace.

  There were a few nervous hellos from the assembled people. The nin
ja bowed. The young man with the spear nodded at Taro, an unsmiling but not unfriendly gesture. Taro raised a hand awkwardly to greet the silent people. Then his eye caught on a boy standing a little apart from the others. The boy was chubby, his red face set in a scowl of scorn and anger. His mouth, firmly closed in an expression of exaggerated disgust, put Taro in mind of a clam’s closed shell—pink flesh squeezed white in places by pressure. But the set of the crinkled eyes, and the fleshy softness of the countenance, reminded him of something much more immediate, something much closer. The physiognomy was unmistakably similar to Kawabata’s.

  Kawabata’s son stared at Taro with undisguised hatred, and Taro shivered—not just from the cold. His arrival at the clan’s stronghold could not have gone much worse.

  Shusaku turned to Taro, Hiro, Heiko, and Yukiko. “Come on. I’ll take you to your sleeping places.”

  But Taro was thinking of his mother—or, at least, the woman he had always known as his mother. Heiko and Yukiko may have been destined from a young age, as the ninja had said, to become ninja. But he was here for one reason and one reason only—to discover where she had gone, and to find her. “The pigeon,” he said to Shusaku. “Has it arrived?”

  Shusaku went over to Kawabata and spoke to him for a moment. Taro saw Kawabata shake his head, and he felt his body ringing like a struck bell.

  “No sign of it,” said Shusaku when he returned to their side. Seeing Taro’s expression, he added, “But don’t worry. If she has traveled far, the pigeon may take some time to get here.”

  Taro nodded. But how far could his mother have gone? He may have been an illiterate peasant, but he was smart enough to realize that a pigeon could cover ground faster than a person on foot, and hadn’t he and Shusaku and Hiro covered many ri in their walk to the mountain?

  The pigeon should have been here before them.