by Nick Lake
Hana turned to him, holding out a hand. She looked sad. ‘Taro...’
He ignored her. She thought she wanted a quiet life now; she had never been a peasant. She didn’t know the misery of going hungry. He would not take her to Shirahama, to be the wife of a fisherman, living in a rude hut such as the one he had grown up in. She might be angry with him at first, if he decided to battle the dragon. She might think he was placing the lure of adventure above the prospect of a quiet life with her. But she didn’t understand what it meant to be poor, not really. If he did this, and if he won the reward the shogun was offering, she would be grateful. She would understand.
One day.
‘Why do you bring me the message?’ said Taro, though he knew perfectly well why.
‘I thought... you might be interested,’ said the abbot.
‘In the dragon? Or in the reward?’
‘Both. I know you have been growing restless here.’
Taro nodded slowly. It was true that he couldn’t remain at the monastery any longer.
‘I wish you could stay,’ said the abbot. ‘I wish I could make you a monk, and teach you. I think you would make a good addition to the order. But it’s not safe. And really... I don’t know if it’s what you want.’
Taro glanced at Hana, who had a strange expression on her face. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ he said. ‘But a dragon? It just seems ridiculous. I mean, they don’t exist, do they?’ Some thought the dragon in the mountain, and the great fish under the earth whose twitching caused earthquakes, were merely stories told to explain the unexplainable.
The abbot smiled. ‘You’re a vampire,’ he said. ‘You travelled into the realm of hungry ghosts and spoke to your mother; you rescued Hana from death. Tell me. Do you think the dragon is real?’
Taro thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps. But I don’t know if I could fight one.’
‘Of course you could. The more important question is whether you could win,’ said the abbot. ‘Dragons are much more powerful than ninjas,’ he added significantly.
Taro thought back to the attack in his room. ‘Then... I could die.’
‘You could,’ said the abbot. His expression was inscrutable. He handed the scroll to Taro. ‘I must send my rice taxes to the shogun this month,’ he said. ‘A full cartload. You could take them for me. See Edo. Decide what you would like to do. No one is going to judge you if you are not interested in facing a dragon. They are terrifying creatures.’ A shadow passed across the old man’s eyes. ‘Take the rice for me. The rest is up to you.’
‘All right,’ said Taro. ‘I’ve never been to Edo before.’
The abbot nodded, then swept out of the room again.
He felt Hana flinch beside him, but he ignored her disapproval. In his mind, he had already made the decision to face the dragon. Of course he had: he’d never faced a dragon before, and he would have wanted to do it even just to see if he would win. The reward, though, was what made it impossible to refuse. With the money, the prestige... he would finally be worth something as a husband. He would be a worthy match for Hana. And maybe... just maybe... he would be one step closer to fulfilling his destiny. The prophetess had told him he would be shogun one day. It seemed to Taro that killing the dragon, ridding the country of a monster, might be a good first step.
He knew it would hurt Hana, but he had no choice.
One day it would all be clear to her, the reason why he needed the land and the title, and they would be married and stand on the ramparts of a castle together – he smiled even more at the thought. He was still staring at her when Hiro, who never seemed to feel the tension in any situation, put a hand on Taro’s shoulder.
‘So,’ he said, pointing to the scroll in Taro’s hand. ‘Are you going to do it? Because, Taro, my friend, I’ve got to say, a dragon...’
Hana sighed. ‘Of course he is,’ she said. She turned her back on him, but not before he saw that there was a tear on her cheek.
It struck him like a physical blow.
CHAPTER 4
Near the capital city of Edo
THE MAN – though boy might have been more accurate a term – was scaling the lower slopes of Mount Fuji. He turned and looked back on the city, so small below him. He had not left Edo often, and he was surprised to find how much world there was outside it. He’d thought its streets, rivers, and alleys contained everything there was to see, from prostitutes to children’s entertainers, from samurai to noodle makers. He’d thought it all went on forever, a giant construction of bricks, roof slates, cartwheels, endless streets; made by people, moved by people. Yet here he was, not two days’ walk away, and the place seemed miniature, a toy.
He paused, feeling a telltale contraction in his chest. He pressed his hands to his sides, closed his eyes, and concentrated on his breathing. It had plagued him since childhood, this affliction. He would be running or walking – or sometimes just sitting still – and his lungs would close, as if operating of their own volition, leaving him gasping for air. Sometimes, though, if he caught the signs in time he could stop it, by focusing.
There was the terror, though, that was the problem. Once air became something he had to fight for, he was seized by a fear that nearly immobilized him, a conviction that this time, this time he was going to die. He wasn’t afraid of being hit or hurt, which was lucky given his upbringing, but he was so frightened of the tightness in his chest that he almost wanted to die, to make it stop.
He thought there was nothing more terrifying in this entire world than the idea of running out of air.
One breath...
Two...
He straightened up. There was no one to laugh here. No one to call him slow-coach, pigeon-chest, rattle-breath. All his life, the boy had suffered such insults, as he trained to be a low-ranking samurai in the household his father worked for. Often, it had been his father doing the insulting.
Now, though, he would show them.
He turned his gaze towards the high places, the mountain peaks above him. The closest one was his destination. From the top spewed fire – diffuse, almost droplets, like burning sea foam. He could barely make out two places where the fire ran down the mountainside, finding crevasses, reaching ever farther downhill, like flickering red fingers. Already one village had been destroyed, the boy had heard, and the scouts for the shogun said the molten flames must soon reach Edo.
It was for the purpose of stopping them that the boy had been sent.
No.
No – he could not claim that to himself, even with no one else around. He had not been sent; he had volunteered for it, wishing to prove to all those who had called him pigeon-chest that he could do great things, wishing to obtain from the shogun the land and title promised to the one who would defeat the dragon.
Thinking of the dragon, his chest again threatened to close in on itself. He allowed his eyes to travel up from the path he walked – carpeted with pine needles – to the wooded slopes, cedar and ash, and then the rocky mountainside and then the fire, a continual bursting into the air as of sea spray from heavy waves hitting shore.
There was a dragon up there. There was a dragon up there, and he was going to try to kill it.
One breath...
Two breaths...
He touched the sword at his side, blinking away the sweat that had trickled into his eyes. Was it his imagination, or was the air growing warmer, the closer to the mountaintop he drew? He cursed this country, with its thin skin, and the monsters that lived underneath.
There was a giant fish that lived under Honshu island, the whole of Japan carried on its back through the sea. A carp. And when the carp had an itch, it would buck and twitch and the earth would shake, causing houses to collapse and trees to fall. There was a dragon, the dragon of fire, and when it awoke from slumbering in some high-up cave, it would spit flames and burn villages and towns until it was stopped. These things were known.
Only, at least in the boy’s lifetime, neither fish nor dragon had moved or been
seen, and other than the war between Lord Oda, now dead, and the Ikko-ikki monks, there had been no disruptions to the peace of the islands. It was for this reason that the shogun was so angered by the dragon – and frightened, the boy thought, he had seen it in his eyes – and had requested that it be killed. The reward was a plot of land of twenty thousand koku, and a position as daimyo.
But then the shogun, too, was only a boy. And not in the sense that he was not yet a man – in the simple sense that he had seen only twelve summers. It was natural that he should be afraid.
The boy on the mountainside found, to his great pleasure, that thinking of the shogun’s fear cheered him up. Yes. If the shogun himself was frightened, then who could blame him, Kazue, for trembling a little whenever his eyes strayed to the mountaintop and the fire?
His breathing eased, and he continued to climb.
The eyes in the darkness told him to stop. They were red and bright, shining in the depths of the cave like enormous rubies.
‘Who are you?’ they said. The boy couldn’t be sure, but he thought the voice might be in his head, not echoing in the cave like a real sound.
‘M-m-my name is Kazue,’ he said. ‘Of the household of—’
‘Your household is nothing to me. I have lived since the birth of the world. You are mortal? That is my question.’
‘Ah... yes.’
‘That is a pity for you.’
Kazue was shaking all over, only half from fatigue. Sweat was leaking from his every pore now, as if in the face of this flaming beast the very water in his body were abandoning him in fear, running down his face so that he tasted it when he spoke. The heat was terrible, a solid thing pressing against him, like a wall that ran all around him. The only mercy was that the fire had stopped. As he had neared the summit, it had simply trickled to a halt, as if the dragon knew he was coming, had heard his approach from far off, and was sitting like a cat waiting for a mouse.
As, indeed, appeared to be the case.
Hardly believing he was doing it, Kazue slowly drew his sword. If his tormentors from the training yard had seen him at that moment, they would have been amazed – they would have seen true courage, which cares nothing for traitorous lungs or shallow, unmuscled chests. They would have known in that moment that bravery has nothing to do with strength.
Sadly, though, they were not there – and neither, in any meaningful sense, was Kazue. Those eyes in the darkness had robbed his power of thought.
‘Did you come to kill me?’ said the eyes.
‘Y-yes.’
‘And who sent you?’
‘The... the shogun. He promised—’
‘I do not care what he promised. He does not rule this land.’
Kazue blinked. He had come here expecting a fight with a creature from legend, and instead he was being interrogated by something he couldn’t see. ‘I’m – I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t,’ came the voice that seemed to be only in his head. ‘The emperors descend from Amaterasu. This is how it was, and how it should be. Only he who holds the sword, the jewel, and the staff may rule.’
‘The shogun has those,’ said Kazue. It was known: he had seen the ceremonial artefacts himself, when they were displayed on feast days.
‘No,’ said the dragon. ‘He doesn’t. He has two treasures and a worthless trinket. The shogun is nothing.’
Was this a riddle? Kazue was trying to think, but his mind didn’t want to obey; it was a familiar feeling to him, since he had trouble controlling his lungs. Strangely, maybe because of the heat, his lungs themselves were working fine. He racked his brain. This was not how he had imagined his encounter with the dragon; he had seen himself destroying it in noble – if not very clearly pictured – combat, cutting off its head and bringing it back to Edo, to lay before the shogun as pretty young girls watched.
‘What do you want?’ he asked the dragon. ‘Why are you burning everything?’ He had a dim thought that if the dragon wanted to talk, maybe he could talk it out of its destruction.
‘I want our mother’s descendant on the throne; I want the world to be as it should. I want the usurpers dead. I want justice. Tell me: would you go down this mountainside and kill the shogun?’
Ten years of samurai training spoke for Kazue, in his own voice. He had been so inculcated with obedience that he could no more kill the shogun than he could cut off his own hand, unless the shogun asked him to, and then he would have to. ‘No.’
‘I thought not. Yet the one who woke me will. With my help, he will destroy the shogun and he will claim the artefacts, and at last an heir of Amaterasu will rule this country again. Unless you stop me, that is.’
‘Unless I... ?’
‘You brought that sword for a reason, I presume? So wield it, if you can.’
Kazue felt a rush of hot wind, as the eyes came towards him. The cave, which was a high, wide cavern, suddenly seemed small and well lit. Uncoiling in front of Kazue was a creature from legend, impossibly vast, the size of its eyes no preparation at all for the enormity of its sinuous body, its bearded and horned head. The dragon was exactly as drawn in the pictures Kazue had seen, a winged serpent with feet and claws, a bearded head like that of a dog, bristling with teeth. Its dimensions, though, were beyond anything painted by man; its head alone was the size of a horse.
If there had been a tiny part of Kazue’s mind that did not accept the reality of dragons, or giant fish under the skin of the earth, it fell silent at that moment.
Suddenly the scene was more what Kazue had imagined on his way up the mountainside – yet now he knew that he would be cutting off no heads and impressing no pretty young girls. He raised his sword uselessly.
The dragon opened its mouth, and Kazue saw a flame spark behind the gate of teeth, as the creature bore down upon him. In the last moment before his mind was wiped blank by fear, and his body wiped from the earth by fire, he was capable of one final thought.
He had been wrong.
Running out of air was not, by a very long way, the most terrifying thing in the world.
CHAPTER 5
IN THE TIME that followed, Taro became less certain about his decision. For sure, it did seem like the perfect opportunity to leave the mountain behind, follow his destiny. Even if he didn’t become shogun, the reward from killing the dragon would be enough.
And it wasn’t as though he could have stayed on the mountain, was it? He had known that the situation was untenable, that he couldn’t remain with the monks forever. He just wished Shusaku was here, so he could ask the ninja for guidance.
But he would have to try to get by without his mentor’s advice, at least for now. Taro had killed Lord Oda on his own, hadn’t he? Anyway, Shusaku was in Edo, or so he had said, and that was where Taro would be taking the rice taxes. At the back of his mind was a hope that he could find the older ninja, ask him what to do.
Before he committed himself to anything, though, Taro wanted to see the abbot on his own. Shusaku wasn’t here; the abbot was the next best thing. A couple of days later, when he could walk easily without support, he rose early and dressed without waking Hiro. This was the first time he was going to leave his room since the attack. He reached under his futon, to check that the ball was safely hidden. He was sure it was the Buddha ball the assassins had come for – not just to kill him, but to take the ball, and with it power over the elements.
As he reached under his futon, he braced himself for Lord Oda’s voice.
Then he touched the smoothness of the ball, confirmed that it was there, and—
He was Sato.
He was tall thin fast agile strong clever half-noble mountain-born, the greatest of the samurai in his father’s honour guard—
For one moment, Taro resisted the ball. He remained conscious of his own skin, around his own body, in the still cool air of the monastery. But at the same time he was in another’s skin, Sato’s skin, and he was looking down at... at Taro.
The boy he’d bee
n sent to kill.
He was in Taro’s dark room, pouring all his force into his arms, pushing the dagger slowly, irresistibly down towards the boy’s chest. They had said, the anonymous men who had paid him so handsomely, that the boy was to be feared, but Sato had seen little evidence to support this.
Yes, Taro had hurt him, twisted the sword from his grasp, broken his wrist. But a little struggle was to be expected. Now that Sato had Taro on his back, had the dagger pressing down, the boy’s lack of strength was obvious. He felt a small smile twitch the corners of his mouth. Sato was being paid for this job, of course. But now his wrist had been broken. The boy’s death was going to be a pleasure to be savoured.
The dagger carried on downward, unstoppable.
Then—
A crunch, and he was hardly aware of what was happening, but suddenly the dagger was in the boy’s chest, but not in the heart, no, not in the heart, and he pulled desperately to free it, but there were steel bands behind his neck, he couldn’t move. He bucked and arched like a fish out of water—
—his mind flashed to an image of a trout, caught by one of the labourers on their way downstream, the logs rolling and creaking below them as the fish flipped silver on the wet wood—
And then needles sank into his neck, the agony, the agony, and he felt a sucking commence, greedy.
No, no, pull away, pull away – but he couldn’t. He was pushing down on the boy’s chest, lifting his head, panic fuelling his nerves, his muscles, but Taro had the advantage, had him held tight, was draining him. He could feel his blood flowing out, hotly, out of his body and into Taro...
I’ve already died once, Sato thought, remembering the day he was murdered, only to be saved by the ninjas. Don’t let me die again, oh please don’t—