The Betrayal of the Living

by Nick Lake

  Agh.

  He staggered away from the flames, continuing towards the stream. There were fewer sounds of battle now. His horse – where was his horse? He heard a frightened whinny, then saw a horse – he thought it was his – galloping away. He turned on the spot, took in the fire all around him.

  What in meifumado had happened?

  Every hut was on fire now, the flames licking at the snow, causing rivulets of water to run down the slight slope towards the stream.

  The stream. Have to get to the stream.

  Kendo stumbled on, the heat of the fire roasting his skin. Out of the huts, and into the open valley, he felt a surge of gratitude when he saw the sparkle of the stream, a shimmering ribbon before him.

  Some of his men were here, he saw. A couple of them kneeled in the snow, looking down at something on the ground. Most were still mounted – as he watched, one of them ran down an Ainu who was trying to escape towards the water. He didn’t see many of the samurai, though. Why not? The Ainu should have presented no real threat.

  Well, there would be time to do a head count. He ploughed on towards the stream, head ringing.

  And then he became aware of two things.

  The first was that the object on the ground, the one the two samurai were kneeling by, was Lord Ando. The duck-feather fletching of an arrow protruded from his chest. As Kendo drew nearer, he could hear the bubbling of his daimyo’s breath.

  No, this was not happening.

  But then he saw the second thing. Curling up into the air from the huts of the village, up and up and up into the air without stopping, was a—

  —was a—

  ‘Dragon!’ shouted one of the samurai, before his horse panicked, threw him down into the snow, and bolted. Kendo just stared up into the sky. The dragon was white, shaped like a snake with wings, only a snake that was as long as the stream itself, its body an arm-span wide. Smoke curled from the nostrils of its bearded head.

  The spirit of the mountain.

  He sensed something break in his men, almost as if a bond that tied them together had snapped, and they began to run. The two samurai who had been tending to Lord Ando were on their feet, moving to the water, babbling.

  He bellowed. ‘Stand and—’

  No. It was too late. The rout was on. Kendo stood in front of Lord Ando, held his sword up in front of him. His arm was shaking. He watched as three samurai, who had pressed their horses back up-valley, were caught in a casual breath of fire from the dragon. Armour and flesh alike melted, the momentum of the horses carrying them forward even as the muscle dripped from their skeletons like tallow candles in a furnace, the three riders ending in a jumble of misshapen metal and bones.

  Now Kendo understood why the people he had killed had all been old – Koshaiman had pulled back the young and the strong, before invoking the dragon’s assistance. Those who remained would have been volunteers, prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of drawing in Kendo’s samurai, for the sake of the trap.

  Even now, Koshaiman would be strengthening his position, higher up in the mountains.

  We’re going to lose this island, thought Kendo.

  To his left, another fleeing soldier caught fire, burning bright for a moment, then splashing into the stream, a blackened mess. The two samurai who had abandoned Lord Ando made it as far as the water. They were diving in when the dragon flew over Kendo, impossibly fast, and caught them in its jaws, and if there was a mercy in being torn apart by enormous teeth rather than burning, then their deaths were merciful.

  Ducking as the dragon fluttered over him like a flag in the wind, Kendo was trying to breathe, but the air was so hot, his diaphragm refused to draw it into him, and he was suffocating in the open air of the valley, drowning in no water.

  He rose again and steeled himself, expecting at any moment the torrent of fire that would strip him clean, melt the body from his bones. But it didn’t come. Instead he watched as all his remaining men were burned, the dragon turning and flitting in the air as it hunted them down, roasted them in jets of fire.

  All around him, the crackle and the roar.

  In his nostrils, the stench of burning meat.

  On his skin, the searing, unbearable heat.

  He would have screamed, if he had possessed the breath to do it.

  Eventually he closed his eyes, unable to watch any more. It didn’t help. The sight of his melting men was on the backs of his eyelids, refusing to leave him, showing him the horror again and again, the waxy flesh dripping.

  A cool breeze, suddenly. He drew in air.

  He opened his eyes.

  In front of him, the dragon had settled on the ground. There was no snow any more, just dead, brown grass. Lumps and pools that had been his men dotted the ground. The village was a grid of dark patches, round, where the huts had been. A voice sounded in his head.

  ‘You did not run.’

  Kendo glanced back at Lord Ando. The man’s chest still rose and fell, only shallow now, the bubbling sound weaker than before. But still alive.

  ‘Ah,’ said the dragon, nodding its giant head. ‘Your lord.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kendo. The word hurt his throat, and he realized he must have breathed in the air of the furnace, burned himself inside.

  ‘You realize you could not have protected him?’ said the dragon. It turned its head and spat fire at one of the dead men, and then there was nothing there but blackened ground, even the bones and metal evaporated into stinking smoke.

  Kendo shrugged. He wanted to say, My flaw is stupidity. But his throat hurt too much.

  ‘Koshaiman said you were monsters,’ said the dragon. ‘Inhuman. Ignorant of the old ways.’ For a moment, it looked as if it were frowning, then it rose gently into the air. It looked for a long time at Kendo, its eyes ancient, large as rock pools.

  ‘We . . . are just . . . different,’ said Kendo. Every word was a sea urchin in his throat, spiked and hard.

  The dragon hovered, contemplating him. ‘You will live together,’ it said at last. ‘Everything is one.’

  Then it flicked its enormous tail and leaped into the sky, and in a blink of an eye it was indistinguishable from the whiteness of the high mountains.

  Kendo’s body slumped, as if his tendons had been cut. He breathed in deep, marvelling at the crispness and clean taste of the air. He was alive. Alive, alive, alive.

  Stupid, but alive.

  He looked once at his sword, which some said was a Masamune, though somehow, strangely, that detail seemed unimportant now, where before it had been such a source of pride.

  Pride. What a peculiar idea.

  There was blood on the sword, an abomination. Kendo stuck it point down into the ground, the last time he would strike with it. He let go.

  He would never pick it up again.

  CHAPTER 7

  EVEN THE ABBOT’S story couldn’t deter Taro.

  Yes, it scared him. He had seen the terror in the man’s face, all these years later, had felt the horror when the dragon breathed fire and burned those men up, armour and all. The abbot really had seen a dragon, and it had been more powerful than anything Taro could imagine. Powerful enough that the abbot had given up the life of a samurai forever, had left for Mount Hiei as soon as the next trading ship came to Hokkaido from the mainland. Could Taro stand against such a creature?

  But there was the reward. It was too much – too much not to try. And there was his destiny, too. The prophetess had said he would be shogun one day, that because he was descended from the ama who had rescued the Buddha ball from the sea many centuries ago, he would be the one to find it again, and rule the country. Well, Taro had already found the ball. He could face the dragon, and as long as he wasn’t yet shogun, he surely would not die. Not without fulfilling what fate had set aside for him. Perhaps, even, killing the dragon was a step on the way to the shogunate . . .

  Taro stopped that line of thought. He knew it was dangerous to focus too much on the prophecy – that he risked th
inking of himself as invincible, which seemed like a sure way to get himself killed.

  There was a feast the night before they left – a feast of such epic proportions that Hiro was nursing a sore head as they carried their few belongings to the stables in the morning mist. There, they found the abbot’s last three gifts – horses, to go with the bow he had already given Taro, and the easily concealable short-swords he had presented to the three friends the previous night.

  Also going with them was Jun, the boy who had helped Shusaku climb up to the fortress-monastery of the Ikko-ikki the previous year, for Shusaku had been blinded by the sun during the attack on Lord Oda’s castle, two years ago now. The abbot had asked Taro to take Jun – apparently Jun had some additional message to deliver in Edo, on behalf of the monastery, over and above the delivery of rice that they would be minding. Taro didn’t mind. Jun was a serious, quiet boy, who made for easy enough company.

  Taro packed the Buddha ball first, wrapping it in layer after layer of cloaks and blankets. Even so he couldn’t help touching it, to begin with, and when he did so he felt Sato’s voice, drowning out even Lord Oda’s, whispering to him about the life he had led, and it was like a dagger turning in his heart.

  What good is an object of power if it speaks to you in the voices of those you’ve killed?

  He wished he could talk to someone about it, but he didn’t know how. Hiro had come in while he was wrapping the ball, had seen the expression on his face and had asked if everything was all right. Taro knew his friend suspected something, but he didn’t know how to describe what was happening, how it felt when the ball spoke to him.

  He pushed the ball to the bottom of his mind, just as he had pushed it to the bottom of his travelling bag. He touched the flank of the stallion he had been provided with, felt the warmth and quiver of its muscle through its skin. Last year he had walked from this mountain to Shirahama, to look for the Buddha ball. This time he would leave the monastery on more comfortable, swifter transport. He was grateful to the abbot for that.

  Hiro stood next to him, looking cross. He wasn’t annoyed about Taro’s quest, obviously. Taro knew his friend would follow him anywhere, no matter what the reason – and in this case, Hiro was more than happy with the idea of securing a grant of land, and retiring with Hana and Taro to the country.

  What he wasn’t happy with was his mount, which was a shorter, stronger beast, intended to pull the cart containing the rice taxes of the monastery. ‘They’ve given me a pony,’ he said.

  Taro turned to look. ‘It’s a perfectly good horse.’ It wasn’t. It was comically small, given Hiro’s bulk.

  ‘It’s smaller than yours.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Taro. ‘But you shouldn’t talk about such things in front of ladies.’

  Hana laughed; Hiro flushed red and turned on his heel, stuffing his cloak into his bag, then untying his horse to lead her outside. Jun stared at both of them as if they were mad.

  Taro met Hana’s eye, smiling. He would have liked to freeze this moment, and briefly he recalled his fantasy; the three of them living together in Shirahama, a simple life of poverty.

  No.

  There was nothing simple about poverty: that was something he had learned when he was a peasant. He had to kill this dragon, and accept the mantle of his destiny, since he couldn’t possibly claim his inheritance from Lord Tokugawa.

  Hana returned Taro’s smile, but there was something missing from it. He knew that she was angry with him for putting himself in danger, that he ought to have talked to her more, about this quest, about the dragon.

  He opened his mouth to say something, about his destiny, about how with the title and money that he would obtain when the dragon was dead, he could give her a better life.

  But then Hana turned away and busied herself with the saddle of her horse, and the moment was past, anyway. He was doing the right thing. He would earn his reward, and he would marry her. Then she would smile for real.

  He led his horse outside, his eyes on the distant lowlands, the small settlements and fields, stretching away till they dissolved into haze, into sky, or ended at the sea.

  CHAPTER 8

  INSIDE THE MONASTERY, the abbot kneeled at his writing desk. This was the only piece of furniture in his room – the abbot slept on the hard floor. The Buddha taught that stoicism was the proper response to the temptations of the flesh.

  Even the desk was sparse: aside from the piece of paper the abbot was writing on, the only other object was a tray of sand, which the abbot had shaped with a miniature rake into swirls and circles. A small stone, partly covered with moss, sat in the middle of the tray. It was imperfect in shape, and if you looked at it closely, making the rest of the world disappear, you could imagine it was a large rock, standing on a beach.

  This was rather the point: a daily reminder that all is one, from large to small, and the stone is to the rock as an insect is to a man, all extensions of the totality of dharma.

  Also, the abbot liked rocks.

  In the abbot’s hand was a writing brush, of bamboo with bristles of fox hair. He put the finishing stroke to the final kanji on the page in front of him, and appraised the quality of his calligraphy for a moment, before calling for an acolyte to take his message to the pigeon house at the rear of the monastery. Before he had become a monk, he had been a hatamoto, more skilled with a sword than a brush, but a lifetime had passed since then, and he was pleased with the form and flow of his characters.

  The kanji were simple enough. Had Taro been there, he would have been able to read them quite easily.

  They said:

  The boy has left for Edo, to kill the dragon, as you thought he would. Lord Oda’s daughter Hana goes with him, and his friend Hiro.

  I have provided Taro and his companions with horses, and sent the boy, Jun, with them. They will arrive within days.

  Next to this letter on the desk was another, its contents much the same. The abbot folded both over. Everything was set in motion. It was a case now only of waiting.

  Closing his eyes, he rocked back on his heels. Taro was clever, there was no denying that. The boy had seen, from the inflection in the abbot’s voice, that he spoke of dragons from personal experience.

  He had tried to erase that experience, of course. There were things the baser part of his being envied Taro for – his youth, his strength, his speed. But he didn’t envy him the journey he was setting off on, and he couldn’t suppress a certain amount of guilt at passing on the shogun’s message.

  Still, there was a chance, wasn’t there? The boy was a vampire, after all.

  A chance?

  The abbot snorted.

  He had seen a dragon.

  He had seen a dragon, and he wished he could go back in time and erase the memory, as the snow had erased all trace of his companions afterwards.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘NO, TARO.’

  Hana pushed him gently away. They were standing under the last, fading glory of the sakura – the pink blossom that spread every spring from the south to the north of Japan, like a delicate fire. Farther south, it would already be gone, making way for the rice-planting season; here it still clung to the trees, including this natural avenue in which they found themselves, just off the main Hokkaido road.

  They had stopped at a ryokan inn for lunch – or rather for Hana and Hiro to have lunch. Taro had caught a young roe deer the previous night, draining its blood before its heart had fully stopped beating. Back on the cobbled avenue, Hiro had walked off to a discreet distance, pretending to admire the flowers up close. Their horses were tethered to a tree a little way back.

  Now Taro bit his lip, and the taste of blood was on his tongue again. He tended to forget the sharpness of his fangs. It was like carrying knives in his mouth. He had tried to kiss Hana, thinking that under the beauty of the blossom, she would be receptive to him. But she was looking at him with a strange expression, half disappointment and half pain.

  ‘I don’t unders
tand,’ said Taro.

  ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘Is it because of the dragon?’ He wondered if she was afraid he would die. Yes. That might be it.

  ‘Is it because of the dragon?’ Her voice had taken on a mocking quality he had never heard before. Her soft eyebrows were set in a hard line.

  ‘I have to try,’ said Taro. ‘The reward is—’

  ‘Oh, the reward. Are you telling me you’re doing this for the reward?’

  ‘Of course.’ She didn’t seem able to grasp that the reward was a necessary first step – that the danger was in the short term, and the benefits for both of them were in the long term. The problem was that he couldn’t explain it without referring to marriage, which was an unspoken word between them, always hovering in the air, but never given sound.

  ‘I don’t believe you. I think you’re doing it because you were bored at Mount Hiei.’

  ‘Well...’

  Her eyes flashed dangerously. ‘Yes, you were bored. And I thought you enjoyed it, spending time with me. Reading. Walking. Just... being.’

  ‘But it couldn’t last!’ said Taro. For all the reasons he had gone over in his mind – he couldn’t be a monk, he couldn’t marry her, they couldn’t stay if they were not married... It was impossible. ‘We couldn’t have stayed there forever.’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Hana coldly. She started walking back towards the road, but then she turned round. ‘You try to kill the dragon,’ she said. ‘And if it kills you, don’t come crying to me.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense!’ he shouted after her, but she was gone.

  All that day, she walked far ahead of him, never looking back at him. Hiro asked what was wrong, and Taro shrugged. He wasn’t sure he could explain it without opening a door he couldn’t afterwards close. His desire to marry Hana was a private thing. If he spoke it, he might break whatever magic there was in it, and prevent it from ever happening.

  Gradually the air grew warmer, which was strange, because they were not heading south. Then they began to reach the lower slopes of Mount Fuji, the foothills and valleys that spilled out from it, like the creases formed when a silk sheet is pulled up into a point. It was easy now to see the creeping tendrils of fire in the high places, the roofs of villages that had already been consumed by it.