by Nick Lake
Unfortunately, of course, Hana was also samurai.
Swimming up to them, Taro got his arm under Hana too, on the other side, and between them he and the older man were able to pick up speed, despite her weight. Hiro was a strong swimmer; he was already well in front of them, almost at the head of the bay. Ahead, hills rose above the moonlit gleam of the sand, dark with trees. Taro glanced back. The ship’s sails were up, and it was coming after them, the wreck of their little boat no longer visible. He cursed, spitting out salt water as he funnelled all his strength into his free arm and legs, pushing the sea behind him.
What felt like an eternity later, he kicked out with his leg and felt sand brush against it. The sea floor was shelving up to the beach. Shouting to Shusaku, he threw his last reserves of blood-power
(Hana’s blood, a cruel voice reminded him)
into his stroke, hand knifing through the water and scooping it behind him, as if the sea were a vast dark grave and he were digging himself out of it. Then his knees were on the sand, and he glanced ahead to see Hiro stumbling up onto the beach. Getting to his feet, he caught his hands together, levering Hana up as Shusaku did the same thing. She was conscious, and coughing, as they hauled her up towards the hills. Behind them, Taro heard the ship grate into shallow water, a noise like the screeching of ghosts. Then there were splashing sounds: men jumping down.
The beach, it seemed, was a vast funnel. They were hemmed in by rocks on both sides, forced towards a fissure in the hillside, a crack of pale light in the blackness. But they had no choice but to follow, or return to the sea. Taro turned and saw that the larger ship had reached the shore. Figures leaped down from the sides into the shallow water, then started coming up through the foam, weapons in their hands.
‘They’re giving chase,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Shusaku.
Then they were off the sand and in the throat of the fissure, a path that was more like a passageway, walled on either side by rock. It got narrower and narrower, dimmer, too. Taro couldn’t see whether it led anywhere, or whether after a while the rock would simply close up again. They had to trust that it would have some issue, though, that it would lead them through this hill and to the other side – otherwise they were dead. Vines and stunted trees clung to the cliff faces beside them. Moonlight filtered down, blue and strange, casting shifting, worrying shadows. The smell of the sea gave way to another scent, of cool earth and dampness.
Deeper and deeper they went into the passage. There were turns, but these were not sharp, and Taro didn’t think they would stop the dead – it was true corners that baffled them. Hana, increasingly, was running for herself, her steps unsure but her eyes wide open and her breathing coming hard. Taro felt relief embrace him, as the cold water had earlier, only the relief was a warm sea to fall into.
Ahead, the passageway constricted – a throat, swallowing – before opening again on a vista of rolling countryside, fields and terraces stretching away to infinity, thin plumes of smoke rising from small villages, up into heaven.
They pushed on, heading for the narrowest part. Hiro sucked in breath, wincing as the many-pointed rock pressed into him, but a moment later he had dragged himself through. He turned, helping Shusaku and Taro with Hana, who was barely needing support now. She followed Hiro through the gap.
That was when Shusaku pushed Taro through, to join his friends, and wedged himself into the narrow opening.
‘Go,’ he said to Taro. ‘Run. Get Kusanagi – use it to claim the shogunate. Don’t give it to anyone else, no matter who— no matter what happens.’
Taro stared at him. ‘You’re joking.’
‘Oh, yes. It seems the time for it.’ Sarcasm dripped from the ninja’s voice.
‘No,’ said Taro. ‘No, you’re coming with us.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the ninja. ‘This is the only way. They’ll catch us otherwise.’ He turned to Hiro. ‘Make sure he goes with you,’ he said.
Taro shook his head. He drew his own sword, stepping up behind Shusaku. ‘I’m staying,’ he said.
Shusaku shook his head slowly, sadly. ‘You’re not.’
Reaching into his wet cloak, the ninja drew out an object, something that Taro had not thought he would see again. Something round, and shining in the moonlight.
The Buddha ball.
CHAPTER 29
SHUSAKU CLOSED his hands on the ball, feeling its smoothness and hardness. He concentrated. Taro had an advantage over him when wielding it – the boy could see, where Shusaku could not. But perhaps if he focused, if he meditated, he too could use its power. He could feel Taro behind him, the enraged pounding of his pulse in his veins. He ignored it.
Work, ball, work, he implored it.
He was no longer ever really conscious of when his eyes were open and when they were closed. It was not important; he couldn’t see anyway. He closed them for sleep, he thought, out of habit more than anything else. But apart from that he was not concerned with what they did. So when a thin bluish line appeared out of the darkness, stretching horizontally, he was thrown at first. It was only when he blinked that he realized it was moonlight, glowing through a crack in his eyelids.
He opened his eyes fully.
He could see.
Oh, my dear gods, he thought. How could Taro have thrown it away? His eyes had been burned out of his head by the sun, but now he was holding a thing owned by the Buddha, and his injuries were meaningless. The ball in his hand was clear, crisp. Every contour and imperfection of the rock face beside him buzzed in the sharpness of his vision. He gazed around, stunned, only half hearing the shouts of Taro and his friends behind him. He looked down at the object in his hands that had done this, that had wrought this miracle.
Beneath the glass of the ball hung a tiny round moon, suspended in space, and beneath that the sphere of the Earth, shadowed on one side, light on the other. He turned it – sure enough, on the other side was a little sun, burning down. He turned it back to the moon-side, where he presumed Japan lay, and peered down into it. Taro lunged for the ball, but he turned, his sides protected by the rock. He had seen the boy do it; surely it could not be too hard?
He stared down at the miniature Earth in his hand, saw small clouds scudding across its surface. He glanced up; clouds, racing overhead. He understood that what he was seeing was not a representation of the world – it was the world, in miniature. He was holding the world in his hands.
‘How did you get that?’ said his charge, his protégé, his son.
‘I followed you,’ said Hiro. ‘I recovered it from the sea.’
Now Taro turned to Hiro, and if Shusaku could have taken away the pain and betrayal on Taro’s face, he would have done it in a heartbeat.
‘No...’ said Taro.
‘I’m sorry,’ said his friend.
Taro looked away from Hiro, as if his friend no longer existed. ‘Give it to me, Shusaku,’ he said. ‘He’s Enma! You can’t defeat him.’
‘I won’t give it to you,’ Shusaku replied. ‘And Enma can be defeated. It has been done before. Even death has to die.’
Then he blocked out the sounds from outside himself, the calling of the crickets, the cries of night birds, the hooting of owls, the steel and bone sounds of the men coming after them, approaching through the passageway. Not too close, though. There was time for this last task.
He gathered his qi, and instead of using it to harden his muscles, to hone his bloodlust and his fight stance, he used it to cancel all other things but the ball.
Then he gazed down into it.
A catching sensation, and he was in free fall, plummeting. He felt his stomach rush to occupy the space previously employed for his lungs, felt the air battering against him, suddenly turned into something much more viscous, much more solid. There was a cloud below him – he half feared its impact, but then he was in it, falling through dense whiteness, damp and cold.
He broke through the cloud, and now below him was the Earth, growing
bigger at an alarming rate. Fields and villages were sketches drawn with a stick on sand; then they were only the view from a mountaintop, and getting closer. His heart stuttered. Would he simply crash into the ground, to be obliterated?
He closed his eyes, braced for the impact, and—
He was standing in the path that ran through the hill, Taro, Hiro and Hana behind him. He could feel them, their anxiety speaking through their rapidly beating hearts. He turned to them. The men coming up behind were close, but there was a moment still, a moment of time.
Taro stood before him; he was struck by how strong, by how handsome, the boy had become. He was more a man, now, than a boy. Inside Taro, Shusaku noticed for the first time, was something familiar, something that perhaps accounted in some small measure for his love for the boy. It was a rhythm, a sort of voice inside Taro’s flesh, a call like that of home, or a child born of your own loins.
It was Shusaku’s own blood, he realized, flowing in Taro’s body, always a part of it now. It meant that in a sense, Taro truly was his son, and it meant that Taro was his to control.
Hana, beside him, was unspeakably beautiful, even pale and wounded as she was. And Hiro. The overweight boy Shusaku had met that night in Shirahama, two years ago, had turned into a muscled ox of a young man.
‘I see you,’ he said to Taro. ‘I see you, and I’m proud.’
Taro frowned. ‘You can see?’
‘Yes. It’s the ball, I think.’ Reminded of his purpose, he concentrated on the feel of it in his hands, recapturing by instinct the feeling of falling through thin air. He made himself somehow inside it and outside it at the same time. He was already conscious of his own essence in Taro’s bloodflow, was already aware that he had left a part of his heart in the boy.
Now he reached out to it.
Speaking without words, he called on his own being, his own blood, and asked it to do his bidding. He didn’t know how he knew to do this; it just came naturally, with the ball in his hand. Taro had been right. It was dangerous, the ball. It was not right that a person should have this power over another, because of having turned them. He knew that if he wanted it, he could kill Taro right now, without even lifting a finger. But he wasn’t interested in killing Taro. He was interested in saving him, so he could follow his mission through to the end.
Holding Taro’s blood in his mind, a pulsing web, he told it what to do.
‘No,’ said Taro, as he began to walk backwards, then turned to head up into the infinite countryside, to disappear into safety. He was screaming then, screaming that word, no, over and over as he walked away against his will. His body trembled; Shusaku was impressed by the strength even this must have taken.
‘Yes,’ said Shusaku softly. He fixed Hiro, then Hana, with a look. ‘Follow him,’ he said. ‘Protect him.’ He couldn’t command their blood; but he could ask them, as a friend. As a mentor.
Hiro had tears on his cheeks, Shusaku saw. The sight of it drove a weight into his stomach, but he held firm, knowing that if he succumbed to his feelings now he would bring Taro back, tell him never to leave, and if Taro stayed he would die. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Run.’
He poured his life force into Taro, through the agency of the ball, focusing all his qi. Taro, who had been walking shakily, picked up to a sprint, and then he passed into a copse of trees and was gone. Hiro and Hana, with one last pained look back at Shusaku, followed him.
Good.
He turned, and saw that he had acted just in time. The first of the men were approaching the narrowest part of the passage now, bringing the scents of death and the sea with them, which two smells were, in the end, much the same thing. Their armour and their weapons scraped on the rock, a hissing sound of threat. Shusaku transferred the ball to one hand, drawing his short-sword. He had pushed most of his power into Taro; now he pulled back a little of it, letting some of his qi flow into his sword arm. These people were pirates, ronin, men without honour. Even if some of them were dead, they were unworthy adversaries; on a good day he would make a pile of their bodies without even trying. Only this wasn’t a good day. This was a time when his strength was at its lowest ebb, slowly abandoning him, as the sea on the beach below was drawing away from the sand, pulled by the moon.
Taro was his moon, and he was running, far away already, compelled by the ball. And a part of Shusaku was gone with him, never to return.
The men stopped in the passageway, then stepped to one side. Kenji Kira pushed through, coming to a halt when he saw the ball in Shusaku’s hand.
‘Taro?’ he said.
‘Gone.’
Kira nodded. ‘You always were a man of honour,’ he said. ‘It’s what makes you so predictable.’ He pointed to the ball. ‘Hand it over.’
‘No. Prize it from my dead hand.’
‘Very well,’ said Kira. He began to move forward, motioning his men to do the same.
‘You should know,’ said Shusaku, ‘that I can see again. The ball has given me my sight. Many of you will not leave this place.’
A hesitation from the men – even the dead ones.
Kira laughed, the sound hollow, like the creaking of an old bellows. ‘This was rather foolish of you, old fellow,’ he said. ‘Even with the ball, you cannot hope to win.’
‘I didn’t hope to win. Just to slow you down.’
‘I see,’ said Kira. ‘To save Taro, no doubt. Noble of you. But stupid. You will die, and I will condemn you to the worst ravages of hell. And after I am done with you, I will hunt down your little friend Taro.’
Shusaku didn’t bother speaking, just leaped forward. Kira, simultaneously, stepped back, waving his men past him. They came at Shusaku like a wave. He tucked the ball into his cloak, sword already swinging in the confined space. The first man to come near him received its point in a sweeping blow to the chin, splitting his head open to the top of the skull; he fell backwards, his head unfolding like the wings of a butterfly. Shusaku’s blade was a blur. The next man – dead already, Shusaku thought – was separated at the waist, his body hitting the ground before his legs.
A strike got inside his blade, slashing his cheek; he felt the searing pain of it, but it went no more than bone deep. He adjusted his grip on his pommel, got his sword up, and knocked the other man’s weapon aside. Then he took a dagger from his belt and buried it in the man’s stomach. Shusaku didn’t wait for him to die, just turned past him, already meeting the sword of the next man, turning it out of his hand, and taking out his throat with a hard sideswipe.
There was no room for skill, or manoeuvre. Only i-aido, the principle of the fastest strike. Luckily, there was no one faster than Shusaku – no one alive at any rate, now that Lord Oda was dead. He cut through the sea of men like a shark, his sword swinging and thrusting in brutal, inelegant, but shockingly fast strikes. Bodies formed a carpet on the ground.
He stepped over those he had killed, trod on them, as he fought his way towards Kira. Shusaku’s foot squished into the stomach wound of a man whose belly he had opened, and he stumbled. He could see Kira, laughing behind his men, who just kept coming, unstoppable.
Then he heard something – something from deep within him, voices that were not his own. It took him a moment to realize that these were the other voices that the ball had awoken in him, the pulses of those he had killed inside him, those whose blood he had taken. Just as he could reach out to his own blood in Taro, so his victims could now reach out to him, could touch him. He was conscious of them, whirling inside him. He had feared them for so long, had imagined himself surrounded by the spirits of those he had murdered, but now he found that he had been wrong – they were inside him, they were part of him, and they were not to be feared. He had never killed without honour, without a reason.
He asked the voices inside him if they would stand with him, and they answered.
They answered yes.
He spun and cut, a dance of death that strewed the passageway with body parts, sprayed it with blood. He was the sword, and the s
word was him, and everything was slow because this was the kill-time. He could laugh at their clumsy attempts to reach him, to get inside his sword arm, to deflect his blade. He did laugh, then, and once he started laughing he found he couldn’t stop.
At that moment, one of the dead, perhaps dead already when Shusaku had decapitated him, caught hold of his ankle. Bony fingers dug into his flesh; he went down on one knee.
He swung, cutting off the hand, but another was on him, and another. And then his sword snagged on something. He saw that one of the bodies on the ground was holding it by the blade – two fingers fell, severed, but the grip did not loosen, and a moment later Shusaku was unarmed.
He looked up and saw Kenji Kira standing smugly, his arms crossed, the moonlight glinting on his bare skull. So unfair, he told himself. So unjust that he should die here, alone. But at least Taro was safe, at least he was far from here already. He would hate Shusaku, of course, but Shusaku was not worried about that. Let him hate. Hatred at least was a property of the living.
Hands seized him, so many hands. Teeth found him, biting down. Blades cut into him.
‘Take the ball,’ said a faraway voice.
Then the many-handed creature that was all around him pulled him in every direction, tearing him into pieces. For just one single, shining moment before the end he was conscious of another voice inside him, or rather a presence – it was the part of Mara that was always in his blood, he knew, because she had turned him. It gave a sort of sigh, of relief, he thought, and he felt that in a moment he would see her again after all those years, holding out her arms, waiting for him, and soon after that he died for the second and final time.
CHAPTER 30
TARO, HIRO AND Hana had travelled some twenty ri already. The scent of the sea was a dim memory now, replaced by the eternal green dampness of the rice fields.