by Nick Lake
In the fields, women were singing rice-planting songs. Taro barely listened, though the melodies got into his head, wrapping themselves around and through him like vines, whispering to him of a time before he bit Hana, before Shusaku took the ball and made him run away, made him abandon his mentor to die.
A time before Hiro betrayed him.
Gods, but he could almost miss that time when they were fighting off dead people, and it was all they had to worry about. Now he walked in silence, his companions behind him. He and Hiro had reached an uneasy truce. Taro didn’t speak, and Hiro didn’t speak. Taro didn’t look at Hiro, and Hiro didn’t look at Taro.
It had been a long walk to Shirahama, punctuated by several uncomfortable nights in ditches and trees, the three of them reluctant to stay anywhere too long, for fear of being caught by Kenji Kira and his men. Along the way there was also the occasional skirmish with the wandering dead – though many of these seemed to have already been burned by the peasants. Certainly there were fewer than there had been before. There was, though, the constant threat of Kenji Kira. And all through the walk, all through the eating and sleeping and defending themselves, Taro and Hiro spoke not one word to each other. Taro still couldn’t believe that his friend had done this to him, had taken the ball when he threw it away – and now Shusaku was dead as a result.
Then there was Hana. She spoke to both of them, but with Taro she was often halting, unsure. She didn’t hold his hand now, and he didn’t expect her to. They never talked about what he had done, but sometimes, when she looked at him, he saw her touch the scars on her neck, not realizing she was doing it.
She’s afraid of me, he would think, when he saw that. It was something he could never undo. Even if she wanted to be a vampire, which she didn’t, she had said so – even if they could be together that way, she would always remember when he lost control of himself, and nearly killed her.
And, at the same time as all this, there was the fear.
Taro couldn’t get the dragon of the sea out of his mind – the one that Lord Tokugawa had said would be guarding Kusanagi. To claim the sword, he would have to somehow defeat it, or outsmart it. He was confident of neither. Could he defeat a dragon? He had never seen one. Humans presented little challenge to him now, with his vampire abilities. They were weak and slow. He had a feeling dragons were not.
Nor could he forget the abbot’s story of the dragon he had faced in Hokkaido. The image of the men melting, like candles. The sound of the screams, which the abbot had so vividly described. The sheer size and power of the beast. Taro had sparred with the abbot. Anything that could make that man afraid must be very terrifying indeed.
I can’t beat a dragon, was the refrain that went through his head. I may be a ninja, but I can’t beat a dragon.
He would be under the sea, too, out of his element. And the dragon... well, it wasn’t called the dragon of the sea for nothing. This is madness, he thought.
And yet he didn’t stop.
All in all, then, it wasn’t an enjoyable trip. They’d agreed, the three of them, that they would stay together until Shirahama. Taro would go on to Edo with Kusanagi, if he could find it. Hana would go with him – she was still insisting on accompanying him until the dragon was dead, or he was. Hiro would stay in Shirahama. Taro wanted his old friend out of his sight, and he told him so. After all, their only recent conversation had been uncomfortable, to say the least.
It happened when Taro was lighting a fire to keep them warm at night, when he saw Hiro’s shoulders were shaking. He went over to his friend, hesitated. Part of him wanted to reach out, to put a hand on Hiro’s back, but he didn’t dare.
‘Are you... all right?’ he had asked. He kept his voice neutral. He didn’t want Hiro to think that he was forgiving him.
Hiro looked flatly at him. ‘Fine.’
‘What is it?’
‘Yukiko.’
‘Yukiko? What about Yukiko?’
Hiro stared at him. ‘Kenji Kira killed her. Didn’t you hear?’
‘Oh. Yes. But... we knew something must have happened to her, after she left that clearing. And anyway, she was a traitor. She killed my mother. Why shed a tear for her?’
‘She was my friend,’ said Hiro. ‘Do you remember that?’ Taro flinched. Actually, he hadn’t really thought about it – all those times when Hiro and Yukiko had sparred together, laughed together. ‘You hate her because she betrayed you, but it never seems to occur to you that she betrayed me, too.’
‘Then you should be glad she’s dead.’
Hiro shook his head. ‘You understand nothing.’ He turned to the fire, and his gaze was lost in its heat and swirl.
That was the longest conversation they had, and Taro wished the journey could just end. Spending this time with Hiro was like a long-drawn-out torture.
Eventually, though, they rounded a bend on a path that Taro knew well, and Shirahama was laid out before them, the village nestled against the hillside, smoke pluming from the houses, all exactly as Taro had left it, not once but twice. He glanced at Hiro. Back then, he had trusted his friend completely. Their lives had changed in one night – ninjas had murdered Taro’s father, and Shusaku had rescued him, had led him and Hiro to the safety of a boat.
Now Shusaku was dead, and Hiro was a traitor. At least, Taro thought Shusaku was dead. There was still that glimmer of hope, mostly because of what the ninja had said in that passageway. Even death must die. He’d been referring to the Tibetan story of Enma and Enma-taka, the Death-ofEnma – every child in Japan knew it. Taro had even thought about it the previous year, when he had ventured into Enma’s realm himself, looking for his mother.
In the story, Enma went mad and began slaughtering innocent people in a Tibetan valley. In response to this, the abbot of the nearby monastery felt himself changing, until he was enormous and his stride encompassed mountains – he realized then that he had become the Death-of-Enma, and he made the mad Enma die, and then he became the new Enma, because Enma was always a man before he was the judge of death. In this way, no man could be Enma forever.
But was the story even real? Certainly many things Taro had assumed to be fiction were real, but that was no guarantee.
And even if it was real, could Shusaku become the death of death? Would he even be able to take that form?
No. Taro thought Shusaku was probably dead back there, torn to pieces in the passageway.
‘You would have regretted it,’ said Hiro, suddenly and softly, as they looked down at the bay. ‘You would have regretted throwing it away.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Taro. He didn’t look at Hiro, just started walking again, following the path down to the village. Hana, who hadn’t been here before, was murmuring to one or both of them, in a low voice, about how beautiful it was. Taro ignored her.
Beyond the houses, beyond the beach where the fires burned salt from seaweed, stretched the gunmetal sea. He could make out the west side of the bay, where the old wreck was to be found, the wreck everyone said was cursed. He couldn’t stop a shiver at the thought of diving that water again, teeming as it was with Kappa demons. And then there was the dragon.
In his mind, a single, searing image: the village the dragon of the earth had burned, those marks where the people had been.
He gritted his teeth. He had to acknowledge the possibility that the dragon might kill him. He was a vampire, he was stronger and faster than any human. He could kill with ease. But if the attack by Sato had shown him anything, it was that even against another vampire he was not guaranteed success. And a dragon would be much, much stronger than a vampire.
Most likely, he would die.
But he’d do it. If there was one thing he had learned about himself, it was that he was not afraid to die. He was more afraid of others dying, and now he had lost someone else. He didn’t even know why he was going to try to get Kusanagi. Maybe because Shusaku had told him to, before he sent him on his way. Maybe because there didn’t seem anything else to
do, now that he couldn’t marry Hana. Now that Shusaku was dead.
Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, it was because Kusanagi was one of the three divine objects. It would give him a claim to the shogunate, if he could recover it. And wasn’t that the point of all this, really? To follow his destiny? To become shogun? Taro wasn’t interested in the power – well, he told himself he wasn’t interested in the power. But to take control of the country for himself... to lower the rice taxes, to try to minimize the destructive force of conflict... that was tempting.
And the power. That too.
Well, did it really matter why he did it? He gazed at that shimmering patch of sea, so innocent-looking from above. The scent of pine needles was in his nostrils.
He’d dive the wreck for the second time. If he found the legendary sword, so be it.
And if he died, he died.
CHAPTER 31
KENJI KIRA stood at the prow of his ship as it knifed through the waves. The Buddha ball was in his hand, humming with contained life. A fine salt spray, like rain, settled on his skin and clothes. Fluttering in the stiff breeze above him, nailed to the mast, was his new flag.
He couldn’t smell the sea – he couldn’t precisely smell anything, apart from blood – but he could feel it, rocking the very wood on which he stood, soaking into his bones. He liked it. He was a little disappointed that he had never known, before, how good it felt to cut through water like this. He wouldn’t have wasted his time fighting battles for Lord Oda. He would have turned pirate when he still lived.
Kenji Kira, pirate!
It had a ring to it.
And then there was the salutary nature of the sea itself, the way it cradled and protected, instead of allowing decay. Throw a branch in a ditch on land and it would sprout mushrooms and lichen, grow moss like a beard, eventually dissolve into nothingness, eaten by wasps, absorbed by the ground. Throw that same branch in the sea, and it would simply wash up one day, years later maybe, pale and hard and smooth to the touch. Nor was it just the water, but what was in the water too. Say one thing for salt, Kira thought. Say that it preserves things, makes them last. For so many years he had sucked pebbles, drunk only water, eaten only rice, trying to make his flesh hard and incorruptible.
He could have simply gone to sea and bathed himself in salt water. Pickled himself. Look at what happened to fish when you salted it. The flesh never rotted. He knew this, intimately, because it was what the still-living members of his crew ate. Revolting, really, but imagine what that salt was doing to their insides! Preserving them, no doubt. Making them proof against rot, against the worms and other unspeakable beasts that invaded a person’s body after death.
Yes. If he was not already a skeleton, he would like to live at sea.
He saw smoke rising beyond the headland ahead. ‘Is that it?’ he called.
‘Aye,’ said the navigator. ‘That’s Shirahama.’
Kenji Kira felt joy course through him, where blood could not. He had arrived at the boy’s home. Did Taro already have Kusanagi? It didn’t matter. If he did, Kira would simply take it from him. If he didn’t, he would force Taro to find it first. It was, like the best of things, simple. And once he held Kusanagi, as well as the ball that was filling his sails, driving him at this astonishing speed towards Shirahama? Well, then he would rule all of Japan, and maybe more.
Ruler of Japan. That had a ring to it too.
He was looking forward to killing Taro. It would be even better than Shusaku’s death, and that had been quite something. In the end, Shusaku had taken some time to die. His limbs severed, his head separated from his body, he had still been murmuring Mara’s name, even to the very last. The fool. He had seemed to smile, right at the end, though it was difficult to tell with the ghastly horror that was his skin, all burns and strange black characters.
That had tickled Kenji Kira more than anything else. That smile. Because it wasn’t over, not by a long way. Death was not the end. He had followed Shusaku into it, caught up with the ninja as he crossed the bridge over the Three Rivers. In death, Shusaku’s skin was clean, not a single mark on him. He had the presence of mind to look surprised when Kira seized him, before dragging him – with the assistance of Horse-head and Ox-face – deeper into death, and through the door that led to hell. Of course, the surprise was misplaced too. Hadn’t Kira told them that he was Enma, that death was his to rule? None could resist Enma. Especially not the dead.
Entering the hell realm, he had taken Shusaku to the worst tortures, skipping the knives and bees and pokers to go straight for the tree where the flaying was done. The skin grew back; that was the beauty of it. Still, he was impressed despite himself in the end – it was five times the ninja’s skin had been stripped from his body, top to toe, before he told them where Taro was going, and what he hoped to do there.
It was another three times after that, before he told them about Hana, and how Taro had bitten her.
After that, Kenji Kira had left the ninja with the demons, for all of eternity.
Oh, he would have grinned, from ear to ear, if he wasn’t missing all his flesh, and so grinning all the time. Hana could never love Taro now, it was impossible. He had attacked her, betrayed his demonic nature. And then along would come an old retainer of her father’s, a man who had proven himself over and over again to be strong, to be ruthless. Lord Oda was dead, but he, Kenji Kira, was alive!
But soon she would be his. He would kill Taro before her very eyes, show her what happened to evil creatures that dared to hurt her.
She would be grateful – he pictured her weeping her thanks, whimpering her admiration for his resolve and his fierceness, his desire to protect her. His chest swelled with pride, and sea air.
He glanced back and up, at his ship’s new standard. He had taken it from Shusaku’s body, after leaving his spirit in hell. He had knelt in that scene of butchery in the rock passage, sawing with his knife, until he had the skin from Shusaku’s back in his hands, bloody and fatty on one side, etched with scar tissue and tattoos on the other. Now it snapped and raced in the strong wind from the Buddha ball.
He had the ball. He had Shusaku, flying from his mast, screaming in hell forever.
Soon Taro’s skin would fly below it.
Kusanagi would be in his hand.
And Hana would be by his side. Lady Kenji no Hana.
It had a ring to it.
CHAPTER 32
‘YOU DIDN’T FIND what you were looking for last time?’ the priest asked.
‘Well, no.’ Taro remembered the fake ball he had recovered from the wreck, the one his mother had put there as a false trail. He remembered removing the true ball from her chest, where she had sewn it into herself, years before. ‘This is something different,’ he said.
‘Your destiny seems tied to that wreck,’ said the priest. He, Taro and Hana were standing by his boat, which was tied up at the shore. The priest, whom Taro had last seen the previous year, when he helped Taro to dive the wreck, had merely nodded in greeting when he saw Taro coming down the hill, as if his comings and goings were no longer to be remarked on. Nor was he surprised when Taro asked to borrow the boat again.
‘I suppose so,’ said Taro. He’d thought the same thing himself – how strange it was that Kusanagi might have been under Shirahama bay all that time, that he might have been so close to it when he was looking for the ball.
‘Well,’ said the priest. ‘At least someone will be using my boat.’
‘Sorry?’ said Taro. The priest of Shirahama, like everyone in Shirahama, was a fisherman first and foremost.
‘Since Lord Tokugawa took Lord Oda’s land, and Shirahama with it, our rice taxes have gone up,’ said the priest. ‘We spend most of our time in the fields now. There is little time for fishing.’
Taro shook his head in irritation. It seemed that the daimyo, including his own father, were determined to break the peasants with their taxes. ‘I’ll be doing a different kind of fishing, though,’ he said.
‘And afterwards,’ said the priest. ‘You will be leaving again?’
Taro nodded.
‘A shame,’ said the priest. ‘But the world is vast – you must explore it. Perhaps one day, when you have seen enough, you will return.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Taro. He glanced up at the village, to find Hiro, but couldn’t see his old friend. He imagined Hiro was in his hut, though there was no smoke coming from the chimney. No matter where he was, though, his presence poisoned the village. It was Hiro’s fault that Shusaku was dead. If Hiro had never recovered the ball, if he’d just left it where Taro had thrown it, then Shusaku wouldn’t have been able to use it to make his stupid, noble stand. Taro knew he could not stay in Shirahama so long as his old friend was there.
Hana, meanwhile, was with Taro and the priest, looking out to sea. She had insisted on coming with him on the boat, saying that someone should be on lookout while he dived. He’d explained about the curse, but she wouldn’t listen. Suddenly she gasped.
‘The Heike,’ she said. At her feet, one of the large crabs particular to Shirahama had crawled up out of the sea. It scuttled up to her, then sidled off down the beach. On its back was the white cross that made people believe the crabs were the spirits of the Heike. They were, in fact – Taro knew it, because he’d seen them change from ghostly men back to crabs, when the feast of souls, obon, was over.
Taro watched the crab go. Again he felt the connections resonating. The Heike, who had perished in this bay. The boy emperor they protected, who had drowned right here, in the blue-grey water Taro was gazing out at, and the sword that had been lost with him. All along, the secret to Japan’s rule had been concealed beneath the smooth surface of this very bay, the one he’d seen every day of his young life, whipped up by storms, calm and translucent in summer sunshine, flooded with the fire of the rising sun. He saw a seagull dive, far out to sea, listened to the constant murmur of the waves on the sand. He tried to concentrate on surface appearance, disturbed by the picture that kept entering his mind of all the ships that must be under that calm, glassy bay, all the dead samurai whose armour and weapons littered the seafloor, who scuttled around its depths as crabs.