Lord Oda's Revenge

by Nick Lake

  ‘There!’ said a rough voice, as a hand held Shusaku’s arm, helping him up onto the deck. ‘Thought we’d never get you on board.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Shusaku.

  He heard a gasp from the man. ‘Your eyes. . . and your skin. . . gods. Who did that to you?’

  Shusaku smiled at the directness of the question, which no noble would have spoken. He could smell the sea on this man, its salt penetrating deep into his pores and his hair. This wasn’t a samurai. Behind the man, he could smell others, too – men who were not the gun-carriers from the quay but rougher, sea-soaked characters. Their blood pumped thickly in their limbs, made strong and warm by hard work and sea air.

  ‘No one did this,’ said Shusaku. ‘There was. . . a fire. I was burned.’

  He felt and heard Lord Tokugawa moving up beside the sailor, or whatever he was. ‘Shusaku, I apologize for this man’s brusqueness. Say the word, and he is dead.’

  The man took in a sharp breath.

  ‘No,’ said Shusaku. ‘He was only surprised. But. . . who are these men?’

  ‘Wako,’ said Lord Tokugawa.

  Shusaku’s mouth dropped open. Pirates? What was Lord Tokugawa doing on a pirate ship?

  Lord Tokugawa took a step forward and put his hand on Shusaku’s shoulder. ‘Come belowdecks. I’ll explain.’ He turned. ‘You others – stay up here. Draw up the anchor. I want to be in Kyoto by nightfall tomorrow.’ To Shusaku he said, ‘Your boy can stay up here. I’ll help you with the steps.’

  As they descended into the ship, Shusaku heard one of the men whisper to another. ‘That’s the great ninja Shusaku,’ he said. ‘They say he could sneak into the shogun’s bedroom, if he wanted to. I heard he’s killed so many people while they slept, that once he woke one of his victims and gave him a sword, just to make it more interesting.’

  Shusaku smiled. Actually, it had been a loaded arquebus. He had been curious as to whether the man could get off a shot before he killed him.

  He couldn’t.

  Below, in the cabin, Lord Tokugawa indicated to Shusaku where there was a cushion on the floor, then sat down facing him. He pressed a cup into Shusaku’s hand.

  ‘O-sake,’ he said.

  Shusaku bowed, grateful. He had never been served rice wine by a lord before, even when he was a lord himself, albeit of a lower stature, and fighting as a banner-carrying samurai by Tokugawa’s side.

  ‘Pirates?’ said Shusaku.

  ‘Of course. It allows me to travel secretly. And’ – the lord lowered his voice – ‘it gives me a scapegoat.’

  ‘The pirates stole the guns,’ said Shusaku slowly.

  ‘Yes. That is what the Portuguese will believe. Not for nothing are you a ninja.’

  ‘But. . . you need the guns yourself. No?’

  ‘Only one, with which to make copies. The others will be left with the wako, as my gift for their services.’

  ‘Left with them? This is their ship, then?’ Shusaku had been on Lord Tokugawa’s private vessel, in another lifetime, it seemed, another wheel of dharma, and it had seemed much larger and taller than this one.

  ‘It is. They will take us to my own ship, under cover of night. We should be there in one or two incense sticks.’

  ‘And then. . . you will betray them.’

  Lord Tokugawa laughed. ‘Not at all. I will simply present them with the guns – all but one of them. They will use them, to carry out their dark work. And why not? They are impressive guns. They are also well suited to piracy. The wako up till now have been unable to use firearms – the spray from the sea puts out the fuses.’

  Shusaku nodded. ‘Clever.’ But of course it was – Lord Tokugawa was not known for rash action, or clumsy thought.

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ said Lord Tokugawa, refusing the compliment as was customary. ‘Anyway, it won’t take long for word of the wako with the special guns to get back to the missionaries, and to Oda.’

  ‘Oda?’ said Shusaku, surprised.

  ‘Indeed. He bought the guns, you see. They were to be smuggled to him tonight.’

  ‘But Oda is dead.’

  Shusaku felt the shift in the air as Lord Tokugawa leaned back swiftly. ‘What? When?’

  ‘Last autumn. The b— that is to say, I – I killed him.’

  Lord Tokugawa let out his breath. ‘That would very much surprise me – because I saw him only last week. We inspected our troops together.’

  Shusaku blinked uselessly. All was darkness around him still, and becoming blacker by the moment. Lord Oda was alive? When Shusaku had escaped from Lord Oda’s castle, blind and staggering, he had distinctly heard a passing servant say that the daimyo was dead, broken by a fall down the winding staircase of which he was so proud.

  And Lord Tokugawa – why was he still treating with him? The two daimyo had an official alliance, Shusaku knew, but surely the events at Oda’s castle would have changed all that? Surely now their hidden enmity must be known by all, spoken of openly?

  Until one of the lords was shogun, and the other dead, there would be no true peace between them. He stammered, ‘I must. . . have been mistaken.’

  ‘Clearly,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘Otherwise I would be shogun.’

  Shusaku had not thought of that. ‘Ah. . . yes.’

  ‘The other person who is rather conspicuously not dead,’ said Lord Tokugawa, a dangerous tone creeping into his voice, ‘is Lord Oda’s daughter, Hana. You received instructions to kill the girl in the tower, didn’t you?’

  Shusaku sat back on his cushion. The tower. Of course. He must have misread the message, or it had been ambiguously worded. It had never been about Lord Oda – to attack him was unthinkable, would unbalance the whole teetering structure Oda and Tokugawa had created, the creaking complication of manners and protocol and open declarations of trust that kept all-out war from breaking out and engulfing the land. Nevertheless Oda had sent ninjas against Lord Tokugawa’s son – his secret son, Taro, hidden in a fishing village. Of course Lord Tokugawa would want revenge. A daughter for a son.

  His son, thought Shusaku. Oh, gods. Suddenly he felt more vulnerable, more open to the harsh elements, than if he was standing on the deck in the sea spray, feeling the first gentle breeze that announced a taifun. He was in greater danger here, and Lord Tokugawa’s anger was a greater storm.

  He sat very still, thinking.

  Lord Tokugawa cleared his throat. ‘And what of my son?’ he asked. ‘Is that another mission you did not accomplish?’

  Shusaku felt himself tremble a little. He was disarmed – literally and figuratively. The samurai had taken his sword, and now he was sitting belowdecks on a pirate ship, blind, facing the most powerful daimyo in the land, while a small detachment of samurai paced the deck above, accompanied by vicious, murdering wako.

  It almost made him feel alive.

  ‘I failed you,’ said Shusaku, feeling the lie as a weight in his chest. ‘Your son is dead. That is why I never reported back.’

  Lord Tokugawa said nothing.

  ‘I. . . was outnumbered. The other ninjas were too many. And then. . . later. . . I was hurt. The sun, you see.’

  He heard Lord Tokugawa shift on his cushion, waited for him to say something. Finally the lord spoke. ‘I see. Tell me, how did my son die?’

  ‘A sword,’ said Shusaku. ‘In the stomach.’ It was true – and not true. What he did not say was that after Taro was stabbed, he had bitten the boy, made him a vampire like himself. But one didn’t make a lord’s son a vampire, especially when that lord was in the process of making himself shogun.

  To do so would be to make oneself dead.

  Shusaku did wonder about Taro, of course. When he’d come to in the courtyard of Lord Oda’s castle, he’d heard people running and shouting, saying that Lord Oda was dead. He had heard no one mention Taro, and he had been eager to escape. Feeling his way up the wall, he had made it to the top before the pain seized up his muscles, and he fell the height of six men to the moat below. The impact h
ad driven the breath from his body and the spirit from his mind, and he had come to consciousness later, mercifully lying upward-facing in the shallows, among the reeds. He had stayed there for some days, covering himself in mud, living inside his pain.

  And then, when he had known that he was truly blind – that his vision was not coming back – he had begun to make his way out of Lord Oda’s town, pretending to be little more than a pitiful beggar. He hoped Taro would return to the ninja mountain – he’d be safe there, or safer than anywhere else. He himself could not return. Kawabata would seize on just this chance to take over, to overthrow him. And besides, he was a freak now, a monster. Taro would have to fend for himself, much as Shusaku missed the boy.

  ‘And the marks?’ said Lord Tokugawa, startling him back into the present. ‘The scars, on your skin?’

  Shusaku’s tattoos had been untouched by the fire, and now they stood proud of the skin, blacker and more pronounced than ever. Around them, surrounding them, interweaving them, was a mass of blistered red scar tissue, where Shusaku’s flesh had been burned almost to the bone.

  ‘They were protection,’ he said. ‘To help me against the other ninjas.’

  ‘Like Hoichi,’ said Lord Tokugawa. It was the thing that came to everyone’s mind – the story of the haunted man who was painted with the Heart Sutra by an abbot, in order to hide him from the sight of his ghosts. Specifically, the part of the Heart Sutra that said, Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. This incantation, etched upon the body, prevented spirits from seeing a person, reminding them – for even spirits are Buddha’s creatures – of the essential unreality of the phenomenal world.

  ‘Yes, like Hoichi,’ said Shusaku. ‘And like Hoichi, I was punished.’ In the story, the abbot had forgotten to paint Hoichi’s ears, and so the ghosts had torn them off, in their anger, for ghosts are always hungry. He pointed to his eyes. ‘My eyes gave me away. The man I was fighting cut them out with his sword.’

  ‘And the burns?’

  Shusaku had not seen them, but Jun had described them to him – and others had too – so he knew what the lord meant. ‘The sun. I lay in full sunlight for an hour, or more, before I came to my senses.’

  Lord Tokugawa gasped. ‘And you didn’t die? I thought that was what happened with. . . your kind.’

  ‘No. I believe that the sutra saved me. The sun is a god, is she not?’ In the Shinto religion that had held sway in Japan before the coming of the Buddha’s teachings, and that had now been assimilated into Buddhist faith, the sun was called Amaterasu, and as a god she could no more ignore the Heart Sutra’s command than a vampire could.

  The sun, Shusaku believed, had not seen him completely – only the parts of him uncovered by tattoos. It had burned him to the quick, but only to a pattern, leaving the tattoos untouched.

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Lord Tokugawa. He sucked his teeth. ‘But I have an idea,’ he said, ‘of how you can redeem yourself for your failure.’ He stood, and Shusaku heard him moving across the room. There was a shifting sound as of hard objects being moved, their friction against one another.

  Shusaku bowed his head, waiting for the sound of the blade being drawn, then the whisper of its edge against the air, cutting the very atoms through which it moved – the last thing he would hear.

  Instead something was placed in his hands. Something long and cold, mostly wooden, with a lever at one end, and decorated all over in metal, chased with flowers and thorns.

  A gun.

  ‘Hold on to that,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘You’ll be needing it.’

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘SHE IS A GAKI,’ said the priest. He had taken a room at the inn, and Taro, Hana, and Hiro had joined him there. The samurai sat cross-legged on the floor, ignorant of their presence, staring into the eyes of the woman who sat before him. ‘A hungry ghost.’

  Taro murmured a silent prayer to Buddha. A ghost? But those things didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, shouldn’t exist. He knew that only he, of all the people in the room, seemed able to see the woman, but there must be some rational explanation.

  But then, he reminded himself, vampires don’t exist either. . .

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the priest. ‘She won’t hurt you. She has eyes only for him.’ He nodded to the samurai.

  ‘Yes,’ said Taro. ‘He is all she looks at.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’ said the priest.

  Taro looked at her, though he didn’t like doing so. There was something unsettling about the woman, about the way that he could just – if he looked from the right angle – see the grain of the wooden floor through her. He had noticed her pallor before, the paper-whiteness of her skin. He hadn’t noticed the black eyes – not black irises, but the whole eye black, as if ink had been dripped into her eye sockets, as if they were the inkwells for the white paper of her body. He shivered uncontrollably.

  ‘Her eyes. . . her eyes are wrong. Black. Her hair is long and braided behind her head, in a single braid.’ He forced himself to be more specific. ‘She has a beauty spot on her left cheek.’

  The priest nodded. ‘She is as she was described to me, by one who knew her in life.’

  ‘Why don’t we see her?’ asked Hiro. He was adjusting the angle of his head, trying to perceive the woman in front of the samurai.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the priest. ‘I can’t even see her myself – I know she is there only because of the man’s condition, and the way that sometimes he murmurs to someone who isn’t present. And I have spent many years specializing in the exorcism of spirits. I once cured Lord Tokugawa, when he was sick in the mountains.’ He peered at Taro. ‘There’s something special about you,’ he said.

  Taro sighed. He was sick of people telling him that.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ said Hiro, punching Taro’s shoulder. ‘You’re special. Perhaps I should erect a shrine to you, and people can come pray to your goodness.’

  Taro pushed Hiro and the two grappled, briefly, before they were distracted by a mumbling from the haunted samurai. Taro and the others turned to him, but he did not seem to see them – his eyes looked through them, as if it were they who were the ghosts. Since he had spoken Hana’s name, he had said nothing more.

  ‘He was so strong,’ Hana said, a little distantly. She was looking at the samurai, Hayao. Taro felt a pang of jealousy. He wondered, suddenly, whether Hana had harboured feelings for the man when he was training her, when he’d been handsome and powerful. He dug his nails into his palms.

  ‘I believe you,’ said the priest. ‘I was called in by his family when he was already sick. But he was a hatamoto, was he not?’

  Hana nodded. ‘He was the best horseman in Lord Oda’s army.’

  ‘And what about you? You were part of the household?’

  ‘I was. . . a serving girl. Lord Oda dismissed me when I failed to brew his tea properly.’

  Taro didn’t think the priest believed that, but the man nodded after a moment. ‘What seems certain to me is that fate has intervened in this meeting. You know this man, and your friend can see the ghost that is haunting him. I’ve never heard of a person who could see the hungry ghosts feeding on others. That I happened to meet you here, in this inn. . . I don’t think it can be chance. I propose that we travel to Mount Hiei together.’

  Taro considered for a moment. This could be part of some elaborate trap, he supposed, but it seemed too coincidental – if it hadn’t been raining, they would not have stopped at this inn, but would have continued onward until full dark. Besides, five people would be safer than three. Or six, he thought with a shiver, if you included the ghost.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we will take the road together.’

  The priest smiled. ‘Wonderful.’ He bowed. ‘My name is Oshi.’

  Taro, Hana, and Hiro bowed and introduced themselves.

  ‘What is happening to Hayao?’ asked Hana. ‘Is the ghost. . . feeding on h
im?’ She glanced at Taro as she said this, a troubled expression on her face, and Taro felt a spasm in his stomach. I’m a vampire, he reminded himself. I’m a monster. She will never love me.

  ‘Yes,’ said Oshi. ‘She is hungry. She is feeding on his qi. Ghosts can consume no other food.’

  Hana’s eyes widened with horror. She glanced at Taro again, and he knew the same thing was going through her head: the ghost is not unlike me.

  ‘Why him?’ asked Hiro.

  ‘Mostly,’ said Oshi, ‘a ghost will attach itself to a person for no reason, other than bad luck. The ghost of a man who drowned might seize another swimmer, in the same place, and cause that swimmer to drown too. It’s said that if a drowned ghost kills another in the same manner, they are freed. Or a group of ghosts will take a liking to a person, because of a skill that person possesses, or a mere accident of his appearance.’

  ‘Like Hoichi,’ said Taro. Heiko – Yukiko’s sister – had told him the story of the blind musician who was haunted by the ghosts of the noble Heike family, so much did they love it when he played the biwa and sang to them the song of their clan’s tragic destruction. Taro still couldn’t help shivering when he thought of the blind man, surrounded by terrible figures whose presence he could not even apprehend, such was the darkness in which he moved.

  ‘Like Hoichi,’ said Oshi, nodding. ‘Indeed, most of those who are haunted are like Hoichi. They don’t know about it, because they don’t see the gaki feeding on them. There is more than one kind of blindness. They may think they are ill, perhaps, but they don’t suspect the truth.’

  ‘So what happens to them?’ said Taro.

  ‘They die. A ghost is always hungry. It feeds on the life force until the victim dies.’

  ‘He’ll die?’ said Hana, horrified.

  ‘I’m afraid so. Unless the Tendai monks on Mount Hiei can help. I have exhausted my own abilities – nothing I have done has rid him of her. But the monks on Mount Hiei possess other secrets. Sutras, and the like, that were written by the Buddha himself. It is the last chance. That is why I am walking to the mountain.’