by Nick Lake
When they lifted the horse enough, Lord Oda dragged himself free, screaming. He promised himself that if he lived through this, he would kill his samurai and all these men – no one should hear Lord Oda scream. But he must have fainted for a while, the tide of blackness streaming in, because when he next opened his eyes he was moving over the forest floor, suspended on a taut sheet, and at least the rocking motion was real now, not some illusion projected by his pain.
He reached down to touch his leg. He was afraid – afraid of the ruination he would feel. His fingers probed the flesh – he gasped with pain – and then he frowned. Earlier it had been broken pottery in a bag; now he felt tender tissue, yes, but the bone underneath seemed different. Not mended, but more suggestive of skeletal structure. He raised his hand to his face. The bleeding from his head had stopped, and it was then that he realized he was using the hand with the snapped wrist.
His wrist, evidently, was no longer snapped.
Gradually he started to smile. Pain still ebbed and flowed, but it wasn’t something that belonged to the world any more – it wasn’t a feature of existence, like weather; it was something inside him. Something he could control. He took hold of it, and he wrestled it down. If there was something he knew, it was how to subdue an enemy.
His remaining samurai walked beside him, leading his horse. Lord Oda guessed that the third horse, like his, was dead. The samurai was talking to the peasants in a low voice – talking about crops and war. Lord Oda got the distinct impression that the peasants disliked his siege of the monks, that they resented the taxes to pay for it, and the levies of men for the army. Dimly, he reminded himself to kill them later.
Soon they came to some kind of inn, deep in the forest. Lord Oda could hear voices from inside – his hearing had grown ever more acute since he became a vampire. There was also a smell of cooking rice. Disgusting, Lord Oda thought. But there was another smell too – the smell of blood. He wondered if it was his own blood he was smelling, but he thought not. He thought it was the blood still moving in the men’s veins, his own samurai’s veins. Now that he thought of it, he could perceive it, something in between hearing and smelling. He was aware of red branching things around him, treelike structures, and he knew that what he was seeing was a different kind of skeleton – it was all the blood that was in these people, these peasants. It flickered and moved deliciously.
And now that he was aware of it the hunger rose up, snarling, and pounced on his stomach. He took in a sharp breath. He needed that blood; he needed it hot and iron-tangy in his mouth, pouring down his throat.
The inn door opened, and the men carried him in. The hubbub of voices stopped instantly. Lord Oda could see smoke from a hibachi, and he could smell it too, though he couldn’t see where the brazier was. The makeshift stretcher was laid on the ground. From the number of feet he could see, and the murmuring voices that had preceded their entry, Lord Oda guessed there were at least ten men in the room.
Some of them might be women, of course. Not that it made any difference to him.
‘Chika,’ said one of the peasants who had been carrying him, apparently to a woman out of Lord Oda’s sight line.
So, at least one woman.
‘See what you can do about his injuries,’ the man continued to the unseen Chika. ‘Get him some food, too.’ Then he crouched beside Lord Oda. ‘We don’t kill, if we don’t have to,’ he said in a low voice. A slow, disappointed awareness was growing in Lord Oda’s chest. Bandits. Of course, they had to be bandits.
‘You just hand over everything you’re carrying,’ said the man. ‘Money, weapons, and the like. When your bones are mended a little, we’ll send you on your way.’
‘What –,’ began Lord Oda’s samurai, but he bit his tongue when a knife appeared at his throat, as if by magic.
‘It’s only fair,’ said the peasant. ‘We are helping you. Only right you should help us, too.’
Lord Oda sighed. ‘You had a wire across the path, didn’t you?’ he said. He was surprised by how strong his voice sounded, by how little it trembled and wheezed. The peasant didn’t seem to notice, though.
‘’Fraid so,’ he said.
‘Why didn’t you just kill us there? I was trapped. I couldn’t fight.’
The man was crouching by Lord Oda’s side – his lined face was right there beside him, his crinkled brown eyes, and Lord Oda saw the unfeigned indignation written on his face by eyebrow and mouth.
‘We’re not monsters,’ he said. ‘We just want to eat. To feed our children.’ He put a hand on Lord Oda’s cloak. ‘Now come on, let’s see what you’ve got.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Lord Oda saw other men searching his remaining samurai, the knife still at his throat.
His cloak parted under the peasant’s touch. At the same time he flexed the fingers of his left hand experimentally. A little pain, but no indication that until half an incense stick ago the wrist had been snapped like a green branch. As he did so, the peasant examining him gave a small gasp. He stood and staggered back. Lord Oda wondered for one moment whether the man had guessed that he was a vampire, but then he saw the man’s gaze fall to his side, where his sword was strapped. At the same time he was aware of its reassuring hardness, pressing into him.
Foolish of him, really. He’d not worn armour or helmet – he hadn’t wanted anyone identifying him too easily as Lord Oda no Nobunaga, one of the most powerful daimyo in the land. But his katana was a stunning piece, made by a master craftsman – Lord Oda remembered decapitating the man after receiving it. He’d done it out of impatience, partly – the man just stood there stammering when Lord Oda asked his price. But partly, too, he’d done it to stop the craftsman making any more swords like it. It was a sword of violence, and one of the finest ever made. Of course no ordinary samurai would carry it.
It also, Lord Oda realized, carried the Oda mon on its pommel. All this flashed through his mind in an instant, and he knew that this was the decisive moment, when all the room was like the inside of a struck bell, all shimmering and shivering and full of latent energy.
‘Y-y-you’re—,’ stammered the peasant. Gods, but Lord Oda hated stammerers.
‘Lord Oda no Nobunaga,’ he said. ‘And you are a dead man.’
Panic seized the man. ‘Kill them,’ he shouted. ‘Kill them now. Hide the bodies – and someone go and get the—’
He broke off when Lord Oda sprang from the stretcher and landed, with only a dim shaft of pain through his leg, on the wooden floor. The peasant who’d been speaking to him moved towards him – he’d got a short-sword from somewhere, a wakizashi. Lord Oda didn’t bother drawing his own sword; the movement would cost him too much time. He sidestepped, another bolt of pain shooting through him, and caught the man as he passed, one arm bracing the sword hand so that the sword dangled, useless, the other snaking around the man’s head, hooking him in the mouth and snapping his neck.
Even as the others came for him, he held the dead man’s weight, which wanted only to rejoin the earth it had come from, and his recently broken wrist screamed – but didn’t yield. He sank his teeth into the man’s neck, and the heart must still have been pumping – just – because a spurt of blood hit the roof of his mouth and gushed, hot and iron-tangy, down his throat. His eyes widened, and he saw the grain of the wooden floor, every knot and eye and scratch. He heard everyone moving towards him, heard their hearts beating in their chests and the whisper of the blood in their veins. He could almost believe the blood was saying something as it coursed around them, and another part of him knew that the special thing said by each person’s blood was their soul.
Their souls are whispering, he thought madly. I will take them inside me and they will nourish me. He drank down as much blood as he could swallow, and then he dropped the corpse, and it rushed to be one with the ground – though he finessed the short-sword from the man’s hand in the same movement. His eyes took in the whole space, the position of each body and the distribution of the weapons. He read the room,
as if it were a kanji character only he could understand, and the most remarkable thing was that he had the time to do so.
He had all the time in the world, he discovered.
It was a single-roomed wooden structure, the brazier he had smelled stood at the rear, and there were several tables arranged in a haphazard placement on the floor. A tavern, of sorts.
He saw his samurai lying on the ground, his throat slit. He saw a very fat man behind a wooden table, a wood-splitting axe in his hand. There was a tattoo of a dragon on his arm, which marked him as a criminal. He saw another man with a scraggly beard, brandishing a katana. Yet another stood in the shadows to his right, a crossbow in his hand, slowly raising it to aim at Lord Oda’s chest.
There were too many of them, that was sure. But they were going to be much, much too slow. Lord Oda could hear his own heartbeat, whoosh-thump, whoosh-thump, whoosh-thump, only it wasn’t just his blood that was rushing around his body; he could see everything, every eyeblink, every pore on every vein-covered nose. He’d drunk before, of course, from animals and volunteers in the ranks, but never all the blood at once, never draining the very life from someone in one feeding. It was as if he’d been shown something essential about the universe, as if he had achieved some long-looked-for nirvana, only he’d never bothered to meditate for it, or go through suffering for it. All he’d done had been to drink.
He grinned, as the peasant with the crossbow – he could see a faint pockmarked scar on the man’s face, perhaps from a burn – continued ever so slowly to lift it. Gravity was against his enemies, he realized. It was like with the corpse – the ground was in love with them and it wanted to own them, to drag them down to rot into it. But he wasn’t subject to the ground; he wasn’t subject to gravity.
He was his own master.
In one elegant motion, without looking, he thrust the dead peasant’s short-sword behind him, spearing the man who had been about to stab him in the back. He didn’t need to look – he heard the man’s heart stop, and he left the short-sword where it was and darted forward. He hadn’t heard the man hit the ground yet, of course. That would come much later, or in a fraction of an instant, which was how it might appear to anyone else and was the same thing anyway.
He jumped a table and landed in front of the scarred man with the crossbow. Ever so gently, he twisted the haft of the weapon, pausing only momentarily to aim it – the man was pulling the lever already, as Lord Oda had known he would. At the same time he reached up with his crippled right arm, the one that had been useless until Taro bit him, and tore the man’s throat out with his fingers. He danced left, and the crossbow bolt moved with him. As it plunged into the eye of the one with the katana, he snapped the man’s fingers, twisting the katana to plunge it into the stomach of axe-man. He ripped up, for once moving as quickly and forcefully as he was able, and was shocked when the blade tore the man all the way up, exiting through his head, causing him to cleave in two.
Letting go of the sword, he caught the axe as the corpse dropped it, turned in a tight pirouette, and let it fly. As he did so, he experienced another glimpse of the room as a totality, saw blood hovering in mid-air like a terrible red constellation against the darkness of the room. The second man he’d killed – the one who’d been behind him – was still falling, and the wielder of the crossbow was only just sinking to his knees.
There was a thump, as the first of the bodies hit the ground, and at the same time the axe blade buried itself in the forehead of a man who had been starting to run at him, a rice-working tool of some kind clutched in his hand. The sound of the axe crushing his skull was awful, a crunching boom to Lord Oda’s sensitive ears. The force of it threw the peasant backwards, and to Lord Oda it seemed like his trajectory, sailing back in a curve to finally hit the wall and slide down it, bloodily, was something as gradual and delicate as a swan coming to land on a body of water.
Slowly he became aware of screaming. There were others still alive, but they began to back away, spilling out of the door, leaving their companions dead on the ground. Colours still snapped and fizzled, the odour of the smoking brazier still filled his nostrils, and his eyes still twitched as he noticed, compulsively, each spot and drop of the raining blood. But it was fading, he knew – even as he looked, the slowness and oneness and elegance of things began to dissolve into random, syncopated chaos. His crippled arm slumped at his side; he felt a traitorous weakness creeping into it.
He took in a deep breath, smiling. No matter that the moment had gone – the moment of enlightenment, of satori. He could achieve it again, any time he liked. All he had to do was kill, and drink.
On his way out to retrieve his samurai’s horse, he paused by the body of the first peasant, the one who had spoken to him, who had known who he was. He observed how it hugged the ground, how totally the pull of the earth had claimed it.
‘You might not be monsters,’ he said. ‘But I am.’
CHAPTER 35
BY THE TIME Taro reached the mountainous region of Atami, near Shirahama, it was the height of summer. His feet were blistered and sore, his soul heavy with the loss of his mother and Hana. He missed Hiro, too – and though he had wanted to be alone, he found himself wishing often that his friend was there to make a joke, or tease him about something, to distract him from his worries. His mind was turning with the death of his mother, but there were more immediate concerns too – he was in Oda territory here, and every day that he moved in it he was placing himself in mortal danger. He was careful to travel as much as possible by night, and to avoid dwelling places, so that it seemed all he saw of the countryside was trees, and rivers, and cold rocky places.
He had survived by hunting rabbits and birds, sucking them dry of their blood. Twice he had even overpowered travellers, when they were on their own – though he had taken only enough blood to keep him from starvation. He was careful to leave them unconscious, but not fatally wounded. He told himself he was not like Little Kawabata, that he had to feed on these people, in order to survive.
But he knew, deep down, that he was exactly like Little Kawabata. He was a vampire, and nothing was ever going to change that. He told himself that it was only because he didn’t want the ball to fall into the wrong hands that he was doing this, but that wasn’t really true. He was doing it because he wanted to bring back the dead, and take his vengeance.
The air hung in a haze over the hills and the sea, as if the fabric of reality were thinned by the heat. At dusk, which was when he began to walk each night, the pine-covered slopes were great purple masses, looming over the endless darkness of the sea.
Though this region was only a handful of ri from home, Taro had never travelled through it before, and found it both familiar and strange. Torii gates and Shinto shrines dotted the hills and bays, as in Shirahama, but they were dedicated to gods he had never heard of, with evocative names such as the Dragon of the Pearl Lake.
As the days and weeks had passed, Taro was not aware that he was gradually losing his faith – his faith in the Buddha, his faith in the essential goodness of the world, his faith in others. But one morning, as he drew within two days’ walk of Shirahama, he felt it break for good.
It was when he was resting for the day in the shade of a small forest, just inland from a long inlet. Taro saw a group of children catching dragonflies by the stream. From their excited exclamations, he understood that they believed these insects to be the reincarnated souls of ancient samurai, who had died in a great battle between the Minamoto and the Taira.
As he watched, Taro felt something inside him wither and die. He and Hiro had been just like those children once – only it was crabs they caught, the special ones with the horned shells, that people from Shirahama said were the souls of the Heike, killed in the great sea battle just off the coast. The same Heike, in fact, that had stolen away the biwa player Hoichi, and made him sing to them the ballad of their destruction.
It’s just a superstition, he realized. These children catch dragonflies
; we scoured the beach for crabs. Probably somewhere in the west or north they hunt for butterflies. In that moment, it all became clear to him, and he thought with a horrified shudder that he would never have understood the truth if he had not travelled so far from home. He would have believed in the same kami gods; he would have taught his children that crabs were samurai. But he had seen other villages now, with different gods and different samurai, and he knew in his heart it was not possible for all these things to be true and real. The only constant thing was that people told the same kind of stories, believed the same kind of stories.
Buddha and samsara and reincarnation – these are just stories we’ve told ourselves.
Of course, if they were just stories, then the Buddha ball was a story too. But maybe it was. He knew that there were bad things in the world – ghosts and vampires and demons. But he had seen no evidence, ever, that there might be good things too. Maybe he was chasing after nothing. He thrust this thought away. At least, while he was looking for the ball, he had something to do.
No, he had to find the ball, and had to believe that it would work – and perhaps the force of his belief would make it true.
These thoughts turned in his mind every day and night, as he trudged alone through the woods and rice paddies, alternately dismissing religion and magic, then deciding once again that the ball must be real, and that the world must be ordered for the best, in the final reckoning, and if he could only find the ball, then he could solve everything, just like that.
Then the cycle would begin again and he would lose all hope and conclude he was a fool. Only children believed the means were available to change the world, just like that, and to obtain what they desired.