by Nick Lake
Yukiko nodded to the man, staying silent for the moment. She wore a steel mask, an armoured body plate, and a horned helmet. It would be impossible for anyone to recognize her.
‘My name is Kawabata,’ said the man ingratiatingly. ‘I see you wear the mon of Lord Oda, may the Amida Buddha preserve his spirit for noble rebirth. I wish to tell you that when Shusaku and the children left to go and kill your lord, I sent a messenger to warn Lord Oda. I failed, I know – but I did try to prevent his death.’
Yukiko raised her mask. ‘I know who you are, Kawabata,’ she said.
‘Yukiko,’ he breathed, stunned. Then he smiled with relief. ‘So you know me! You know that I am not loyal to Lord Tokugawa, like the rest of these ninjas.’
Yukiko smiled back. ‘Unfortunately, Kawabata, you make two mistakes.’
‘Mistakes?’ he stammered.
‘Your first mistake,’ said Yukiko, ‘is to believe that Lord Oda is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth.’ She leaned forward. ‘Lord Oda is a vampire now,’ she added.
Kawabata’s mouth dropped open and for once, he was rendered speechless. Yukiko savoured the moment.
‘Your second mistake is more grave,’ she said. She saw him tremble. ‘You say you are not loyal to Lord Tokugawa. But the ninjas of this mountain are sworn to serve him, are they not? Certainly they were when Shusaku was in charge.’
He didn’t reply.
She impaled his heart with her sword. ‘Really, Kawabata,’ she said indulgently. ‘What use could I possibly have for disloyalty?’
CHAPTER 37
THE GHOST OF Taro’s mother raised her arm to point at him, then shook her head slowly. Taro blinked. What did she mean? He wanted to ask her, but when he rushed forward to where she stood, she was no longer there. Ama women and children looked at him strangely as he turned round quickly, trying to spot her. She was gone – but it had been her, he was sure of it.
The obon festival had brought her back, and rather than returning to the hut, she had followed him here to the cliff. As soon as he had seen her, though, she had disappeared, as if her existence were so delicate that the weight of his attention – like the touch of a hand to a spider’s web – had made her unravel into nothingness. Even when she had been standing there, she had been as insubstantial as smoke, the leaves of the trees visible through her flesh.
Ignoring the stares and questions of the others, he hurried back down to the village, hoping that she might have gone there instead. But when he came to the hut, he found it empty and cold. Only moments ago he had been dismissing everything he had once believed in, and the world had seemed devoid of gods and ghosts. But now he had seen his mother standing before him, even though her body had burned weeks ago.
She looked sad, he thought. Sad, and hungry.
He shivered. If his mother had returned at obon, it was because she was in the realm of hungry ghosts, and had not been reincarnated. That meant either that she had accumulated bad karma in life, or that something was tying her to this realm. He was suddenly filled with horror at the thought that she was somewhere cold and unfriendly, doomed to never be satisfied, either by food or warmth.
She can’t find the place, he realized suddenly. Spirits were no longer used to the geography of the physical world, and had to be guided to their homes. People placed blue lanterns in their windows, to light the way back for their relatives. Hurrying to the store cupboards against the wall, he rummaged among the dusty items there until he found two small lanterns. Taking a flint from by the fire, he lit them and placed them within the paper windows.
Now if she comes to look for me, she will find me.
Looking around the small space of the hut, he was powerless to prevent memories of the last time he had been here from swimming to the surface of his mind. He looked at the open curtain that led to the sleeping area, and saw the mat on which his father had been lying when the ninja killed him. The blood was gone from the floor, but he could see it as if it were still there, staining the house forever. The fire he had built flickered and crackled just like the fire he had warmed his mother by, when she returned from the wreck.
Until he’d found her again at Mount Hiei, that had been the last time he’d seen her – a frail woman, huddling by the fire for warmth. He remembered their conversation, how she’d reminded him that ame futte ji katamaru – ground that is rained on hardens – to stop him worrying about his father. So much had changed since then, though, and Taro was no longer convinced that hard events hardened a person in turn. There came a time when rain and gravity only wore the ground down, and caused it to slide downhill, bearing everything with it.
But that was a trick to make himself feel better, wasn’t it – to blame it on the rain, or fate, which is outside human power?
The truth was, it was his fault. If it wasn’t for him, Yukiko would never have come to the mountain, and his mother would never have been killed. Her very death was an act of revenge against him. Tears blurred his vision. Grief seemed to expand inside him like a great balloon. He missed Hana, but he didn’t feel about her this colossal, all-encompassing ache – he felt, he realized, as if she wasn’t really dead, but would wake up again. Her body had to have been saved for a reason. But his mother was different. He just wanted to speak to her again, to say sorry, to tell her he loved her.
He wanted also to talk to her about the things that had remained unsaid – the prophecy that he himself would one day be shogun; what she knew about the ball. Ever since he had been aware of the world around him, he had looked to her for advice. It was she who had taught him to swim, she who had told him the stories of samurai heroism that had filled him with such a yearning for adventure, until he had found himself in the middle of one, and learned the obvious but unteachable lesson that blades, like noble actions, might be beautiful – but above all they are hard, sharp, and can cause great pain. He would give anything to hear his mother’s stories again, the way she told them, rather than be in one.
But maybe he could.
When his father had died, he had been struck – and it literally felt as if he had been hit by something heavy and hard – by the sudden realization that he would never ever see him again, and it had physically buckled him. But this time he had seen his mother, standing in the rain. And it was obon. He might see her again. . .
Brushing away his tears, he checked that the lanterns were still burning in the shoji windows, then went over to the corner of the room devoted to the kami and put his hands together. Princess of the Hidden Waters, he said under his breath. If my mother is a ghost, let her come and speak to me.
Amida Buddha, let my mother come and speak to me.
CHAPTER 38
TARO SPENT MOST of the next day sitting on the beach, watching the boats going in and out, and the amas diving from their platforms. He couldn’t dive for the ball until night, when no one would see what he was doing. The people of Shirahama feared the wreck, and they were kind and compassionate and meant well.
That meant they would try to stop him.
His eyes on the boats, he tried to contain his impatience. He was itching to get out there over the water, shining now in the afternoon sun, and dive down. He had loaded the offering shelf in the hut – the shoryodana – with rice and rice wine, so that his mother could eat, as if she were at home again, and among her own things. He had laid out her diving belt for her, and the bag in which she used to collect abalone, for the dead liked to enjoy their old pursuits while they were back on earth. Taro wondered if even now her ghost was flitting among the mountains and valleys of the reef, frightening the fish.
As always, the fishermen and diver-women avoided the north side of the bay, where long ago a ship had gone down, its drowned passengers contaminating the waters. There was only one way for the ghost of a drowned person to find release, and that was to drown someone else in the same place.
Taro knew now, though, that the wreck was no ordinary ship. The prophetess had told him that it had been a Chines
e imperial ship, carrying three treasures from China, priceless gifts from the Japanese princess who had married the emperor of China. Just as they reached the coast of Japan, though, the ship was beset by storms – it was said that Susanoo himself, the kami of storms, desired the Buddha ball, one of the three treasures. Fearing that all aboard would drown, the captain had flung the Buddha ball into the sea, and the sharks of the sea kami, who was in league with Susanoo, had taken it into their guard, and thus it had been lost.
One day some years later, the prince, named heir of the emperor, brother to the princess who had sent the ball, had come to Shirahama and fallen in love with an ama diver. They were married and had a son together. Then one day, the prince told his wife the story of the ball, and how it was meant for his family, and seeing how much it meant to him, she dived down to recover it. Except that the sharks and demons still guarded it for the jealous kami of the sea, and she was wounded by them, her chest bitten open. Using her last reserves of strength, she placed the ball inside the hole in her chest and rose to the surface, where her husband plucked his prize from her dying body.
For years, once the prince acceded to the throne (and with the Buddha ball in his grasp, that had not taken long), he ruled Japan with inflexible authority, the ball giving him control over all of nature.
But there are greater powers even than the Buddha ball. The prophetess had told a story about a curse placed on the imperial family by the ama who had died in the process of recovering the ball – for her husband, blinded by his infatuation with his newfound power, had forgotten to perform any of the funeral rites that would have given her soul rest, and had passed over her son, making another woman’s offspring his heir.
Her ghost remained by the seashore a long time, until one day her son – the one she had borne with the prince – came to Shirahama, to see the place his mother had come from. Revealing herself to him, she learned from him that he had been disinherited, his father the emperor choosing as his heir the son of one of his concubines. Her fury was like the sea in a storm – deep, violent, and implacable. When her son at last performed the nenbutsu rites and gave her peace, she used her moment of enlightenment – her melting into all of dharma – to gather the force required for a final, unbreakable curse.
She declared that the emperors would no longer rule Japan, and that one day the country would be governed by the son of a simple ama diver like herself, that this boy would be the rightful holder of the Buddha ball.
According to the prophetess, that son was Taro.
Now Taro watched the restless, silvery waters above the wreck. If he were to make his way there, the amas and the fishermen would try to stop him. The superstition surrounding that part of the bay was so strong, they would never let him dive there. Anyway, he didn’t have a boat, and the site was too far to swim to and dive as well. The wreck was deep, and diving was exhausting. He’d make it out there and down to the ship – but he’d be drained of energy on rising again to the surface, and then he’d be stuck out there, prey to the currents that would eventually carry his flagging limbs, and his body with them, far out to sea.
Yet his mother had risked it and gone there on the day they were attacked by ninjas, when this whole nightmare had begun. She had been prepared to die when she approached the wreck. At the time, Taro had not understood it – but now he knew she had been hiding the ball. She had heard rumours of vampires in the vicinity, and she was willing to sacrifice herself so that it would not fall into the hands of evil men. Why she had it in the first place, Taro didn’t know – but that ancient ama’s curse must have worked in some strange way to bring it into her possession, when everyone else thought it was lost, or only a myth.
Taro himself had not believed it was real, until he saw that a man like Lord Oda no Nobunaga was willing to kill for it.
A voice broke into Taro’s thoughts.
‘Your mother dived the wreck the day you both disappeared,’ said the priest, sitting down beside him.
Taro stared at him, surprised.
‘And now you want to go there yourself,’ the man continued, running his fingers over his grey stubble.
‘No, I—,’ Taro stammered, but he wasn’t sure what he could say.
‘It’s all right,’ said the priest. ‘You don’t have to explain. I could tell you the wreck was dangerous, but I think you know that anyway, and I doubt it would do much good to discourage you. I could see, yesterday, that you had experienced much more than you were telling me. When you lived here, you didn’t carry a sword beneath your clothing.’
Taro’s hand went to his side, where a katana was strapped beneath his kimono.
‘Yes, I see more than I say,’ said the priest. ‘And one thing I can see is that karma wants me to help you, even if I don’t know why.’ He pointed to a boat that lay bobbing in the water just offshore, close to where they sat. ‘That’s mine,’ he said. Then, apparently following another train of thought, he jerked his thumb back towards the village. ‘I’m leading a service this evening, before we send the ghosts back to Enma’s realm in their little boats. There will be a lot of o-sake, and the service is likely to go on for a long time.’ He turned again to the sea. ‘If my boat were to go missing in that time, I would be highly unlikely to notice.’
Taro couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘I. . . thank you,’ he mumbled.
‘You are welcome,’ said the priest. ‘You know,’ he added, ‘I was there the day your father brought you in his arms from the beach, after you rescued Hiro from the shark that killed his parents. You were bleeding from a terrible wound, yet you had killed the shark, and when you opened your eyes and spoke, it was only to ask if Hiro was all right.’
Taro glanced down, embarrassed.
‘And you haven’t changed since then,’ said the priest. ‘You’re still brave, but also unswerving, which can be bad for one’s karma, and one’s health. Not many people would take a knife to a mako, let alone a boy.’ He looked at Taro, and his gaze was serious now. ‘I know you will go to the wreck, and that there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But be careful, do you understand? There are things on this earth that you cannot even imagine.’
Like vampires and ghosts? thought Taro. But he just nodded. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said.
‘Good. Just don’t get yourself killed. We have enough ghosts to be contending with, this obon season.’
Taro sighed, thinking of his mother’s ghost. ‘Why are you helping me?’ he asked.
The priest gave Taro a keen look. ‘Do you believe your mother is at rest?’ he asked, answering Taro’s question with another.
‘No,’ said Taro. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘You’ve seen her? When we were at the shrine, you went as pale as a ghost. I thought perhaps. . .’
‘Yes,’ said Taro. ‘Yes, I’ve seen.’
‘That is what I thought. It seems to me that whatever is keeping her on this plane might have something to do with the wreck. I am just a foolish old priest, but I see a woman dive there on the day she disappears and her husband is killed, and I wonder if there’s a connection.’
Taro nodded. ‘I think there might be,’ he said.
‘You must be careful, though,’ said the priest. ‘There is a reason why people avoid the wreck, much as you may not believe it.’
‘Demons?’ said Taro, with a weak smile. ‘Kappas?’
‘Yes, and worse,’ said the priest, with no trace of humour.
CHAPTER 39
OARS RAISED, THE little boat rocked on the waves. Taro had rowed out to the far north side of the bay, taking the priest’s fishing boat. The moon was bright, uncovered by clouds, and illuminated the scene before him as if it were daylight, only leeched of colour. Everything – the sea, the wood of the boat, the mountains – was silvery blue. Taro glanced back at the lights of Shirahama, seeing no movement. The people were inside the gathering hall, beginning the closing ceremony of obon. He had perhaps three incense sticks before they would move to the beach and place
in the sea the boats in which their relatives’ shades would return to the land of the dead.
Reaching out with one hand, he touched the water. It was cold, even though it was the Month of Leaves and the land was warm. But the sea was another kingdom, and everything was different here. Still, he could not let the cold stop him. He had to hurry – not only so that he could return to the village before the congregation reached the beach, but also because he could feel the wind rising. Already the sea all around him was becoming choppy, the waves standing up in points, like the teeth that encase a pine cone. Taro had never come close to this part of the bay. Now he felt a physically palpable animosity from the place, as if the wreck below him were a spidery monster, squatting malevolently on the sand. The air felt gelatinous and resistant – it wanted him gone too.
He sent a silent prayer to the Princess of the Hidden Waters, hoping that the kami would protect any diver, not only the exclusively female amas. Then, quickly so that he couldn’t change his mind, he dropped backward into the water.
Immediately he had the old sensation of breaking through a membrane and into another realm. The water was clear in the moonlight, and even from so high up, he could see the first spars of the wreck, perhaps the depth of three men standing on their shoulders. Curving out of the sand, these glistening wooden staves resembled the bones of a whale. Farther to the north they disappeared, as the sand of the bay gave way to rocky reef, a landscape of the Kanto in miniature, with coral for hills and fronds of anemone for trees.
Taro felt that greasy resistance again, but he pushed downward, feeling the pressure in his ears. He was glad he was a vampire and did not need to breathe as much as an ordinary person. The wreck was deep. By the time he had forced himself through the water to the white sand below, his ears were ringing and his eyes stinging with the salt. He kicked forward and grasped the nearest rib of the ship, wanting some purchase in this shifting, contingent world. A cold current snaked around him and out to sea, ruffling his hair, as if wanting to take him with it.