“I cannot go with you. My father would never allow it.”
Yon continued to push the sparrows down the alley until they stepped onto the main street leading to the wharves. “I will do it alone,” he said. “They must be returned. The marshal must not find American women at the Royal Dragon.”
“What if they find them with you?” she asked.
Before Yon replied, Maque heard a whirring sound. A bullet struck the wall beside her. The brick exploded and sprayed her face with clay shrapnel. Yon grabbed the women by their sleeves and pulled them down to the pavement.
“This way,” he said, leading them, hunched over, back toward the loading dock.
“No.” Maque moaned, blood welling from cuts above an eyebrow and across her cheek. “We cannot go back to the Dragon House. The marshal will be back with an edict.”
“We cannot walk into a gunfight,” Yon said.
“But we can walk around one.” Maque pulled on the sleeve of the first sparrow, the blond woman carrying the bag of Mahjong tiles. The other two followed like baby ducklings.
Yon crouched behind them as they opened a door into the opposite building and walked inside. “Where now?”
Maque turned to him. “We will walk through this building and the next until we reach the waterfront. It is how I reach the docks when it is raining and I must meet a boat from China.”
“I thought you were staying here.” Yon said.
“I wish to see the sparrows safely on your boat.”
“As the lady wishes,” Yon said, bowing. “After you, honored mistress.” Yon waved his hand toward the dark interior. Maque and the sparrows led through the first floor. As they passed a stairway, he clasped the young woman in front of him.
“Someone is shooting from upstairs.” He pointed to the ceiling. “We should stop them before anyone else gets hurt.” He touched the fresh blood on Maque’s cheek.
“No, we will not interfere. Innocent people die every day in Seattle. You cannot get in the way of the tongs and live.”
“Maybe they are Hip Sing tong and can get us to the docks,” Yon suggested. “We will tell them the women will be shipped to buyers in China.”
Maque nodded. “You might be right.” The women followed Yon up the stairs. He ascended first.
“Don’t shoot,” he called, raising his hands above his head as he stepped onto the open warehouse floor.
From her vantage point at eye level with the landing, Maque could see ahead. She recognized Plain-suit and Chalk-stripe, now known to be Mar Tuck, the despised former Suey Sing tong member who had delivered the sparrows to her loading dock. Chalk-stripe held a gun in each hand. Plain-suit lowered a longer gun with a round canister and a handle attached beneath the black steel barrel.
“Stay back,” Yon said in a hushed tone without turning toward her. “They are armed and one has a tommy gun.”
“They will not harm me if they want help from my father’s tong.” Maque stepped past her bodyguard and glared at the San Francisco thugs.
“You ignorant peasants,” she said. “Why must you again disturb the chi of the venerated Royal Dragon House?”
“If it isn’t the obedient daughter, my little sparrow, and her bad rice.” Chalk-stripe lowered his guns to the level of the white women, still crouched in the stairwell. “Hasn’t your father sold them yet or are you personally training them for their courtesan duties?”
“You will call her ‘Madam Maque,” Yon said, the timbre in his voice shaking.
“Madam?’ How fitting for the mistress of white sex slaves.”
“You will not use that tone with her,” Yon said. His muscular arms trembled with anger.
“Or you will do what?” Plain-suit asked, raising his guns and pointing them at Yon. “You are an Indian. If you are killed, no one will even notice.”
“He is a faithful servant to our House. If he is killed, my father will revenge his loss.” Maque’s thoughts raced. “If the Suey Sing have found and seek to kill you, your stay here will be very short. San Francisco’s many hiding places do not exist in Seattle. It is only a small city with fewer places for rats to cower.” She paused and tapped her index finger on her lips, her long nail almost cutting her delicate nostril.
“What can we do?” Plain-suit asked,
“Follow me to my boat,” Yon said. “I’ll get you out of town.”
A blast of incoming bullets hit Plain Suit in the back. Viscera and guts spilt out his belly and he collapsed onto the floor, facedown and moaning. Yon lurched forward, grabbed the injured man’s tommy gun, and backed quickly away from the windows.
“Coming or not” he asked the other gunman.
Chalk-stripe leaned over and lifted a leather wallet from Plain-suit’s back trouser pocket as his partner begged for help.
“Coming,” he said and shot Plain-Suit in the head.
* * *
Buildings blurred by in their mad rush through warehouses to the docks. The rat-a-tat-tat from Suey Sing tommy guns decreased. Yon held the retrieved sub-machinegun pointed to the ground and did not return fire. They concentrated on fleeing, not on fighting back. As they approached the seaside quays, rats disturbed from mounds of stinking garbage scurried before them. The sparrows wrinkled their noses but stifled their shrieks and clung to Yon and Maque during the frantic retreat.
“Almost there.” Maque opened a door leading into a long, narrow passage between warehouses.
They ran down the passage to a short pier. Chalk-stripe and Maque stood watch as Yon lifted the American women and their bag of Mahjong tiles aboard a wooden boat equipped for fishing. He untied the lines from the cleat on the pier. “Get down,” he said to the sparrows.
“You must be careful on your return,” Yon said to Maque as Chalk-stripe waited by the boat holding the lines.
She shook her head. “I will not leave you alone with that faithless man. He will kill you and steal the sparrows back. I am coming with you.”
“I will not allow Mar Tuck to harm you or the sparrows,” Yon said. He lifted Maque onto the boat.
Yon and Chalk-stripe jumped in. Yon worked on firing the boiler while Chalk-stripe kept watch, his guns pointed toward the dock. Maque waited with the sparrows and hushed the women when they started giggling. The pier appeared abandoned, but she would not tolerate any risks.
A fish-spotter’s seat towered over nets hanging from the boat’s vertical surfaces and laying in piles across the deck. Glass floats studded the nets. The marine glare of the blue-green balls faded with the last rays of sunlight.
The steam engine chugged and the boat eased away from the pier. Yon pushed Maque’s and the sparrows’ heads down when they tried to see the sights of the harbor.
“Soon,” he said to Maque and spoke in gibberish to the other three women. The sparrows nodded and remained quiet and low while Yon steered the boat out of Elliott Bay and into the shipping lanes of Puget Sound. Chalk-stripe kept watch at the stern, but no boats set out after them.
They had lost sight of the lights of Seattle when the wind picked up. Raindrops fell, light at first but increasing to a drenching downpour. Chalk-stripe pocketed his guns and pulled his jacket collar over his neck. Yon set the tommy gun on a coil of rope and draped canvas over Maque and the women. The sparrows settled down, the blond one clutching her bag of tiles, and slept under the dry cover, but Maque found a small hole and watched Yon and Chalk-stripe. She fought a rising nausea as the boat began to roll and pitch on the open waters. An hour or more passed while Yon steered the boat and Chalk-stripe leaned over the side, retching and coughing.
Maque knew she would be joining Chalk-stripe at the rail soon when Yon walked over to the seasick man. With one quick motion, he lifted the thug by the back of his trousers and threw him over the side. Maque rushed to where Chalk-stripe had stood and leaned over. She saw his arm reach out once and disappear into the dark roiling water. The rain slowed to a drizzle, but the rocking of the waves did not. Nausea overcame her and she vomite
d into the boat’s wake.
Yon held her until she recovered her composure. “Is he dead?’ she asked.
“More than likely,” Yon said, “but he might be unlucky enough to wash up on San Juan Island. The Nipponese farmers who migrated there are always in need of free labor for their strawberry farms.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
He avoided her question. “What do you want to do with the sparrows?”
“Can we throw them overboard, too?” Maque smiled broadly.
“No, I don’t think they can swim,” he said.
“I’m tired of playing babysitter.”
“We can give them to the coast guard at Port Townsend. Maybe collect a reward?”
“The sooner, the better.” Maque rolled her eyes.
“And what will you tell the Dragon when you return home?”
“What Dragon?” she said. “My once honorable father would have sold these silly women for sex slaves. No one deserves that fate. And he would never have insulted my mother this way if she were still alive.” She lowered her blood-smeared face. “I have no home with him. He didn’t care if I were imprisoned or hurt. And mistreating the sparrows meant nothing to him.”
Yon hugged her as she began to cry. Maque looked up at him. Through her tears and tinted by the golden gleam of the moon rising above them, he looked almost Chinese. She stepped closer to the brawny Alaskan.
“I have heard that the Northern lights are beautiful,” she said.
“Not as lovely as the delicate lanterns of the East.” He brushed his lips against her forehead. “Would you return with me to my home in Alaska?” he asked.
“Free me of these sparrows and I will follow you anywhere.”
Yon slipped the cord holding his scrimshaw pendant around her neck. The sparrows woke and screeched as a larger wave turned the boat. Yon hurried back to the wheel.
Maque knew a sure way to keep the women occupied until they reached Port Townsend.
“Mahjong, anyone?” she asked. The rain stopped and Maque laughed into the wind.
LOTUS RONIN
by
Alan J. Porter
— :: —
The sand burnt her feet. The thirst was unlike any she had known before, while the merciless sun threatened to drive her onto her knees at any second, but all she could think about was the blood. The blood and the smell. The awful smell. It had been her first kill, but it was far from the honorable experience she had expected.
It had been short, and brutal. A struggle to survive rather than a dance of equals skirting with mortality.
Her mind wandered back to the smell. The smell of his unwashed body, weeks of sweat and grime, the smell of his fetid breath on her face; and finally the putrid smell when her sword had sliced across his belly spilling his guts on to the sand.
Texas was turning out to be a lot different than Osaka she thought as she gave way to the demands of her exhausted body and sank slowly to the gritty embrace of the desert, perhaps to join her recent opponent in her own eternal sleep.
* * *
“Sleep,” the voice barked, “is not for warriors. It is for field laborers and fat courtiers.”
“Go away Sakai-san,” came the muffled response from the thin coarse blanket, whose comfort was more symbolic than practical, as in reality it offered little protection from the limb numbing cold on the mountain side. Realizing that she had little choice but to obey the harsh command, Karin Konishi rolled out from under the nominal bedding and lazily pulled herself to her feet to face her tormentor.
Damn that smile, she thought. She could never stay angry for long with her sensei. He may have been a tough taskmaster, the dominating figure of her current life, ever present in her dreams as well as her waking hours, the master of the impossible demands, but he had the round face of an imp and a smile that could melt the coldest heart. In many ways it was his most deadly weapon.
“What task do you have in store for me today, sensei?” she asked with a small polite bow.
“I require a lotus blossom.”
“It is the wrong time of year, and those flowers do not grow on these slopes.” She shook her head in disbelief. “How am I to accomplish such a task?”
“You assume too much, and achieve too little. Ask not what you can’t do, but what you can.”
With that typically enigmatic answer the ronin known as Sakai turned and started down the goat path to the village nestled in the valley below. He paused and looked back at the young daughter of his former master, shivering on the slopes, the wind and snow blowing around her. Approaching her eighteenth summer, she had the poise, determination, and grace of her mother, combined with the warrior spirit of her late father. She also had one other trait in abundance, a desire for revenge. It was that Sakai was determined to focus. She needed to learn discipline and control before he could unleash her on the man whose actions had brought them to their current circumstances. She would be the weapon he would wield to regain the honor taken from his lord’s family through guile, deceit, and treachery.
“When you have completed your task, you may join me in the tavern.” He smiled to himself as he once again turned, and limped his way down the path, cursing the pain in his leg with every step he took.
It was four hours later that the door to the tavern was pushed open and a ragged bundle of freezing girl stepped through the doorway. The wind and snow seemed to continue to whirl around her even after she had stepped across the threshold and the door had swung shut behind her. All but one patron in the tavern glanced up from their plates, drinks, and games to get a glimpse of the new arrival, and all just as quickly returned their gaze to their previous pursuits, for here was someone whose whole demeanor said leave me alone as much as if they’d shouted it at the top of their lungs.
The figure made straight for the one person who showed no interest in her arrival, and arriving at the table slid something across the scratched and battered wooden surface till it intruded into the direct eye line of the man bent over his bowl of steaming soup, his sixth of the day.
“Thank goodness,” the customer said, “I’ve gotten tired of eating this slop all day.”
His gaze switched from the soup to the object that had been placed in front of him. He put his spoon down and reached for it, holding it gently between the tips of two fingers. He held it up to the light, and turned it around, examining its form and construction. A perfectly folded origami lotus blossom.
* * *
She had been conscious for a few minutes before the boot struck her, listening to the drawled conversation around her, as well as any sounds that might have given her clues to her surroundings. So far she had concluded that she was no longer on the harsh desert sands, but on the packed earthen floor of a wooden hut, one, judging from the breezes she felt, whose walls had been crudely constructed. The sounds of small animals in the undergrowth outside, possibly rabbits, indicated that she had been moved some distance to a more fertile area, so she must have been out cold for several hours.
The voices and footsteps indicated that the hut was occupied by two men and a woman. The woman seemed to be furthest from her, and judging by the occasional clang of metal on metal and the aromas coming from her direction, she was probably cooking something. A meat stew from the smell, maybe culled from the rabbits outside.
The boot was accompanied by a rough pronouncement “The slanteye’s a wakin’.”
“She ain’t no Chinese” came the second male voice, “she’s a Jap.”
“They’re all yella to me.”
The casual racism and confusion between Asian races was something she’d never get used to, but she had come to expect it as part of the cost of being in this strange country. She could almost forgive it as just one of many signs of this country’s relative youth, an infant nation still struggling to find its own culture and moral code.
“Anyways how you know the difference?” the rough voice asked.
“I seen some in Dallas, last tim
e I was there.” came the slightly more cultured response.
Dallas—that meant she was in Texas, and hopefully closer than she’d ever been to her target.
Her hand went down to her belt, and confirmed what she already knew. Her sword was missing. Slowly she opened her eyes.
“See, I told ya!” exclaimed the rough voice in something close to triumph. She smiled at his reaction guessing that he didn’t get that many opportunities to be correct. The rough voice belonged to a young man probably around the same age as herself. However his frame was bent, his shoulders rolled from many hours tilling the fields, and his left leg bent so that his foot turned inwards. This explained the dragged foot she had heard as he moved around the hut. He was wearing an odd collection of clothes, a pair of rough cotton pants, scuffed and worn work boots, a flannel shirt stained and torn, and on his head a battered hat with a wide brim. His face showed leathery signs of too much exposure to the sun, even at his age, and he had several days’ growth of rough whiskers. He reached a rough calloused dirt engrained hand toward her. She wasn’t sure if it was a prelude to a punch or an offer to help. Rather than find out she sprung to her feet, and took a step back to put herself beyond his arms’ reach.
“You’re a spry one, ain’t ya?” the female by the cooking pot spoke for the first time, “an’ you’re looking hungry. You want something to eat?” she gestured toward the pot. The young girl said nothing, made no movement. It was a tempting offer for she was indeed in need of food, but she was still unsure of who these people were, and what threat, if any, that they posed.
It was the second man who interested her the most, the one who’d said he’d been to Dallas. She looked at him with an appreciative eye, for as much as the first man was crude, slovenly, and bent, his companion was the opposite. His clothes, while old and worn, were still neat with signs of precisely sown repairs. His boots, while scuffed, were straight, his hat, brushed and clean of the sand and dust that covered the rest of his ensemble. Did the sand mean he’d been the one who’d pulled her out of the desert? The hat was also pulled slightly forward and down, the brim casting a shadow over the man’s eyes.
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