Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha

by Richard Monaco

  “Yes, lord,” said the young man.

  “Your name?”

  “Sanada, lord.”

  “Meanwhile, Sanada,” Izu went on, indicating Gentile, “go with this man and guard him well.” Smiled. “And challenge every monkey you meet.”

  Nineteen

  Trapped

  The full moon was just rising over the dark sea. An unsteady line of silverwhite made a path through the easy waves to the beach.

  A road, Colin thought, for fairies or angels to tread…

  The seven of them stood on the sand together. uMubaya was a little apart, listening and watching. The onshore breeze and soft surf sounds obscured any noises coming from behind them among the dunes, moon-touched rocks and blotted shadows of bushes and scrub trees.

  “There’s a fishing village not too far south of here,” the tallest monk, who rarely spoke, pointed out.

  “Good,” said Takezo. “We’re going that way, in any case.”

  uMubaya cocked his head. “I think we are found, again,” he said.

  Takezo held up his hand to freeze everyone in place. Reached out, as he had in the room with the ninja assassin, to sense what was around him. Grunted with admiration for the black man.

  “You’re right,” he whispered. “Strip yourself and slip away. Important one of us remains free. “Follow the coastline. It will bring you to Edo. See Lord Izu if I don’t find you there. My woman, Yoshida Miou, at the Highbridge Inn on 4th River Street will help you. Go now.”

  The Zulu was already stripping and tying his garments into a bundle which he put in his beehive priest’s head-covering.

  “Cannot we try to fight?” he asked.

  “Can’t win. If they bring him back dead with you still free, his guilt can’t be proven so easily. A doubt is enough.”

  “I do not care to turn my back,” uMubaya said.

  “Well said,” Nori put in.

  “This is strategy,” Takezo said. “Go. Samurai care more for honor than success. Foolish.” That was from childhood ninja wisdom and his life had proved it.

  By now dozen of fighters were closing around them on three sides, forming a loose crescent whose points reached the surf line. The Zulu went straight to the sea and half-crawled into the low waves, then walking in waist-deep water parallel to the shore, just beyond where the surf broke into gleaming foam.

  He could hear shouts and the clash of steel blown back unevenly to him. He followed Takezo’s instructions. He could see little against the blotting background of dunes and rocks. Moving on south the sounds were deadened into indecipherability by the shifting wind and crumpling waves…

  Never spent much time in water, he thought. Next I am sailing on the endless ocean… a king-to-be in a pretty dry country… now where am I? Smiled and shook his head. I like this Takezo as much, I think, as Nori… hope we live to drink and laugh… Takezo stands apart… not like the others I’ve met here… or anywhere, maybe…

  He half-swam, holding his headpiece and spear out of the water as the moon went higher and spattered the sea with shimmering pale coins and strokes of light. After a time he waded up to the firm sand where the foam traced brilliant curves and curls as each wave receded.

  It was beautiful and it held him and made everything else seem far away and dream-like: the brilliant, silent heavens, the stars like shattered diamonds.

  Of course, this brought back memories…

  He wasn’t asleep. The moon was high and round, pared and netted by the complexly entangled branches over them. They lay side-by-side, not touching, on the blankets with soft brush tucked underneath them.

  “Mer’ce. Your name is beautiful.”

  “It is a name. The vulture is ugly. The antelope is beautiful. Do their names make them so?”

  He puffed out a long, slow breath, as if at the moon, too.

  “I will ask you a question,” he told her. “After the lion.”

  “If I am in the other world with you, I may answer.”

  “You will be my queen.”

  “A king?” Her tone was faintly scathing. “Why did you not just take me, then?”

  He stared straight up at the fragments of the moon that trembled as the light breeze stirred the branches.

  “Then you might always hate me, Mer’ce.”

  “I might hate you, in any case. Know you no married couples?”

  “You must say yes.”

  “That can never be.”

  “After the lion, who knows what can be?”

  “You and the lion. You will be eaten and this subject will be closed.”

  “You will love me.”

  “I will sleep, now.”

  “You will love me.”

  “After the lion.”

  She sounded as if she were smiling. He stared straight up. Breathed out another long, slow breath and listened to the cries of hunters and prey and the droning, drumming din of ten thousand insects all around…

  And even now, he was tangled in the memory of her long, exquisite legs and arms, her flared hips and lean, long torso, more graceful than a flower in the wind… perfectly shaped breasts, neck like a goddess, rich lips and deeply gleaming eyes as if the night itself had condensed into dark, misty jewels… and, still, it wasn’t just that, either, it was what she said and didn’t say, the mocking humor and all the mystery of herself that he didn’t know… her days and nights and thoughts, enriched by being hers…

  “Aiii,” he whispered. “I am a weak man. Enough dreaming!”

  Then he dropped in one motion to his belly on the warm, wet sand. The beach was narrow here and back along the shadow of the dunes whose tops were moonbright something had moved along with him.

  *

  Takezo backed them all to the water’s edge.

  “To fight so many,” he pointed out, “we’re better off in the ocean.”

  “You have ‘jitsu’ for outnumbered?” Colin asked.

  “Run away no jitsu,” said the detective. Nori liked that. “If you cannot run, make it as if you fought one man alone many times in succession. Then you don’t feel outnumbered.”

  Nori liked that even better.

  “Just make sure you kill him every time,” he advised.

  Some of the attackers now showed clearly in the moonlight. Drawn blades beaded silver reflections. He was trying to detect the ninjas who had to be there. Nothing of them would be showing.

  One shadow and two men suddenly loomed up and the ronin drew and struck in one motion in a flash of moonlight without touching a single sword, just the sound of two flesh-impacts, groans and curses.

  The sword moves by itself, he noticed, again, almost as if another had swung it. The old masters of the blade had said, in effect: when the technique melts away and one has no idea of swordsmanship, then the blade is freed. The blade but not the man. Still, how would the blind bird know he is caged if he never tried to fly?

  “Into the water!” he reiterated.

  A flicker of moongleam as a ninja loosed a throwing weapon that whizzed at his head; he deflected it with his sword. One of the priests was plying a humming chain and sickle and the spiked ball glittered as an adversary went down followed by the round-faced priest doubling up. Takezo heard the arrow zip and hit him.

  “Surrender!” someone shouted. “No disgrace! In the interests of justice!”

  “Let justice begin here!” answered Takezo.

  They backed further into the soft tugging of the surf. The moonlight on the pale beach showed the action in blurry silhouette.

  Too many, he thought.

  The wounded priest knelt back to the water, shaft poking from his side. Colin slashed and grunted and fended off a pair of samurai. They could sense the fact that the Scot didn’t much value his life and (despite all the theory of the buse) they held back a little. Most men were ready to die at any time except now, say what they would. Takezo noted the effect.

  Not caring, he knew, adds half to skill…

  In his own case he was, gen
erally, too busy or bitter or drunk to care.

  “All right!” he shouted. “Wait!”

  They were now in a line in the surf. Four of the pursuers were down on the sand. Nori was beside him, blade bending the silver light like a rill of water. There was a black crease of blood across his forehead in the monochrome illumination.

  In the pause he’d created, Takezo’s mind went (peripherally) to the great Chinese painter and poet, Wu Li who’d written somewhere, he was sure: “to understand bamboo, paint the shadow of the leaves by moonlight.”

  Black and white, he thought, the night is rich with truth…

  “Surrender!” the same voice demanded.

  “You do what you are told without question,” Takezo called back. “Suppose your lord were a madman?”

  “You are a madman,” came back. Takezo thought he knew that voice.

  “Is that Yoshi?” he inquired. “The one who dresses as a woman by the high bridge in Edo?”

  “No time for nonsense,” said the commanding voice. Yoshi, Takezo was now sure.

  “Then what brings us here?”

  Nori and one of the priests guffawed.

  “Your lawlessness,” the voice answered.

  “I have a token from Lord Nobunaga,” the ronin pointed out. “I am a staunch clansman, in a way.”

  “We will have to kill you,” the voice repeated from the moonshadowed wall of men on the beach.

  “If we quit will you feed us sweet rice buns, Yoshi?” Takezo wondered.

  Nori nearly doubled over with laughter. His admiration for the infamous spy knew no bounds, at that moment.

  The leader had come forward, his face a pale blur above his dark robes, framed by his basin helmet.

  “No point in continuing,” he said, quietly. “I am Captain Yoshi. Come with honor.”

  “With you, the killer of women,” Takezo said. “Girls fall like rice to the sickle.”

  “Never mind your talk. Respond!”

  “But I do mind.”

  “You need not kill yourselves.”

  “I want you to perform jigai,” said the ronin.

  This brought laughter on the beach as well as in the water because jigai was the ritual suicide of a woman. Takezo was surprised by the blocky Captain’s new self-control.

  “They want you all for open trial. No need to die,” he offered.

  With the surf breaking around their knees, Takezo kept them drifting south, the way the Zulu had gone. If they, somehow, broke out, they might meet up at the fishing village. He spoke just loudly enough for Nori and the others to hear him:

  “We might be safe. Up to a point.”

  “What point?” queried Nori. “I think my head is not long for these shoulders, no matter what.” Shrugged. “Life is a dewdrop in the sun.”

  “Brace up,” said Takezo. “Now!”

  He glanced up and down the strand, trying to spot those ninjas. Felt the day’s warmth radiating back from the sand, smelt the sea smell with a hint of decay. Here was all this soft human flesh exposed to bitter, yieldless steel, bright in the silver light.

  Except he never expected what came next as he lunged with the others at the men enclosing them at the water’s edge. The wounded priest broke the arrow shaft and pushed it through even as he ran. Never expected, as they closed, that the enemy would drop back and then a blurring softness would close around them.

  Shit of the seven devils, he thought, a net!

  His katana was already entangled, so he drew his short sword and slashed with force and control – except they were steel-mesh links. They were all caught.

  “Humiliating!” snarled Nori.

  Takezo next curled himself up to maximize his freedom of movement and minimize his discomfort as the net was closed.

  Appropriate, he thought. Caught like fish…

  “May your balls decay,” he said.

  Twenty

  Miou

  She was taking the sultry air on the veranda of Sanjuro House. She was weary, bored and worried. She knew she’d been harsh with Takezo because she was guilty: part of her wanted to improve him; part of her wanted him to give her up. Loving him had crept up on her and it was frustrating. The sky was clear, moon and stars reflected on the wide, shallow stream that curled, broke and tinkled over mini-waterfalls under a low-hanging willow.

  She was sick of her work… sick of so much. She’d escaped being a farmer’s woman and become… what? A sometime entertainer, sometime whore…

  A spy, she thought, and worse… She didn’t like to think directly about some things she’d done. And I want to tell him…

  “I want to, once, open my heart completely,” she whispered, as if to the moon and star-haunted stream, the softly swaying, silver-tinted willows. “Ah… I mock him, sometimes, yet he is so much freer than I … ”

  But it wasn’t the willow or the purling water, either, that answered her.

  “I’m afraid I believe that,” a voice she knew well said softly. “But why do you share this thought with me?” He assumed she’d detected his silent approach across the thick boards. One of his nicknames was the “ghost,” more literally, “the ancestor,” which was a tribute to his wisdom as well as stealth. She knew him as a razor-edged man. She’d told a friend (without suggesting his name) that he made love as if stabbing with an aikuchi – short dirk used for hara-kiri.

  At first she’d been fascinated and attracted to him. And flattered by the attentions of a man so feared and respected. Some said he had supernatural powers. Her fear of him, at first, produced a kind of passion. Later, there was more fear than anything… so she learned to act and fake.

  “Sanayu-san,” she said, knowing, not needing to turn. Sometimes she asked herself if ever in the throes of love while he spent himself inside her, would she ever be able to reach the blade or steel pin from under the mattress or couch and strike a mortal blow. She didn’t hate him, even for how she’d been used and trained. It was more a reflex – as when you saw a deadly snake while walking through the brush.

  “What do you ask me to do, now?” she wondered, still motionless, as if he were a viper, looking at the stream unfolding its mysterious beauty and feeling a remote longing beyond any words… Takezo was part of the feeling but not the subject anymore than the reflections or the scented air…

  “Why ask that, Miou?”

  She shrugged, slightly, whispered:

  “Why not say it? You want me to kill him.”

  “I do?”

  “Or betray him to his death.”

  “You are one of us. You come when I request.”

  “Like a beaten dog.”

  He was at her side, now, leaning on the porch rail. She kept her eyes on the slow current as if it mattered: the reflected heaven that (as a child) she often tried to touch. Once one summer she’d dived into still water that seemed, to a child as to a poet, the same as the star-shocked sky itself. Small and pale and naked in the foot-deep rice paddy, the village silent and lightless all around, lying in the warm, soil-scented, soothing wetness, reaching, when the wavelets died away, with small fingers for the wavering, reflected stars, coming up with loose and empty water spilling from her fingers…

  Takezo, she thought. My love… I am lost to you…

  “Was your former life so sweet?” he wondered. He’d wondered that before. “Your father sold you like a beast.”

  “Once I was a free dog.”

  “Who is truly free? Maybe the Buddha.”

  His voice was gentle, almost soothing. Why need he speak loudly?

  “Now I am sold to spying and murder,” she said.

  “A great warrior, when asked what he thought about what he’d been ordered to do, said: ‘I have no interest in thinking.’”

  “In what hell does he reside, now?”

  “You have spirit.”

  “Like the dead girl.”

  “Strange how Toshiro died,” he said, voice almost a purr, now. That was a dangerous sign.

  She turn
ed and looked at him, finally. He was compact, calm, watchful.

  “Why was he in my bedroom?”

  “One supposes a lady has her reasons.”

  “Amusing,” she said.

  “He was found, they say, in your garden.”

  “Was he there to enjoy morning glories?”

  “Difficult to ask him.”

  She looked at his eyes. Just glints. Studied the water full of stars, again.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she wondered.

  “Should I? Are we not lovers? Who would cut down the flowering orchid he has himself watered?”

  “Who truly loves what his tears have not wet?”

  The lucent water held her eyes. She recalled Takezo’s face when he sometimes held her after lovemaking: his relaxed, slight smile; looking at her and past her at the same time. She loved his dry humor and dry outlook, too. For all the violence of his life, she knew, he was kind and forgiving and regretted any hurt he caused. How many could that be said for?

  Tanba no Kami Sanayu touched her arm, gently.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, softly. “Just keep to your duty.”

  “Which duty, now?”

  “Find the ring.”

  He knew he didn’t have to explain much to her. She was very quick and he was proud of how she’d been trained. Her intelligence and independent nature was a potential problem but a sharp blade might always cut by chance.

  “The one Jiro Takezo took from the murdered Osan?”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “No. He mentioned it. Said it was Chinese.”

  “Who knows. Find it. This will benefit him as well as you.” He turned and kissed her forehead. “Believe me.”

  “Can you promise that, Tanba?”

  “I cannot guarantee the workings of fate,” he allowed. “I advise you concentrate on your job.”

  “Promise you will not hurt him.”

  She tried studying his eyes again, knowing it was futile.

  “I will not hurt him,” he said. “Though I wish he had never been born.” He shrugged. “For simplicity’s sake.”

  She knew he also had to consider the possibility that this Takezo might be running her as an agent of his own. He liked to say love was ever a weakness. Even mere sex.