Kame was furious and cold. He was a hair from drawing the blade.
“You,” he said, quietly, just audible over the background sounds of voices, hissing fat, plucked music. “You could not even protect your whore. You think she was run down by a cart.”
“No, I don’t. But now I know the rest.”
He’s stalling to let them get ready, his mind said. I spoke too soon but at least I’ll have his head…
“You know very little, Takezo,” Kame said and his amusement was real. “So many questions with just one answer. We were waiting for you.”
Because he’d missed that, too: a drunken assassin bragging about slaying women. All they had to do was make sure Taro or Yazu heard and the bait was in the water.
And so comes Takezo the fish, he thought, wryly.
The men were already in motion, on their feet as Kame drew in a glittering flicker, fanned blade hissing as the detective tilted back and the terrific cut just missed his throat. The two thugs closed in, simultaneously, brandishing swords. Striking down at Takezo who stood flatfooted, this time, and blocked both cuts with one round sweep in a flash of sparks.
Think of attacking, his mind almost chanted, conceive of defense, and you are already defeated…
He frog-hopped over the table, sword first like a fang, and cut at Kame, as the room began to clear out, people scrambling and shouting. His wiry target ducked aside and whipped back a missed stroke. The bony assassin was very, very strong.
One of the thugs was just a blur in the smoky, erratic light as he tried a lunging stab and Takezo’s blade seemed to whip itself back and under and caught the man’s lower ribs. Chopped through.
Kame came back, quick, low and deadly as a cobra; Takezo stood totally unmoving, sword leveled waist-high in front of him. Kame stopped short, too talented, himself, to press into the ronin’s fearsome stillness.
The other thug wasn’t so aware and tried to cut down from behind, his opponent seeming almost trapped being so close to the wall. Takezo backed into and under the stroke and stabbed his blade under his own armpit and into the fellow’s chest, still watching Kame. That was that.
The assassin had his back to the flaming brazier where the pork had blazed up into fatty fire, surrounding him with flame-wrung smoke as if, Takezo poetically flashed, he’d just stepped through the gate of Hell. The whores and patrons who’d hadn’t run out (not counting the drunks on the floor) stared while the owner, halfway to the fighters, was yelling for someone to get the okappiki.
At this point, Takezo wasn’t even not thinking: more than ever, it was as if his body could itself see and respond at once; aware of everything without fixed focus. Something had suddenly altered his technique, again, as when he’d nearly died in the tea garden. Now he knew each outcome was already inscribed in unfolding time. The one who wanted to win would lose. Time felt fluid and collected around his sword and himself; now he could move into and out of it at will. He’d never felt so remote, so detached from consequences. Smoke, fire, shouts and flashing blades were gestures, soft, vague breezes affecting nothing that mattered – perfectly still at his center as if composing a poem in a garden.
Closing with Kame, another, huge thick-bodied man with massive hands holding an iron staff he plied like a baton, moved in on his flank. He went near Kame to tempt a stroke but the other fell back again and edged behind the flaming grill so that he spoke out of the fire and oily smoke from the burning flesh.
“This is too big for you to understand,” Kame said.
“Why?” asked Takezo, again. “By whose command? Whom did she hurt? My poor love.”
“You don’t understand the powers involved. The destiny of our people is at stake.”
So it wasn’t for pay… but why did he…
Takezo edged nearer, starting to move around the smoke and stinging heat. His eyes teared as Kame circled with him. The massive man with the iron staff was closing slowly, still out of range.
What do they think I know that’s so dangerous? This fellow says nothing and never will… a fanatic, a ninja actor, not a low assassin… maybe high in rank…
Unexpectedly, the massive man hurled the twenty pound rod in a single snapping motion and it whirled at the detective like death’s scythe, tearing through the fumes and should have shattered him.
Except he couldn’t tell himself from his sword or his opponents or even the side-spinning staff of death because time belonged to him and he dance-stepped through and past and the bar took down the brazier, meat, sparks, wood and charcoal spraying across the room, igniting curtains and setting Kame’s kimono afire.
The innkeeper screamed for buckets as everybody conscious fled. Kame beat at the flames then poured a jug of sake on himself as Takezo came for him, not even looking at the squat man who was now coming with a stool. He faced Kame as he struck behind and cut the man’s hand off at the wrist, dropped stool banging to the floor as he screamed and staggered back. Flames now chewed rapidly left and right across the walls and flowed across the dry wood of the ceiling. Paper screens whooshed, burning almost instantly; straw matting crackled and curled.
Naked and half-naked whores and customers were coming down the stairs as smoke poured up in their faces. Outside someone was banging an alarm bell. The owner’s voice was yelling for help.
Flames beaten out, robe smoldering, Kame, hemmed in by Takezo and the explosive fire, charged and slashed with terrific speed and desperation. The detective blocked two cuts, ducked a third and just sliced the shorter man’s back as he spun away into a spume of smoke, seeming to briefly dissolve into shadow and reform into substance on the other side.
They were in the center of the room, now. Kame was circling to keep a support post between them. Takezo pressed him. It was hot as a baking oven in there. The flames had already enclosed three walls. One of the sleeping drunks leaped and stumbled madly, rebounding off a partition, hair ablaze, then reeled though the front door.
“Killed that woman,” he snarled, breathing a little hard, more from emotion than exertion, “for the destiny of our people?”
Takezo kept him cut off from escape. As he ducked behind the stairs a naked couple came tumbling down, coughing and shouting. Takezo dropped back in front of the door and waited as the flames burst and spurted, everywhere. He couldn’t see far into the room, now, stinging billows of smoke filling the place and pouring out all openings. Straw and paper walls went up, explosively.
Kame came out of the choking clouds, eyes tearing, coughing, sword upraised. The heat was nearly unbearable.
“Madman!” he yelled. “Finish this outside!”
“A taste of the hell-world that awaits you,” Takezo returned, holding his ground in the doorway, blinking and wincing as the furnace-level heat blasted at him in the sucking draughts.
“You still fight like a girl!” Kame yelled, tossing his sword aside into the flames and coming forward, unarmed, out of the roiling smoke and fire. “Act like a man, ‘Peony-boy,’” he sneered, charging, hands open. “Fight me!”
Takezo, for once, was surprised enough to break his unfocused concentration. He hadn’t heard that nickname since he was 12 or 13 years old. The associations weren’t pleasant. And to make it worse, he suddenly realized who “Kame” was: the squinted-in eyes, bony cheeks, truculent manner.
Osa… yes… he got skinny, his mind said. Incredible… Osa!
He hesitated, wanting to ask questions except the desperate fellow-student was on him, inside his sword’s arc and they locked and spun. As the room reeled around them, in the blasting heat, the moment was a slowed nightmare…
“I could always beat you, Girl-boy!” hissed his childhood nemesis as they bounced off the doorframe, then went down and rolled outside, choking and struggling.
“Osa,” Takezo snarled. “You still smell like monkey-shit!”
“You’re out of time,” Osa-Kame hissed in his ear.
He had to release his sword to avoid the supple, wire-strong choke hold bony Osa
was putting on him and his outflung arm sent it sailing into the yard. Osa had his old schoolmate facedown on the board sidewalk in front of the door, the heat and smoke gusting out as the fire peaked towards a crescendo.
“I’ll put it in your ass, Girl-boy,” Osa promised over the flameroar. “The way you always liked it.”
Then the roof fell in and the impact and gush of sparks, flying fragments and unbearable heat sent them rolling, locked togther, off the raised planks into the street where the crowd was falling back. Men with buckets were already soaking the neighboring building – the nearest other one was across the street.
Yazu had shown up and the little man was armed with a short sword. He and Gentile moved into the blasting heat to assist but Takezo waved them off.
“Stay back!” he commanded. “This is for me alone!”
Chunks of blazing wood were all around them as they levered, punched and kicked at one another, then rolled over a burning board that set both kimonos alight. They flung apart, ripped clothes off, facing each other, now, in loincloths, hair wild, blackened with soot and dust, blood on both of them, fire geysering and spilling all around. Battling, the Italian flashed, like a beautiful, trapped human spirit versus a razor-faced demon formed from conflagration itself. Even there the painting in his mind took new form: this battle witnessed by a goddess-like Osan showing stern compassion and sadness…
Takezo realized he’d never defeat Osa hand-to-hand; too slippery and inexplicably strong. He saw his sword a few yards away, the hilt sticking out from under a mass of smoldering rubble that glowed like a charcoal fire.
The detective ducked past Osa, going for the blade, diving – except the ferocious opponent, seeming all sharp bone and relentless muscle, quick as a ferret, slammed on top of him again, driving his face down almost into the hot coals. Takezo’s hair started to smolder. The blinding, searing redness seemed to bake his skull. He felt the terror of childhood again, the binding, suffocating agonizing weight of the bully and murderer.
Yelling with pain he clutched a handful of redhot wood in his free left hand and scattered it over the clinging, strangling killer’s bare torso and in a spasm his body literally flung Osa off his back. He groped for his blade, blinded by tears from the heat and gritty smoke as the other rolled over in the dust, screaming curses, getting the flaming chips off himself, then, in a blur, stood and knocked down Yazu and disarmed him in a single motion.
Then the seared, charred-looking killer, crossed the few yards of wild flame-shadows and wind-billowed smoke to where Takezo, clawing at his eyes with his burnt hand, was still trying to find the sword he’d almost reached. His fingers kept perversely missing it even as Gentile rushed in past the stunned Yazu, rapier out.
Osa was first and the short sword was already coming down to stab through the detective’s exposed back when he went still inside again and he gripped the hilt and drew the now glowing blade from the steeping coals, blinded eyes shut and running tears down the sooty cheeks as if he wept like an avenging angel for the world consumed by blood and flame.
To the Italian it looked like a wide-shouldered, bird-legged, cadaverous shadowy demon leaped and squatted on the air, striking down with a supernatural fang of doom. But, on his knees, the blinded ronin arced the glowing blade up and under so fast it seemed a semi-solid red fan of flame, intercepting the fiend’s neck so that his body dove on into the coals, the impact spattering them into a whoosh of new flame as his head hit, bounced and rolled to the side, rebounding from one of Gentile’s boots.
The heat pressure from the crumbling inn was so intense Gentile felt like a hot hand was pushing him back. He took Takezo under the arm and helped him up. The ronin swordsman was still touching his face. He had a little blurry vision left; enough to locate the head and lift it by the topknot; but he was burned under both eyes and could feel the seared flesh swelling.
Squinting at it up-close in the smudgy, flailing flamelight, it seemed eyeless in its hollow shadows and the gaped mouth was a wordless, dark cry. He kept the hot sword out to the other side. His blistered left hand seemed to be clutching a ball of agony.
Now you answer my questions, he said to himself.
“What will you do with this man’s head?” Gentile wondered as they fell back to the crowd in the street. Yazu came over, looking for his sword. He worked around the roasting body, shielding his face from the heat. The stink of burning flesh sickened him. He found the blade and scurried away.
“I knew him,” Takezo said. “A long time ago.”
“Sensei,” said the bony pupil, joining them, their wild shadows shifting and jerking around them. “You are burned. And you weep. Let me take this evil head and practice my downcuts on it.”
“Nevermind,” was the answer. “I need it.”
Osa, he thought. Well, why not… time sped up and floated you ahead to wait for me… Osa, you were the devil of my fate… I never got to ask you why you always hated me… maybe I can ask Yoshi why he does… .He now was weeping through his tears, thinking about Miou because Osa had been part of killing her so the question had become: who did he really serve, Reiko, Nobunaga… and then was sure it had to be whoever Miou, herself, had been forced to work for… And the ring, business… again…
“Your poor eyes, sensei,” said Yazu, hoarsely. “Let me get a poultice from the healing woman and –”
“I’ll shave my skull and put on black robes like any Zato.” These were blind men who dressed like Buddhist priests and made a living from various skills like storytelling or music.
“Not easy to join those guilds, master,” Yazu reflected. “I know a skilled acupuncturist who might help –”
“I’ll be a traveling singer,” his master remarked. “I’ll sing joyful songs of spring.”
Yazu just looked at him. They were passing through the crowd onto the main street which became the Tokaido Eastern Sea Road and ran hundreds of miles along the coast to Kyoto.
The dour, blocky tavern owner and his big-bosomed part-time prostitute wife, barely covered by a torn and scorched, sashless kimono, followed them for a little way cursing Takezo and waving their arms. Then the woman charged with nails outstretched, robe open and fluttering in the breeze, eyes wide and furious in the changing, reddish light.
“You demon of shit!” she cried. “Who will pay? That inn is our life!”
“Go away, witch,” said Yazu, brandishing his short sword, stopping to block the couple who were followed by a younger relative, holding a bo staff.
Head in one hand, sword in the other, Takezo was being partly guided by the tall Italian and took little interest in these matters. He was thinking about what he had to do, now.
The snarling woman was almost on him, when Yazu stooped and picked up a semi-dried cowflop muffin and scaled it at her. It caught her in the neck. Spattered and stuck.
Disgusted, she wiped at it, then slipped on another and went down on one round side. Her husband and the staff-wielder came on. Yazu stood his ground, stooping, firing off three more dung pies, one glancing off the innkeeper’s rage-distended face, shutting one eye.
“You die for this!” he fairly shrieked over the background roar and cracking of the blazing building, wiping at the befouled socket and then careening on at the skinny apprentice as his armed companion moved to flank.
Gentile turned to watch and Takezo managed to get a blurry view by tilting his one semi-functioning eye at the flame-lit skirmish. The infuriated wife was stooping and wildly hurling cowflops herself from the steamy collection by the roadside. Her aim was poor and she succeeded only in hitting her husband in the back which he hardly noticed, having drawn a dagger and made several cuts and thrusts at Yazu.
Yazu, never easy to grasp or strike, avoided them as well as the sweeping pokes and blows of the staff. As his master had taught him, he took a stance and shuffled calmly forward, sword leveled waist-high, between the two men who now hesitated. The short, curved blade gleamed in the flickers of red-orange.
“What is death?” he exclaimed. “Mere illusion.”
“Ah-ha,” sneered the innkeeper, “a bodhisattva.”
The younger man with the staff could bear no more and leaped in, aiming a round blow at Yazu’s angular head.
“Here’s a sutra!” he yelled.
The counter sliced the bo in half. Then Takezo’s stooped, skinny student and petty thief, in the same motion, whirled a sidecut at the innkeeper, just missing him as he stumbled back behind his outstretched dagger.
“Illusion!” reiterated Yazu. “Life is a shadow!”
“Well done, I think …” murmured sensei Takezo, twisting his head to try to really focus against the background of billowing dark smoke and seething flame. As he went a few steps closer, still holding Osa’s head in one hand and the naked sword in the other, the sight proved too many for the two attackers and they fell back at a half-run to the delight of much of the crowd. Gentile was grinning.
Yazu stood, posed, sword above his head, savoring his triumph, trying to look detached. Unexpectedly, the wife lurched back into the scene, both hands laden with turds, and managed to come behind the victorious swordsman. Takezo saw only a smoky blotch of movement, tilted his head, again. Gentile shouted a warning but, instinctively, in Italian which had little effect.
So the roundly naked, coldly frenzied and furious lady clamped both hands, like the stinking paws of some cacacophic avenger, over poor Yazu’s face and filled most of his head’s orifices with shit.
Yazu twisted and turned, slashing, accidentally shoving her to the ground where she sat, then laughed and cursed with the fearless joy only a baited and outraged woman can display. His previously victorious sword was waved in vain all around him.
Gentile sank down to one knee, shaking with silent, pre-laughter which soon exploded into sound. Takezo couldn’t quite make it out but heard the gagging sputters of his student as he blew out his nose, spat and vomited from his mouth and clawed at eyes and ears to expunge and free his head of packed vileness.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 23