Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha

by Richard Monaco

  “Aaaahhh!” he cried, sagging to a squat and puking with singular violence, his sword forgotten in the dust.

  The innkeeper, himself, simply sat down and in the light of his burning livelihood, roared, uncontrollably, with hooting laughter.

  “Ahhccc,” coughed the defeated one, on all fours, spitting straight down and shuddering in massive spasms.

  “What?” wondered Takezo, squinting, cocking his head.

  Gentile got up and took his arm, again, avoiding the head side. The sword was cool now, anyway.

  “La Donna,” he pronounced, shaking his head and grinning, “e sempre la vincha.”

  “Eh?”

  “Women always conquer.”

  *

  A little later, after Yazu had practically drowned himself washing in a rainbarrel, splashing and wiping his face clean, they went on. Takezo had very little vision. His eyes hurt, were nearly shut, now, and there were only blots and shadows with scattered specks of relative clarity. He’d sheathed his sword and had put the head in a small leather sack he’d borrowed from a standing horse. The sky was overcast and there was distant lightning out over the bay. The wind would suck first from one quarter, then another. There was a sense of something immensely gathering. Dogs hid. Horses were restless. Gentile felt it.

  “A storm coming?” he wondered.

  “A storm, yes,” replied the ronin.

  “This head, Takezo-san,” he asked. “I do not think he will tell you much.”

  “Wrong. He will have a great deal to say.”

  ‘Peony boy,’ he thought. Time brought me a revenge I never sought… and if he knew who I was then others know… He shrugged. Could he be in greater danger, in any case? He’d forgotten… or had he? Shrugged, again. Did I recognize him and not recognize that I did? That makes no sense, yet… Because he’d always dreaded that memory and wondered, suddenly, if he’d really run away from that as much as the ninja training. He’d defeated Osa and now held his head by the hair in his hand as he walked, the topknot just protruding from the small sack. Takezo tilted his face almost like a blind man to find fragments of focus with his scorched and swollen eyes.

  “Where are we going, sensei?” wondered Yazu, now recovered from the dung-battle, sword in his sash and almost strutting like a boy playing samurai. He was a little uneasy because he feared being asked to carry the head.

  He saw they were approaching a checkpoint at a bridge over a small canal. In the overcast night, the light was all from scattered lanterns and fluttering torches.

  “You know where Ri-ru lives?”

  “The one-eyed witch-woman?”

  “The same.”

  “Yes. But, sensei, why don’t you bring this unhappy head to a shrine and calm its troubled spirit?”

  “Seems happy enough, to me,” the detective said.

  “Yet a troubled spirit is said to haunt those who had a hand in …”

  “Better beware the wife of that innkeeper than the dead,” Takezo advised.

  “Do you intend to bury it, Takezo-san?” asked Gentile, chuckling.

  “I can’t bear to part with it,” said the detective. “I have things to ask it. My fellow student.” Twisted around and found an almost clear spot of sight: saw the street and the guard at the bridge ahead, lit by the shifting light of two torches set above on the gatehouse. The stolid figure seemed to shift back and forth with the restless shadows. “Lead the way to Ri-ru’s.”

  Peony boy, he repeated to himself. We hold time in our memories except time decays our memories, too… what’s ever to be trusted? And there was the memory:

  Because it was dark and hot and he’d gone alone to the little mountain lake’s edge to swim. He’d already stripped and waded a few steps out on the stony, muddy bottom. The stars were bright in a moonless sky. The still, dark water was full of gleaming reflections and tree-shadows as if the earth and sky had sealed together. Frogs and nightbugs made a strangely soothing, undulating din.

  The air was heavy but sweet. He smelled pines and flowers. It was good to be away from everybody. He often slipped off like this to swim out, float and drift, silent, alone, feeling comfortable as if he really lived there, was at home there and could drift where he pleased…

  Another swooshing step and then thumps and violent splashes behind and beside him as he turned to face blurred shadows and was instantly hit at the knees and tilted backwards and then the shadows fell on him in massive, overwhelming weight and he was knocked flat on his back and under the surface, shouting bubbles, water burning up in his nose, choking for air and struggling as they dragged him onto the rocky mud shoreline and flipped him over, facedown. Pebbles ground into his face and the mud was sour with wet decay.

  There were three of them in full ninja suits and he knew they were teenage and it was no training test because one had to be Osa (he knew the strong, gripping, wirelike fingers and bony shoulders) whose name he kept snarling until his mouth was pressed into the sour muck by a hard pair of knees (another held his legs) while Osa lay on top, breathing hard and muttering; then, while he writhed and twisted on the mud, smearing himself and tearing his skin, gagging and spitting the foulness from his mouth, he felt what he took, at first, for a stick poking at his buttocks, then some rubbery implement, the pressure on his back shifting around, Osa’s voice panting with effort and something else, too, saying:

  ‘Hold still little flower …’ Laughter around him. ‘What kind of flower are you, pretty boy?’

  ‘Peony,’ another said, laughing, holding his legs as he kicked and twisted on the mud and rocks and stink. ‘He’s your peony-boy.’

  Thirty-Five

  The Trial

  Colin sat on the ground with bound arms in the brilliant, hazy, hot, shadeless walled yard. Two guards with spears and wide, conical straw hats stood behind him while the magistrate, other officials and clan dignitaries (including Hideo, Issa, and Reiko) sat up on the long porch in the cool shade of the overhang. There were more people seated on folding stools under umbrellas on the shimmering, sandy enclosure.

  When the accused looked up, sunglare and sweat blotted at his vision and the figures above him were featureless. His head throbbed.

  Being used to the ponderous injustice of English law applied to Scots and the quick, violent tribunals of the Northern clans, the Japanese system of harsh, rigid military law seemed almost reasonable. At least there was a presumption, not of innocence but some interest in the facts, in hearing testimony, weighing the words of high and low alike.

  His arms hurt; he was numbed and cramped.

  I came a long way, he thought, to die in this bonnie fucked place…

  He didn’t feel much about Osan other than wishing he’d never seen her. It all seemed long ago, lost in blurs and batterings.

  So he didn’t look up when the magistrate of the seaside village of Mora came out onto the blindingly hot sand to testify about finding the body and how the two foreigners and the retainer, Nori, had fled at once. The man stood there, tugging at his chin and described the headless girl lying in the garden outside the inn and expressed his view that the Zulu was a demon though he had not actually seen him.

  “Where Nori?” Colin suddenly asked, trying to focus on the shapes above him.

  “Be quiet, barbarian,” said the judge, harshly.

  “The traitor, Nori!” declared Reiko, scowling.

  “Speak when it is your turn,” said the judge whose big, dark robes with exaggerated shoulders gave the Scot an impression that his head was tiny. “Where is this man?”

  “The traitor was left dead on the beach, judge-sir,” Reiko answered. “You’ll have to ask the crabs and gulls his present whereabouts.”

  The authority frowned and looked, unsympathetically at Colin.

  “Unfortunate,” he said. “Who is left here to testify?”

  Reiko briefly recalled the scene at the beach near the small fort where Takezo had escaped with uMubaya. They stood on sand slapped smooth by the unending waves
after the priests were released and Colin was carried off to Edo in a prisoner’s net-closed palanquin. Nori understood his position.

  “Unbind me, Lord Chamberlain,” he’d requested.

  “Amusing,” some samurai had said.

  “Want to go, eh?” Reiko had asked.

  “A sword, please,” asked stocky Nori.

  “Know you’re a traitor?” Reiko, gestured that he be untied.

  Nori knelt there; behind him the water broke, muted and steady against the softening, off-shore breeze. The round moon was going down in his face, fat and reddish over the western mountains.

  “I leave no regrets,” was the last Nori had said as he tore open his kimono, baring his torso, taking the dagger, putting the point to the side of his belly. He looked only at the moon, cut about in half by a distant slope.

  Reiko had turned away as the blade dimly gleamed in the samurai’s shadowy movements as he stabbed and ripped himself open with a sighing gasp…

  Issa, who’d been staring across the bright yard at the red-lacquered gate to the street, noted a commotion as guards, a crowd of commoners mixed with ronin and idle samurai surrounded two women and two men. She noted the outlandish costume of Gentile as he seemed to guide a dark-robed, wild-haired blind man holding a sack in one hand. She almost smiled despite misgivings and anxiety because she was sure it was Takezo in some absurd disguise and so there now was likely to be some entertainment mixed in with law and bloodshed.

  They came up to Colin and faced the magistrate, their shadows blurry and dark as the hazy sun was reaching noon. There was silence for a moment as the viewers absorbed the surprising, disturbing sight of a one-eyed witch in white, a foreign devil in bizarre garments with a sword like a 5-foot food pick and a ronin in a torn kimono with burnt hair, swollen eyes and stained with char as if, Issa considered, he’d made a ridiculous effort to disguise himself as the black man.

  *

  Earlier at Ri-ru’s

  It was pre-dawn by the time they’d made their way to the witch’s place. Takezo’s burns hurt and both eyes were swollen nearly shut. He wanted to bathe and sleep at the same time. Everything hurt.

  There were no lights. Yazu knocked and called out. After a few minutes the tiny hunchbacked woman peered through the spaces in the shutters.

  “Go away!” she said. “Or you’ll be cursed!”

  “How would I be able to tell?” said Takezo. “Uni,” he went on, using her nickname, “it is Takezo Zato. Call her and let us in.”

  “Who?”

  “Open, fool!” cried Yazu. “My master is grievously hurt!”

  A lantern light shifted inside and showed through various spaces and then Ri-ru’s voice:

  “He never comes here when he’s well.”

  The door opened inwards as Takezo said:

  “I’m never well. You miss nothing.”

  “It’s nearly sunrise,” the dwarf said. “Who are these men?”

  “Go back to sleep, Uni,” the witch said, holding the lantern up to see Takezo and Gentile as Yazu peered around the doorframe like a curious monkey, blinking at the light. “May the merciful heavenly beings protect us,” she whispered. “What has happened to you?”

  Takezo staggered past her and groped his way to a stool he barely saw.

  “Forgive me for not washing my feet,” he said. “I need rest.” He set the bag with the head down. It clunked on the smooth wood that gleamed darkly as the lantern moved.

  Her lined and bony face, twisted to her good eye side, came into the light she held and to his blotted and focusless vision she seemed disembodied.

  “You’ve been burned.”

  “There was a fire,” said Gentile from outside the light. “And bloodshed.”

  Uni, the dwarf servant, was in the darkness across the room, looking on.

  “A hunchback came here looking for you,” she told him.

  “Eh?”

  “He was old and bad-mannered,” she went on. “A cripple. Said it was important. Said he knew you.”

  Takezo nodded.

  “Interesting,” he said. It had to be old Momo, Hideo’s doorkeeper. The lord of the cellars he’d cracked on the skull. “Any message?”

  “Look at your eyes,” said Ri-ru. “You really fell from your pony, this time.”

  “Might have been worse.”

  “Ah,” she sighed, getting up. “Said the monkey who dropped into the cooking pot: ‘At least I won’t die without food.’” She was already across the small room, opening a cabinet. “I’ll make a balsam for your eyes.” To the small assistant: “Since you’re still here, boil water for steeping.”

  “Yes,” said the other, bobbing her head as she lit a second lantern, then turned to the fire. The flints clicked and scraped out sparks as she rubbed them.

  “What did the man say?” Takezo repeated, shutting the one eye that worked at all. Groaned, internally, as sleep dragged at him. He decided he felt like a gangrened foot. Wasn’t really that interested in the latest news from the castle.

  “He was irritating,” she reported. “He said someone… I don’t remember his name… a samurai …” She worked over the fire, blowing on the coals.

  “He said Yoshi,” interjected Uni.

  That woke the detective up a little.

  “Maybe so,” Uni went on. “Anyway, he said to say… ah, I have it, he said to say this Yoshi had brought him another dead woman.”

  “One with her head on,” Ri-ru added.

  Gentile squatted beside Takezo.

  “What might this mean?” he asked.

  “Old Momo?” wondered Yazu. “Pretty strange.” He stood, nervously, partly in the glow from the lanterns and small fire where Uni had set a pot to heat.

  “He further said,” put in Ri-ru, dropping some scented leaves and chunks of perfumy stuff into the water, “the information might be useful at the trial today at the chief magistrate’s on 2nd Street. The great lords will be there.”

  Takezo took a deep breath. Gentile looked at him, up close, deep, dark brown eyes troubled, his face tired and world-weary in the uneven light that lit barely half of his features.

  “Trial? Could it be?”

  “Yes,” said Takezo. “It must be.” To Ri-ru: “Do what you can for me. No sleep tonight. And I need your help with my chief witness.” To Yazu: “Go, seek out Momo find out what he knows and then come to the trial. Not long after sunrise. Go!”

  Maybe I have them, he had to think. Maybe…

  *

  At the trial

  The witch woman knelt and formally set down her “conjuring box” on the sand next to Takezo, who’d taken the testifying position near Colin. He held the sack in one arm. For effect he’d refused to wash or neaten his hair and he was still wearing the ripped, bloody and burned dark blue and black kimono. The salve had partly opened his left eye and by tilting it like a bird he could sort of see, though the people in the shadow of the porch were pretty much outlines blurred together. He recognized Issa, Hideo and Reiko among the others.

  “Who called you?” the Judge demanded.

  “Hachiman, god of justice,” replied the ronin.

  “Fool. That is the god of war,” interjected Reiko.

  “Maybe the same,” he replied.

  “Who is this witch?” asked the judge, a little uncomfortably.

  Ri-ru stood there while her tiny assistant dribbled water over the leaves she’d put in her box. Ri-ru’s hair was wild and long under a black headband and she kept her bad eye aimed at the judge – which did little to put him at ease. Her face was expressionless, painted white with thick makeup, almost the same tone as her plain, unpatterned robe. She might have been in ghost costume for a play.

  “Who is this?” someone asked. “The ghost of Masakado?”

  “Don’t use such names!” cried the judge, for fear of drawing the famous and cursed spirit.

  “She will speak for a witness in this matter,” declared Takezo.

  “Which witness? You
?”

  “No, another,” said the dramatic detective with a flourish, bending and lifting the head out of the sack by the hair, displaying it. Colin strained to see. Hideo stood up and the judge leaned forward. If they’d been Christians, Gentile considered, they’d have been crossing themselves. Takezo held it up to Chamberlain Reiko. “He misses his friend,” he declared.

  The magistrate considered the two faces before him.

  “Hard to say which looks worse,” he pronounced.

  The head’s jaw hung slack with dried blood around the lips, that with the sooty, seared skin, charred hair, protuberant cheekbones and madly staring, bulged eyes created a demonic, rapacious, furious look hard to match. The worse thing noted the court, was that Takezo’s own damaged and disturbing head was alive on his shoulders, speaking and moving.

  “You cannot escape from here,” said Hideo, still standing.

  “Do I seem to want to?” Takezo responded, noting that Reiko hadn’t lost any composure at the sight of the late Osa-Kame. Tilting his eye around, he stepped back close to the bound Scot who was taking an interest. “Let the witness speak!” the ronin declared, dramatically. He wished his face didn’t hurt. Wished he could see better. Shrugged. There’d be no fighting his way out, this time; but, without Miou and the illusion of a future, he was just going on, anyway, out of an almost abstract curiosity about what number time would roll him next.

  “This man always fills the air with nonsense,” said Hideo. “An insult to the court.”

  “He’s no doubt drunk,” put in Reiko.

  “Thank you for your kind help, my lord,” said the judge. “Please sit and permit me to continue.” To Takezo: “Now, you, enough foolishness. Whose head is this you so disrespect?”

  “Let this witness speak out,” the ronin said, brandishing Osa’s noggin. He could see Issa was smiling, slightly. “He was an evil man, lately repentant.”

  At which cue the witch twisted around, loosed her long hair and began to twirl in place as if she were trying to screw herself into the ground as her dwarf assistant, Uni, set alight incense and waved it wildly in the air. Ri-ru began to keen and moan softly, then loud… then soft… then a sudden shriek, high, ululating, ending in a gagging cry. Gentile noted the audience was having all its superstitious strings plucked. He felt a little smug, standing, one hand on hip, head tilted, every inch the Renaissance rationalist.