At the edge of the thick masses of leaves and underbrush, in the cool shadows speckled with hazy spots of filtered sunlight, he stripped and went in the water up to his waist, reveling in the cool, foaming push and sweet, clean fragrances, the sun and deep green shadows on the stippled surface. This reminded him of home, of a place he liked to go alone and purify himself after the blood of a battle by ritual washing, a strong stream that fed the river called Thukela where trees grew thick on the slopes above the sand and brassy, olive colored plains.
He wondered if he would live to leave this incredible land. If he told the tale at home they’d be sure he’d been taken to a world of sprites and spirits. Not so far from the truth, he reflected, standing there, waist deep, refreshed, looking downstream and out across the flat landscape to the sea. From here the land haze and cool surf mist turned the collection of small houses and fishermen’s huts into featureless, pale nubs with touches of green and black.
He was thinking about hunting. Wanted to test himself against this strange wilderness. Realized how much he’d missed things like this.
All the rules, he thought. Even their fighting has more steps than a dance… this is good, here… very good… but I must do what I can for red-hair… He grinned and shook his head. And that mad warrior drunk more than sober… He shook his head and laughed aloud. There’s one who stands up to fate’s blows – even if a little unsteadily…
Wondered what Takezo was doing, if he’d gotten back to Edo without more bloodshed. He was a man, he considered, worthy of true respect. He couldn’t know the respected one was, at the moment, in the middle of his warehouse district binge in the city 60 miles distant.
Later he took a nap in the soft shade and woke as hazy sun was settling towards evening. He got up, packed his monk’s robes in the beehive headpiece and hung it on a string behind his back, spear in one hand, and followed what he took for a game trail at almost right angles to the stream and roughly parallel to the open country just below. Wearing just the loincloth was comfortable and reminded him of home.
He trailed the animal which he took for an antelope by droppings and tracks almost to dusk, partly circling around the crescent curve of the hills. He came out into a huge old bamboo grove, some stalks two hands thick around, going up out of sight and spaced like pine trees. He was down about to the level of the farm plain.
He wasn’t too concerned about actually finding the creature because even the pretense of a hunt was better than just semi-wandering based on vague instructions about what to do when he reached the village. A man’s actions were supposed to have some purpose.
So when he came over a sudden, steep declivity he wasn’t actually much excited by the sight of the buck, its antlers just fuzzy stubs this time of year, in a mass of cut brush, branches and mounds of rotting grasses from some farmer’s ground-clearing, chewing, and looking around with big, liquid eyes, body all white-dappled brown.
He stopped and just looked. To his right the big stream flowed rapidly in a wide curve, powering a watermill about a quarter of a mile away. He could pick up the creaking on shifts of breeze. The late sun slanted steep and mellow.
He crouched a little and cocked his spear. Wondered if the naginaga would fly true. He’d never really tossed it. Thought about Mer’ce, naturally. Smiled.
A man can imagine her comments, he said to himself, amused. Wished she were there to make them. How weak that was. I’ll never see her again, his thoughts said, bitterly. This creature is so graceful… And refused to phrase: “like her.” I do not wish to kill it… I am not hungry…
“Why must I think of her?” he murmured, shrugging his massive shoulders. “How weak.”
Worse, he was trying to imagine her village from her descriptions. She’d called his country “bare and spiny.” She’d pictured hers as lush, rich with green and brilliant blossoms.
They were lying awake, side-by-side, on the soft hillock under the low, wind-twisted tree as the brilliant, full moon had now dropped off from the night’s silvery noon. They had not touched. The nightsounds chirped and droned on. Stars crusted the sky.
‘What is it like there?’ he asked, looking up at the incredibly lustrous sky.
‘Why do you care?’ her voice wasn’t unfriendly, he thought. ‘You will never see it.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘My father’s main village is in a valley. Many trees. Farms. There is a river there full of fish and snakes and water beasts that could eat you in a moment.’
She’d snapped her finger to indicate his consumption. He smiled. Liked getting her reactions and opinions.
‘Sounds crowded,’ he jibed.
‘They’d make room for you.’
‘I have been in battles where the spears flew so thick --’
He broke off and sat up because he’d heard it: a low, purring snarl and cough down the easy slope in the moon-softened brush that partly enclosed the hillock. She’d heard it too. He loosened the rag that tied his two spears togther. She was squatting now, alert, long arms resting on her knees.
‘We should strike a fire or climb this tree,’ she said, casually.
‘Let him come.’
‘At night?’ Expressionless.
‘The moon is bright.’
‘Great hunter,’ she said, studying the deep, detail-less shadows under the silvered bush, ‘your spears are too big and clumsy.’
One was a long throwing spear, much heavier than the ones used by her people. The other was the famous thick-bladed Zulu hand-to-hand weapon. The longer one in his right hand, other in his left, he crouched to his feet and started moving carefully down the weed-grass slope, listening and keeping his eyes unfocused for better night vision.
‘Climb the tree,’ he whispered.
‘You better climb it, yourself,’ she told him.
He knew she was right, this was not the time; dawn or sunset, not in the middle of the night. But her actually saying it made it impossible. She might have just mocked him, he decided, to his death.
He felt very exposed in the moon’s brightness, his shadow softly clear on the knee high, rough growth, undulating ahead of him.
Fool, he thought. Go back and wait for morning…
It felt as if his body was holding back against the seeming downflow of the slope itself under him so that time rushed forward and he was instantly far too close to the menacing shadow of the bushes and he heard her calling out to him from up behind.
All irrelevant because the shadows lunged out and formed a big, liquid-smooth silvery shape exploding almost instantly into a growling leap all too close too sudden too fast to even take in so that, instantly, his arm had whipped away the long spear at the center of the tinted dark blot of bright fangs and claws and it vanished as if the night or phantom beast absorbed it; then snarls and hot, raw breath in his face and terrible rips of pain along his sides and across his back and he went down only aware that he was about to die, of incredible weight and massive movement, the moon rocking in the sky, the crushed grass, the metallic taste and the feral smell of blood… and his free arm pumping of its own volition, stabbing the spearblade, the “sword-on-a-stick,” into the vast, suffocating mass that beat down, crushed and ripped and shook his soft and fragile flesh… his arm stabbed and stabbed and stabbed… and then, as his consciousness drained away into the shadows, there was just the blur of the moon… and then it shook… melted and went out…
“Go away,” he said, in Zulu, to the stub-horned buck and maybe to his memories, too. “I do not need you.”
Spear over his shoulder, he strolled towards the animal who took him in with a long, soft, incurious look, then simply bounded, flowed away around the tall mounds of cut grass, upslope and blended into the sun and shadow speckled forest edge as if dissolving into that intense green and gold.
uMubaya stopped and turned to his right into direct sunlight, feeling something, instantly expecting attack, a missile or a charge because he knew, even before his squinted eyes
finished adjusting to the soft, uneven brightness, it was a human watching him from partly behind a mound of wheatlike grasses.
When she stepped out he was surprised and a little excited, too, because it was a bare-legged woman wearing a white, diaper-like tunic, hair caught up in a wide band into a brush effect not unlike the women of his people.
They just looked at each other. She had a pretty, round face and solidly curved body showing, darker than the Japanese he was used to. He was instantly thinking about how she might feel under his hands.
She didn’t run away as he approached. He made a Japanese-style bow which she returned. Up close her unmade-up face was a little roughened from exposure to the sun.
“Are you mortal?” she inquired.
He flashed his smile at her. He liked doing that because it seemed to have a shocking effect among those where noble married women actually blackened their teeth to seem to have none.
This one giggled, without covering her mouth, something he couldn’t know would be a social gaff in Edo. Then she smiled widely showing large, fine teeth.
“A black demon,” he told her and she giggled again.
“A poor hunter,” she put in.
“Even here,” he said with a sigh and a headshake. “Women tell me that. Princesses.” He didn’t know the word and said it in Spanish which failed to enlighten her. Then tried: “Great ladies.”
She liked that.
“Yes,” she said, joking. “My father is daimio of the village.”
Later, night, the moon a thin crescent in the blurry sky that hinted more rain. They could see it from where they lay side-by-side in the loft of the laying-by barn, stretched out on soft sacks of millet. It smelled musty and sweet and uMubaya felt totally relaxed for the first time since he’d been washed up on the beach.
“No one comes here at night?
“Only to do what we did, maybe.”
He touched her with friendly intimacy.
“Why did you, I mean, with a demon?”
“Why not? I have never seen your like.”
He grunted and looked at the moon, thoughtfully. Memories.
“My people hunt and fight,” he told her. “Like others.” Chuckled. “In the dark, who can tell one from another?”
She gripped him low.
“Here’s one way,” she said, giggling.
“Pause for breath,” he said, grinning. “But all peoples I have met seem more alike than different, in the end.”
“Well, if they hunt in your fashion your people must often go hungry.” She giggled again.
“I didn’t want the beast,” he explained, touching her, absently.
“The woman who tells you ‘no’ is always unpleasant-looking.”
He chuckled.
“You recall someone to my thoughts,” he told her, looking at the moon.
“Someone who teases, dark sir? They say I tease too much.”
He shut his eyes.
“My name, though you have not asked, is uMubaya. What is yours?”
“Unimportant,” she murmured, “unless you see me again. What is your second name?”
“One is enough to know me by.” He yawned and stretched. “What is yours, in case I do see you again?”
“Kimi Teasing,” she told him, not giggling this time, now touching him down where it mattered. She put him, he considered, in a grip few men could break. “Enough foolish talking,” she concluded.
Dark followed day followed dark… bright, hot, harsh… his eyes felt filmed over, sticky… there were glimpses of blurry, bright blue fragments above him leaking through a network of twisted, sharp, spiky finger he sometimes recognized were thorns… when he’d try to move, tearing, agonizing stiffness would rend his body and he feared those spiky hands were gripping him… his heart would race, rapid and light, breath rasp into his dry, raw throat… then an inexpressibly soothing coolness would touch his cracked, sore lips and trickle into his mouth… then light and darkness… he would burn with thirst and gasp for air… violent shivering shook him, terrible cold… cold… twisting, wild images of fangs and fighting, blood and pain, mad dancing and feasts and somewhere lost among bright and dark and freezing and burning and terror and despair there was something wonderful that was no more grounded or certain than the rest, yet more solid, somehow, a sweetness and musk that sucked a strange, painful gathering of independent, itching, irresistible need into his body, knotting itself into his loins while his hands groped like a newborn child’s at the breast, to somehow seize the sweetness… his body thrashed for relief and ecstasy amidst all the hurt, spears, swords, screams and blood and lost, lonely emptiness that welled up like a vast, shifting painting in the fever of his mind… he felt her and knew it was she… heard her cries… smelt female richness… then fell into imageless night… and then woke and was alone in a thorn bomba she’d enclosed him in for protection while his wounds healed and sick heat faded… finally, days later, blinking and wincing against spikes of sun stabbing into his consciousness through the brush he saw her impassive face, the V cheekbones, the proud-held head, himself too weak to do more than rasp at words, her voice saying:
‘Farewell, brave man. I must go home. I will always think of you.”
Later, the moon was gone from the open space and only the stars, intercut by long, straight, silvered clouds showed. The drone of nightbugs and chorusing frogs was almost a roar.
He’d fallen asleep and, as he woke, the dream overlapped and he was back there on the veldt under a waning moon that seemed to melt in silverwhite blurs through the netted thorn branches of the bomba where’d he’d been lying in fever and stiff pain for unmeasured days. Since it was part dream, it suggested meaning and seemed clearer than mere memory: the earth was soft under him (like the bagged millet he presently lay on) and his fever and soreness had seemed to melt away and gather in the suddenly rock-hard center of his body as the graceful, long-curved female outline descended over his arched and aching groin and sat them into a single flesh welded together by agonizing sweetness… he knew what it meant (in the dream now and in the fever then) because the two times had been welded together. It was as if he’d been made of liquid so that his entire being flowed up from the feet and down from the head and poured out into the graceful weightless shape straddling his loins that was also himself and an emptiness, as well, infinitely suctioning him away as he was trying to fully wake up now and the fever then… gasping and blinking, sitting upright in the barn, the Japanese woman stirring slightly beside him, traces of dawn showing at the open high door beside them, a single, soft, big star in the subtly lightening eastern sky…
It happened, he thought. It must have happened… I remember… I remember her leaving me there when the fever had cooled and I was still weak as a baby goat… it must have happened… or did I dream it only in the heat of my brain? I’d have to ask her and even then I’d have to believe her…
The memory of a dream or the dream of a memory, he didn’t quite put it. And this haunted him, too. He lay back down and looked at the star that he didn’t know was a planet. At some point his eyes closed again…
There was a dreamless blotting-out and then the loft opening was hazy and bright and he was lying there, alone. He rubbed his face and sighed. Sat up.
Did I dream this, too? He asked himself.
He could see over the edge of the opening across flat, flooded rice paddies to where the wood and thatch homes clustered beyond the watermill. He supposed she went back to her hut and family.
He liked this woman who hadn’t given her real name or asked for his. Sensed that it made it less real for her but no less exciting. Smiled. She’d been more than real in his arms: the fluid touch and musky scent, soft outcries in ecstasy’s helplessness… trying to press himself deeper and deeper, to pin her there as if she, somehow, were melting away beneath him…
Memory is not here, he reasoned, again thinking about Mer’ce and the troubling dream of the moonstruck, South African night. Many nights a
nd moons ago… here is here…
He stood up and dressed himself in his monkish disguise. Outside, the fresh sunlight reflected on the rice fields and stream, the high blurry clouds still pinkish. The air smelled of earth and green and was still almost cool; but the heat was already gathering.
There was a ladder up to the opening and he climbed down. At bottom there were red and black blossoms wedged in a crack between two boards. He knew she’d left them. Smiled.
He entered the village an hour later. He was dressed the same as the first time but assumed most monks looked like other monks. He passed the bailiff’s where Takezo in his merchant’s disguise had discussed bringing his imaginary goats to the inn. The barrel the late, wide-shouldered and mocking Osa-Kame had been sitting on was still there. No one was outside.
He went into the first sake and bun shop he came to on the main street which ran straight down to the beach where the inn overlooked the ocean. The surf was a steady whooshing hiss; erratic on-shore breezes brought a salt-scent and touches of coolness to the sunbright-side of the thoroughfare.
There weren’t many people out yet. A boy was currying a horse behind a rude fence; an old man and woman on a porch were mending fishing nets; a stout, barefooted woman was toting two jugs of water on a pole across her shoulders, singing to herself.
Inside he sat at a table facing the haze-bright street through the unshuttered windows.
The medium-sized, average-looking, greyhaired shopkeeper was a little uneasy. He’d asked if the blessed monk actually had coins to pay or did he mean to bring out his begging bowl. uuMubaya put out a few of the coins Takezo had given him.
“Priest,” said the man, peering out into the street, nervously, “don’t bother with this village.”
“Do not?”
“No good.”
“No good?”
“Where are you from? The far South?”
“Yes,” said the Zulu.
“Thought so. I have an ear for accents.” Pursed his lips and studied the other. Yawned and showed big, yellowed teeth. “Take off your headpiece.”
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 26