“Perfectly.”
“Because you’re all part of it.”
“It?”
“The big thing. The great changes in the world. Maybe the restoration of the Emperor. You have to kill a certain number of girls for it to work.”
“Understand this, roughneck, I love my daughter. I wish her no harm. She fled and I don’t know why. I’m grateful to you for showing that she may be alive.”
“They opened the grave.”
“Yes.”
“And it was the girl with the lily tattoo?”
“Yes. And there’s more you don’t know.”
She stepped aside and he had a fleeting impression this was a moment in a play except there was no chorus to explain and comment on the drama. He waved his hand in front of his face at the smoke that was really thickening as the seated man puffed continually at his pipe: Osimachi and the others looked almost like cutouts blurred and depthless in the tobacco fog.
And then, for the first time, he was so shocked he staggered back half a step, blinking, staring through tearing eyes at the graceful, beautiful woman who’d, as if on cue, come out from behind the screen. As she came through the haze towards him his heart pounded and his mind said It’s a spirit… it’s a trick… it’s… because it was Miou… but it’s so smoky… impossible… and then she was close and it was her face… clever makeup… ninja tricks… and she spoke, saying in what might have been her voice:
“My love, I still live!”
Dropping to her knees before him and he knew it was nonsense but had to watch himself lose his concentration because hope overwhelmed it and, in that instant of wanting to believe, gave Issa the time to whip one silver hairpin from her coiffure and stick it into his neck.
Globefish poison, he thought, already feeling dark numbness shock his blood and brain, face and neck tingling as the drug-like poison began to shut down his nervous system, his breath and the floor came up on a tilt to pound into him – except he didn’t feel it and only was aware of what might have been Yazu shouting something too far off and blurred to understand and a close, fading whisper, that could only be Issa, saying:
“I have come too far to turn back, poor Takezo. I too am on the wheel of fate …”
And then the smoke and shadow closed in and covered him completely, pressed him down, pressed him flat as if darkness were a vast weight and nothing moved. What could move? Time had stopped…
As Yazu saw his master fall he drew his sword and struck a pose, blade over his head.
Life is nothing, he kept saying in his head.
“Traitors!” he said with his mouth. “False-swearers!”
Issa turned to him, silver needle in her hand, beautiful clothes rustling, eyes remote and introspective.
“Calm down,” she recommended. “These are matters beyond your understanding.”
“I understand you slew my good and wise sensei. Evil woman!”
He was chill with fear and felt flimsy as when struggling in a dream; still, he didn’t retreat. Kept his sword upraised. Then made a feint as if to strike her with it though he had no real intent. His legs felt watery but, still, he stood there, suddenly thinking about his garden, his son and himself patting the transplanted flowers in place with care around the murky little pool; his wife coming out with a big bowl of soup for them all to share…
He had an impression Issa moved as if a gust of supernatural wind blew her and she was, somehow, behind him and he tried to turn awkwardly in the smoke and shadow and felt the needle jab the back of his neck. From far away he heard his sword drop and clatter… laughter… his flesh became ice and he knew he was falling and had a remote impression that when he hit his body would shatter like a sheet of frost… saw only the garden and tried to say something very important to his wife and son except there were no words for it or sound either… very important… he wanted… just wanted… a great sadness because there was no sound and then he felt himself shatter and there was no garden…
*
Issa
She dropped a sack of coins onto the floor table in front of Osimachi. The chukk impact rang the wood with an almost musical tone.
The song of money, she reflected walking past them to the back door that opened out into the garden yard. What is the true price of what cannot be bought?
“Be careful of him,” she said behind her. The fact that she said it annoyed her. It wasn’t necessary. “As was agreed,” she went on anyway. “Thank you.” Her thank you was almost a threat because she was irritated and guilty, too.
The false Miou was following her. She stopped without turning.
“My Lady,” the girl said, “please, do I return to my job, now?”
“You mean you want your money. Your services were bought.”
“Please excuse me, Lady.”
“He is a good man,” Issa told her, “not really for sale, though he takes money.”
“Yes, please.”
“My head hurts.” She stared at the open sliding door out into the overcast night, not turning. “My insides are tied in small knots. I feel like my life is all mistakes.”
The sickness of the woman’s moon, she said to herself, touching her abdomen, unconsciously. I must control my judgment… the smoke in here chokes me…
“Yes, my Lady.”
“Go,” she said. “Your madam has the money you were bought with.”
“Yes. Thank you.” She bowed at Issa’s back as she went through the door.
“I’ve been bought, too,” she murmured, to herself as she went outside into the hot, thick, heavy-hanging air. She breathed hard and deep. “Not for money. Maybe far worse.”
I like him too much, she thought. I wanted to seduce him to prove… no, not prove… maybe because he’s not one of them, eager to bow and beg favors… I hated him the way a woman hates what she most wants… no… needs…
She looked at the backs of the buildings across the half-hearted sketch of garden: a few bushes, a few flowers, a few rocks all overlit by too many lanterns, she observed, all soft shadows and warm pools of light. Reminded her of a festival. Inside the mumble and shouting of gamblers, the shrill interjections of women, clash, bang, laughter and curses was a screen of sound behind her.
I like to take a man by his strength and bind him… lead him where I please… I use him but am I not still a whore in the morning, unpaid, unlike that child we just hired to act and betray? She snorted with self-contempt. There’s pleasure in feeling the power of a whore and imagining you rule men…
“All I rule are web-weaving, shadowy, greedy …”
She thought about Takezo.
Dirt washes off some of us… washes off him…
She stepped off the low porch, looked down into a softly bright stain of red lantern light on a razor-edged rock surrounded by sagging, long-stemmed flowers. Her feelings went one way, then another. She unconsciously slipped a hand beneath her underslip to check her loins for wetness. She hated when the blood ran thick and warm down the inside of her thighs.
“Aiii,” she sighed. “It is so difficult …” Shut her eyes. “Difficult to find balance.” My child, she thought, hopes she will express something whose truth will stun the world into sense...she chases false ghost light, but she is brave and, like Takezo the Spy, she is unsullied …”I am cruel to such people since they lay bare my shames.”
She dug her fingers into her face and then ripped her gold-sandaled foot in a slashing kick at the flowers and left a shattered swath.
“I sicken of doing wrong,” she hissed. “I sicken of greedy men and I sicken of myself.”
As if no time had ever intervened her memory was darkness where a twisted rill of pale candlelight, softly wavering, in a big black night where formless terrors gathered. She was a child and that air was cool on her pale, naked body and the big, massive, sweet and sour smelling shape that by day was the lord she was, at times, presented to and the semi-hard poking thing pressing at her lips, big, harsh hands vising both sides
of her head, pushing her into it, filling her mouth and throat until she was almost gagging, afraid to breath, hearing his moans and wild curses that she didn’t know were curses.
Because later there were strange men (a roar outside she didn’t know was battle) and shouts and screams all around her in the small fortress where she’d been born (she was just nine) hands on her, lifting her, carrying her away to a slave existence…
“Beast!” she said, standing in the garishly overlit and unkempt garden. “I live still and you are dead. Did I not find your grave, some years ago?”
Her retainers had waited outside the walls of the famous cemetery. Alone in her cold fury, she’d pulled her undergarments aside and squatted over the sunken mound and made water as if it were poison, an acid of hate that could corrode the very spirit of the dead man.
I am too vengeful and unforgiving… my heart is stained with hate and may never be washed clean… yet… I must control my life… without this clan I am a slave again and what fate for my dreaming child…
“Takezo-san, I am sorry. So sorry. Maybe you are a purity. I stained you. But you are, I think, pure and corrupt at once.” She shut her eyes. The world tipped and swayed, a little.
I can’t look back… I won’t be a slave again… never… nor will my child… why should I not rule these fools?
Tears squeezed out of her eyes. She just stood there. The garish lights. The blank, overcast sky. The faint, rotting scent of dead flowers.
Thirty-Eight
Most of it had to be dream. Opening his eyes did no good because the darkness was utter, the air stale; he’d try to move… the darkness was solid and curved around him. Next, vivid brightness as if he were watching a living painting, a giant hand scroll unrolling before him with city, town, countryside, mountains, rivers and sea flowing past… people suddenly coming to life, moving, all at a distance until, instantly, he’d be close… wherever his numbed fingers touched there was the unyielding curve closing him in behind, in front above – he had a fleeting impression before sheer, numb weariness dropped him back into what might have been sleep (unless the black confinement itself were that) that when he pressed his hands a few inches over his head there was some slight give… maybe that meant something… maybe not… and the painting came back to life, again, and there was a woman lying flat on her back in the gray wash of early morning light, mist gathered around her in dark, dew-wet bushes, lying on sandy soil in a bright shock of blood, headless and he tried to move, to act, to speak… but he was high up above a battlefield, next, horsemen clashing in a violent storm, the dark clouds themselves seeming to shape themselves into twisting, lunging, stabbing, striking riders treading on piles of dead and dying… blurs… blackness. He tried to stand and push his way free against the unyielding, hard, smooth circle that trapped him as if he were in a lidded jar… then the scroll was back, moving and there was Miou with her broken, bloody body walking like a puppet on a string upheld and moved by moonbeams… holding out a ghostly shimmer of silver, silent, beseeching eyes full of silvery tears, holding out the shadow of the ring, lips moving but speaking only in shadows…
And he heard his voice or some howling wordless rasp of agony; there was only the hard, stifling jar-like prison as his mind said:
This is all that’s left of the world… He tried to smile into the numbness of his face. Wonder what time it is…
And then he was rising higher and higher over the vast, unrolling scroll until all the pain, lust, love, longing and mad violence were just shapes, colors and lines like a picture without a subject leaving only the essence and gesture of human life… and he soared so high, now, it could have been just curds and kneadings of smoke…
The constant tilt, bump and rocking kept jarring him back to the black confinement of his barrel-shaped environment. The numbness was lifting and he started to seriously, though weakly, struggle and push against the section above his head that gave slightly.
The air was fetid, humid, hot and hard-to-breathe; he was conscious enough now to imagine he might have been buried alive – no – the rocking motion told him he was moving but he was suddenly sure he was in a coffin being carried to the graveyard.
A nice revenge, his thoughts said.
Redoubled his efforts, straining, not really aware of how feeble his struggles were until, suddenly, they were still and cooler air flowed down over him because the lid was gone and his hands barely reached above the rim of a hogshead-like coffin. He was panting, the beaded sweat rolling off his head and face.
After a few breaths he gripped the rim with fingers that felt like fat Chinese sausages and tried to heave himself up. He got far enough to glimpse overhanging trees and a pair of torches, swaying slightly in the heavy, nearly windless air.
He heaved again, hung a little longer and this time saw what he thought for an instant was a statue of an armored man. Looking straight up there were shadowy pine branches and flat, blank dark sky. He knew it wasn’t a statue.
His lips were tingling, hard to move. Forced in a deep breath and tried again.
This time he got up enough to rest his elbows on the lip of the coffin-barrel and hung there, blinking to help adjust his eyes to the bright flame.
There was a grave dug among the marker stones with what he assumed was his sword thrust into the earth as when a samurai dies in the field. There was what looked like the same suit of armor and the same mask he’d met in the barn, how long ago? It seemed very, very long ago. Time had sucked away days like years, like dead leaves down the river…
He stared at the blurry outline that seemed to be alone. Assumed he probably wasn’t.
“Well done,” Takezo grated. “You got me, once more.”
He remembered Yoshi and Captain Mori. Remembered the two of them standing over him in Miou’s garden as he came awake into headache and a sick stomach, the mellow morning sun hurting his eyes whenever he peered out from under the sleeve of his robe at the two of them standing over him. He couldn’t help but think that if he’d said “no” then, she might still be alive.
The first mistake engenders all the rest, he thought. My parents made it by having me… regret isn’t so vain when you have nothing else left…
“No so hard,” the muffled voice said with a metallic vibration.
“And now is when you tell me if I don’t give up the ring I go into the hole you dug over there. Or first you offer me gold.”
The numbness was draining away by tiny increments; he was still far away from any level of effectiveness.
The metal-muffled voice seemed amused. He was close and the bright torch lit the silvery faceplate. Takezo could see his own gleam and shadow-eaten reflection there distorted to seem all mouth, chin and twisted cheeks without eyes.
“Maybe the offer is your woman back,” the voice said.
“Who was the actress?” the ronin almost spat.
“Maybe the dead girl was the actress and your grief was senseless.”
Takezo knew he was being played, again.
“You,” he said with full contempt, “who are you playing? You’re not Izu. Not Nobunaga nor Hideo nor Reiko. Too intelligent to be Yoshi. Maybe you’re a woman with a deep voice.”
The numbness really was fading. He started to gather himself to leap out. Go for his sword by the open grave. What were his odds, anyway? Keep talking a little longer, he decided.
“I respect you,” the other said and there was almost a kind of purr in it, Takezo noted. “So you still live. I want you to come back.”
“Back where?”
He tested his legs for standing, started to squat upright, got past shoulder-high and then they weren’t there and he went all the way back down with a thump, banging his head.
“Too soon,” the voice said. “The drug takes time to wear away.”
Then the mask was leaning in over the rim, the bright torch halving it with uneven shadow.
“Come back where?” the ronin repeated.
“To your clan. To the li
fe intended for you.”
A night of surprises, he thought. By the Holy Beings, maybe I’m near the end of all this obscurity…
“I have no clan. I have no life.” Heaved again and this time, straining on his arms, stayed almost upright, face so close to the mask he could smell the warm metal. “Show yourself.”
“Show you something else.” He stooped down and stood back up with a severed head in his hand. He thrust it forward as if to touch the detective’s face. “The hole is for him. Talked too much.”
He recognized the young samurai, Sessu, who’d loved Miou, too. The torchlight showed him with lidded eyes and a sad mouth.
“He’s pretty quiet, now,” said Takezo.
The other half-turned and tossed the grisly artifact in a soft looping arc at the hole. It hit and bounced, dropped into the pit blackness.
The detective got all the way up, this time, and rested on both palms.
“Rejoin,” the tinny, firm voice said, coming close, again, the frozen metal fury inches from the battered, bleary, numb, weary flesh face. “Hear this: you are strong and valuable. There will be a decisive war soon. The upstart Nobunaga, enemy of the worthy people, will be crushed. He will die even before his armies collapse.”
“Are you a soothsayer, Mask-san?”
“Before the first arrow flies we will own victory.” The torch was close enough for Takezo to feel the heat pressure. “The world will be overturned as if a great earthquake had struck and the great castles will be brought low while the lesser will rise, triumphant. There will be a new way of life. You can be part of this. It is your place. You can be part of destiny or die a slave with the weak and stupid!”
As the speaker got fired-up the muffling effect of the mask increased the distortion of his speech as the metal rattled and vibrated. Takezo missed a number of the words which sounded like coughs and retchings of air; he got the gist.
“You will rule?” the detective asked. “Will you unmask, then?”
The man stepped back, torch in one hand, other on his martial hip. Behind him the flames lit the lines of tombs and grave markers.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 28