The same sunset that made a dark corpse of the earth and the sky a waterspill of burning blood, filled the window of Hideo and Issa’s lesser audience room, called Moon and Mist, on the first floor of the castle. They were both kneel-sitting at a floor table, a tea service being laid out by a serving girl.
The double doors slid open and a retainer bowed himself in. He was stocky and nondescript. He bowed over to his lord and lady and handed Hideo a scroll message. Hideo read it, glanced at his wife whose detached eyes were looking at nothing, then said:
“No answer. Go.”
As he left Issa gestured for the girl to follow, taking up the pot and preparing to pour, saying:
“My lord, are you still determined to support the upstart rustic?” A reference to Nobunaga’s country samurai roots.
“More to the point is that he supports me. If an emperor were drowning, would he not let a lowly fisherman pull him from the sea?” He looked around the bare, highly polished room. There was one immense screen in three parts all done in black, white and gray with misty hints of mountain-like outlines, groups of probable trees like coagulations of some primal smoke, a tiny, melting hut, all under an oversized, clear, perfectly round moon. “You have other matters to concern yourself with, woman. Where is my devoted chamberlain?”
She looked sidelong at him, teapot poised.
“So,” she said, “you meant to chastise?”
“Do you have cause to fear it, woman?”
“Ah, my love,” she replied, “who has not some small shame or other?”
“Who has not?” He wasn’t really looking at her. “You, who have face like a mask of brass. What might shame you?”
“Rumours.” Teapot still poised, the polished metal glinting dark red in the sunset glow from the window. No lamps were lit and sourceless shadows began to pool around them and blur their outlines and slight expressions. “False ideas.”
“I feel the unseen hand of age on me,” he said, looking straight ahead across the imperceptibly dimming chamber at the wall where a triple rack of sheathed swords glinted darkly. “I’m sick of ambition. I want to fight to protect and not to take. What use is a world of treachery?”
She poured two cups, delicately, her pale, loose blouse seeming to concentrate the dying light. There was a distant rumble that might have been a single bang of thunder.
“Men will ever betray from fear or for advantage,” she pointed out.
“Unlike women,” he snorted.
Hesitated, then handed him his cup. She had almost intentionally spilled it.
Too late to turn back, she thought. Anyway, he hates me as it is and after we both reawaken he will hate me the more… unimportant, if we succeed our clan will survive…
“You are harsh, today, my lord.”
“I think that drunkard’s half-conceived play haunts me with truth, lady.” He held the hot cup, remembering Takezo on the stage playing the murdered lord. “I have covered my sins like a cat his droppings.”
And then, looking at her in the last light that left those ambiguous eyes with ambiguous hints, he raised his cup to his lips as she followed suit and they both drank deeply. She couldn’t look at him. At the window the sunset’s dark red seemed to have flared brighter. Seemed strange.
Next the double doors slid open and Reiko bowed himself in like, Hideo thought, a character in a puppet play.
“What a delight to my eyes,” Hideo said.
The Chamberlain came close and bowed again; stayed down.
“Lord,” he said, “are you unwell?”
Because the Daimio had broken out in a sweat, blinking, rubbing his face.
“The room swims,” he said, thickly, breathing hard. Stared at her as he went down sideways onto his right elbow. She was sagging, herself. “You whore!” he snarled, feeling his heart racing as he fought to keep conscious. “As I feared …” He groped for his sword but, instead, went down flat on his face in slowed-motion as if he sank into water or a dream. The last thing he saw was her sinking gracefully onto her side, and her voice, saying:
“We will sleep… just sleep, until this is… is settled… for the good of …”
“Treacherous whore …” He thought he might have said… or was it just the rushing of waters that covered him, now, and was carrying him away into the thickening dark…
She held the tilting floor with both hands, watching Reiko as the drug lapped at her consciousness.
“Where are … ninja?” she asked, in a gasp. “You cannot carry us alone.”
“Plans are changed,” she heard him say, kneeling over her fallen husband, jerking his head up by the topknot in a gesture of unspeakable rudeness and contempt. His helpless and violated master actually managed to struggle and froth curses. “I will have discovered this treason,” Reiko went on, “in time to save only your life.”
And through the dimming world where things moved slower and slower as if running down, she saw the shadow of her lover raise his shadowy sword and strike at her shadow-husband’s stretched-up neck once… twice… three times before the blot of head parted from the blot of body in a mist of colorless blood as the last light failed and Reiko’s voice, far away and substanceless:
“One cannot strike half a blow! Only the dead can be trusted!”
*
Suspended
Someone was coming back from somewhere… he was coming back… there was no name yet or thoughts or words, yet… The quasi-memories were mixed in bright and dark together at the same time as if all were motionless as a painting where swords were frozen in mid-stroke, bird’s wings never flapped, the moon stayed still among fixed clouds and flames burned forever without consuming anything…
He felt he was a he and there was a name… somewhere… that didn’t really matter yet… call dung gold, if you liked, but where would you spend it?
Like the babe lapping honeyed milk at its mother’s breast so Takezo, still nameless to himself, drank deep of an incomprehensible bliss as if he existed without shadow, edge or blur because there was nothing to contrast anything with so while nothing was solid, nothing was empty either. He didn’t want to leave the milky softness… sweetness… silky feelings unfolding like perfumed gossamer under a child’s questing fingers… And then there was what, in a world where time moved and things took solid form, would have been a memory:
Wild wind pushing stinging specks that might have been dust or sand, voices that were wordless barks; impacts that set fire to existing pain… and then something lifted and moved him and he floated, arms and legs pulled out and then, at full stretch, a new agony became the only thing real and wild confusion smothered down on him, massive and there was a pounding that shook everything, a monstrous iron hammer slamming down as if the weight of the world hit him…
‘Here hang until you rot, how I wish you might never die.’
And he was reborn, full of knowing, with a name for his pain and pain maker. So there were words, again, “Yoshi” the first.
Is this Shite’s pillar I am pressed against? his mind inquired.
He thought there might have been a sound out there in the pictures that might have been memories:
“Yoshi… come closer …”
“Master,” came back Yazu’s voice, instead.
“Takezo?” called out Gentile from below. “E nomini rex coeli.”
Their voices were blurred and blotted by the background roar of wind and surf. He felt the push and sting of spray or rain – couldn’t tell which. His eyes felt as if they were sealed in wax and there was no point trying to open them.
“That cur, Yoshi, is gone, master,” called up Yazu, voice not changing position. “May ten devils eat his heart in the third hell!”
The remarkable, dull, sickening pain in the ronin detective’s hands focused his recovering attention. Tried to move his arms but they were stiff, dead wood. The pain would gather and slowly increase after each effort. He had an impression he was clutching hot coals that were being fanned and expe
cted his flesh and bones were reducing to char.
He was pretty sure he said something more to his companions but everything went silent and he could see, again, though he knew they must be memories but how could you be sure something was a memory and not a dream? Then a gust of red flared into memory’s focus out of the ship’s hatch blasting him into slowed time and he had an impression the flames had a face, a gaping mouth fanged with fire and eyes full of smoke and emptiness…
Did that happen? His mind asked. Or…
And he was back to dark agony… hearing voices that might have been the sea’s speech violently inflected on the wind…
“Where are we?” he called out, voice raw in his throat.
“Oh, sensei,” called up Yazu from somewhere below in the gale-wrung darkness. “What horror!”
“I cannot move,” Takezo mumbled. His lips hurt. “Why is that?”
“You hang crucified on a tree,” called up Gentile, then, in Italian, to himself: “In the plight of our Lord.”
“We are bound here below, master,” Yazu explained above the noise.
Takezo sighed. His burns hurt; his bruises hurt and his pierced hands were an amazing torment. He had the natural warrior’s ability to isolate pain as well as his meditative detachment, but this was pushing his limits. He wanted to be unconscious.
“Had I eyes,” he called out, light-headed and scornful, “I suppose I’d have good view of something.”
“Not much to see,” responded the Italian. “Fog and smoke and flames. The city burns like tinder and the waves grow.”
“Suspended,” he sort of laughed in a ghastly way, “with a view of my blindness.” He didn’t like the sound.
I am a ghost, he thought. Yoshi is a ghost… what we were is long lost… once I walked the earth among men… there was love and other things… He was, he considered, almost laughing again, the spirit come back in the noh play. This must be Shite’s pillar…
He did laugh again and it was worse, this time…
*
Along the coast
As the sun set, the flames expanded, the red reflection covering more and more and more of the bay, the reflected light moving with the water’s massive rhythm, painting the beach, the trees and themselves in an almost regularly shifting latticework of bright and shadow as the mists thinned and thickened.
Taro was limping. He’d caught one foot behind a seat as the boat dug in and pitchpoled into the beach spilling them into the slapping, churning surf. He was leaning on a pretty straight, heavy piece of driftwood that served for cane.
They had a good view of the fire as it exploded and contorted in the bursts of gale, eating into the unresistant city.
Osan was looking for the shore road that looped towards her castle home. She knew this stretch of coastline very well, since childhood.
uMubaya had seen wildfires race across dry fields fast as most men could run; he’d never imagined anything like this.
Like 10,000 huts burning, he considered. What thing next? Will this whole land sink into the sea? Maybe 300 yards ahead masses of smoke and fog blowing across the bay hit shore and made an undulant wall. So thick, amazing… like winter porridge…
Osan had never been so weary. Unused to prolonged exercise, her legs wobbled, slightly, with each barefoot impact. She gathered her will and kept on, concentrating on getting home and saving the Scot. She believed her cowardice was to blame.
Taro was dazed, generally. He’d observed that the wind was blowing the flames away from his district so he could assume his family was safe. For now. He’d never heard of such a fire.
They didn’t say much among themselves, at this point, and then the smoke- amplified fog billowed up to meet them in semi-solid sheets so that they had to stay very close in a choking world of dull-red, shifting light and groping shadows.
Osan felt like a bug being crushed under a random foot. uMubaya thought they might be among the half-forms and shadows of devils while Taro formed no ideas at all, just angling along, digging in his improvised staff and favoring the hurt foot…
And then something more solid showed. There were rhythmic, clopping, cracking sounds like hooves; devil’s hooves uMubaya thought, and deep voices shouting what might be the stony accents of some demonic language. That might have been better because, as visibility fluctuated, amplified by the weird illumination, horsemen seemed to coalesce from the twisting fumes and fine ash and they made out, first, a round, flattish face, scarred nose and cheek and small eyes, features that seemed carved to emblemize anger.
“The one called Yoshi,” the Zulu said to Taro.
“Hold up!” Yoshi yelled as his two men were passing, becoming less substantial again. These semi-shadows turned back and, more or less, hemmed them in with their backs to the beach.
“No reason to wait,” sneered Taro. “Proceed on to Hell.”
“Ah, Osan!” Yoshi yelled from his belly. “How fortunate to find you. Your father and mother grieve. We will protect you from these bad men.”
“Thank you. I know you not,” she responded. “These men are friends, sir.”
They reined closer. Yoshi glared, sword drawn. His horse snorted and rocked sideways.
“Bad choice of friends, Lady Osan,” he asserted. “I serve your mother and the clan!”
“What of my father, the Daimio? You do not mention his name?”
“He is a traitor! His power is done! Mount up behind me, Lady, please.”
“Go away,” she retorted. “What things you say!”
“Kill the men,” Yoshi ordered.
“Brutal fools!” she cried. “You force violence everywhere!”
She stooped and picked up two good-sized stones as the horsemen closed in, swept by in the wild, blurring, stinging, shifting atmosphere that (she thought) could have been some dark, tormented underworld…
*
Hand washing
Now candles and lanterns brightly lit the chamber. The wind sucked and puffed at the unshuttered windows. Maybe a dozen or so retainers plus a few women stood around where Hideo’s corpse was being wrapped in a sheet along with the head.
One of the women was working on the big blood splash and what suggested an attempt to scrawl some message in indecipherable calligraphy – in fact, where the head had rolled, erratically, after Reiko dropped it.
Reiko stood on the slightly raised platform facing the room.
“Men are searching the grounds,” an average sized, lean, scarred captain was reporting. “The gates are sealed.” He was pondering the bloodstains, too, where the woman with a bucket and rags was trying to clean up; not much progress. The stains seemed to have seeped into the polished boards. “Ninjas,” he whispered, harshly. “Who could bear this disgrace?”
Reiko winced and adjusted his bloodstained kimono which was slashed open across his chest. He kept a cloth pressed to the wound.
“We must bear it, Captain Katsu,” he said. “We are about to attack the very enemies who sent their sneaking killers to do this terrible deed.” He paced onto the raised level of the floor where Issa was slowly recovering consciousness. The two candles on tall metal stands sketched shadows over his long, wide-browed, arguably handsome face. He stood now just above where the bloodstain sprayed out. He gestured at the recumbent woman. “We must rally behind this, our lady, who has shown the courage of Keza Gozen!” He had everyone’s attention as he shout-spoke. “Had I not arrived when I did she would have been slain too, no doubt. The villains fled out the window using their despicable arts.” He drew his sword, face set as if carved, eyes slits of shadow. “The hand of Nobunaga and Izu is here seen! Their armies are on the march! Good men are gathering to resist them. We must fight to avenge our lord!” He pointed to the blood on the floor that the woman was still, ineffectually, scrubbing. “Every man must seek vengeance or live in shame!” The men in the room drew their swords and shook them overhead, glinting in the soft, uncertain light. “If we must die, then we die with our swords in their b
ellies, not ours in our own! No suicides! Vengeance! Vengeance! Only vengeance!”
As they cheered he just stood there, frowning at the dark shape on the floorboards that suddenly reminded him of a face… eyes maybe weeping or bleeding… except it was all bleeding…
He blinked hard; kept staring. Someone was talking to him. He frowned. Didn’t follow the words because his attention was caught by the rills and dribbles left by the bounced and rolled head that tantalizingly suggested writing.
He knew he’d never left the room but, still, had an absurd idea that someone had tried to scrawl a message, in his lord’s blood, revealing something… He was sure there were no spirits but kept wondering if the ghost had done it.
“Nonsense,” he muttered, still staring, squinting.
“Why do you say that, Lord Chamberlain?” the Captain reacted, frowning, thinking Reiko meant what he’d just said about organizing their troops.
“It comes from seeing plays,” Reiko murmured. “Ghosts always come back in plays.” He turned away with an effort just as he was imagining he identified the characters for cursed and doomed, suggested by the soft brushing of flame-shadows on the gleaming, red-dyed boards.
“Chamberlain?”
“Plays should be forbidden,” he said.
“Sir?”
The samurai still in the chamber were listening, puzzled, wondering if Reiko’s mind was wandering from grief.
“Actors make lies seem real.” His eyes rolled back to the splashes. His subject changed, somewhat, and his confidence increased. “He couldn’t write anything.”
“Write what, Lord Chamberlain?” the Captain asked, hopefully.
“Without a head, what can a man say?” With that he stormed forward, feeling giddy and nervous, and kicked the woman’s bucket so that the water sprayed and it rolled erratically across the shadowy floor. “Disgrace!” he shouted. “Why do you play with our lord’s gore? Making pictures?”
“My Lord,” she responded, backing away on her knees covering her face with both hands. “Please, what do you mean?”
Reiko turned away, looking at Issa, now, who was trying to sit up.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 35