“Clean up!” he ordered.
The Captain was looking at the retainers who were pretty much trying to look at nothing. Reiko went closer to Issa, stepping back up on the platform. They didn’t speak. Turning to the men, he said:
“Go, to your duties!” As they left he said to the Captain: “I thought something was written there.”
“Where, Chamberlain?”
“On the floor. On the floor.” Shook his head. “But there’s nothing.”
“No, Lord,” the troubled retainer said, bowing himself away. “Just blood.”
“That’s right. That’s right.”
Issa was sitting upright, partly supported by a woman. She was taking it all in, her unreadable eyes remote and inward.
Forty-Six
Out of the fog
The first two horsemen crashed forward, striking down at the Zulu and the big policeman.
Taro flung a handful of pebbles and sand into his attacker’s face, ducking alongside the animal’s flank. The shrewd and tough streetfighter reached up and under, avoiding the rear hooves and driving his fist into the unprotected testicles. It got results: the mount bucked and the momentarily blinded rider tipped to the side and Taro caught him with his stick, knocking his arm loose from his sword, the sound of cracked bone like a shot.
Taro got the sword in hand in time to meet the next attacker who thrust his spear savagely. The policeman deflected, side-stepped and got in a cut at the back of the rider’s leg above the stirrup, he tried to wheel around, bumping off the first horse which was bucking sideways and backwards in testicular agony, then blending into the shroud of whipping fog and smoke as uMubaya went for Yoshi, slashing with his naginata. The second man, recovering from the collision, tried a jab at the black man’s back but missed, stunned by one of Osan’s rocks banging off his helmeted skull.
The Zulu ripped his stick-with-a-sword at Yoshi’s nearest arm, but the furious captain blocked and countered, just missing. The fumes and sea and mist suddenly thickened, again, and blotted them all to shadow and sound.
uMubaya took Osan’s arm and the three of them stayed close and moved along the beach into the featureless, faintly red-glowing blurring.
“Good throw,” the Zulu told her.
“A cruel man,” she said. “Without even the pretense of Bushido.”
Which is itself a pretense, she thought, leaning against the changing wind, balancing on the wet, uneven sand, as they struggled on through the flowing semi-solidity of night, fog and smoke…
Further on, uMubaya stopped and gestured them to a halt. Because there was something strange about the huge, twisted shape looming, half-melted in the mist, above their heads. Imagination made it a giant beast with long, clutching arms, swaying in the seething clouds, gathered into a monstrous, primal rage.
The Zulu felt, suddenly, puny.
“Ghost, hold back!” he cried in his own language.
The fireglow from across the bay brightened and dimmed as the clouds thinned and thickened in the twisting sucks of wind.
“Aiiiii,” signed a voice from beneath what proved to be an enormously thick pine tree.
Moving closer they discovered two men tied by ropes running around the girth of the bole. The black man recognized Yazu and then Gentile.
“What is this?” he wondered, in Spanish,
Taro limped closer and looked up at where Takezo hung, tied and nailed through his palms to a cross limb.
Takezo was comfortable. He was missing many pieces of the puzzle of himself but was calmly contemplating a young girl playing, alone gathering tiny purple-red berries alongside a ditch full of water that fed the rice paddies, standing up to the knees, barefoot, the blindingly reflective surface enhaloing her in gold and blue sky-shatters; though he’d never seen her as a child, he knew it was Miou. No way to tell if it were dream, imagination or some stray memory. He knew she was an image and he knew she was real. It lived in both their lost hopes and purity. There was her soul refracting the world in light without pain or dull shadows…
“Dio mio,” cried Gentile, staring up at the crucified man on the massive tree as the red-tinted foggy smoke boiled around alternately making him ghostly, then drawing open the curtain on utter, bloody solidity. “Lasciate ogni speranza,” he whispered.
Taro was already working on the ropes that bound the Italian to a much smaller pine as uMubaya used his sword-bladed spear to free little Yazu.
“Poor man,” sighed Osan, looking up at Takezo’s bleeding palms, swollen around the short suicide daggers driven into the dark wood that, if the ropes fell away, would surely slice through his hands completely.
“Blades out first,” observed Taro.
“Si,” said Gentile, rubbing his stiff, sore limbs and staring at Osan, now. “Ah,” he whispered. “You …”
uMubaya had Taro up on his massive shoulders, both leaning into the rough-barked trunk, so he could reach the knives. He tugged them out with one terrific, quick yank.
Osan and Gentile helped support the ruined ronin as they lowered him to the ground, Yazu holding the legs until they sat him with his back to the tree, Osan holding his arm and shoulder.
The wind had momentarily lulled and the smoke-clouded vapors had pulled back far enough to show the crashing surf in the filtered fireglow.
“What cruel masks we wear,” she said with bitter contempt, “to hide our true faces.”
She cut away a strip of her soaked kimono with her sash dagger and wiped and dabbed Takezo’s face and hands.
“Ah,” breathed the ronin, “is this the first paradise?”
“Poor master,” sighed the kneeling Yazu.
“My darkness now comes and goes,” Takezo said. “Better than before …” Winced and sucked in a pained breath when Osan touched one punctured palm. “… before it was always dark …”
“Your eyes improve?” asked Taro. “They don’t look good.”
“It was most dark when I could still see… are these my hands?”
“Yes, master, at the ends of your arms.”
“A strange place for them …” He smiled and the effect made Gentile wince. “Are there still fingers? I used to touch her with my fingers even when I didn’t see her at all …” the ronin said to no one not even himself.
“Whom, master?” Yazu wondered.
“We’d better get going,” Taro pointed out anxiously, looking around for signs of Yoshi and his men. Nothing.
“Now, I see her… sometimes… She’s dead, you know …”
“Yes, sensi.”
“But she is clear to me, now.”
“We must go,” Taro reaffirmed. Listened: just the sound of the massive waves crumbling into the shore.
“He has fever,” said Osan.
The pictures were back and this time there were several at once; none of them moved. He looked at the man in the steel mask and dark armor, sitting in dimness intercut by shafts of golden light that seemed to imprison him… saw Yoshi’s face… just his head on the floor of the barn among scrawls and blots of blood, near the feet of the man in the mask trapped behind the sunbeams and Yoshi’s was smiling as if at some secret…
He heard voices; wanted them to go away. The words weren’t really words and Miou, standing there in motionless silence, said things that he only felt. She seemed to float, nude, in a garden of night among mist-melted moonstains, flowers gleaming on bushes of shadow like great pearls and he had trouble focusing on her exquisite outline because it shifted like smoke. He wanted to just follow her, into that mysterious, mapless world…
*
The second trial
Not long past dawn, the court convened. There were fewer spectators, this time. Even in the shelter of the porch the wind was unpleasant. The sand covering the yard was being sucked up into mini-whirlwinds in the walled enclosure. The sunless sky was covered by low, churning clouds. The thick, wet, moving air took off some of the humid heat. Pennants flapped wildly; shutters broke loose here and there; and a
t peaking gusts, shingles lifted and some bounced and sailed loose.
Colin was sitting on the sand, again, roped to the ears, facing the judge. Izu and his bodyguards were there. Issa, sallow and tense, sat on the stool beside Reiko and various clansmen and witnesses.
Everyone was somewhat distracted by the arriving storm and the mounting masses of smoke on the other side of the city that were blending into the rapid, curving clouds overhead. It was hard to pay close attention to this rather flaccid trial.
“No reason to waste time here,” declared the judge. “The end is clear.”
“Agreed,” said Reiko. “The fire may turn this way.”
“Yes. Witnesses state that the accused and the black devil kidnapped, raped and murdered the young woman, Osan.”
Colin strained to read expressions and was satisfied he was doomed. This time he wasn’t going to duck and hide and finally escape and become a sailor. Well, he reflected, he hadn’t really escaped at all. Men, a Druid priest had told him, have strings held by fate that move them, that they refuse to notice…
“Time is short,” Reiko said, standing up, gesturing at the sky. “The city burns. War threatens. We bring one more witness.”
Issa just looked at him and seemed about to speak as the vassal stepped forward to testify. She’d seen him around the castle. She thought she could see the lies in his eyes. She was still trying to compose herself. The drug hadn’t entirely worn off. She was still too numb to really take in the image of Reiko chopping off her husband’s head. She knew she was going to have to do something about it, one way or another.
I am in so deep, she thought. Who am I to now quibble at details?
Because she sensed, whatever happened, she’d have to give up her life.
Still, numbly and in a strange reprise, she watched a group coming through the red-lacquered gateposts led by a woman who seemed to have a gleaming face and a monk she instantly suspected was Takezo, the bony-bandy-legged little commoner flanking them, beside big, wide, tough-looking Taro who was limping a little. And the Italian. She sighed at herself for that one. She had no real explanation for her impulses. All that seemed so thin, tawdry and uninteresting, now. Like another time, another world…
“Madness approaches,” she murmured to herself. She faintly liked the idea.
As they came closer the judge was already waving his hands in denial.
“No, no!” he expostulated, “no more witches and dead men’s heads testifying!”
The woman, Issa now saw, was wearing a polished mask and might have been a man on stage playing a female part. She caught her breath, seeing Takezo’s face at closer range: swollen; burnt much worse than the first time. And his eyes now totally shut, his hands like lumps of raw, bloody meat.
“Ah,” hissed Reiko. “So, here he comes for the last time.”
“Arrest them all,” cried the judge, “if they brandish a single body part!”
*
View from the darkness
Madness may be a mad idea conceived by the sane who are merely dull, Takezo proposed to himself.
Everything had blended into a single pain. He felt like a lump of muck. Everything that mattered to him had been mist in his clumsy hands. The pictures came and went with the fluctuations of his fever. Otherwise there was just darkness.
The wind pushed and twisted at him and he judged it was increasing. His feet were alright. His arms hung at his sides, hands dead weight. No way to swing a sword, he noted and concluded that was appropriate. The specific pain seemed to have been absorbed into his overall numbness.
From the voices he knew the Italian was on his left, and Taro his right. Yazu was in front and the woman behind.
“While I hung up there,” Takezo suddenly spoke as his fever billowed up and he had the impression he was talking to Issa. “I realized all things come to a single point. All things,” he repeated, “come to a single point.”
“Takezo-san?” Gentile wondered.
Point… point… all of this comes to one point… Nothing else was solid in the swirl and swirling of time. The point where I cannot hold a sword… the point… else it was for nothing…
“We are slaves, otherwise,” he said.
The woman’s voice said:
“Yes. Freedom is necessary.”
“No… just a point is necessary …” He laughed and it hurt his face. “Or else you’re a slave to pointlessness.”
“Do you know where we are?” Taro asked, gently.
On level ground, the wind banging around what sounded like shutters and boards; leaves whooshing; close and distant voices, undulant, calling and shouting.
“On the main street of the city of the dead,” he decided.
“Maybe a pretty good guess,” said the policeman.
“Put on your headpiece,” suggested Gentile to the Zulu who was back in his monkish robes. Osan had on the same simple kimono.
“Put on your head first,” the blind ronin recommended. “Too many loose hats with nothing to sit on top of.
“We are coming near the magistrate’s place,” Yazu put in, uneasily. “Not a place I favor.”
“How’s the fire doing?” Takezo asked, remembering, wincing as the bright image of the explosion replayed in a huge, motionless flare of light and heat. “It’s like my life. Burning bright with destruction.”
“Ah. For now, fairly far south,” said the Italian. “But the wind is blowing this way. Can’t see much in this smoke and mist.”
“Sensei, we will leave you at the witch’s house to recuperate,” his bony pupil said. “We take Lady Osan to the trial where her parents will be found.”
“He’s mad from fever,” Taro murmured.
“No,” said Osan. “Not mad at all. Just too truthful to be endured.”
Takezo tried to flex his hands: the thickness and pain almost amused him. His bare feet felt good on the warm dirt of the street.
“I must go to the trial,” he said. “Yoshi and other crawling things will be there.”
“Sir,” said Osan’s voice, “you must rest and heal.”
Takezo laughed through his sore, burned lips.
“Heal what?” he asked. “But it is all clear, before me.”
“You can see, master?” Yazu wondered.
“All is dark and so it is plain.” Snorted. “My eyes confused me. It’s better, now. At the trial there will be darkness in human form.” The wind filled his ears with damp, thick air. He was trying to sense what was around him. “What of the fire?”
“It burns, Takezo-san,” said Taro. “Like your fever.”
“There will be rain soon, I think,” remarked uMubaya inside his headpiece.
“I am amazed you can walk, like this, Takezo-san,” put in Osan.
“A three-wheeled cart can be driven,” he told her. “One pain takes your mind off another.”
“Rain better come soon,” said Taro.
“Lady,” Gentile said, “it may be dangerous for you at this trial.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “In a nest of snakes is one place safer than another?”
Ah, he thought. Yes… why, we are really walking and talking, like this…
“Is this a wonder, foreign Lord?” asked Yazu.
“Well… I thought, imagined such things while believing she was dead, so …”
If it stays like this, Takezo was thinking, it will be good. Just darkness…
PART II
One
Trial again
“Are you traveling players?” demanded the judge. “What is this disrespectful mask?”
The wind was stronger, still undulating and there was a smell of smoke, now.
Takezo cocked his head. He thought his right hand fingers had just moved, a little, in the deep thickness of their pain.
“Are not courts theaters,” he inquired, “where the play is always bad?”
“I know you,” the judge said. “Your face is even worse this time.” Then, to Osan and uMubaya: “Unco
ver yourselves, priest or no. This is a court of law.”
“As a zato,” the ronin said, sniffing the air, “my sense of smell is already stronger. Reiko is here unless a dog has just passed wind.”
Someone on the porch laughed. He was sure Issa was there, too, and pictured her smiling behind her fan. The fever was down; he was more himself.
“Blind man,” said the chamberlain, “where is your begging bowl?”
“Why? Want to rob me?” To Taro: “Open my pouch and put the ring in my hand.”
The judge was saying something with considerable ferocity that the wind blew, mainly, away. As Takezo held out his blood-crusted, agonizing paw, Taro dropped the ring on it. He heard Osan, voice muffled by her old-man-mask she’d picked up beside the road on the way. He remembered the conversation from between his semi-hallucinations.
“Treason and treachery,” she said. “Where is Daimio Hideo?”
“Show yourselves!” repeated the judge
“Murdered by evil assassins!” yelled Reiko. “And the villain behind it is known!”
“I know one villain!” Osan’s voice, just ahead of Takezo who felt the fever coming back – not so good because there were pictures, again.
The suit of armor stood there with dull fire inside the eyeslits.
If your eyes are flame, his mind commented, do you have smoke for brains?
“I will defeat you,” he told it.
Two
Osan
She moved up close to the porch where they sat, wind tugging and whipping at their loose clothes. The chamberlain was still reclaiming, but she only partly followed his words because anger and disgust blotted everything out.
She pushed her palm out at him as if it were a weapon.
“You,” she cried, behind her old-man mask, “you are false!” Then she pulled it off. Issa stood up, obviously as surprised as Reiko wasn’t. “Where is my father?”
“Who is this?” the magistrate asked.
“The dead girl,” the ronin said to the fire-eyed metal face. “We always bring the departed with us.”
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 36