“If we live,” he started to say, but she hushed him again, lips by his.
“Please, Zo-san, no more words. Each one hurts my mind.”
“Yes… yet, we …”
Pressed her soft fingers over his mouth. He sighed. The world was vibrating, the earth itself sounding a sonorous roar as the incredible typhoon gathered full power.
There was nothing now but the wall and the two of them, alone in the storm’s lee.
Amazing just to be here… am I really holding Osan in my arms? How did this come about? The taste of her. The scent. The feel. No words needed… how true… when the storm ends, what do we do? Where…
“When this is over,” he couldn’t help saying into her warm hand, “where do we …”
She pressed his mouth shut with the palm and said nothing this time. Her wordless breath was warm in his ear.
It was enough. He understood better, now. He tried to think about the unfinished painting… tried to think about many things and found them slipping away.
Because this might be the end, now… or tomorrow… just words to those who think they are secure… nothing is secure… nothing… the words are obvious, everyone says them… poets love to speak of death… until it is upon them… Ah, my love, you are clarity, words cheapen it…
He wanted to say he loved her but feared her silence; he’d have to live without the familiar yes or no; whatever the truth.
She’d softly rolled herself under him and he was amazed by what her hands were doing and then, what his were doing in return. His breath thickened, it was far past words; far past even believing so there was just the wind, as good as silence, gripping the world, and the heat, scent, touch, incredible closeness as their bodies rode into rhythms that seemed as external as the storm, itself, blending them together as fluid as clouds or waves, sealing them from lips on down into an indistinguishable, indivisible movement…
No words. No pictures. Just what was…
Somewhere, in the swirling of himself and herself something still wanted to ask a question and do something about something… somewhere… far away… blown away as they melted together like a wax drowned candle… there was nothing to hold… no form, no line, no language…
It was brightness and honey and breath and bone… dissolution and solidity; need without names, fulfillment without intension…
He knew he said something that was only sound. He knew she answered. He knew her arms and breath were his and his front and back were hers. Inside-out, they had no history and no future; if they’d already died, neither had noticed…
He knew he cried out – or, maybe, just whispered or dreamed the sound:
“Osan.”
Thirty-One
In the Bamboo Grove
Issa was light in his arms. Takezo tried to cover her with his blood and mud smeared, tattered rags. The wind had sucked the strips away immediately and left her naked, again, soft, sweet-scented and incongruously languorous.
He was going faster and faster as the wind kicked at his back. He went to his knees by the time they reached the slope of bamboo grove; fragments of sight blurred and blanked his glimpses of the thin and thick boles, tough, sharp leaves whipping and rattling in masses, the hissing swooshes audible over the background roar. Trees had gone down all around or been stripped of their branches but the bamboo still leaned and bent, lashed and bowed. Sudden blasts of rain semi-solidly slammed into the arched green canopy, blowing into spray. The ground was muddy, warm and pleasant as he tucked them into a rill above a fast, brownish, choked and swollen stream flooding from the hills above.
He cradled her as if she were the most precious thing left in the shattering, melting world. He was panting, drained. His heart labored. She was sleek, soft and quiet; kept her face on his chest as a child might. He’d never had a child. Interesting. All those women and no children.
“As good as any other place,” he grunted near her ear. “Live or die.”
He lay sideways, cradling her, head on the slope, the wet, long grasses flicking in waves of wind around them.
He knew it would happen if he shut his eyes and it did – except it was going to be brief (if immeasurable) this time:
He was back in the picture as the shapeless darkness was staining away the trees, flowers, hills and valleys and was running as that lifeless tide closed around him, his own flesh stained, too, and dissolving with each step…
There was a last stir and swirl in a gentle haze of tall flowers in dry and wet, meltingly graceful brushstrokes.
‘Please,’ he may have sobbed out.
‘Sayonara,’ he may have heard.
Blinked awake. She was still there, motionless in his embrace. The storm was pounding on, too big to comprehend. The bent bamboo arched over them making a kind of temple roof. He squinted that left eye and saw more, this time. A mixed blessing because there was a twisted, blurred outline that was worse than any vision in a fugue of fever: clinging to a tall, vibrating, six-inch thick stalk, digging in his feet, snarling and yelling, soundless at the distance, anchored by ripped, tattered-looking armor, was Yoshi. The head was bare and the furious face floated in semi-clarity, maybe 30 feet away.
Better to be mad and seeing devils, he said to himself. Blinked and there were only blurs. Proves nothing…
Her lips were moving over his face, their hair streaming together, lying just under the bulge of earth and long grass under the ripping rage of rain that whipped and hissed in the densely resistant bamboo leaves.
He was trying to locate what he hoped was just a spasm of his distorted sight. Her sweet mouth was at his ear, full of words:
“I never hated you,” she said. “You made me think my life wasted.”
“By all holy names,” he said, stunned. “Why?”
“You were free and I was… what I was.”
“A great lady.”
“A sly whore and spy.”
There, he thought. But how could he find us?
Slapped at his eye, twisted his face: Yoshi’s was nearer, the face close to the ground, running rain and mud and blood, too, creeping closer.
“Go away,” Takezo said, shouted.
“My love?” Issa asked, startled.
“Not you. Not you. The stupid follow us.” He pushed her down the slope so that her bare feet were washed and vibrated by the rapid stream.
He hunched up into the blast that screamed bluntly through the lashing, whipping grove. Dirt and hot rain slashed into his swollen face. Pain had long since ceased to matter much. Sometimes kept him conscious, he reflected. After being blown up and crucified, what was left? Thought he smelt a whiff of smoke; meant nothing to him.
He screamed:
“Ugly!!! Stupid!!! Go away!!!”
Had him in a blur, then lost the round, scarred face. Heard an inarticulate, raw, rasping raving from the maddened mouth of his brother. Then that unforgiving countenance was suddenly a few seething inches away, bent by rain, wind and abused eyes.
“Time is run out, drunkard,” the mouth said, spitting, full of shadow. “I would crawl into Hell to cut out your heart.”
He saw and sensed the movement as Yoshi struck at him with a short-sword, swinging down over the rim of the ditch-like ravine. He wasn’t quite amused, but felt that if he were cut in any such way he would deserve it. Because the physical was the least of it and that strange energy filled him, instantly, like wind a sail, and the would-be assassin was disarmed.
“Go away!” he repeated. “Go to your father. I won’t kill either of you.”
He was aware that Issa had crouched up beside him. He pushed her down a little with his stiff right hand.
Yoshi was flat on his belly on the reverse slope, half his face showing where he was turned to one side. That should have told him something; except he was worrying about her getting accidentally slashed if another blade came into play. A distraction. Pale flowers and thin grass kicked in the gusts along the rim. Another scent of something burning that meant not
hing to him.
So he was just reaching up to drag the monomaniacal killer over and down with the idea of dumping him in the water. Hold him in for a while, short of death – maybe.
As he’d tried to teach Yazu, there was nothing more dangerous than a plan. As he reached up there was a barrel of a gun big enough to stuff an egg in, flat in his face. The burning matchlock fuse flared in the wind. What his almost randomly streaked sight picked up was just the twisted grin and bright mad eyes in a ballooned-out, melting face: he got one hand up on the lacquered wood and steel collar and yanked at the same moment (time had gone into that strange slowdown that no one ever got used to) he was aware Issa’s nude body was going up past him, shouting something like:
“No, my love!”
As he was still pulling Yoshi, now suspended half out over the steep edge, he partly saw the flash and explosion that would have gone off in his face deflected by (he glimpsed in a shred of sight) her quick, strong, levering grip on the thick wrist. The blast was more of a whoosh that a bang. He felt the stinging heat, smoke instantly whipping away; felt and glimpsed in shadowy blur her body flung back and down by the impact, rolling into the muddy, swollen stream. His sight was now like a slatted blind so he caught slices of what was happening: the armored, stocky figure sailed out and down as Takezo uncoiled all his amazing force; her smooth body rolling in cuts and stops in the gray rainmist and green and white purity of flowers in their lyric sweep along both sides of the rapid stream. And the heart-stopping shudder at the bright blood flicking in the wild air and staining her honeypale, vulnerable being…
And he was already scrambling down, oblivious to everything, his mind pounding the same words, over and over and too fast for voicing:
Not again… not again… not again… .
Aware that Yoshi had landed on his face in the muddy water and was stuck, feet kicking the air, armor weight holding him under, Takezo scrambled to where the stream was starting to roll and carry her away.
He pulled her free and lifted her into his arms.
“Not again!” he cried, then screamed into the blotting, overwhelming wind that notched to a mad peak, sucking and shoving, blowing thick earth and flowerheads into the whirling, tortured air. “Not again!!!”
Thirty-Two
Osan and Gentile
They were wrapped and rolled together into what might have been an unconscious symbol of total union. Their eyes were shut. The wind slammed into and over the low wall. Rain scythed past. The world beyond their little island of breath, flesh and blood was a droning, violent emptiness seeming, he thought, to be rubbing the world away.
He been amazed that they’d made love, barely changing their positions, barely moving, just sheer intensity in the strange silence of the storm. The feeling that finally poured out of him was a distillation of passion he never knew existed. Emptied out of himself, poured his sense and soul into her as if both were ecstatic air, melted into magical water where dreams floated like reflections in an unstirring lake…
He was glad she insisted on silence. He was afraid of words too. But he had to speak, anyway, before it was gone.
“Osan.” Lips to her ear. “We are not to blame.”
Her long, soft arms locked a little tighter. She didn’t otherwise respond. Sighed and pressed her face deeper into his chest, like a child.
“Hmmm,” she sounded.
“You are right. T’a ragione, mi’ amore. This is all there is.”
“Mn.” Her lips bussed his chest, the surprising hairs her mother had once intimately likened to a bear’s pelt.
Like the silent monks, he thought. A vow of silence, words distract the spirit…
He held her, tighter, closer, wishing he could really melt and meld into her.
We were air, starlight on water… transfigured flesh…
“More words,” he said, into her sweet hair. “No better than pictures.” Kissed her face as the wind howled and shook the foundations of the world. “Ah, bellissima… la pella… corpa… sangue …” Kissing until her somewhat bruised lips responded so there was the heat and scent of her mouth, too, now. “All there is,” he said like a sob or a sigh. “Silencio.”
Thirty-Three
uMubaya
At some point the peaking storm was crashing onshore and he found himself dancing on the wind. He felt transparent to it; part of it, moving fluid, unbreakably flexible and impervious as a bending reed.
Maybe my mind is empty, was a passing thought.
He was dancing along the sheer bluff above the four and five story waves, in the air more than touching the ground, spear gesturing, mouth open sucking in and shouting out the mad, spray-filled air.
He felt he had wings and so leaped with no idea of any result; leaped like a prayer into the infinite immensity and felt himself float as if the immeasurable violence were a warm pool and he went up and out like a chip, a feather…
Carry me, his mind said, to the beginning or the end…
“Aiiiyaaaaa!!!” he cried – or the wind did through the enormous emptiness of himself…
Thirty-Four
Chamberlain Reiko
Reached the moat while the storm eye was still overhead. The water was clogged with debris. A half-naked body floated on its face in the mucky stuff. Shutters and most of an overhang had been ripped away from the upper stories of the castle. The sun was hot and bright and drove steam from puddles and the unshadowed half of the moat. His blood-soaked robes were stiffening. His wound was leaking less.
Behind him in the shattered, partly flooded street dozens of survivors were out, shocked, shaken, some kneeling before Buddhist statues; others pacing up and down beating prayer drums and chanting. They gradually fell silent and collected in a crowd, watching him as the second side of the vast cyclone inexorably closed in.
None of this was noted by the Chamberlain who stood in front of the first gate and kept pounding it with the hilt of his sword harder and harder, shouting in a rasping, flat, furious voice:
“Open! Open! Fools! I am Lord, now!” And on and on, for a while. In one hand he held the rope to the Scot’s bloody, muddy, headless body. He paused, turned and looked at it. Gestured with the sword. “Here is my lady. Show proper respect or you will all suffer!”
The crowd just stared, stunned-looking men and women under the incredible mass of a storm that might well kill almost everyone, watching a madman as if it were a play.
He saw what he saw. He went and knelt beside the exquisite, palely golden beauty, her angry eyes not fazing him because he knew he could win her over. Smiled with confidence, stroking her sweet bare flesh. Bending low, alive with lust, giddy from the relentless exertion of dragging the big, headless body all that distance and then pounding the door for five minutes, weakened by bleeding.
He was inside now, kneeling over the silken sleeping mat, soft candles hinting her lush outline and peach-sweet flesh. He inhaled deeply. There was incense like melting flowers, full sake bowls, screen paintings of lovers and courtesans dallying…
His hands moved lasciviously over her unresisting body, the tender elasticity of her goldenpale breasts, opening her sleek legs and running a hand over her loins, beneath, between, behind…
“What is power without love?” he cried, pulling aside his tattered, bloodstiff kimono.
He had no idea the astonished crowd had closed around him or that one of the guards from the castle had joined them, shoving a few aside, scowling, eyes wide as the nude Chamberlain prepared to mount the bloody, headless male corpse.
“He’s mad,” one fat-nosed commoner said.
“What obscenity!” a skinny woman cried. “Here with hell come to earth!”
“He’s a demon!” another woman, fat and old with eyes lost in her fat. “Come from hell bringing destruction!”
The wind was starting to re-gather itself, gusts slapping the dust up, flicking across the oily moat.
“Ai,” exclaimed the first man, “it comes again! It comes again!”
>
The wide-eyed samurai went closer, muttering to himself. He was short and wide and unbelieving.
“What shame,” he muttered. “Beyond comprehension.”
“Love is all,” declared Reiko parting her fair legs, lifting them to insert himself in her. “All I have done was for love. For love.”
With a sound, a kiai shout close to retching, the samurai parted the Chamberlain from his consummation with a two-handed downcut. Stood there, swaying in a windburst, sword at his side, blinking and still shocked. The blood had sprayed and spattered across the sandy ground in what could have been another message that no one was going to read…
Thirty-Five
Yazu
Found his street in the burnt and shattered neighborhood. The wind was almost playful, kicking up mini-whirlwinds in the dust of the flattened city. A swirl of ashes gently twisted past.
Found where his house had been. Found his son, sitting on a fallen roofbeam with some neighbors. The boy came to him and they held each other.
“Where is your mother?” he asked.
The boy just held him around the chest, saying nothing. A stunned-looking, tough-featured woman spoke up:
“Dead, Yazu-san. So many are. So many… ai …”
“Terrible, terrible,” said the man beside her in a soft, shocked voice. “Ah, what terrors. What loss… Are we not cursed by heaven? All sins come home …”
“Dead,” Yazu murmured. “You must take cover. The storm comes again.”
Held the boy away from himself. “Be strong. Brace up.”
“Yes, father.”
“Good.” To the neighbors. “Keep him safe. I must go find my sensei. Matter of honor.” They just looked at him. “Stay with them, son.” To them: “Where is she? She must be given good rites.”
“In back,” said the woman.
He looked at the flattened, shattered buildings.
“Back of what?” he wondered.
Thirty-Six
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 42