Black Wind

by F. Paul Wilson

  Nothing happened for a while, but Meiko allowed herself no false hope: The radio said a particularly large air flotilla had been sighted heading this way. They waited together. Meiko checked on Naka from time to time, but he was sleeping peacefully, as only a two-and-a-half-year-old knew how. When she came back to Matsuo, she could feel the tension in him as she leaned against his arm. Every muscle fiber in his body seemed to be on alert.

  Around midnight, they saw the first firebombs drop through the sky. The leading B-29s marked out the target areas with long-burning incendiaries. They plotted a huge square on the plain side, down in the Tokyo flatlands where the big factories squatted with the countless huts of the workers who toiled within huddled around them like hordes of suckling young.

  Soon the second wave arrived, carpet-bombing the marked areas. The B-sans were invisible in the black sky but trailed wakes of flame along the ground like waves behind a boat. Horrified, Meiko watched the wild spread of the fires. Soon all the lowlands were alight. The wind whipped the fire heavenward in vortices of flame. The sky was alive with sparks. The tinderbox city had been ignited and the radiance of its burning lit the underbellies of its attackers miles above. The smell of burning wood filled the air.

  And then the fire began to spread beyond the markers.

  "It's coming this way," Matsuo said.

  Meiko felt her heart cramp and pause in her chest. "Will it reach us?"

  "Look at it. Unless some miracle stops the wind, it will be here in no time."

  She thought of Naka sleeping in his bed and fought the panic that crept in from the shadows.

  "What'll we do?"

  "I'm going outside." His face was grim in the approaching glow from the flatlands. "We have water. Maybe I can save the house."

  Maybe? Meiko thought as she hung on the window and watched the approaching fire. We need more than a maybe.

  * * *

  Matsuo could feel the heat as soon as he stepped outside. The air was alive with sparks. He uncoiled the hose and turned it on. The pressure was pitiful, not enough to water the garden, let alone soak down the roof and walls. He checked the rain barrels at the corners of the house. The snowfalls of the past two weeks had run off the roof with the sudden warm spell, filling the barrels to the rims. He dipped two buckets into the nearest and set them in the backyard, kissing Meiko's worried face as he passed her at the window.

  Then he stepped back and surveyed the roof. The curved wooden shingles were ripe for a fire. He pulled out a ladder and climbed, taking a bucket of water with him. The gusts were hotter and stronger up here. He had to hold onto an eaves to keep from being blown off. He turned his back to the wind yet still the smoke stung his eyes and choked him. Larger sparks and bits of flaming wood filled the heated air. He wet his hair to keep it from being singed, then tossed the bucket of water over the shingles and watched it trickle down to the gutters and back into the rain barrels.

  Maybe this will work, he thought.

  He could keep the roof wet this way without wasting much water. But as he shielded his eyes and risked a glance toward the east, he cried out in alarm.

  The fire was almost upon them, like a living thing, leaping over huge gaps of the city in its westward trek, lighting spotty fires here and there in its haste to engulf the entire city. Matsuo looked down at his puny bucket, then looked again at the approaching holocaust. It only took a second to decide. He tossed the bucket into the garden and scrambled down the ladder.

  "Meiko!" he cried, rushing into the house. "Get Naka! We're leaving!"

  "I have him.” He could see the little boy clinging drowsily to her neck. "Can't we save our house?"

  The our cut him like a knife. They had been here only a few years, but they had been good years. It was a good little house, neat, trim, full of memories. Their house. And now they were going to lose it.

  "Only the kami of the house can save it now. Nothing a couple of humans can do will make any difference. Grab what you can and we'll run for it."

  Besides Meiko and Naka, Matsuo could think of only one valuable he could not leave without. He ran to where Nagata's daisho sat on its katana-kake and thrust the two swords into his belt. Everything else was replaceable.

  * * *

  So hot!

  Meiko ran beside Matsuo as he carried the crying Naka through the smoke-layered, fire-rimmed streets of Tokyo. At times the very air seemed to burn. She was dressed in a light sleeping kimono and feared it or her wooden geta would burst into flame. Every so often Matsuo would stop at a water barrel and insist that Meiko immerse herself in it, then he would do the same. Finally, he would dip Naka's quilt in the water and wrap him up in it again. Naka didn't like being wet. He cried constantly. She was about to protest the repeated dunking when she saw a woman running down the street ahead of them with a child bundled in a quilt and lashed to her back—the bundle was burning. Meiko wanted to cry out to her but she turned a corner and was lost in a sheet of flame.

  Confused crowds clustered at every intersection, knots of lost, terrified faces, unable to choose which direction to run. Matsuo pushed through them. He seemed to know where he wanted to go.

  "We've got to keep moving upwind and crosswind!" he shouted above the roar of the flames and the blistering gale.

  "Which way is that?" she said. The wind seemed to be coming from all directions. "How can you tell?"

  He looked into her eyes, then away. "I'm guessing. Let's hope I'm right."

  They passed brave firemen trying to fight the endless blazes with failing water pressure. The air grew hotter. Suddenly, to their right, Meiko saw a pillar of flame swirl and funnel into the air. Then another. Then two more. They hung there, twisting and whirling and stabbing at the city below, drinking up the heat and spewing it back.

  Tornadoes of fire. She had heard of such things in the fire that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Tatsumaki they were called—dragon tails.

  As they crossed an intersection she saw a tatsumaki lash out at a spot down a side street, causing a whole block of houses to glow from within like paper lanterns, then burst into flame as they were sucked up into the mad, fiery vortex. Matsuo led them through Asakusa at a run, past the temple to Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy. The park around the temple was ablaze, the great gingko trees burning like giant torches. And from within the burning temple itself, Meiko could hear the screams of the devoted trapped there. The fire knew nothing of mercy.

  Matsuo led them to the banks of the Sumida River where he pressed her and Naka through the throngs lining the bank. The fire on the far side was burning just as wildly as the district they were fleeing. The whole of the sky glowed a bright orange, as if the earth had drifted too close to the sun. There were no shadows anywhere.

  "What will we do, Matsuo?"

  For the first time now, she was afraid they might die.

  "Take my hand.”

  Holding Naka against him, he pressed through the crowd and onto a bridge.

  "But it's burning over there, too!"

  He stopped in the middle of the span and clutched her to him as he leaned on a support.

  "We should be safe here. This bridge is made of steel. There's nothing on it to burn."

  But it could get hot. As the tatsumaki lashed the city with their maelstroms of fire, as the very air around them seemed to burn, filling with smoke and ash and flaming bits of wood and paper, the bridge grew more and more crowded, the steel of the structure grew hotter and hotter. The heat in the air, the hot steel against her, the press of the crowd—Meiko felt as if she were suffocating.

  "Matsuo, I can't breathe! And look at Naka!" The little boy's eyes were rolled back and his head was lolling. "We're going to die here!"

  She saw Matsuo glance left and right along the span of the bridge. Even if there were someplace to go, they couldn't budge.

  Further up the river, the steel of another bridge was beginning to glow with the heat.

  "We have to jump," he said.

 
; She looked down at the dark waters below. In the light of the flames she saw charred debris and—was that a body floating by? She looked back up at Matsuo and the panic she felt must have been clear in her eyes.

  "Trust me. I'll get us through this—all three of us—but you've got to believe in me."

  She felt the strength in him, took courage from the determination to live in his eyes. He helped her up on the railing and then gently pushed her off before she had time to change her mind. Her mind screamed Naka! but her body arched itself into a dive and she hit the water cleanly. She took no time to savor the blessed coolness of the deeper water, but fought her way back to the heated surface. Something splashed just behind her as she gulped air, and then she heard a child's coughing cry.

  "He's all right!" Matsuo said out of the dark, and then he was beside her, letting the child clutch her neck.

  "Oh, Naka!" she said, struggling to keep the two of them afloat. Matsuo helped by partially supporting them.

  "Don't fight the current," he said. "Just follow it downstream."

  She struggled, half treading, half swimming, moving along the heated water of the sluggish Sumida. A nightmare journey, drifting past the horribly dead in the water and the dying on the bank. Lacy fingers of steam reached up from the water around them, catching and holding the red light from the flaming city. It would have been beautiful were it not for the screams and cries that filled the air.

  Along the way they were joined by other swimmers, some who lasted, some who fell behind and sank from sight. She reached out for what looked like a charred log floating nearby. She grasped it and it rolled over, revealing an open mouth and teeth at one end. She screamed and kicked away from it.

  Meiko stopped looking around her. She narrowed her world to Naka and Matsuo and herself and the river. She knew if she let her surroundings dwell in her consciousness she would go mad.

  She and Matsuo took turns supporting Naka and gradually left the flames and heat behind. Eventually she found herself slumped wet and cold—she had thought she would never feel a chill again—on a foul, muddy bank within sight of Tokyo Bay. The water of the Sumida was lower than she had ever remembered it. Had it boiled away in places upstream, or were the canals and channels that fed it clogged with bodies?

  Clutching Naka against her, and clutched in turn by Matsuo's encircling arms, Meiko watched the city continue to burn as swollen and charred corpses floated by. And still the B-29s kept coming. Despite the inferno below, wave after wave sauntered unchallenged through the air to drop ever more incendiaries on the agonized city. They finally ran out of bombs and planes at around three in the morning. The wind gradually died and the fire gradually burned itself out.

  The all-clear sirens sounded at dawn.

  * * *

  Matsuo stood in the remains of his house. He had left Meiko and Naka at the Mazaki home, luckily spared in the uphill Akasaka section. Nothing but a smoldering ruin was left of the home he and Meiko had called their own.

  But this was a small loss on the scale of last night's horror. And he knew that scale. As soon as Meiko and Naka were safe at his in-laws', he had hurried to the unscathed Diet Building. Chiyoda-ku, the district encompassing the Imperial Palace and the government offices, had been spared. From the uppermost level of the Diet's sturdy tower he looked down to the plain side of Tokyo. The sight left him weak and sick. Even though he had been surrounded by the fire last night, he had not grasped the full extent of its toll. A haze of smoke still covered the area. All the homes and factories and parks and trees had been reduced to a blackened smudge. Central Tokyo had been leveled. Although he lived here, he had never considered the city home. He felt he belonged most in Kyoto. But seeing Tokyo like this tore the heart out of him.

  He went down to the streets.

  Dazed by the enormity of the devastation, Matsuo walked from the periphery of the fire area toward its center. Nothing was left standing except an occasional steel frame, a rare concrete pillar, small sections of stone wall. Here and there a tree trunk or telephone pole stood black and stark against the white pall of smoke that permeated the air. He passed charred carts and burned-out hulks of cars, and then he began seeing bodies. A few at first, huddled in doorways or in the ditches that were supposed to protect them. The odor of burned flesh grew, competing with, then overcoming, the smell of burned wood. Bodies littered the street, more and more of them, blackened, wizened, contorted shapes. Some had been virtually incinerated to ash. Others appeared to be merely charred but, when touched, dissolved into feathery fragments that wafted away on the breeze.

  The bodies grew in number as he walked on. They were everywhere, countless thousands of blackened corpses, sometimes piled so thickly that they choked intersections.

  He had heard whispers in the halls of the Diet about the early death count: already a hundred thousand dead or missing with the total rising hourly. Estimates were that the figure would double when all the reports were in.

  Two hundred thousand dead! Almost all of them civilians.

  Matsuo knew how the Americans felt about the Pearl Harbor attack, but their anger could not justify this sort of atrocity. Only the east loch of the harbor had been hit. Honolulu had been spared. Matsuo had been there and had seen that for himself. Not a single bomb, not a single bullet had been aimed at the city. Only military targets had been struck, only soldiers killed. Granted, they had been sleeping and had had no warning of war, but the fact remained that they were all members of America's armed forces. The women and children and workers of Tokyo who had been incinerated last night were not soldiers. Yet the planes had kept coming, dropping their incendiaries hour after hour.

  Anger bubbled up in him when he thought of all the crisp, flaking corpses in the street, the bigger ones clutching the smaller ones protectively, futilely.

  Isn't it enough that they overwhelm us in battle? Do they want to erase us from the face of the earth as a people, too?

  This war had to be stopped.

  * * *

  "We cannot let this go unavenged. We must strike back!"

  Shimazu sat silently amid the smell of scorched wood and watched Hiroki fling himself about the room, expending his rage in all directions. The fire had burned itself out in the temple's district, but the temple had not escaped unscathed. The roof had caught and burned through on the east side, spreading to the upper floors where the Seers and the surgeons lived. All three of the Seers and many of the surgeons had perished. His heart was heavy with the tragic loss to the Order. He had known those monks all his life.

  Curse these American dogs!

  "If only I had enough shoten at my disposal," Hiroki said. "I'd take them to America myself and place them throughout Los Angeles and let those Americans know what it is to die in their homes and streets."

  "We do not have a safe way to transport shoten the five thousand miles to America." Shimazu wondered idly what would happen if an altered child awoke on a submarine and began to generate the Kuroikaze there. "Nor do we have any to spare, especially with the loss of so many of our surgeons in the fire."

  "Why didn't the Seers warn of this?"

  Shimazu shrugged. He was so tired. "What is the point of such a question? The Seers are dead. We cannot ask them. So why ask me?"

  Hiroki did not respond immediately. He seemed sunk in gloom. He began to mutter, more to himself than to anyone else.

  "The temple is damaged, we have no more Seers, and not enough surgeons left to produce the shoten we need. The Americans bomb us at their leisure. We don't have enough petrol to train new pilots properly, so we teach them enough to get themselves airborne and crash their craft into an enemy ship." He looked up with haunted eyes. "We are lost."

  "Remember what the Seer said," Shimazu reminded his pupil.

  But even he was having doubts now about the outcome of the war. Iwo Jima was about to fall. Manila had been taken earlier in the month and it was only a matter of time before the last Japanese regiments were obliterated from the Phi
lippines. With few minor exceptions, the inexhaustible American war machine had retaken all of the floating worlds Japan had seized a mere three years ago. And with the Third Reich in its death throes in Europe, it was only a matter of time before the Great Bear of Russia turned its hungry eyes toward Japan. The Emperor was more tightly encircled by the white barbarians than ever before. There had to be a way out.

  Shimazu sighed. "It is too bad the Seers never looked backward. Perhaps they could have told us where the scrolls were hidden."

  Hiroki jumped up and stared at him. "Look backward. Why didn't we ever think of that? We could have had the scrolls years ago."

  "We tried that. But apparently, once one has looked forward with the Seers' elixir, the past is closed to him."

  Shimazu could not remember much experimentation by the Seers in the area of looking backward. The past was considered a matter of record; it was always the future that claimed their interest.

  "Has anyone who has never looked forward tried to look into the past?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Then we must try."

  "We have no new Seers."

  "I will take their elixir!" Hiroki cried.

  Shimazu studied him intently. Surely Hiroki was the Okumo brother who would bring the glory to the Order.

  "But you still have your eyes," Shimazu said. "I will not permit you to give them up."

  Relief was evident in Hiroki's face as he replied. "Perhaps I won't see as clearly as a Seer, but surely I will see something."

  "You have no training. You won't know how to control your visions. How will you guide them to the point in time you desire? How will you focus it in the proper place? You may be endangering yourself for nothing."

  "We have to try. There has to be a way."

  Shimazu shook his head. It seemed hopeless. Hiroki had not a Seer's years of experimentation and experience behind him. He would not know how to obtain anything useful out of—