Blood and Chrysanthemums
Page 25
How strange it is, he thought. He gave me so many gifts: the diary, that long talk by the fireside, his trust in my sword arm and, least important, a portion of his wealth. Any of those would have been more than I deserved. Yet his greatest gift to me is the one thing that should have caused me the most grief. I do grieve for his death. I mourn that I shall never know him better than I do at this moment. I sorrow at the passing of something so old and fine from the world.
But it was Fujiwara’s death, perhaps even more than the other vampire’s life, that seemed to have swept away the fog in which he seemed to have wandered these last months. As he stood over the kneeling figure and lifted the beautiful, deadly sword, something had burst and flared inside him, like a star going supernova.
I can do this, he had thought with piercing clarity.
When the time comes, I can do this too.
There was no sin in what Fujiwara had done. Child of another world, product of a different culture, he bore none of the burdens of the faith of Rozokov’s childhood. There was no question of sin or evil, no agonizing over damnation or salvation. There was not even despair or defeat in it. There was only the will and the knife and the ultimate moment of self-assertion. There was only honour.
He was not required to endure an immortality for which he had never asked. He did not have to allow the black hole of his need to warp him beyond recognition. Any moment that he chose, he could follow Fujiwara into whatever might exist—or not—beyond the final cut of the knife.
And now that he knew this, he had not the least desire to die. The night air was full of the scent of pines. The stars, hidden behind their curtain of clouds, had secrets he had not even begun to understand. Even his love for Ardeth, complex and untidy and painful as it was, was sweeter than he had imagined possible.
He stood up, brushing dead grass from his coat. Yamagata had taken the body away. He did not know how the yakuza would explain the death or what kind of funeral they would hold. Whatever it might be, he would have no part to play in it. So he had decided on a ritual of his own to give what solace such rites could offer.
Rozokov reached inside his coat and withdrew a small piece of paper. He had cut it from the back of Fujiwara’s diary and carefully copied the words onto it. He had no doubt that they had looked very different when Fujiwara had originally written them in the fifteenth century, soon after his encounter with the playwright Hidekane. He knew the words by heart but still paused to read them again.
Autumn chrysanthemums bloom
Twice lovely for their sweetness
And the shadows that lie below them
Waiting for the fall.
He refolded the paper into precise quarters and looked around. A short distance from where he stood was a tree. He supposed it must have once been a pine. Some time in the past, lightning must have found it, for now it was nothing but a thin, black staff thrusting from the earth.
Walking to the tree, he ran one hand slightly up the burned wood. Just above the level of his eyes, the trunk had split open with the force of the lightning. A narrow crack began there and widened until the trunk was two sharp spikes.
“Goodbye, Sadamori,” he whispered, as he slid the paper into the dark heart of the tree. “I am grateful for your life. I was saved by your death. Rest in peace, wherever you may be.”
Then he turned around and saw Ardeth standing at the top of the trail.
He walked forward, so did she, and they met somewhere in the centre of the moonlit bank. “I came to say goodbye to him too,” she said, after an uneasy silence.
“Has Akiko left?”
“Yes.” Her mouth twisted a little in wry amusement. “He left me some money.”
“To me as well.” He had suspected Fujiwara might do that. It was an acknowledgement of their separateness that seemed to have pleased Ardeth. He felt a stab of pain but it surprised him by fading almost at once. “What will you do with it?”
“I don’t know yet. Mark asked me to go climbing in California.”
“Will you go?”
“Maybe. I’d like to do more climbing. But there’s a lot of sun in California,” she said with a small smile. “And I’ll have to decide whether Ardeth Alexander is officially dead or alive. What about you?”
“I haven’t thought about it yet. Will you stay in Banff for a while?” She met his gaze with serious eyes.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes.” She turned away for a moment, staring across the lake at the dark outlines the mountains.
“I can’t stay for long. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“There are a lot of things we’ve never quite resolved between us. I don’t think we can do it just yet. Fujiwara was right—I’m too young.”
“You are,” Rozokov acknowledged. “I knew that our paths must part so that someday they can come together again. But I would delay the parting for a while.”
She was quiet for a long moment. He watched her profile and suddenly longed with terrifying intensity to touch her, to smooth the hair the breeze ruffled around her head, to feel the cool curve of her cheek. At last, she turned to look at him. “So would I,” she said softly. “I don’t want to leave you again. Not yet.” She reached out and laid her hand against his chest, her fingers moving to grip the lapels of his coat.
On the mountain, in the moonlight, they kissed in welcome and farewell.
Acknowledgements
Profound thanks are owed to many people, especially:
Jim Baker and Diane Volkers, who donated Banff tours, free accommodations and jujubes, climbing expertise, and who got me halfway up the wall;
Professors John Brownlee and Yasko Nishimura of the University of Toronto, who provided invaluable information on Japanese history and culture; any errors there might be occurred despite their best efforts. Additional thanks to Professor Nishimura for her calligraphic talents;
Kim Kofmel, who told me when I most needed it that this was a story she wanted to hear;
Telemedia Publishing, which generously found a way for me to do my job and write a book at the same time;
My editor [for the original edition], Cynthia Good, who believed in the book and in me;
Mary Adachi, whose copy-editing sessions taught me about writing and Japanese language and culture in equal measure;
And most importantly, my husband, Richard Shallhorn, who held me together through a birth process that was far more arduous than either one of us expected.
Thank you to Sandra Kasturi, Brett Savory and the team at CZP for the e-book editions. Thanks to Gillian Homes of the House of Pomegranates for her gorgeous cover and to Suzy McKee Charnas for the kind introduction.
Note: Some imaginative liberties have been taken with Banff geography and climbing-wall architecture.
About the Author
Nancy Baker is the author of three vampire novels (The Night Inside, Blood and Chrysanthemums, and A Terrible Beauty) and a collection of short stories (Discovering Japan). Her next book, a fantasy novel titled Cold Hillside, will be published by ChiZine Publications in 2014. She lives in Toronto and avoids writing by working with numbers, gardening, and making jam. You can find out how any or all of these things are doing at nancybaker.ca or on Facebook.
Other CZP eBook titles by Nancy Baker
In case you missed the first Ardeth/Rozokov novel, you can read it now!
The Night Inside: Dependable grad student Ardeth Alexander finds herself trapped in a nightmare as the unwilling blood source for a captive vampire. When she discovers that her fellow prisoner is not the worst monster she faces, she realizes that the only way to survive is to make an irrevocable choice.
A Terrible Beauty: “Will you give me your blood to drink, though you die of it?” In an unexpected twist on a fairy tale, an artist goes into the wilderness to fulfill his father’s debt and finds himself the prisoner of a dangerous, alienl
y beautiful monster.
Copyright
FIRST ELECTRONIC EDITION
Blood and Chrysanthemums © 1994, 2014 by Nancy Baker
Cover artwork © 2014 by Gillian Holmes
All Rights Reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Distributed worldwide by
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The Night Inside
First published by Viking
The Penguin Group
Penguin Books Canada Ltd
1994
eISBN: 978-1-77148-190-8
Every effort has been made to contact holders of copyright for poetry selections included in this book. If you have information pertaining to such copyright, please contact the publisher immediately.
The Japanese characters within the book were drawn by Yasko Nishimura.
ChiZine Publications
a CZP eBook
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
Copyedited and proofread by Steph Da Ponte and Sandra Kasturi
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.