by India Millar
Bigger would know, of course – the Boys knew everything – that Suzume could not feel pain. Until her mizuage, Auntie would make sure that neither of the Boys could have fun testing just how much she would be able to endure. But of course, there were a multitude of ways that the Boys could enjoy themselves with poor little Suzume that did not include deflowering her. I shuddered at the thought, then prayed that Bigger had not noticed.
He picked up the pipe off the tray and ran his finger appreciatively down the long, ivory stem before fitting the ceramic pipe bowl into its mounting. Suzume had left a pot of opium, already rolled into neat balls, and Bigger picked one up carefully, prodding it into place in the bowl with a sliver of metal. The pipe lamp was lit and he leaned forward, all his attention on the pipe bowl as he turned it too and fro in the heat. When the opium was vaporizing to his satisfaction, he sat back and – to my surprise – offered the pipe to me. I bowed low, but shook my head. I had tried a pipe once and had been so sick afterward I thought my insides had come loose. Carpi, I had noticed, seemed to be smoking opium more often these days, and I did not like the look of the effect it was having on her.
Bigger shrugged at my refusal and took a long draw at the pipe stem himself. He held his breath for ages and then exhaled slowly.
“Big hates you, you know.” His normally sharp voice was mellowed by the opium. I looked at him in confusion and waited until he had inhaled again before I dared ask.
“Why?”
I was even more terrified of Big than I was of Bigger. On the rare occasions that I met him in the corridors of the Hidden House, I invariably made sure to flatten myself against the wall and bow as low as I could without coming into contact with him. But still I could feel intense dislike radiating off him like a black cloud. In spite of the fact that I had wondered since the night I had met Danjuro why Big had decided he disliked me, if it had not been for the opium, I would never have dared question Bigger.
“Don’t you know?” His voice had slowed to a lazy drawl. I shook my head. “He couldn’t believe that you took Danjuro away from him. Big’s been in love with him for years. And of course, Big was very fond of Terue. Your mother.”
Bigger yawned and I prayed he would not fall asleep too soon. My mother. Big had been fond of my mother. No one ever spoke about her, at least not when I was listening. Now Bigger was telling me that Big, of all people, had been fond of her? I was beyond amazed. I wanted to know about my mother, but I knew I must tread very carefully. Bigger was obviously more interested in Danjuro, so I risked asking him about that.
“Does Danjuro feel the same about Big?” I asked, feeling my way carefully.
Bigger shook his head lazily. “I don’t think Danjuro cares about anything except his art.” He yawned again, exposing his teeth and his gums. Through the fog of opium, he must still have seen my bewildered expression because he laughed. “You don’t know anything at all, do you? Do you even know who Danjuro is?”
I shook my head. He had been well dressed, but his bearing had none of the arrogance of a samurai, still less a noble. Neither could I believe that he was a merchant. Truth to tell, Danjuro had been a mystery I had been picking at from the moment I had laid eyes on him.
“Danjuro is…Danjuro!” Bigger laughed uproariously at his own wit. Like the well-trained geisha I was, I giggled with him. Bigger sucked on the pipe again. “He’s the lead actor with the Edo kabuki,” he said finally. “The lead actor is always called Danjuro, at least he is if he’s considered good enough and he comes from that family of actors. It’s a great honor. Danjuro must be the seventh or eighth actor to bear the family name.”
He put the pipe down with great care, smiling at me beatifically. I could tell he was falling asleep even though he hadn’t told me anything about my mother. My need to know overcame my fear, and I slid across the matting to Bigger, inching my hand into his partly open robe. It was a huge risk; as far as I knew, Bigger was not interested in women. It was quite likely that he would, if I was very lucky, shrug me aside. If he took offense, he was likely to slap me so hard that I hit the floor. But it was a chance I had to take.
I smiled up at him, and my hand found his tree of flesh. I was bitterly disappointed to discover that he was completely flaccid, and for a few moments nothing I could do seemed to make any difference. And then, suddenly, Bigger became interested.
“What are you up to, little Midori?” he slurred, the words clearly an effort.
“I hoped to please you, Bigger-san,” I murmured, as shyly as I could. Bigger grunted and began to grow under my fingers. I was glad my face was hidden from his view or he would have seen the astonishment – and fear – in my expression. Seeing the Boys aroused in the bath or with a patron was one thing. Having that arousal under your own hand was different. Very shortly, I understood only too well why Bigger had his name.
His tree of flesh was like nothing I had ever imagined. It was not only huge – it must have easily reached to beyond his belly-button – but was also thick and solid. What tiger had I roused? But at the same time as I felt fear, a slow snake of excitement began to uncoil in my belly. Could I, could any woman, take this inside her? Ride this snake and live to tell the tale? I licked my lips and slid my fingers, which barely met, around his thickness. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I began to move my hand back and forth, expecting every second that Bigger would get tired of my nervous efforts and would knock me aside.
But he did not. Instead, he seemed amused. Moment by moment, it seemed that the effect of the pipe was wearing off.
“What a brave little Midori No Me you are,” he snickered. “Don’t you know what I do to little girls like you? Why, I break them in two!”
I was breathing heavily. I couldn’t help it. Part of me was terrified at the thought of trying to take all this inside me. Another part was as deeply excited. What would it feel like? Could I do it? Could I?
Bigger settled the question for me. He laced his fingers in my hair and dragged me up, level with his face. Very deliberately, he pushed the tip of his tongue between his lips and licked my face, starting between my eyebrows and ending up at my mouth. His tongue traced the outline of my lips with an absurd delicacy. When he spoke, his lips were so close to me that I felt the puff of his breath on my skin.
“Do you want me to break you, Midori? Is that what you want? Do you want to feel me inside you? Do you think you are woman enough to take me? Do you?”
I was screaming inside. Fear was telling me to say, No, Bigger, no, of course not. I am so sorry I disturbed you. I don’t know what came over me.
My lips said yes.
Bigger was laughing at me silently, his lips parted, his teeth bared in almost a snarl. I was reminded of an alpha wolf, growling at his pack to keep them in order.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”
Bigger slouched onto his back and threw his robe open. He gestured at his tree of flesh. A gesture that said, Go on, then. If you dare.
I was wet with desire, but even so I dared not accept his invitation. Not yet. Instead, I bent and took the engorged bulb of his tree of flesh in my mouth, licking and sucking until he was slippery wet. And all the time, Bigger lay back and watched me, his expression unreadable.
When I finally thought I was ready – or as ready as I was ever going to be – I raised my head and took a deep breath. Very carefully, I slid across and put one leg over his belly. Bigger lay still, neither helping nor hindering. I raised myself onto my knees and then began to lower myself, as slowly as I could. After a lifetime, I felt his erection nudging my sex. I stretched myself wide with my fingers and took the plunge before I could change my mind, taking him inside me.
Bigger laughed.
I was lost. Suddenly, I was a greedy child. I wanted as much of him as I could take, no matter how it hurt. I forced myself down onto him, perhaps halfway down his tree, and then raised myself up again. Down another half inch. No more, I thought. I could take no more. Bigger had other ideas.
�
�If you sow the wind, you must expect to reap the typhoon, Midori No Me.”
His voice was hoarse and rough. I stared at him with my mouth wide open, shaking my head slightly from side to side. Bigger moved fluidly, rolling me onto my back so that he was looking down at me. And from that moment on, his gaze never left my face.
His erection was so enormous that he had not fallen out of me as we turned over. Ignoring my squeaks, he began to force himself inside me. I was almost relieved. I was no longer in charge. I had no option. What I had started, Bigger was going to finish. No matter what.
I slid my hands beneath him and stretched my sex as wide as I could, hanging on to his tree of flesh to try and control his movement. I might as well have tried to stop Mount Fuji from erupting. Bigger was iron, his flesh not flesh at all but something harder than any man had a right to. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and suddenly he was fully inside me.
I moved with him, hardly able to believe that I had been able to take this giant of a man. He gave me incredible pain with every thrust, but alongside the pain was equally huge pleasure. I screamed out loud, pain and pleasure mingling into one indescribable whole. And still Bigger watched my face, his gaze never wavering.
Had he stopped, I would have crawled on my knees to him. Done anything, anything at all to entice him back inside me. He was not a man, he was a god. Suddenly, my world began to spin and I screamed again with pure pleasure.
Bigger did not burst his fruit inside me. When he withdrew, he was still fully erect. I looked at him dizzily, hardly able to believe what had happened.
“Midori No Me, you would not have been able to do that had I wanted to punish you.”
I shook my head and blinked at him fuzzily, still deep, deep in pleasure.
“If you tell anyone, anyone at all, that you took me and lived to tell the tale without screaming every time you thought about it, then I will punish you. Punish you worse than anything you could ever imagine.”
A shudder rippled my flesh like a cold wind had blown over me as I realized how insane I had been to tempt this man. And how lucky I had been to get away with it. It would not, I knew, ever happen again. I bowed my head in unfeigned humility.
“Yes, Bigger,” I whispered.
I felt him staring at me and wondered if, after all, I was going to be punished for my insolence. I was, but not how I expected.
“You look nothing like your mother, you know,” Bigger said.
I froze. A few minutes ago I would have given anything for him to tell me about Terue, the mother I had never known, but now I did not want to hear. It seemed to me to be a blasphemy to her memory that this man should speak about her, especially after what we had just done. I felt absurdly guilty and offered a prayer of apology to my unknown mother. I lowered my head and tried not to look interested, but Bigger was relentless.
“Terue was very beautiful. The perfect geisha, she was called. Tiny, much smaller than you, and slender as a willow branch. To hear her sing a sad song was to bring tears to your eyes.”
I closed my own eyes. Bigger poked me in the ribs hard enough to bruise and I opened my eyes.
“She had not just the patrons of the Green Tea House at her feet, but the whole of Edo. Could even have had a nobleman for a husband, if she wanted. But what did the silly bitch do? Run off with a foreign devil. You get your looks from your father.”
My father? Strange, I had rarely spared a thought for him. He was just too much of an unknown. I had no concept of what he looked like, how he thought. I kept my gaze modestly lowered.
“He was tall, like you. And he had hair the color of a red fox.” Bigger had known him, I realized with astonishment. He actually knew my father! The knowledge was a revelation. “Same color eyes as you as well. He was as ugly as sin, should have been in a circus side show as a freak, if you ask me. What Terue ever saw in him, none of us could understand. But that’s women for you. The gods only know how they think. If they think at all. We hardly saw any foreign Barbarians in Edo in those days, so he stuck out like the monster he was. He was a merchant, imported opium and exported silk and porcelain. I’ll give him his due, he actually bothered to learn Japanese. If you didn’t look at his ugly face, you would have thought you were speaking to a native of Edo.”
I stayed silent. I couldn’t have spoken if I had wanted to. A sliver of mucous slipped down the inside of my leg, distracting me. I tried to ignore it.
“Of course, we all knew why Terue ran off with him.” Bigger was jeering at me. He stopped, and I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood rather than ask him to go on. He pulled a sour face and went on anyway. “The stupid bitch had got herself pregnant by him. There would have been no place for her in the Floating World, nowhere in Edo, if she had produced a half-breed deformed freak like you. She could have exposed you and left you to die on Mount Fuji, of course, but word would soon have got round as to whose little monkey you were. So she was merciful, and left you here when she ran off with her foreign devil.”
He smiled at me, almost lovingly, and I tried not to shiver. As he rose to his feet and fastened his robe, he added casually, “If you really want to know about Terue-san, you should have a chat with Big. He knew your mother better than anybody. Except her foreign Barbarian, of course.”
Bigger swaggered off, pulling the screen closed behind him with exaggerated courtesy.
I sat silently. Nekko climbed onto my knee, purring to himself. That was the barb on the arrow, then. Big. Big had known my mother well. Big, the one man out of the whole of the Floating World who I could never hope to talk to. Big, who had hated me simply because I was my mother’s daughter and now hated me even more because of Danjuro.
I lifted Nekko off my lap and rubbed my face in his fur. I blew on his neck and he mewed, whether in pleasure or indignation I had no idea.
When I was sure that Bigger had gone, I changed my robe and went to the bathhouse. Nekko sat at the edge of the bath and tried to bat the steam with his paw. As I sunk into the hot water and felt it cleanse me, I wondered if my mother, the famous geisha, would have been ashamed of my conduct with Bigger. Suddenly, as certainly as if I heard her voice whispering in the echoing bathhouse, I thought not. She had taken her chance, had done the unthinkable. Had done what she wanted to do. Had taken her life and shaken it and reformed it in the pattern she wanted. It was a life that did not include me, but so be it. Few, if any, Japanese women would have had the courage to do what she had done. At least she hadn’t exposed me on a mountaintop. I was alive!
In just the same way as Terue had done, I had followed my impulse and done what I wanted with Bigger. I had decided that I would have what I wanted at that moment.
No, I decided. Mother would not have been ashamed of her daughter. In fact, she might even have been proud of me.
Chapter Seven
Blossoms skip at the
Caress of spring.
I share their pleasure.
I had never seen Auntie ruffled before. Had never dreamed that anything could get her even the least bit excited. But here she was, clucking like a mother hen rounding up her chicks.
“Should I wear a wig, Auntie?” A totally irrelevant question, of course, but I was so ecstatic myself, I hardly knew what I was saying or doing. Auntie actually thought about the answer for a second as well. Truly, a day of the strangest happenings!
“No, I don’t think so. We’ll put your hair up, of course, and style it properly for you. I recollect that he liked your hair, so no wig. Your green kimono, of course.” As if I had another one that was fit to go out in! “And full makeup. One of my girls is not going to be seen out improperly styled.”
I almost laughed out loud at the last comment. When, I wondered, had one of the Hidden House girls ever been “seen out,” either properly or improperly styled? We were hidden gems, blossoms too strange to be seen by the light of day. On the rare occasions that one or two of us had been sent for to attend an especially important occasion inside the Floating World,
we were put into a closed carriage and escorted by the Boys. It had never happened to me, but Carpi had gone once, in company with a girl who had since been bought out by a danna. I couldn’t remember her name, but she had been mute. I asked Carpi about it afterward, and she had simply shrugged, her mouth turning down sourly at the corners.
“It was nothing.” My face fell and she shrugged again, almost apologetically. “Auntie put us in the carriage straight from the door and closed the curtains on us. The Boys traveled inside with us and handed us out when we got there. I don’t even know where ‘there’ was. When the patron had finished with us, we were put back in the carriage and delivered to the door of the Hidden House. And that was it. A patron is a patron, after all. Here or there.”
Now the moment had arrived and I was so excited I found it difficult to breathe. I gave thanks to the gods on my knees. It was exactly as if Danjuro had heard Bigger talking to me about him and about Big. For the moment, I was too excited to even worry about either of the Boys.
After months and months of thinking about Danjuro, wondering about him at every possible moment, dreaming about him, it seemed that he had suddenly awoken from a sleep of his own and had taken it into his head to send for me. I was to attend a performance of the kabuki! And – if it was possible for things to get any better – he had even said that I was not to be escorted by the Boys, but was to be allowed to go to the kabuki on my own, accompanied, as was only proper, by little Suzume, who would act as my maid.
He would, of course, be happy to pay the fee for me for the whole evening, and there would be a nice present for Suzume.
Although I had not seen Big, I could almost feel his loathing simmering.