by Steve Bein
Her mind turned to the late Lord Kanayama. That one was like a stone. Emotionally stoic, unflappable even in the midst of combat. Hisami never met him more than briefly, but in all her contacts with him she had never seen him laugh, never a frown or a grin. Yet he was as wild as a tiger when he died. Could the sword have turned him? And if so, how much more quickly would it bewitch her husband?
She thanked the priest and took her leave. She would have to hurry now. Nothing about her husband was predictable anymore, and the consequences would be deadly if she was not home when he returned.
18
Saito’s mare galloped through the gate, dust billowing in her wake. She was breathing heavily, lungs pumping like bellows, and Saito was panting too. He’d ridden her hard, and the wind from the ride was a cool relief on his sweaty brow. It was good to ride a horse like that from time to time. It spoke to the condition of the animal, and also made it clear who the master was. He felt the need to assert his mastery this evening.
Swinging off the saddle, he handed the reins to his stable hand and gave the horse a pat on her flank. On his way out he patted his wife’s favorite horse as well, feeling energized from the ride. As he wiped the coarse brown hairs from his palm, his mood suddenly soured.
Hisami, dressed in gold and black, bowed deferentially as he slid open the door. “Welcome back,” she said sweetly. “Allow me to take your sandals and put up your swords. I’ll have the maid bring some tea.”
“No.”
“No tea?” she asked, proffering her hands for the sword.
“No,” he said again, walking past her and taking his customary seat.
Hisami eyed the sword nervously. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Don’t get so upset.”
“Shouldn’t a wife be upset when her husband goes armed in the house?”
“A wife should not be meddlesome,” he grunted angrily. “Nor should she go out without her husband’s permission.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Go out?”
“Your horse is drinking deeply outside. It sweats.”
Hisami swallowed. “It is a hot day.”
“No,” he snapped. “It’s been riding. Hard. Where did you go?”
Hisami struggled not to blush. “I did go riding earlier,” she admitted hesitantly, “but only on business. To see that all our family affairs are in order.” Her eyes fell to his weapon again.
“Meaning what?” he demanded.
“Meaning only that your behavior has been somewhat irregular for the past few days. I wanted to ensure that everything was well with you.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” he grumbled.
“No, you don’t.”
His eyebrows knotted in a suspicious glare. “What do you mean, then?”
She blinked quickly and padded over to her cushion, across from his. “You know,” she said, sitting, “I was thinking we still haven’t had a priest come to have the house blessed. Why don’t I summon one? Then we can have your father’s emblem anointed as well, to bless your newly adorned sword.”
“Again with the sword! Why can’t you just let me be?”
“I’m not talking about the sword,” she protested, her face a mask of false innocence. “A house blessing is only natural—”
“No priests! Our house is blessed enough.” His eyes transfixed hers with a murderous glare.
“I went to Seki,” she blurted out. “I know about your Beautiful Singer. And its curse.”
“Nonsense!”
“It isn’t nonsense. It’s what killed Lord Kanayama. It’s what brought you into ill favor with Lord Ashikaga as well.”
“Meddlesome wench! You and your damned spies!”
Saito’s face was red with fury. “It is a wife’s duty to know the affairs of the house,” she retorted.
“It is also her duty not to let her ears stray in places they should not go!”
“Please,” she implored, “let me summon a priest.”
He jumped to his feet. “Never! This idiotic superstition is trying my patience. I won’t hear another word of it.”
“Then you won’t hear another word from me.”
Saito grunted, thinking the matter settled. It took another moment for her implication to set in. “What do you mean?”
Hisami rose to her feet. “I cannot stay under the same roof as the spirit of that woman. It is obvious to me now that you are bewitched. Allow me to summon a priest for an exorcism, or allow me to leave.”
“What?” The muscles in his arms tensed as if he were about to strike her. “This is ridiculous! Have you become some peasant now? What you speak of is pure fairy tale!”
“Then why does my husband shout and threaten me—armed—in his own house?”
“I shout because you’ve lost your mind!”
“Someone in this room has,” she swore bitterly, her voice losing its implacable calm for the first time. “Let us find out who! Choose! Choose one of us, me or your spirit whore, and let your choice speak for your sanity!”
Hisami’s voice was an eagle’s, piercing. Saito didn’t hear it; his ears were filled with an all-too-familiar tune. The keening note sprang from his hip and trailed a silver arc through the air. The Beautiful Singer whirled and returned to her scabbard. Then the first drops of Hisami’s blood hit the ground.
Pale, she raised a finger to her throat. Her trachea hung open, a crimson waterfall flooding over her breast and dyeing her silken robes. It was a perfect cut, as long as a finger and half as deep. Her hand rose higher; she stumbled forward. Saito took a step back and watched her draw a hidden blade from her hairpin. She looked up at him, already dead on her feet, and made a final lunge. Then she fell to the floor.
Saito touched his cheek. Surprised, he rubbed blood between his fingertips. It was only a scratch, fine as a hair. A slash of red traced below his eye, as finely as an artist could paint one. A lake of the same red pooled on the floor. Saito looked down at his dead wife, at the spattered red flecks on her beautiful white cheek. Then he drew Beautiful Singer from her sheath and made sure she was clean of stains.
19
Saito fell to his knees under Lord Ashikaga’s withering glare. He had been ordered to Ashikaga’s chambers the moment the news of Hisami’s death reached the castle. Saito had never seen that gruesome face so angry. Rage flushed the skin but the scars remained white, adorning the lord’s scowl with strokes of war paint. “Explain yourself!” he roared.
“My lord, she stepped out of line.”
“No! You’re the one who is out of line!” Fury swelled in Ashikaga’s face, even his scars turning red. “How dare you kill one of my own without my permission?”
“She was only a woman.”
“She was samurai!”
“But lord, she was my wife. It is my prerogative to—”
“She was my samurai! And you dare speak to me of your prerogative?” Ashikaga rose to his feet, dark as a thundercloud. “You cut down one of my samurai without so much as consulting me? Without considering my honor? She questioned you on a matter that should well have been questioned, and you killed her for it. In this, she was more loyal than you.”
“But lord!”
“Enough! You will commit seppuku tomorrow at dawn. Get your affairs together and choose your second.”
Ashikaga stormed off the dais and out of the room, the echoes of his words still vibrating in the air. The silence that followed was heavier still, leaving Saito alone in the emptiness to contemplate his fate.
20
The first ray of morning crested the tree line and limned the paper walls with rose. The gathering was set. Ashikaga sat on a broad cushion, twenty armed samurai flanking him in attendance. A platform lay before them, upon it a miniature table bearing a dagger folded in a sheet of paper. Nakadai Minoru stood on the left side of the stage, near the door. Outside the door, Saito was held firmly by the wrists, a pair of samurai watching over him. He was dressed head to toe in white, the color of death.
Yet Saito had not a single thought for suicide, and he found his mind strangely clear. No doubt Hisami would have said this was because his haunted sword no longer plagued him, but Saito scoffed at the thought. It could only be his own imminent demise that had left him so oddly serene.
Lying all night on the dark floor of his prison, he’d had a long time to contemplate his two last wishes. The first was for vengeance. Someone had betrayed him. At first it was not clear who, but after long consideration he concluded it could only have been Nakadai. Only Nakadai could have told Hisami of the Inazuma blade. He was obsessed with the curse. Nakadai could have seen his master’s tachi on Saito’s hip and secretly reported it to Hisami. He could even have pressured her into riding to Seki to snoop. Saito had underestimated him; he never would have thought the fat man could be so observant, so traitorous, so bold.
Yet Nakadai was the obvious choice to be Saito’s second. In seppuku, the second was responsible for beheading the condemned after his self-disembowelment. For a samurai to die with honor, his second must also conduct himself with honor, and so it was a position of the greatest trust. Hisami herself could have been his second, were she still alive. Without her, it would be either Nakadai or Ashikaga’s official executioner. The executioner was generally reserved for common criminals, not samurai, and up until Nakadai’s treachery, he and Saito had been lifelong friends. Besides, by choosing Nakadai, at least Saito could vocalize his hatred, even if he could not act on it.
Revenge being unrealizable, Saito’s second dying wish was to hear Beautiful Singer’s song one last time. Lamentably, that too would be impossible. The guard whose hands now sullied her sheath was under the strictest orders not to hand over the sword until Saito was kneeling before the sacrificial knife. It was customary for a samurai to die with his weapons, but many a man tried to hack his way out of a death sentence, and it seemed Ashikaga feared Saito would do the same. That Saito suffered the dishonor of being suspected of such cowardice would also please the lord. Saito wondered why he had become the object of such contempt. He also wondered whether, with Beautiful Singer in his hands, he could cut deep enough through the surrounding warriors to make a bid for Ashikaga’s own neck. Perhaps that was why he was denied his sword. The possibility that Ashikaga feared him made Saito smile.
But such dreams were not to be. He would be without his weapon until he was seated with the knife in front of him and with Nakadai behind, ready to behead him once he committed the ultimate act of sacrifice. He would die with Beautiful Singer resting asleep in her scabbard, and he would never hear her enchanting voice again.
And now, standing at the very doorstep of the place where he would die, he was overcome with sudden realization. If he longed to hear her voice, then her voice had a hold on him. Could Hisami have been right all along? Had he killed her for nothing?
The thought was too terrible to bear. Even if it was true, there was no way to undo what he’d done. His only remaining recourse was to avenge her. It was right, then, that he should die by his own hand, for he himself was to blame—but only partially. Nakadai was a coconspirator. It was Nakadai who had whispered rumors of the curse in her ear. How else could she have heard of it? Yes, it was Nakadai who had pushed her to the point of obsession. Even if Saito admitted that he himself was also obsessed, it was Nakadai who made their two obsessions collide.
Saito’s need to hear his Beautiful Singer one last time was no less intense. But now his desire to exact vengeance on Nakadai burned hotter and brighter than ever before.
Saito smiled, and smiled triumphantly because suddenly he knew how to realize both of his wishes at once. When the door slid open in front of him, he felt no fear. When his guards shoved him forward, he walked confidently to the center of the dais. He saw Nakadai there, his narrow eyes sorrowful. Saito bowed to him proudly and knelt before the knife.
“A request,” he said serenely as he took his place. He kept his voice so low that Nakadai had to step forward to hear him. “Would you do me the honor,” Saito asked, “of carrying out your duty with my sword?”
Nakadai looked down at the tachi and Saito saw he did not recognize it. Then the big man looked up at Ashikaga and repeated Saito’s last wish. The lord considered the request, conceded it with a gruff nod of the head. Saito took the sword by the sheath from one of his guards and carefully set it at his right side, where it could not easily be drawn. Still Nakadai approached it cautiously. The other samurai tensed, all of them expecting trickery. Saito watched as Nakadai crouched behind him, grasped the scabbard, and lifted the sword. An iaidō master could have drawn and cut even with his sword in another man’s hands, but Saito remained still. He closed his eyes and offered a prayer to Buddha.
Ashikaga nodded again, and with this permission Saito took up the knife and ritualistically cleaned it with the paper. He stripped the white robes from his shoulders, baring himself to the waist. Then, with great resolve and immeasurable self-control, he picked up the blade and thrust it into his abdomen.
Sensation vanished in a wash of pain that left him in an icy shock. The room went white. His body was numb as the knife bit into him and then across. The last thing he heard was an ethereal song in the air, just before his head separated from his neck. His last thought was that his were not the only ears that heard it.
BOOK THREE
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
21
As he crossed the waiting room, Fuchida Shūzō wondered what everyone else there was thinking about. All the faces were impassive, downcast. It was dinnertime for these people. Fuchida had only just woken a few hours earlier—like all of nature’s deadliest predators, he was a nocturnal creature—but most of the visitors in the waiting room were accustomed to being home at this hour or else still at work, enslaved by the impossible hours of the sarariman. It was not an especially active time for acute care, and only a dozen or so sat on the powder-blue pleather couches. All of these people waited on a loved one, or else waited to receive attention themselves. Which ones were thinking about death? Which ones chided themselves for their own stupidity? Dog bites, falls from ladders, unexpected allergic reactions—most of the injuries here were foreseeable, avoidable, and nonlethal. Stupidity. But then there were the ones that required paperwork to release remains to the morgue. Which ones were they?
Fuchida could not tell, nor was he certain why he could not tell. Was it the unflappable demeanor the Japanese were famous for the world over? Or had he so little compassion that he could not tell the mildly irritated from the panic-stricken?
Fuchida felt neither irritation nor panic. He’d felt both in the past, when the diagnosis had first come through, but now coming here was scarcely different from going to the post office or collecting protection money. It was just something he did.
His only feeling was a vague sense of something missing. It bothered him like a song stuck in his head that he couldn’t place and couldn’t shake. He felt this way often when he was without his beautiful singer, but even a yakuza couldn’t get away with carrying a sword through the halls of a hospital. Now that he thought about it, he did feel a niggling irritation too, not at having to come to the hospital but at being deterred from hunting down the Inazuma blade he’d been seeking for all these years. Time was growing short. It had never been in the cards for him to hold on to the second Inazuma for long. He hadn’t understood that before, but it was clear to him now. For fifteen years he’d thought to make himself the first man in history to own two Inazumas, but now he understood that he could parlay the second sword into something greater, something too valuable for him to consider keeping the weapon for himself. Yes, he would be the first t
o hold two Inazumas, but only briefly—just long enough to seize the reins of his own destiny. But if he did not acquire the second blade soon, the only option left to him would be to sell his beautiful singer, and that he could not abide. Better to be a mere courier for the second Inazuma than to part with his beloved.
Fuchida walked across the faded blue carpet of the waiting room, his path already worn gray by thousands of prior patients, and jabbed the elevator button with his thumb. When the elevator came, he pressed the button for the tenth floor, then spent the ride examining his distorted reflection in the polished steel walls. He wore his black suit and white shirt again, a bolo tie today, his hair tied back in a tail. Would someone say he looked sad? Anxious? Bored? Fuchida couldn’t tell. He just looked like himself.
He got out on the hospice care floor and went to the room he always went to. His father was watching television. The volume was low—whatever else might be afflicting him, the old man’s hearing was still as sharp as a wolf’s—and Fuchida didn’t recognize the program. Some show about movie stars. His father lay under a dark blue blanket and pale blue sheets. His hospital gown was also light blue, and he huddled in an extra blanket wrapped about his shoulders and chest. A thin clear plastic tube was taped under his nose to supply oxygen.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Shūzō-kun. Come on in. Sit.”
His father muted the television, and they talked about the usual. “You ought to come by for breakfast sometime,” the elder Fuchida said. “The morning shift’s got a nurse with an ass like a ripe peach.”
“She should let you chew on it. They’re not feeding you enough, Dad.”
“They feed me plenty. I just can’t keep anything down. How’s business?”
Fuchida bunched his lips, nodding. “Fine. Looking better all the time.”