The Diamond Chariot

by Boris Akunin

  But he could.

  She rubbed his bruises and grazes with a healing ointment and then showed him how to banish the pain and fatigue with ketsuin – the magical coupling of the fingers. Under guidance Erast Petrovich spent a quarter of an hour twisting his fingers out of joint to form them into incredibly complicated shapes, after which the absolute exhaustion disappeared as if by magic and his body felt strong and filled with energy.

  The lovers did not see each other during the day – Fandorin strove to comprehend the mysteries of falling and correct breathing and Midori was occupied with some business of her own, but the nights belonged entirely to them.

  The titular counsellor learned to manage with two hours of rest. It turned out that if one mastered the art of correct sleeping, that was quite sufficient to restore one’s strength.

  In accordance with the wise science of jojutsu, each new night was unlike the one before and had its own name: ‘The cry of the heron’, ‘The little gold chain’, ‘The fox and the badger’ – Midori said that sameness was fatal for passion.

  Erast Petrovich’s previous life had been coloured primarily in white, the colour of the day. But now that his sleeping time had been reduced so drastically, his existence was dichromatic – white and black. Night was transformed from a mere backdrop to the stage of life into an integral part of it, and the universe as a whole benefited greatly as a result.

  The space extending from sunset to dawn included a great many things: rest, passion, quiet conversation and even rowdy horseplay – after all, they were both so young.

  For instance, once they argued over who was faster: Midori running or Fandorin on his tricycle.

  They didn’t think twice about crossing to the other side of the crevice, where the Royal Crescent was waiting for its master, then going down to the foot of the mountain and holding a cross-country race along the path.

  At first Erast Petrovich shot out in front, but after half an hour, tired from turning the pedals, he starting moving more slowly, and Midori started gaining on him. She ran lightly and steadily, without increasing her rate of breathing at all. After almost ten versts she overtook the tricyclist and her lead gradually increased.

  That was when Fandorin realised how Midori had managed to deliver the healing maso herb from the southern slope of Mount Tanzawa in a single night. She had simply run fifteen ri in one direction and then the same distance back again! So that was why she laughed when he pitied the overworked horse …

  Once he tried to strike up a conversation about the future, but the answer he received was:

  ‘In the Japanese language there is no future tense, only the past and the present.’

  ‘But something will happen to us, to you and me,’ Erast Petrovich insisted stubbornly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied seriously, ‘but I haven’t decided exactly what yet: “The autumn leaf” or “The sweet tear”. Both endings have their advantages.’

  He went numb. They didn’t talk about the future any more.

  On the evening of the fourth day Midori said:

  ‘We won’t touch each other today. We’re going to drink wine and talk about the Beautiful.’

  ‘How do you mean, not touch each other?’ Erast Petrovich asked in alarm. ‘You promised me “The silver cobweb”!’

  ‘“The silver cobweb” is a night spent in exquisite, sensitive conversation that binds two souls together with invisible threads. The stronger this cobweb is, the longer it will hold the moth of love.’

  Fandorin tried to rebel.

  ‘I don’t want this “cobweb”, the moth isn’t going anywhere in any case! Let’s do “The fox and the badger” again, like yesterday!’

  ‘Passion does not tolerate repetition and it requires a breathing space,’ Midori said in a didactic tone.

  ‘Mine doesn’t require one!’

  She stamped her foot.

  ‘Which of us is the teacher of jojutsu – you or me?’

  ‘Nothing but teachers everywhere. No life of my own at all,’ muttered Erast Patrovich, capitulating. ‘Well, all right, then, exactly what is “the Beautiful” that we are going to talk about all night long?’

  ‘Poetry, for instance. What work of poetry is your favourite?’

  While the vice-consul pondered, Midori set a little jug of sake on the table and sat down cross-legged.

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’ he said slowly. ‘I like “Eugene Onegin”. A work by the Russian poet P-Pushkin.’

  ‘Recite it to me! And translate it.’

  She rested her elbows on her knees and prepared to listen.

  ‘But I don’t remember it off by heart. It’s thousands of lines long.’

  ‘How can you love a poem that has thousands of lines? And why so many? When a poet writes a lot, it means he has nothing to say.’

  Offended for the great genius of Russian poetry, Fandorin asked ironically:

  ‘And how many lines are there in your favourite poem?’

  ‘Three,’ she replied seriously. ‘I like haiku, three-line poems, best of all. They say so little and at the same time so much. Every word in its place, and not a single superfluous one. I’m sure bodhisattvas talk to each other only in haiku.’

  ‘Recite it,’ said Erast Petrovich, intrigued. ‘Please, recite it.’

  Half-closing her eyes, she half-declaimed, half-chanted:

  ‘Dragonfly-catcher,

  Oh, how far ahead of me

  Your feet ran today …’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Fandorin admitted. ‘Only I didn’t understand anything. What dragonfly-catcher? Where has he run off to? And what for?’

  Midori opened her eyes and she repeated wistfully in Japanese:

  ‘Doko madeh itta yara … How lovely! To understand a haiku completely, you must have a special sensitivity or secret knowledge. If you knew that the great poetess Chiyo wrote this verse on the death of her little son, you would not look at me so condescendingly, would you?’

  He said nothing, astounded by the profundity and power of feeling suddenly revealed in those three simple, mundane lines.

  ‘A haiku is like the casing of flesh in which the invisible, elusive soul is confined. The secret is concealed in the narrow space between the five syllables of the first line (it is called kami-no-ku) and the seven syllables of the second line (it is called naka-no-ku), and then between the seven syllables of the naka-no-ku and the five syllables of the third and final line (it is called shimo-no-ku). How can I explain so that you will understand?’ Midori’s face lit up in a crafty smile. ‘Let me try this. A good haiku is like the silhouette of a beautiful woman or an artfully exposed part of her body. The outline and the single detail are far more exciting than the whole thing.’

  ‘But I prefer the whole thing,’ Fandorin declared, putting his hand on her knee.

  ‘That’s because you are a little urchin and a barbarian.’ Her fan smacked him painfully across the fingers. ‘It is enough for a sophisticated individual merely to glimpse the edge of Beauty, and in an instant his imagination will fill in all the rest, and even improve it many times over.’

  ‘That, by the way, is from Pushkin,’ the titular counsellor growled, blowing on his bruised fingers. ‘And your favourite poem may be beautiful, but it is very sad.’

  ‘Genuine beauty is always sad.’

  Erast Petrovich was astonished.

  ‘Surely not!’

  ‘There are two kinds of beauty: the beauty of joy and the beauty of sadness. You people of the West prefer the former, we prefer the latter. Because the beauty of joy is as short-lived as the flight of a butterfly. But the beauty of sadness is stronger than stone. Who recalls the millions of happy people in love who have quietly lived their lives, grown old and died? But plays are written about tragic love, and they live for centuries. Let’s drink, and then we shall talk about the Beautiful.’

  But they were not fated to discuss the Beautiful.

  Erast Petrovich raised his little cup and said: ‘I drink to t
he beauty of joy.’

  ‘And I drink to the beauty of sadness,’ Midori replied, and drank, but before he could do likewise, the night was split asunder by a frenzied bellow: ‘TSUME-E-E!’2 The response was a roar that issued from an entire multitude of throats.

  Fandorin’s hand shook and the sake spilled out on to the tatami.

  As his hand trembled,

  Wine spilled on to the table.

  An evil omen

  1 ‘Again’ (Japanese)

  2 ‘Attack!’ (Japanese)

  A BIG FIRE

  Not that it happened often, but sometimes he did come across a woman who was stronger than him. And then the thing to do was not thrust his chest out and put on airs, but quite the opposite – pretend to be weak and defenceless. That made the strong women melt. And then they handled everything themselves; all he had to do was not get under their feet.

  In the village of the accursed shinobis there was only one object of any interest to a connoisseur of female charm – seventeen-year-old Etsuko. She was no beauty, of course, but, as the saying went, in a swamp even a toad is a princess. Apart from her, the female population of the village of Kakusimura1 (Masa had invented the name himself, because the shinobi didn’t call the village anything) consisted of the old witch Neko-chan (what a lovely little pussy-cat!),2 pock-faced Gohei’s pregnant wife, one-eyed Sae, and fifteen-year-old Nampopo. And two snot-nosed little girls of nine and eleven who didn’t even count.

  Masa didn’t try to approach his chosen prey on the first day – he watched her from a distance, drawing up a plan of action. She was a fine girl, with qualities that made her interesting. Hard working, nimble, a singer. And it was interesting to wonder how the kunoichi – ninja women – were made down there. If she could do a jump with a triple somersault or run up a wall on to the roof (he’d seen that for himself), then what sort of tricks did she get up to in moments of passion? That would be something to remember and tell people about.

  At first, of course, he had to find out whether she belonged to any of the men. The last thing he needed was to draw down the wrath of one of these devils.

  Masa sat in Little Cat’s kitchen for an hour, praised her rice balls and found out everything he needed to know. There was a fiancé, his name was Ryuzo, a very nice boy, but he had been studying abroad for a year already.

  So let him carry on studying.

  Now Masa could get down to work.

  He spent a couple of days getting friendly with the object. No languorous glances, no hints – Buddha forbid! She was pining without her fiancé, and he was far from home, among strangers, they were about the same age, so surely they had things to talk about?

  He told her a lot of things about the wonders of Yokohama (fortunately, Etsuko had never been to the gaijin city). He lied a bit, of course, but only to make it more interesting. Gradually he worked his way round to the exotic bedroom habits of the gaijins. The girl’s eyes glinted and her little mouth opened halfway. Aha! She might be a shinobi, but she had real blood in her veins!

  That finally convinced him that he would be successful and he moved on to the last stage but one – he started asking whether it was true that kunoichi women really had the right to do as they wished with their own bodies and the idea of being unfaithful to a husband or a fiancé did not even exist for them.

  ‘How can some little hole in your body be unfaithful? Only the soul can be unfaithful, and our souls are true,’ Etsuko answered proudly – the clever girl.

  Masa had no interest at all in her soul. The little hole was quite enough for him. He whined a bit about never having hugged a girl – he was so very shy and unsure of himself.

  ‘All right, then, come to the crevice at midnight,’ Etsuko whispered. ‘And I’ll give you a hug.’

  ‘That would be very charitable of you,’ he said meekly, and start blinking very, very fast – he was so touched.

  The place chosen for the rendezvous was absolutely perfect, all credit to the girl for that. At night there wasn’t a soul here, and it was a good hundred paces to the nearest house. They didn’t post sentries in Kakusimura – what for? On the other side of the crevices there were ‘singing boards’ under the earth: if anyone stepped on one, it started hooting like an eagle owl and it could be heard from very far away. That time when he and the master had climbed across the rope they’d had no idea that the village was ready to receive visitors.

  With Etsuko everything happened quickly, even too quickly. There was no need to act like an inexperienced boy in order to inflame her passions more strongly – she came dashing out of the bushes so fast she knocked him off his feet, and a minute later she was already gasping, panting and screeching as she bounced up and down on Masa, like a cat scraping at a dog with its claws.

  There wasn’t anything special about the kunoichi, she was just a girl like any other. Except that her thighs were as hard as stone – she squeezed him so hard, he would probably have bruises left on his hips. But she wasn’t inventive at all. Even Natsuko was more interesting.

  Etsuko babbled something in a happy voice, stroked Masa’s stiff, short-trimmed hair and made sweet talk, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  ‘Didn’t you like it?’ she asked in a crestfallen voice. ‘I know I never studied it … The jonin told me: “You don’t need to”. Ah, but do you know how good I am at climbing trees? Like a real monkey. Shall I show you?’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Masa agreed feebly.

  Etsuko jumped up, ran across to the dead pine tree and clambered up the charred trunk, moving her hands and feet with incredible speed.

  Masa was struck by a poetic idea: living white on dead black. He even wondered whether he ought to compose a haiku about a naked girl on a charred pine. He had the first two lines all ready – five syllables and seven:

  The old black pine tree,

  Trembling like a butterfly …

  What next? ‘With a girl on it?’ Too blunt and direct. ‘See love soaring upwards’? That was six syllables, but it should be five.

  In search of inspiration he rolled closer to the pine tree – he couldn’t be bothered to get up.

  Suddenly Masa heard a strange champing sound above him. Etsuko dropped out of the tree with a groan and fell on to the ground two steps away from him. He froze in horror at the sight of a thick, feathered arrow-shaft sticking out of her white back below her left shoulder-blade.

  He wanted to go dashing to her, to see whether she was alive.

  Etsuko was alive. Without turning over or moving her head, she kicked Masa, so that he went rolling away.

  ‘Run …’ he heard her say in a muffled whisper.

  But Masa didn’t run – his legs were trembling so badly, they probably wouldn’t have held up the weight of his body.

  The night was suddenly full of rustling sounds. Dark spots appeared at the edge of the crevice – one, two, three. Black men climbed up on to the edge of the cliff at the point where the shinobi had their secret hoist. There were many of them, very many. Masa lay in the tall grass, looking at them, horror-struck, and he couldn’t move.

  One of the black men walked over to where Etsuko was lying face down and turned her over on to her back with his foot. He leaned down, and a blade glinted in his hand.

  Suddenly the girl sat up, there was a wheeze, and he was lying, but Etsuko was standing with a sword in her hand, surrounded on all sides by the mysterious newcomers. White among the black, Masa thought fleetingly.

  The clash of metal, howls, and then the white figure disappeared, and the men in black were furiously hacking at something lying on the ground that crunched as they hit it.

  Masa clearly heard a girl’s voice shout out:

  ‘Kongojyo!’

  One of the killers came very close. He tore up a bunch of grass and started cleaning off his sword. Masa heard loud, sporadic breathing.

  The pale light of the moon seeped through a thin cloud for a moment and Masa saw a hood with holes instead of eyes, a cartridge be
lt over a shoulder, a black jacket.

  Don Tsurumaki’s men, that was who they were! They’d followed the shinobi’s example and covered their faces so that they wouldn’t show white in the darkness!

  How had they managed to get past the ‘singing boards’? Surely they couldn’t have come through the underground passage? Who could have showed it to them?

  Masa crawled on all fours into the undergrowth, jumped to his feet and ran.

  The Black Jackets didn’t waste any time. He heard a muffled command behind him, and fallen pine needles started crunching under rapid footsteps.

  He had to get to the houses quickly, to raise the alarm! The Don’s men wouldn’t bother to find out who was a shinobi and who wasn’t, they’d finish off everybody regardless.

  When he had only twenty paces left to go to the first hut, Masa was unlucky – in the darkness he ran into a branch, tore his cheek and – worst of all – he couldn’t stop himself crying out.

  The men behind him heard and realised they had been discovered.

  ‘TSUME-E-E!’ roared a commanding bass voice.

  The response was a roar from many voices.

  ‘An attack! An attack!’ Masa roared as well, but shut his mouth almost immediately, realising that he was only exposing himself to unnecessary danger.

  The attackers were roaring and tramping so loudly that the inhabitants of Kakusimura couldn’t help but hear them.

  Now, if he wanted to live, he had to think very quickly. So Masa didn’t run towards the houses, he hid behind a tree.

  Less than half a minute later a crowd of Black Jackets went rushing past, spreading out and forming into a half-moon in order to take in the whole width of the island.

  Torches blazed into life, thrust into the ground along a line at intervals of five paces. The chain of fire cut across the entire forest, from one edge to the other.