by Nick Lake
At each side alley they passed, or so it seemed, there was a girl kneeling on the ground, a single tatami mat in front of her. These girls would look up when the group passed, gazing at Taro and Hiro with beseeching eyes, quoting small amounts of money, rice or – on a couple of occasions – sake.
‘What are those girls doing?’ asked Taro.
‘They are tsujigimi,’ said Hana. ‘Mistresses of the Street Corner. The lowest class of prostitute. The mats are for... well, you know.’
Taro stopped, looking at the nearest girl. She was younger than Hana, by a couple of years, but less pretty. Taro wasn’t sure how much of that was accident of birth, and how much was the harsh life of the street, which had leeched the colour from her skin and sketched shadows under her eyes. Her threadbare mat was laid out on the mud in front of her, for any passer-by to see. ‘What... right here? In the street?’
Hana shrugged. ‘They don’t have anywhere else to go. The yakuza control the brothels, most of which are located in their own district, on a private island. Only the rich can gain access. And only the prettiest girls are taken in – and they’re worth most when they’re virgins. After that they have to learn some accomplishments, if they want to remain geisha. Musical instruments, massage, wit.’
‘You seem knowledgeable on the subject,’ said Hiro, a little teasing, but mostly genuinely curious.
‘My father,’ said Hana simply.
Taro saw the girl in the side alley look up at him, and began to walk again, so as not to feel her eyes on him. ‘But what about their parents?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t they do something to stop it?’
‘It’s their parents who sell them,’ said Hana. ‘In the case of the brothels, anyway. I suspect many of these tsujigimi have no parents. They would have died, of starvation or war.’
Taro felt a little ill. They were in the capital city, the seat of the shogun, and people were living like this! They had come into the city through the Gate of Eternal Youth, walked through streets lined with the prosperous houses Taro had expected, and teeming with merchants, yet here were young girls prostituting themselves on the streets.
They were looking for somewhere to stay, so when an attractive woman stepped out into the street and said, ‘Rooms, five yen a night,’ he turned to Hana inquiringly.
‘No,’ said Hana. ‘Remember what I said about the prettier girls?’
Taro stared at the innocuous, ordinary-seeming house the woman had come out of. ‘That’s a brothel?’
‘You didn’t think you’d pay five yen for just a bed, did you?’
Hiro was looking at Hana admiringly. ‘How did you learn all this?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t exactly your kind of area. You’re highborn.’
‘Yes,’ said Hana with a shrug. ‘But you hear a lot, when your father has his own army.’
Crossing another canal, and choosing a street turning at random, they began to enter a gradually more respectable part of town. Hana didn’t know Edo very well, and so they were having to wander a little in order to find a place to stay.
Hana had laughed at Taro’s suggestion that they ask someone for directions. ‘If you want your throat slit, be my guest,’ she’d said.
They walked down a street of small houses where red lanterns hung from the eaves, illuminating the doors. But there was something odd. Everywhere else in the city, even more so than in the country, the houses had been protected by charms – majiwari-zawa monkey carvings, hanging from the eaves to protect the occupants from disease and misfortune, o-fuda tablets hanging from every door to ward off malign spirits. Here, though, in this street, Taro could see none. He thought that was strange. Even in the poorest parts of town, the little tablets had been hanging, protecting the inhabitants of even the rudest huts from attack by things of the night.
Just then a woman opened a door to their left. ‘You are looking for rooms?’ she asked. Taro was surprised when he saw her face – her voice had sounded old, but her appearance was youthful.
‘Yes,’ he replied tentatively.
‘I’ll give you twenty yen for the night,’ the woman said. ‘And your friends can stay for free.’
‘Twenty is too much,’ said Hana automatically. ‘We can’t pay more than two.’
The woman laughed, a throaty laugh that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her. ‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘I will pay him twenty yen.’ She cocked her head at Taro.
Taro frowned, bewildered. ‘You’d pay me to stay in your inn?’ he asked.
Now it was the woman’s turn to look confused. ‘That isn’t why you’re here?’
‘We just want rooms,’ said Hiro. He sounded weary, and nervous.
The woman stepped closer to Taro, avoiding the muddy places in the street. She wore an expensive silk kimono. ‘But you are a kyuuketsuki, aren’t you? I could smell you from two streets away.’
Taro took a step back.
‘It’s all right!’ The woman laughed again. ‘You’re welcome here.’ She backed away from Taro and opened the sliding door to the house she had come from. ‘Come, look.’
Taro turned to Hiro, who shrugged.
He went over to the door and peered inside into the gloom. Lying on cushions on the floor, separated by shoji screens that flickered with candlelit shadows, were sleeping bodies – young and old, male and female. Without thinking, he stepped into the room, following a sort of corridor between the screens, to get a better look at them. He was half-conscious of Hiro telling him to be careful.
No – not sleeping. Taro saw their dull eyes turn to him languidly. Were these opium addicts? They seemed drugged, that was for sure. Small smiles played on their lips. His eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, he noticed that not all the people were lying down; some were sitting, gazing at him hungrily. The very faint music of a biwa reached his ears; somewhere, at the rear of the room, someone was playing an old song.
Something brushed his arm; he turned, startled, to see the woman standing next to him. Hana and Hiro were behind them, looking tense, as if they expected a fight at any moment. In this light, Taro could see that the woman wasn’t young, as he’d thought. She was beautiful, though, with elegantly arched eyebrows and bow lips.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked.
That laugh again. ‘Nothing. They are in a state of bliss.’
Taro crouched down. There was a man at his feet, a portly man of middle age, lying senseless on a mat. His eyes stared up at the ceiling. There was a mild smile on his face. Taro examined him carefully. Then he gasped: on the man’s neck, two small droplets of blood shimmered in the candlelight.
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘I drank from him myself.’
Taro could feel his feet backing him away, though he hadn’t thought consciously about moving. ‘You... ’
‘I drank. You could too. In fact, I would pay you. And your friends could stay too. It would—’
‘Wait,’ said Hiro, putting a hand on Taro’s shoulder, stopping him as he walked backwards into his bulky friend. ‘They want you to feed on them?’
The woman looked genuinely embarrassed, and a little confused. ‘I thought you knew!’ she said. ‘I thought you came to this street for a reason. You know, the lack of o-fuda hanging outside is the signal.’
‘I did wonder about that,’ said Taro.
‘Explain, then,’ said Hana to the woman, a little abruptly.
The woman – vampire, evidently – led them back to the street. Once outside in the moonlight, she gave Taro an apologetic smile. ‘It’s something in our saliva, or in our teeth, or something,’ she said. ‘Apparently it’s better than opium. Someone discovered it by accident – a vampire was careless and left his prey alive. But that person spoke to others about the feeling of it, the paralysis, the hallucinations, the meditative calm... and after that, people began to seek us out. To pay us.’
Taro was still amazed – not least because Shusaku had never mentioned that his bite might have an effect on the victim other than their loss of bl
ood. Maybe he didn’t know. Shusaku was an oddly innocent person in some ways, Taro thought, despite all the men he had killed. Or perhaps it was because Shusaku had always fed on animals, when he could – it was true that he was rare among ninjas for his reluctance to drink human blood. And on those few occasions when he did, Taro supposed that Shusaku had usually escaped long before his prey regained consciousness. ‘They pay you to bite them,’ he said slowly.
‘Yes. And we get sustenance. Everyone wins.’
Hiro pointed to the door. ‘The people in there, they didn’t look well. I mean, apart from lying there like that. They looked pale. Thin. Do they really win, in the end?’
The woman gave a small, strange smile. ‘Well, no. They die, usually. But they die happy.’ She turned to Taro. ‘Thirty yen?’ she asked, but even in her voice he could hear that she didn’t expect him to accept.
Taro shivered. ‘No, thank you. But if you could direct us to an inn, we’d be very grateful.’
The woman – Taro never did learn her name – nodded, disappointed but still friendly. ‘If you ever find yourself in need of money, or shelter, you know where I am,’ she said. Then she described how to walk to a good, reasonably priced place to stay.
As they left the street and followed the woman’s directions, Hiro turned to Hana.
‘I guess there are some things even the worldly daughter of a daimyo doesn’t know, huh?’ he said.
Hana hit him playfully on the arm. ‘Keep walking,’ she said. ‘You could do with the exercise.’ This was no longer true – any fat Hiro had once carried had been left behind, on the walks to and from Mount Hiei, and on the training ground. But Hiro looked at Taro anyway, mock-wounded.
‘Can’t you control your girlfriend?’ he asked.
Taro shook his head. ‘I’d have to turn her first.’
‘No way,’ said Hana. She glanced back towards the strange house they’d just come from, part warped brothel, part drug den. ‘You vampires are revolting.’
Taro put his hands up. ‘Right now, I’m not going to deny that.’ So far, Edo had not turned out to be at all what he had expected.
But the biggest surprise was still to come.
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT DAY came on them like a bad mood, muggy and overcast. The guards at the Palace of Long Life gave them some trouble at first, their eyes hard and unfriendly.
‘What’s in the cart?’ one of them asked.
‘Rice,’ said Taro. He lifted the cover, showed them the pile of grey grain.
The guard poked his sword halfheartedly into the rice a couple of times, then nodded to them. ‘I saw the sword you’ve got hidden under that cloak,’ he said, ‘and thought you might have decided to take up the shogun’s challenge.’
‘What, this little shrimp?’ said another, fatter guard. He pushed Taro hard in the chest with a chubby finger. ‘This stripling? He’d be no more than a tasty morsel for the dragon. We’ve seen men twice your size go up that mountain and never come back.’
Taro smiled thinly. He would have liked to break the man’s finger, but he restrained himself, barely. Anger swirled in him – and something else, too. A chill of premonition. Maybe it was crazy to go after the dragon? But he thought of the prize and knew he couldn’t turn back. He had no choice. There were no futures open to him, other than the one that led to the dragon, and the prize.
‘Hand over the sword,’ said the first guard, in a sort of spoken sigh. Taro was actually impressed that he had seen it so easily. Of course, the guard didn’t know about the throwing stars up his sleeves, or the dagger in his boot, and Taro wasn’t about to tell him. He drew the hidden short-sword and handed it over.
‘Rice store’s in the east quadrant,’ said the fat guard. ‘Hand it over, then get home.’
Taro tapped his chest, where the scroll was. ‘Actually, I have a message for the shogun too.’
The big guard sighed, stepping aside. He gestured vaguely to the buildings of the palace. Taro had never seen anything so grand – the roofs higher and more delicate than those of the Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei, and tiled with brilliant red. He felt small and insignificant, which he supposed was the point.
‘The shogun is practising his inu-oi,’ said the guard. ‘You’ll find him at the back.’
Taro wanted to ask at the back of what, but the guard had turned to his friends, making it clear the interview was over. Taro shrugged and walked through the covered archway into the palace that was almost a city itself, within the city.
‘What’s inu-oi?’ he asked Hana. Inu meant ‘dog’, but that didn’t help Taro to work out what the word signified, what it was the shogun was practising.
‘It’s a samurai game,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think you’ll like it.’ She had decided to come with Taro and Hiro into the palace, despite the risk that she might be recognized as Lord Oda’s daughter. As she pointed out, it had been nearly two years since any samurai had seen her in her true guise, and she had changed much since then. Anyway, who would expect the daughter of a fallen daimyo to turn up at the shogun’s court, in the company of two lowborn adventurers?
First they went to the east quadrant. When they got there, Taro stood open-mouthed. The grain store was not a store but a warehouse, a palace of rice. It stood the height of three men, and was as long as the great hall at the monastery on Mount Hiei. Inside, sunlight fell in sharp shafts through the gloom, cutting through it, illuminating miniature mountains of rice.
What does the shogun need with all that rice? thought Taro.
‘Taxes?’ asked a burly man who had been raking rice into one of the bigger piles.
Taro nodded. ‘From the Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei.’
The man went to a side wall and took down a scroll. He ran his finger down it, then made a mark with a grubby fingernail. ‘Five hundred koku, right?’
‘Give or take three cupfuls,’ said Taro.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ Taro began to remove the harness from the horse. ‘There’ll be a boy named Jun along soon, to collect the beast,’ he said.
The burly man shrugged. ‘Long as he don’t eat the rice,’ he said.
‘Jun doesn’t eat raw rice,’ said Hiro. ‘It gives him wind.’
The man gave him a withering look. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘But you won’t be laughing if your horse eats any of this rice, I promise you.’
Hiro nodded, mock gravely.
‘Get out, all of you,’ said the man, turning to his rake.
They left the rice store and began looking for the shogun. So far the grounds had been easy to navigate, but Taro guessed that was because the shogun wanted people to bring rice – whereas it seemed he didn’t want people finding his own court too easily. Twice they got lost and had to ask for directions from passing servants, such was the scale and complexity of the palace. Doors gave onto doors, which gave onto passageways and courtyards, all bustling with people, busy about their tasks. It made Taro think of an anthill, and the way that the ants scurry around it, carrying out their incomprehensible duties.
Eventually they reached a much wider courtyard, whose floor was bare earth instead of stone. There were a great many people here, most pressed round a large circle. Shouts of encouragement and exasperation resounded off the walls of the surrounding buildings. There was a smell of cooking in the air – rice cakes – and a festival atmosphere reigned.
Hana led the way towards the front of the crowd. To those who turned, irritated, when she eased past them, she smiled a demure smile, casually melting their hearts. Taro and Hiro followed, Taro noticing that he received more sharp elbows in the side than Hana did.
Before long, they were able to create some space around themselves, and Taro could see what was happening in the centre. A circular enclosure had been staked out, similar in size to the main hall of the ninja mountain. Within this was another, smaller circle – the two circles divided by a fence, and another, taller fence on the outside.
There was a
loud bark, then something flew past, within the confines of the larger circle. Taro realized it was a dog, running fast. Then there was the zzzip of an arrow, and a shaft stuck from the ground where the dog had just been.
A groan from the crowd.
Taro narrowed his eyes. In the smaller, inner circle, a young man sat astride a horse, a bow in his hand. He wore the mon of the shogunate on his light armour, but no helmet. From his face, Taro would judge him to be no more than twelve years old – his features refined, set in an expression of disappointment, mixed with amusement.
The shogun.
As Taro watched, the boy ruler of the country pulled another arrow from the quiver at his back, urged his horse into a canter with the pressure of his legs, and nocked the arrow – riding with no hands – as the horse gained speed, turning the circle defined by the inner fence. This time the horse was running counter to the dog, and as the terrified dog streaked round, the shogun rose from his saddle, paused a moment with the arrow drawn back, and let fly.
The arrow met the dog on one of its bounds, its force so great that the dog was driven straight down to the ground, nailed to it, with shocking suddenness. The shogun raised his bow, easily grasping the reins with his left hand, and brought the horse back to a trot.
Cheers from the crowd.
Taro looked at Hana, who seemed stricken, embarrassed, as if because she was a member of the samurai class from which the shogun also came, she was somehow responsible for its excesses. Taro’s heart was pounding in his chest. The boy had shown astonishing skill, that was for certain. But to what end? A dog was dead, for no other reason than entertainment. Taro was reminded of Shusaku’s assertion – which had appalled him two years ago – that while samurai may prize honour above all things, very rarely do they show anything other than cruelty, and mindless obedience.
Taro had seen enough, the last two years, to know that Shusaku was right.
‘Now what?’ he said, as the shogun inspected his bow, turning it in his delicate hands.
‘Now they bring out another dog,’ said Hana.
