The Betrayal of the Living

by Nick Lake

  This time they didn’t have to question the peasants – one of them came over to where they stood, bowing in greeting. He looked ashamed at being caught in this act of desecration. ‘We mean no disrespect,’ he said. ‘But they come back otherwise.’

  ‘They come back?’

  ‘The dead,’ said the peasant.

  Taro and his friends shifted, uncomfortable. ‘What are you talking about, the dead come back?’ said Hiro.

  ‘We bury them; they dig themselves out. Come walking home, looking for food. Sometimes they decide the living look good to eat. The dead are always hungry.’

  ‘No!’ said Hana, shocked.

  ‘Yes, lady. So we burn them – that usually works. And we put the rocks, in case some of the bones haven’t turned to ash. They get up, if there are bones.’

  Taro could see madness in this man’s eyes, perhaps stemming from hunger and thirst. He nodded encouragingly, as he backed away towards the road. Hana and Hiro followed.

  ‘You watch out!’ the man called after them. ‘Don’t sleep outdoors.’ Taro couldn’t stop a shiver from running down his skin at that, even though the story was plainly ridiculous. They did nothing but sleep outdoors – they had no other choice.

  CHAPTER 17

  THEY WERE SLEEPING when the dead found them.

  Taro was woken by a scream. He rolled over onto his feet, eyes scanning the shadowy scene. It was Hana. She was on the ground, grappling with a figure that had her by the hair.

  They were in a shallow depression in the ground, a natural campsite protected from view by those passing on the road. Between them, the remains of their fire glowed dimly. Nearby, the darkness of a forest loomed. And over Hana was this bent and angular intruder, seeming more animal than human, though it was standing on two legs.

  Hiro got to Hana first. He kicked at the figure, his foot connecting with its head. It fell backwards onto the ground, and Taro saw for the first time that it was a woman. The lower jaw had fallen or rotted off, revealing a row of black and crooked teeth. The eyes were bloodshot and staring, the skin bluish, and not just from the moonlight.

  A dead woman.

  Taro spun as a shuffling sound came from behind him. From the corner of his eye, he saw Hana get to her feet, leaping backwards so that she, Hiro, and Taro formed a tight circle, facing outward. On his side, Taro saw a pair of men, one missing an arm, stumbling towards him. They were mumbling, and he remembered the sounds from when he had been haunted by his mother. It was the tongue of the dead, incomprehensible to living ears. Taro’s eyes were not totally accustomed to the darkness yet, but he thought there might be more behind them, if it wasn’t the shadows of trees, moving in the wind. There was a smell of rot, all-surrounding, all-enveloping.

  ‘How many?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got three,’ said Hiro.

  ‘Two,’ said Hana, a little breathless.

  That made seven, at least.

  ‘My gods,’ said Taro. ‘What is happening here?’

  No one answered – there wasn’t time, because just then Hiro broke away, drawing his short-sword and slashing in one fluid motion. Taro saw the attacker’s legs cut off at the knees, and before the body hit the ground he was turning back to his own two ghosts. The first was nearly on him.

  His mind was spinning like autumn leaves, caught in a violent wind. What were these dead people doing, attacking them? It seemed the peasant had not lied.

  He whipped out his own sword, leaped forward. The dead were not armed, there was that to be grateful for. But they were strong. He cut the first one open from shoulder to side, so that now both ghosts had only one arm. And yet this one kept coming, reaching out for him with the arm that remained. The arm he had chopped off lay twitching on the grey ground, he noticed. His nostrils were full of the smell of decay, like rich ground full of mould and mushrooms – and under it, the metal smell of ash, from their fire. He hoped Hana was all right. He could hear her cries behind him, but they were cries of battle, not of pain.

  He hoped.

  He spun, cutting at the legs of the other one, as Hiro had done. It crashed to the ground like a felled tree, and he turned to the other, which was a mistake.

  As he thrust his sword into its stomach, the corpse whose legs he had severed grabbed hold of his ankle with its one arm. Taro let out a scream as the bony fingers dug into his flesh. He slashed at the body on the ground, which was groaning all the time, he realized, a low sound like the rumbling breathing of cattle. Its head lifted up, like a snake’s, and came down hard on his leg – he felt the teeth break through the skin of his leg before the pain hit him.

  Screaming, he stabbed down desperately at the creature’s neck. The thing was tearing at his leg, not biting and holding on with its teeth but ripping strips of flesh, feeding. He had opened up four or five slashes in its back, but it didn’t stop, and the feeling was of his leg catching fire.

  Where was the other ghost? He turned just in time to strike it in the face with the end of his sword, the arc uninterrupted, the blade taking off the lower jaw to make this one a match to the woman that had grabbed Hana. It staggered backwards, giving him a moment’s respite to look down again, at the one eating his leg. Making an effort to pause, despite the agony, he aimed and cut, removing the hand that was still attached vicelike to his ankle.

  The hand remained there, fingers closed around his flesh, as the arm oozed black blood. The dead man seemed untroubled by the loss. Desperate, Taro began to hack without focus, just thrashing away with his sword, no elegance at all in it. He assumed his friends were too busy to help him

  (Let them be busy, let them not be dead)

  and the world seemed to have shrunk to just him and this dead man gnawing at his leg. It seemed appropriate: It was the dead man who stood between him and staying alive. He was struck by the awful realization that this might finally be the time his luck ran out, this might be the night he died.

  Suddenly the biting stopped, the pressure on his leg eased, and both the dead man’s head and hand fell away. He realized that he had cut right through the neck with one of his wild threshing slashes.

  ‘Take off their heads!’ he called out. ‘It stops them!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hana. Taro was glad in that moment that she was a betsushikime – if she hadn’t been a warrior, she’d be gone by now.

  He wasn’t able to be pleased for long that she was alive, though, because then the one whose jaw he had separated was on him, clutching at his cloak. He got his sword up and against its throat, then pushed. The blade went through easily, and of course the dead man continued to claw at him, but that was before he wrenched the sword to the left and right, sawing through the neck as through a slab of meat.

  Head and body fell, the body toppling away from the head, which dropped straight down.

  Taro peered into the gloom, saw more bodies coming. He turned to Hana. She had just been seized from behind, by a child that was clinging to her legs. The gesture seemed so innocent, so playful, that for a moment he hesitated, but then he heard Hana scream as the child’s teeth sank into her back.

  Taro jumped, sword flashing in a vertical arc. It hit the child’s head at the apogee of the curve, when all his weight was behind it, and the blade drove all the way down to the waist – Taro was afraid that he would cut Hana, too, but he had judged right; she lurched away, unharmed. The body of the child split like a pea pod, stinking.

  ‘There are too many,’ said Hana. Taro looked up and saw it was true. Hiro caught an old woman – or what had been an old woman – on the backstroke, lopping off her head. He sidestepped the falling body.

  ‘Too many,’ he said.

  Taro just nodded. He glanced around, sizing up the corpses that staggered towards them. They must have come from all around – had they even been following, and if so, for how long? They didn’t seem capable of thought, or planning, but that didn’t mean they weren’t.

  Suddenly Taro remembered something the peasant had said, the one
who had explained the stones. We burn them – that usually works. He reached into his cloak, taking out the Buddha ball. ‘Cover me,’ he said, crouching down in the mud and blood.

  It was the first time in many weeks that he had held the ball, afraid as he was of the voices that were awakened when he did so – Lord Oda’s, mocking and cruel; Sato’s, confused and regretful.

  But now he had a good reason: They were surrounded, and losing.

  Inside the glass of the ball, he saw dark clouds covering the earth. A tiny full moon hung above the clouds, like a silver bauble. He allowed himself to flow down his arms, then his hands and fingertips, until he crossed over the glass and was falling through the dark mists of night towards the earth.

  Then he stepped out again, into the ordinary world, and held himself in both places. He closed his eyes, reaching with his mind, and gathered the force that lives in the air, unseen. Catching it, he rolled it, like a skein of wool, holding it together. Then he pushed it to where he wanted it to go, and released it.

  Lightning didn’t so much shoot down from the sky as simply appear, a crackling bridge between earth and sky – it was so fast that it could as well have come from the earth as from above. The dead person immediately in its path was incinerated, collapsing in a heap of dust, and those around it burst into flames, like wax candles, stumbling into one another, spreading the conflagration.

  Taro pointed to the place where they burned. ‘That way,’ he said. ‘Head for the flames, it’s where we’re safest.’

  ‘Then the trees,’ said Hiro, panting as he caught up. Hana had caught hold of Taro’s hand as they ran.

  ‘Trees?’

  ‘The dead can only move in a straight line,’ said Hiro.

  Taro could have hugged him, if they weren’t rushing through a terrain of burning, bubbling bodies, those who had still not been reduced to ash clutching at their clothes as they passed. It was true – the tales said that the dead could not turn corners, and what was a forest if not a place of corners? It was impossible to walk in a straight line through a wood. The trees would get in the way.

  A hand reaching out—

  He ducked, letting go of Hana’s hand, rolling. He slashed with his sword, severing another neck.

  Two in front—

  He was still inside the ball, as well as in this world, and he struck, sending the unimaginable power of the lightning straight into the left one’s head, which exploded. The other whirled away, on fire, screeching – or perhaps that was just the noise of its flesh burning. Taro noticed that he no longer had full control of the weather – he had collected all this energy, in the air, but it seemed he had brought clouds with it, or perhaps it was the rubbing together of the clouds that made the energy. At any rate, the sky was now filled with black, boiling, roiling thunderclouds, obscuring the light of the moon. Rain began to fall, so torrential and hard that it stung the skin.

  At the edge of the trees, he pushed Hana ahead.

  ‘Guard her!’ he shouted unnecessarily to Hiro. He knew his friend would lay down his life for Hana simply because Taro loved her. That was how good a friend he was.

  Taro turned, to stop any dead getting too close, and that was when a dirt-covered hand closed over his mouth, twisting viciously, and everything went black.

  CHAPTER 18

  SHUSAKU USUALLY PERCEIVED his enemies as red diagrams, traceries of blood against the blackness, pulsing in the eternal night of his blindness. The heart, pumping. The tubes receiving; so many of them, it had surprised him when he first lost his sight, and learned to hear the blood instead, and so see it in his mind.

  But these enemies, he couldn’t see.

  He could sense Taro, running ahead of him – also Hana, and Hiro. He would know the rhythm of their heartbeats anywhere, Taro’s especially. The boy was like a son to him. And he could tell that they were fighting, that Taro was using the Buddha ball. He felt the heat and the charge in the air when the lightning hit the ground.

  But as for the things they were fighting, he couldn’t see those.

  You can’t see them because they’re dead, he thought. It was a thought to paralyze him. He had a particular terror of the dead, often imagining that the many people he had killed in his life were crowding around him, using up his air, threatening to submerge him. Taro had told him to let it go – had told him that he had looked inside Shusaku when he held the Buddha ball, and seen no ghosts consuming him. But Shusaku didn’t think it mattered whether ghosts were real or not.

  The guilt was real. That was all that mattered.

  With a force of will, he got a grip on himself. As soon as he’d heard from the abbot that Taro was going to Edo, to confront this dragon everyone was talking about, he had left the little village in Monto territory where he had been questioning old soldiers in the hope of finding – after all these years – who had killed his Mara. He hadn’t told Taro of this mission, of course, had said instead that he was going to Edo, which was sufficiently large that no one would ever find him there.

  He hadn’t told anyone where he was really going, in fact.

  And now, because Taro had decided to take up a ridiculous quest, he had to let it go. Not that his questions had been getting him anywhere – everyone just repeated the same old story, that Mara had evidently come across someone looking to kill Lord Tokugawa, and they had killed her to get her out of the way. It left too many questions unanswered, though. Chief among them: if an assassin had been frustrated in an attempt on Lord Tokugawa’s life, wouldn’t he have tried again?

  These questions would remain, for the time being, unanswered. And thus Mara’s killer still walked the earth, unavenged. Shusaku couldn’t bear it. But Taro was like his son, and Taro was alive, where Mara was not. Taro had to come first.

  Cursing his surrogate son’s stupid bravery, Shusaku had travelled to the capital himself. On arriving, he had seen no trace of Taro, but he had spoken to inn owners, prostitutes and street vendors, and eventually he had come across a rumour that Taro had gone to Miyajima, to try to find Kusanagi. It had always been whispered, Shusaku knew, that the sword hanging in the shogun’s palace was a fake; to hear it repeated so idly, though, by a seller of hot pies, was shocking. Almost like being told that the earth beneath your feet was really air, and you were living in the clouds. It strongly suggested that support for the shogun was waning, and that troubled him more than anything.

  Still, Taro’s quest made sense to Shusaku. No one could kill a dragon without the legendary sword. But it was dangerous, too. Anyone who possessed the sword – if they could only get hold of the mirror and the jewels, too – could claim the country. Taro would have the key to the shogunate, and more, once he laid hands on it. Many were those who would wish to take that key from him.

  Was this what Lord Tokugawa was after? Or did he simply want Taro to take the throne that he himself could not, to secure it for his bloodline if not his own person?

  It had been a long time since Shusaku had heard from Lord Tokugawa – he had expected to, after the battle and Lord Oda’s death. He had thought every day that a pigeon must soon arrive at the abbot’s coop, bringing a summons. But there had been nothing.

  It made him a little nervous. With Lord Tokugawa, the things you knew about were always less worrying than the things you didn’t know.

  Well, it didn’t matter. Lord Tokugawa was always scheming, and there was no point trying to anticipate him. It was said he thought in years, where others thought in days and weeks. Anyway, there was no time, because Shusaku was still surrounded by the dead. Could they see him? He wasn’t sure. Things of the spirit world generally couldn’t, because of his tattoos, but did the dead count as spirits?

  It wasn’t the time for reflecting on the matter.

  Luckily, whether they could see him or not, he at least knew where most of them were. They moved clumsily and loudly, and the ones on fire were hot enough to feel, although he wasn’t especially worried about them. He concentrated, drawing in his qi. Then he be
gan to move, in a run that was more like a dance. Leaping, ducking, pirouetting, he placed the dead by their footfalls, and decapitated them as he passed. He felt the fingers of one brush his hair, even as he rolled on the ground and came up, his sword snapping round behind him.

  He heard the head hit the ground at his rear.

  One of them was lying on the ground in front of him, obstructing his path, and he tripped on it – but he didn’t fall, just stumbled. Coming out of the unsteadiness, he struck out at what he assumed was the neck of the one in front of him; his assumption was confirmed by the thud of the head on the grass. Now he knew that the dead could not see him – because, as talented as he was, he would not be alive if they could. There were so many of them, they would just overwhelm him. No, the sutra that was burned and tattooed onto his body must be making him invisible, he thought.

  You can’t see me and I can’t see you, he thought. But luckily, you are ever so noisy, and I am not.

  Taro was just ahead of him now. The boy had stopped, abruptly, as if caught by one of the corpses.

  Then, to Shusaku’s horror, Taro’s heart stopped beating.

  The thin tree of blood that was Taro’s body, at least as far as Shusaku perceived it, went limp. Still upright, though – Shusaku guessed that a corpse was holding him up.

  Shusaku almost went down on his knees.

  No.

  Taro could not die.

  But then, to his amazement, the blood began to flow through Taro’s body again; he could hear it, and it was glorious. But Taro still wasn’t moving, and Shusaku knew if he didn’t act quickly the boy would be overcome, and die.

  Stranglehold? Twist hold? He guessed that the corpse that had grabbed Taro had deliberately or accidentally performed one of the throat moves that cuts off the blood supply momentarily, knocking a person out.

  He could sense Hiro and Hana moving towards Taro, but they would not be as quick as him. He prayed as he moved, prayed that his strike would be true, would not go too far and cut Taro’s neck too. He hoped his years of training with the sword would not let him down.