by Nick Lake
She shrugged. She didn’t believe him, he could tell.
‘Kenji Kira was only thinking aloud,’ said Shusaku. ‘Men always suspect women, when it comes to possessions and mysterious illness.’
‘It’s not a mysterious illness. Our Lord Tokugawa was shot.’
‘He’s recovered from worse injuries quicker.’
Mara nodded. Good. Perhaps she was beginning to relax. He wanted her – he didn’t want to be worrying about Kenji Kira right now, or Lord Tokugawa even. He just wanted to hold her in his arms, feel her body against his.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s not unreasonable to think that you could render a man ill. You’re beautiful.’
She kissed him, and the world disappeared.
‘Be my wife,’ he said without thinking.
Suddenly she was standing. ‘What?’
‘My wife. I would like you to be her; I mean, you. I mean, I would like you to marry me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I should have composed a poem, or something.’
‘I don’t like poetry,’ she said. ‘Anyway,’ she added in a teasing voice, ‘I’m just a serving girl.’
‘So? You’re a woman. I’m a lord, even if my estate is much smaller than that of our Lord Tokugawa. I can marry who I please.’
‘I’m not— that is— I’m not like other women.’
Shusaku smiled. ‘I know. That’s why I love you.’
She opened the shoji door to leave. ‘You understand nothing,’ she said. Then she was gone.
Shusaku lay back on the bed and sighed. She was right.
He didn’t understand.
The next day Mara died, and Shusaku was made a vampire.
He had been dreaming about Mara – a dream where she was his wife, and they were living in his father’s castle together, the whole ten-thousand-koku territory theirs to do what they liked with. He had been holding her hand, looking out over the land, gleaming with paddy fields.
Now he was awake, and there were shouts all around. It sounded like they were preparing for battle.
No more than one incense stick later, he was mounted, Lord Tokugawa by his side. The daimyo was better, it seemed – perhaps it had been a living-spirit possession, after all. And Lord Tokugawa was not one to waste time, once he was back on his feet. He wanted the Monto wiped out, and he wanted it done that day. There was, too, the fact that it was raining. Rain prevented rifles from firing – the Monto would not be able to surprise them in the same way again.
On Lord Tokugawa’s other side, Mara was sitting on a dappled mare, a woman’s short-sword in her hand. Shusaku was surprised – when he first joined the others, he didn’t recognize her, for she was wearing that same deep, cowled hood. But when she turned to him he did, and he asked Lord Tokugawa what he meant by bringing a woman into battle.
‘She insists on it,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘Wants to protect me, she says.’
Shusaku spoke quietly. ‘You have an honour guard for that,’ he said. ‘Me included.’ There were three samurai who rode with Lord Tokugawa, the brightest fighters of the army, and Shusaku was one of them. He wasn’t proud of it – but he knew it was a true reflection of his skill with a sword. ‘She’s a woman. She may get killed.’
Lord Tokugawa gave him a hard look then. ‘Men get killed. Is it so different for a woman?’
Shusaku had no reply for that. He couldn’t say that he loved her, that he lived for a smile from her lips. He just nodded, and lowered his helmet. Lord Tokugawa spurred his great stallion. His horned mask was already on, obscuring his features.
When they eventually charged, it was an uncompromising battle. Lord Tokugawa was fully back to strength – he cut down at least a dozen men, the Tokugawa mon fluttering in the rain-soaked wind as he slashed and parried, like a demon on horseback.
Shusaku, too, killed his share, finding as he always did that the world had shrunk to the ambit of his sword arm. Nothing else existed but that circle of steel.
Slowly, though, he and the rest of the honour guard, Lord Tokugawa also, found themselves forced to the side of the battlefield by arrows, which seemed almost to be fired at them for this very purpose, to herd them. It happened gradually, but before he knew it, Shusaku noticed that they were in the woods, below the Monto fortress.
He started to have a bad feeling. The stone walls of the fortress loomed over them.
‘Ride at the wall,’ Lord Tokugawa said. His voice sounded oddly high. ‘Follow it round. We’ll find a gate.’
But just then a circle of Monto samurai came out from the trees, blades in their hands.
Gods, it’s a trap, thought Shusaku.
He spurred his horse, wheeling. His first sword stroke took off the enemy’s arm as it brought a blade swinging towards him – his second split a skull. He had the bloodlust rushing through him now, the sakki. It was battle-spirit, and he was infused with it, filled with it, as a drunk man is with wine.
Then he heard a crash. He turned to see that Lord Tokugawa’s horse had been cut down, its forelegs severed by a sword. Lord Tokugawa stood unsteadily on the bare ground, sword in hand. Shusaku roared, leaping from his own horse.
Before he could reach Lord Tokugawa, though, he saw that Mara was already by his side. She raised her sword – Shusaku was struck by how quick the action was – and parried the blade of one of the Monto assassins. But there were two more behind her – she hadn’t seen them, was still fighting the one who had attacked her – and time seemed to slow as Shusaku ran towards them, and they closed on Lord Tokugawa. Shusaku could see what was about to happen.
‘Lord To—’ he shouted—
Space stretched, so that the two tan or so that separated him from his lord became a thousand ri—
Mara planted her sword through the heart of her attacker, then turned, too slowly—
The two Monto samurai struck—
And Shusaku watched, helpless, as a blade cut through the mouth hole of Lord Tokugawa’s helmet, like a dagger through a mound of rice, all the way to the hilt. The daimyo’s blood spurted forth, a splash of red, a dragon breathing.
Inside Shusaku’s mind was a white, meaningless noise, a kind of hush and susurration, like the sound of the tide on pebbles, or the wind in the leaves.
Apparently, something had snapped in Mara, too, because her sword whipped into movement as if animated by its own will, her hand and feet flying. The hood fell from her face; she was moving so fast that it seemed her very face was steaming. In a heartbeat, two at most, the three Monto closest to her were cut down. One’s head had not hit the ground before she ran another through; all of it was happening too quickly for Shusaku really to take it in.
He stared. He could not move so quickly himself, and he was well on his way to becoming a sword saint.
It was his surprise at her speed and viciousness that was his undoing. He felt the sword come through his chest, heard the triumphant cry of the samurai behind him who had done it. He looked down, dumbfounded, at the metal growth sticking out of him. Another samurai was in front of him – it seemed that more had come from the trees. The Monto drew his sword back to deliver the final cut, to kill Shusaku dead.
I can’t die here, he thought. I was going to marry Mara and live in a castle.
He went down on his knees. He saw, in the corner of his vision, Mara running towards him, a scream on her lips. She hurled her sword forward into the air, its blade turning over and over, catching what little remained of the light. Then her hands went to her sides and she was throwing things – he didn’t understand, but he saw two of the remaining Monto fall, silver flowers blossoming in their flesh.
Throwing stars?
Without even looking up, Mara caught her sword again, which she had thrown into the air
(to free her hands, he realized)
and in the same movement as the catching, she brought the blade down, burying it in the forehead of the Monto in front of Shusaku. He saw that her face was red-raw, as if burnt. She pulled the blade out, snapped her swor
d hand back, and decapitated another who had come up behind her. Shusaku’s mouth was open, and not just with pain. He had never seen fighting like this. Then the samurai behind him struck again, this time driving his short-sword through Shusaku’s stomach.
Shusaku felt the world go dim, its sounds distant. He could smell the earth. It wanted to claim him.
From far away, he heard Mara scream again. He began to topple as she severed the sword hand of his killer – Shusaku saw it spin and then land on the mud, like a bloated, pale spider. She spun and slashed in a storm of steel, and the samurai around her died, and died, and died.
She’s a demon, Shusaku realized. She’s a demon from hell, and she is sending them all there. It was like she was dancing, and when she came to a stop, her head down, her blood- and rain-soaked hair hanging bedraggled over her face, breathing hard... she stood in a field of butchery. She looked up, and he saw her long eyelashes, and the pain in her eyes. He had never seen anything so beautiful.
He closed his eyes to die.
A lifetime later he felt a pressure on his face, and she was kneeling by him. There were tears on her cheeks.
‘Mara,’ he said. ‘I wanted to marry you.’ He may have recited to her his death poem, which he had prepared for this moment. A samurai must always have a poem ready for his death. Either that or he just thought its words, without saying them out loud.
He looked into her eyes, and he fell into their depths.
He didn’t come up again.
The next he was aware, he was on the back of a horse. Its motion was agony to him.
‘Wait...’ he said. ‘My wound... I’ll bleed out.’
‘What wound?’ said a man’s voice.
‘The man’s delirious,’ said another.
Soon afterwards he found himself in Lord Tokugawa’s camp. He managed to get himself off the horse... surprisingly easily, in fact. It was night, but everything seemed impossibly bright, the colors of the camp hissing and booming in his head. He could hear his own pulse, echoing. He could smell... he wasn’t sure what he could smell.
But it was delicious.
He wondered if he was in heaven, and this was confirmed when Lord Tokugawa walked up to him, utterly unharmed, no sign of the sword that had been buried in his face.
‘You’re here, my old friend,’ said Lord Tokugawa.
‘Yes,’ said Shusaku. ‘Have you seen Enma? Are we to be judged?’
A laugh – it resounded in Shusaku’s skull. ‘You’re not dead, man!’
‘I’m not? But you died – I saw you. In the clearing. And then...’
‘That wasn’t me,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘You didn’t really think I’d go back into battle, did you? The Monto aimed for me, with that gun. I have no intention of dying before I rule this sorry country.’
Shusaku nodded slowly. Of course. He’d heard the high voice, hadn’t he? The man riding with him and Mara had been an imposter, meant to draw the Monto out.
‘Mara?’ he said. Their relationship was a secret, but he seemed to have just died and come back to life, and the miracle made attempts at hiding his love for her seem irrelevant.
Lord Tokugawa’s face contorted in pain. ‘I’m so sorry, Shusaku, my old friend,’ he said.
Shusaku swayed. ‘No. No. No...’
Lord Tokugawa put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ve been gone a whole day,’ he said. ‘My men only found you because they were recovering any swords that might have been lost on the battlefield. Last night... when you were lost... we found Mara outside my tent. Her throat had been slit.’
‘Her throat...’ An image in his head: his lips, on the soft hollow at the base of her neck.
‘Yes. All the way through, in fact. She’d been decapitated.’
Shusaku had the feeling that someone had just told him he was standing on air, not the hard ground. He put out a hand, clung to Lord Tokugawa’s arm. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lord Tokugawa. ‘No one does.’
Yet Shusaku did know – not then, but later. It was when he went back to his tent and examined himself in his silver mirror. His face was pale, and there were shadows under his eyes. He was so very, very thirsty.
And there were two puncture wounds on his neck. Dried blood encrusted them. They were not so far apart. The width of a person’s canine teeth, maybe.
He stared at them.
He thought of that deep hood, how it had come down, and her face had burned.
He thought of the throwing star she had used – a ninja weapon, and wasn’t it said that all ninjas were vampires?
Now he had an idea why Mara had been killed. She must have been a vampire. And before someone killed her, she had made Shusaku a vampire too, had saved him by cursing him. He took off his kimono and ran his fingers lightly along the silver scars on his stomach and chest, the only trace of the swords that had cut him right through.
There were two things he had to do, one short-term and one long-term. In the short term he had to tell Lord Tokugawa what had happened to him. It would not be easy. The daimyo might choose to cast him out, or worse, require him to commit seppuku. Still, he was prepared for that. He was samurai. And what choice did he have? He couldn’t go out in the sunlight any more, he supposed. That wasn’t so very easy a thing to conceal. Yes, in the short term he would have to tell Lord Tokugawa of his transformation, and be prepared for the consequences.
Also in the short term: he would need to find something to drink. Blood, he supposed. He noticed that the thought didn’t disgust him.
Then there was the long term, assuming Lord Tokugawa let him live.
In the long term, he would find whoever had killed Mara. He had no idea who that might be. She’d seemed scared of Kenji Kira, but then how could Shusaku credit anything she said? She hadn’t told him she was a vampire, a ninja presumably. He thought of the way she had fought in that clearing. It struck him that she might have been sent to assassinate Lord Tokugawa, and had been caught in the act. Only why had her interceptor not come forward, if that were the case? Anyone who could say that they had stopped a would-be assassin, saving the daimyo, would be a hero, could claim land and title.
It was a mystery. But Shusaku thought he might just have time to solve it, now that he was a vampire. He could be patient. He would keep Mara alive in his thoughts, remembering the darkness of her eyes, her long eyelashes, her slender form whirling with sword in hand; how beautiful she had been.
And then, when he found the person who had taken her from him, he would fix her in his mind and avenge her death, giving peace to her soul. It would be a katakiuchi, a vengeance killing. It would be an act of honour to kill the culprit, an act of cleansing.
Not that he would bother with killing him honourably, or cleanly. No. He would tear him to pieces. He touched his top teeth, and as his finger brushed them he felt his canines lengthening, sharpening.
Good. He would use them, when he did the tearing.
CHAPTER 41
The realm of Hell
Now
MARA.
Mara.
The name had been on his mind since he’d spoken about her with Taro on the boat. Then, suddenly, it had been on Kira’s dead and decaying lips, a defilement, a travesty.
Shusaku opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Inside him was a fire, consuming him. Hatred clouded his newly recovered vision in a haze of red. He felt that no water or ice could quench him, could put out the inferno raging in his flesh and his blood. He was a dragon, not a man. He could breathe this fire, if he wanted.
He had loved Mara, had wanted to marry her. He had never known a more beautiful woman; even Hana, to his eyes, was an imperfect carving, next to a masterpiece. But Mara had been kind, too, and quick, and humorous – and she had been the one to turn him. He had seen, when he used the ball, how his blood still flowed in Taro. He understood now that hers was still in him, that in some sense she would always live as long as he did.
But it didn’t dim h
is rage. Kenji Kira had killed her. He had always suspected it, had always wondered, but now the hatamoto had confirmed it. His mind was half on a mountainside, twelve years earlier, and half on the scene in hell before him, Kira standing there so smug, Horse-head and Ox-face beside him.
The tearing of his skin came to him as an instinct. He simply knew that it was right. Maybe he had to get the Heart Sutra off him, to become what he needed to become – maybe, much as it stopped spirits and the gods from seeing him, it would stop, too, his own essence from bursting out, becoming more than itself.
His whole consciousness a scream, he tore the skin from his chest first; it was easy, because it had only just been flayed. Kenji Kira, he could dimly see through the red and the pain, was staring at him in horror. He dug his fingers into his waist, pulled a strip off his leg, the agony of it unbelievable, all-encompassing. It was as if his pain wasn’t something inside him, an attribute or property of his, but was everywhere in the world, surrounding him, drowning him. He was drowning in blood and pain.
He understood that this was necessary, so that he could become the death that must come even to death, so that he could be the Death-of-Enma, but he had not been prepared for the pain, so much worse somehow than being flayed, because he was doing it to himself.
Taro had been right, it seemed, that he could do this, but he hated it all the same, was almost insane with the agony of it.
Yes, Taro had been right.
Curse the boy.
A ripping sound – the last of the skin on his leg came away, and he could see his own muscles and sinews, even the veins snaking around his naked soft tissue. He dropped the tattooed covering of flesh, saw it pool on the ground like bloody clothing, was conscious of putting behind him something he could never recover.
He didn’t care.
As he tore, as he ripped, he was conscious of growing. The desire to kill Kenji Kira, to destroy him, was a kind of expanding feeling, like that of taking a deep breath into the lungs. He felt, too, though he couldn’t explain it, that it wasn’t just him who wanted Kira gone. That it was everything, the universe, the whole of dharma, pouring into him, making him swell up, making him the vessel of Kira’s annihilation. There was a sort of voice in his mind, a music, which he understood to be the harmony of all things, and it considered Kira an abomination.
