Colin woke up and lay there on the futon, a rolled-up blanket under his head. He couldn’t deal with the wooden Japanese pillow.
He listened to the wind and pitter of rain on the treated paper windows. Heard uMubaya’s low snoring from the pallet across the room. Osan’s samurai bodyguard, Nori, was sleeping sitting up, sword under his armpit, leaning on the wall of her adjoining room. He was stocky and generally looked meditative and serious.
They’d been lying low there for less than a week. When uMubaya went out or when they’d traveled he wore a priest’s outfit with a huge, beehive-like wicker helmet that completely hid his head – Osan’s idea. His sleeves were long enough to conceal his hands. Colin wore a cowl-like hood and she’d dyed dark and styled his straight reddish hair and used makeup on his face that passed casual scrutiny.
That evening, as the fog was just gathering and the sky was still clear, Nori and uMubaya walked on the beach, the Zulu just wearing a hood in the moonlit dimness. They sat down near the softly breaking surf in sight of the warmly-lit inn where Osan and Colin were having tea in private. The half-moon was well up in the east over the ocean and silvered the edge of a long line of oncoming clouds. The air was mildly cool and soothing. uMubaya remembered the rocky coast of his father’s kingdom where there were stretches of beach and constant winds. Very dangerous waters, a Swazi fisherman had once told him.
He was telling Nori something about his home country when, suddenly, red torchlight tossed shadows around them. The black man assumed it was Colin, but the samurai instantly was crouched, hand on sword hilt.
A thin, medium-sized fighting man with a pointed chin and wide, bony shoulders came out of the night behind the fluttering light with a young woman, who kept her head down-tilted, as was custom. She was a commoner by dress and manner, slim with long limbs.
“Wondering who was out here,” the new man said. “We are going back to the party.”
“Fine with us,” said Nori.
uMubaya put his hood up but it was too late.
“Interesting,” the stranger commented, at the same time studying Nori. “I know you. I used to serve Hideo.” The flame shadows hollowed out his deep-set eyes above cheekbones that looked like ax cuts. “Is this a demon?” Indicating the African whose eyes just showed in the shadow of his hood.
“A foreigner,” said Nori, frowning. “Under the protection of my lord.”
“In any case, a wonder.” His head jerked towards the woman. “She and I were contemplating the moonrise.” Smiled. “You must come to the party. Up here at the inn. You are my guests.”
“Thank you. Where did you come from?” Nori asked.
“From the north. I am guarding a merchant and his baggage. No more service for me. I like the pay and don’t have to bow to the soft wretch. Come.” Started walking up from the beach.
“My friend here is weary,” said Nori. “It —”
“I won’t hear of it. Come. We must meet your friend who is not a demon.”
“He —” Nori knew they’d have to go or try to kill the man and risk commotion. And he’d come from the north and would know nothing about their situation.
“It would be insulting to refuse,” the wide-shouldered man said, walking on.
They followed him. The slim, graceful woman reminded uMubaya a little of Osan. He thought of his betrothed Ulele – not without regret at times – but the most attractive woman he’d ever seen was the northern one from the burning hot lands on what he now knew they called the equator where the sun could kill the unprotected; the Masai captive princess, a slender, long-limbed beauty with a proud, long back; high-cheek bones and distant, almost insolent eyes. He’d instantly wanted her. Her name was Mer’ce.
After they found her alone, wandering on the beach in Zulu land she was brought to the King’s ikhanda. Instead of forcing her to marry or just mate with him, uMubaya spent time with her, learned some of her speech, courted her… She’d treated him with royal disdain and declared she had no wish to mate into a nation of fat people and mentioned that in her land a boy must kill a lion with a spear by the time he was 13 or else he could not become a maron, a warrior. Had he done that? He hadn’t, of course – but argued that he could probably defeat their best fighters. This produced much amused scorn. Annoyed, he took her alone with him into the bush to find a lion. She told him he’d be eaten and how could his big, clumsy Zulu spear penetrate? The innuendo was clear. After a few days they came on a pride and he’d fought a hunting female. Mer’ce went up a tree to watch and mockingly encourage him. The lioness in defense of her hidden offspring charged. In a near-miracle he killed the beast as he fell, bleeding and semi-conscious, under it…
She left and he never forgot her. Because there’d been one moment, before she went, which left him with a hollow ache and a feeling he would long for her forever… he was young enough to be sure it would be forever…
Nori and uMubaya had gone to the party with the bony samurai, drank with the men and prostitutes there and, later, semi-staggered back to their room. They’d been offered women by the host but both refused – though uMubaya had been pretty tempted.
Colin was uncomfortable thinking about how he’d tried to have Osan while they were gone. She’d tilted her beautiful head aside and neither said yes nor no. She’d let him hold her but no more. He’d automatically caressed and tried to press her to open into surrender. Overwhelmed by wanting, body and soul, he almost gasped, saying he was dying with desire. His massive hands were gentle but implacable.
She used only words to resist which might have been all that stopped him.
‘When you adulterate gold,’ she’d told him, ‘do you not cheapen it?’
He didn’t follow.
‘Love you,” he said. “Me… love you.”
‘You cannot force a flower to bloom by squeezing the bud. You can kill it, Co-rin, or leave it to itself.’
‘Bloom?’
She picked a flower and bud from the vase on the floor table and showed him what she meant with pantomime and words; then held him, gently.
‘You not love me.’
‘You tell me what I feel?’ she wondered, smiling, slightly.
She’d gone to sleep on a futon under the window. He’d lain down on one across the long room and stared at the shadows from the single lamp in the middle of the floor, moving like slow, dark wings, he’d imagined. Music and voices from the party were faint. He’d dozed and half-woke when Nori and the Zulu stumbled in.
What could I offer such a woman? He asked himself, lying there, much later, staring at the faint glow of the window as the wet dawn subtly intensified as one of the two men snored like, he thought, like a sick hound. He remembered his homeland: dark wooded glens, mist spilling slowly among raw, dark-rock mountains, tiny, almost steely-bright blue, yellow and white wildflowers growing in harsh places on spiky bushes… She is lovely and gentle… Tried to find the poetry. What could he offer, hillman turned seafarer? We have to leave here… I should bring her back to her family… I think she came only to show them she could… her mother, anyway… there’s a bitch-wolf…
With a slight groan he rolled and levered himself to his knees, then upright. His head ached a little from drinking too much high-proof sochu. Nearest thing and a poor second, he felt, to the malt brew back home.
He went quietly out the door and headed, barefoot, down the corridor that led to the sea side of the long inn. There was a latrine maybe 50 yards away, but he figured to urinate among the rocks and pines and drink some well water – then back to bed – the others wouldn’t stir for a while yet.
He stood on the porch, weaving slightly, and watched the dull, sourceless gray glow incrementally increase. He felt blurry.
“I love you, Osan,” he murmured, in Gaelic, out into the foggy wetness. “Yet… it’s true… what can I offer, here, in this land where… ”
He stepped down among the rocks and trudged a few steps. He had vague notions of finding a ship and having the captain ma
rry them.
They might let them wed just to save face, he considered.
Fog softly flowed as if the dark, wet bushes coldly smoked. He practically tripped over what he took for a sleeping woman. He tried to focus, thinking she shouldn’t be sleeping in the rain. The upper third of her body was under a bush and her clothes were parted, showing a long-limbed, beautiful, naked body.
His stomach clenched, his heart pounded and he dropped to his knees. There was enough light now to show color. The color was red and it hit him like a fist of ice and steel.
“By St. Stephen’s balls!” he cried. He touched her kimono and his hands came back bloodstained. “Oh, sweet God! No… Sweet God, no!”
Because he knew the kimono and the combs he’d been watching move in the soft lantern light earlier that evening, the graceful limbs and hands.
He gagged out a cry in a kind of mad sickness and pulled her out of the shrubbery and then keened in highland agony because her head wasn’t there.
He didn’t hear himself – there was now a commotion inside and, suddenly, a round face under a peasant’s straw hat was peering between the pines that lined the road that dead-ended here.
He stood up, stained bloody across his pale silks.
“Murder!” cried the face. “Murder!”
Colin just stood there in the slowly gathering leaden light, not looking up as Nori and uMubaya came outside and stumbled towards him.
Later Colin had only broken, blotted impressions of Nori trying to kill him as the Zulu rode his back down into the sand… blurs… outcries…
Three
Takezo walked over the bridge on the road to Hideo’s stronghold. It was slightly downhill on the far side of the river and the noon sun impacted the dust into quivering, blurry heat-shapes. The sky was so bright blue it hurt.
This was not so massive a place as the one on the south side of the bay miles from the growing city with complex mazes and blocking walls before you reached the actual main structure. Edo had been a fishing village and had expanded quite a bit but nothing like what was soon to come when it would be the unofficial capital and eventually, renamed Tokyo, the biggest city in Japan and, in population, the world.
He knew where they’d be keeping the body until tomorrow’s burial ceremony. With half the troops, not to mention Izu’s men and peasant recruits, out scouring the countryside for Colin and the other two it was a good time to investigate. The missing head had maddened the clan. A disgrace, in itself. Izu was in trouble.
He passed the gate where tradespeople and others were going in and out and went to the door he knew accessed the cellar, the coolest place in the huge building. At the portal a small, hunchbacked man with a severe limp responded to his pounding, opened the wood and metal door and stood blinking into the day’s dazzle. He was bald with an uneven scraggle of beard.
“Hm,” he grunted. “Are you delivering the buns? Where’s Oku?”
“Hm. Are you the keeper of the gate to hell?”
“Looks like me does he?” Liked that. Chuckled. “No doubt you’ll be knocking on that gate soon enough.” In the brightness, the sloppy clothes fooled the gatekeeper until he saw the swords at the other’s belt. No commoner carried katana and shogo. “Who let a samurai bum like you through the gate? Did you steal those swords? You’ll find hell in a minute, in that case.”
“You talk a lot, bent man. Show me to the body of the lord’s murdered girl.”
“You order me, you vagabond? I am, Momoichi, master of the cellars.”
“I have authority, Sir Momo.”
“Authority. From the king of the devils?”
“Interesting. Very likely.”
“Get away from here and go beg your supper, samurai.”
Takezo sighed. He didn’t need this. A number of peasants and castle folk were starting to gather amused. He reached into his pouch for the Nobunaga’s talisman but the fellow was already stepping back and shutting the inward opening door.
The ronin shoved it and knocked the little man down. He heard him scuttling and cursing in the dimness as he stepped inside, trying to focus past the bright wedge of sunlight spilling in around him. Something flashed the light near his head and his body barely ducked back with that uncanny, instant awareness that comes to those who, somehow, have “opened their spirit.” He needed it because this was as close as he’d come to death in a long time: the wicked weapon (a kind of long-handled scythe) hooked at his skull, slit his left ear and creased his neck.
Dog dung! His mind said. The deadly little man came quickly and unevenly out after him. Clear why they don’t need a guard here…
There was a spiked ball and chain that attached to the base of the scythe handle. He began to spin the ball before him in humming, looping, figure-eight arcs. The idea was to hit an opponent or catch his sword arm – except Takezo hadn’t drawn yet.
“I apologize,” he said, “for my rudeness.”
“Too late!”
One of the female watchers yelled, to general laughter:
“Chase him old Momo!”
“He looks like a hungry dog caught by the butcher,” another said.
Momo whirled the ball over his head. The ronin drew but, because he didn’t want to fight or attract more attention, hesitated, pointing the blade level out front so the ball whipped the chain around his wrist, binding it to the handle and the surprisingly strong, bent man started pulling him into range of the scythe.
“Aaah,” grunted Momo, with satisfaction.
“He’s dead,” someone else commented from the sidelines.
“Foolish to pull me where I wish to go,” said Takezo, angry now.
And he charged the man which made the chain slack and no more than an annoying decoration. At the same time he drew his short sword with his left hand and blocked the vicious scythe-chop, then slammed Momo on the side of his skull with the flat of his long sword. The hard, round head rang like a block of sounding wood farmers use to signal.
He untangled himself while Momo groaned and rolled over in the sunbright cloud of dust they’d raised.
“So many bad tempers,” Takezo said.
Old Momo, touching his head and not saying much above a mutter, led the way down a ramp into the dark coolness under the castle, holding a torch that flapped their shadows around them.
“You should have circled when I rushed you,” the tall swordsman commented, thinking over the fight. He’d used the scythe and chain but never liked it because once you were committed there were few options. Touched his cut ear. Not much blood.
“I should have hit you the first time,” the limping man said, bitterly.
“A point.”
They’d come to a big, cool chamber where the light showed a single wooden coffin that looked like a barrel, tied with thick cloth across the top like a birthday present, used to bear the body to the graveyard.
“During the fighting days,” Momo said. Touched his head. “Arr… you dog.”
“I might have split your skull.”
“During the fighting days, this place was full of high-and-mighty dead men.”
“Is this the woman?”
“Woman? A body. Arr… ” Touched his head, again. “Important men were saved for a proper burial. They kept better down here”
“Did they appreciate the honor?” Takezo asked, drawing his short sword and freeing the coffin top. The light now showed a small shrine that had been set up on a table a few feet away.
“Ha. The rest went into a hole where they fell or were left to feed the birds.”
“Better to be important and saved for worms.” He lifted off the cover. “Bring the torch here.”
“What do you hope to see? She has no head.”
The body was folded, neatly. It was soft and slightly swollen, now. Spices had been poured in to mask the scent.
No head but hands, thought Takezo, studying the strange ring on her thumb where it was still too-large, though the fingers were somewhat swollen. He lifted the
hand and noted it seemed to be gold. Odd… Why? She’s not Chinese… who wears rings? Sometimes people might take up a Chinese style but generally it was very rare. He was puzzled. It was put on her… who put it there? Why?
It was thick with a blood-red, dull, flat stone in an elaborate setting. He twisted it off, easily, and stowed it in his belt pouch.
Her mother looks a little Korean, he decided. But I never noticed a ring on her…
“What are you doing? Stealing from the dead?”
“Who said this was the lady Osan?”
“Mmm.” The hunchback’s round face was half-lit by the shifting flamelight as the samurai’s wide set, penetrating eyes watched him from his own shadows.
“There’s no head,” Takezo emphasized.
“That’s clear. Makes a problem for the ceremony.”
“Who washed and dressed her?”
“Her mother. The lady Issa. And some others. Anyway, she goes in the earth soon enough.”
“Ah.”
“A mother ought to know her child, head or not. Better put that back or you’ll have no head yourself.”
Did Issa put this on her for some strange sentiment? That lady seems as tender-natured as a sea-snake… The girl had a rebellious nature but why wear something that doesn’t fit?
He took the torch and peered back in at the body. Someone had pinned a silken cloth over the neck creating an eerie impression. On impulse he adjusted the pale kimono where it had fallen over one shoulder. Had to lift and free it so that much of her naked body was exposed. This close the nasty pungency of decay overcame the stinging, almost choking spices.
In the shifting shadows he noticed something strange: pressed the softening flesh between her thigh and public hair to better expose a tattoo, very small, of what looked like a lily.
That must have hurt, he thought, covering her and setting back the round lid. A ring, a tattoo… did she live among foreigners or with savage men of the north? Hideo’s daughter?
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 3
