Which might explain the mother’s subtle hostility to the dead child he felt he’d detected. Possible.
The guards closed in around him and she said:
“Seize him. Take the thing. Then take him away and beat him well, as my lord wishes.”
The men went for him but her lord interjected:
“Stop. Not at my child’s funeral. Anyway, this man is more than he seems. I want no blood shed here.”
“My lord,” she began.
“Quiet,” he told her, then, to the kneeling, seeming musician: “Why keep it if it is not yours?”
“The lady did not say it was hers, my lord.”
“Insolent answer,” Hideo said. To her: “Is it, woman?”
“I do not recognize it.” Her eyes stayed on Takezo’s face, cold and curious.
She’s worried, he thought. Not handling him well…
He bowed himself away past the furious retainers who let him pass with ferocious reluctance. As he started to semi-hobble back to the road, the cloud shadow-just beginning to pass over, he noted Issa turning to whisper to the man beside her who’d been out-of-sight behind a group of mourners. He recognized him, long face and scraggly beard.
Reiko, he thought.
The sudden sunlight illuminated part of her oval face in the shadow of her headdress and the top of his high-shaved head. He knew what that conversation probably meant and so wasn’t surprised, a little later, as a couple of their men caught up with him on the road that gently dipped down into the city proper. A beautiful view, all lush bluish-greens, dazzling white and yellow low buildings with touches of red, a few pagodas poking higher, all shimmering in the bright heat. A big cloud shadow was just passing softly and unevenly over part of the bay and city.
The ronin felt a poem-stirring, again.
What a beautiful world to look at, he said to himself,
He didn’t bother to turn as one said:
“Stop, dog!”
“Always the same insults,” he sighed.
He kept limping on. He heard and felt them rushing up close, sheathed swords poised to begin beating him. From the corner of his eye he could see all their shadows stretching out to the side from the still low morning sun, the angles of their weapons and arms. To seem weak was another no jitsu.
It was too easy because they expected nothing and were not exceptionally strong swordsmen. He actually could feel that.
As they struck he dropped to one knee and swept his weighted, steel-tipped cane in an arc behind him that cracked both their shins with a satisfying impact as he rolled over backwards and away in virtually the same movement.
One cursed, the other yipped as they went down in the yellow dust. The first drew his sword and forced himself to stand. Takezo was sure he’d fractured at least one bone and took agonizing chunks off the other legs.
He now limped rapidly outside striking distance.
“Samurai beating a poor cripple,” Takezo said, deadpan. “Poor bushi do.”
“Come here, you stinking pig-dung!” the standing one raged while the other sat and held his broken shin with both hands. “Come here and die!”
“I’ll die in good time, brave and skilful warrior.” Takezo shook his head. “Now you know what it’s like to have an affliction other than your unfortunate face.”
And went on as the man tried to hobble, bent-legged, in utterly futile pursuit.
“Insolent… ” The man was lost for words. He spat and sputtered, tried to run and fell flat, raising a spume of dust. “I’ll find you… you will die… how you will die!”
Eight
At Hideo’s
Lorenzo Gentile was wearing the clothes he’d been washed ashore in: a loose green silk brocade shirt with puffy sleeves, white tights, soft pointed low boots. An Italian gentleman sitting at the windowledge of Osan’s chamber, half-staring out over the immense bay, blindingly blue under the blinding, nearly cloudless sky.
In the distance, looking north across a narrow fold of the water, he could see Edo harbor and the shimmering outline of boats, anchored maybe a quarter of a mile offshore in the blurring haze.
He turned back and looked at a gold leaf fan on the near wall with a monochromatic painting of a fierce, armored warrior, standing bent-legged, sword upraised, under a calligraphically graceful pine tree, surrounded by waves of flowers and bamboo, swayed by some soft, unseen breeze…
They are amazing, he thought, in their violent and sensitive natures… I might adapt this flat style…
His clothes were too heavy for the heat. He was sweaty and felt slightly dulled. He’d kept the sack roped to him when they’d gone overboard in the storm so he still had pistols, pencils and paper and some clothing – the paper had been ruined.
He had no urge to practice reading Japanese, just then; but he wanted to continue studying an essay written by Osan. His serving woman had given it to him a little furtively. She’d said it was gracefully, yet strongly, composed. He’d been very impressed, as he studied it.
A remarkable mind, he thought. Remarkable sensibility… would that I might have met her… such an acute nature in this, well, unenlightened land…
“What use are priests and nuns,” she’d asked, “who retreat to mountains or don black garments of piety and set themselves apart so that people are ever conscious of them? One whose mind and heart has been transformed by compassion into wisdom and sees through this fabric of dreams confused with memories, memories confused with today so everything we do and see and hear and believe is always somewhat false; such a one ought to stay amidst mankind, almost unseen, and wear away the illusions of the rest of us the way a single drop of pure dye can transform a vat and color 10,000 garments … ”
He glanced at the gold-leafed, painted sliding door that showed a moon cut in wavy half by a hard edged cloud above a hushed world of pale-hinted, moonlit mountains and a mysterious river gleaming away into forest darkness…
He sighed, within himself. Wished he could have discussed this with Osan. He’d met her at the same formal function as the romantic Scot except he didn’t follow her out into the overcast night when he saw her slip away from the gathering.
Lord Izu had requested he come there to Hideo’s city stronghold to study and attempt a “Western” portrait of the dead girl. He considered Izu a good Prince (in the Machiavellian sense) and his balanced and regular features seemed to confirm this.
He’d asked if he were supposed to be a spy. Bland-faced, quiet Izu hadn’t quite smiled, looking up from his tea in the warmly-lit reception room, saying:
“Gen-tile-san, could I ask a guest from another land to perform the unworthy work of a base ninja?”
He’d taken the point, realizing that these shadowy men were used the way Italian Dukes used assassins: with great respect and subtle contempt.
Nine
On the Road to the Monastery
Colin, uMubaya and Nori the samurai walked in loose single file. On one side the hill fell away into a lush valley where blue-bright fragments of a wide, shallow river, was intercut by dense trees. Rice fields were visible, further along.
“What a beautiful land,” uMubaya commented in his fairly good Japanese, removing his nonsensical headpiece for a while.
“Do you not miss your home?” Nori wondered. “I cannot imagine living so far from my people.”
The Zulu shrugged.
“Much depends on the people,” he returned, looking at the deep green, forested hills in the distance and wondering what wildlife might be found there. No lions, he was certain. Smiled faintly.
“What depends?” Nori asked on.
“I have two uncles and several cousins I miss no more than fly-bites,” uMubaya told him.
“I see your point, black man.”
“And there is so much to know and see.” Glanced back at Colin who was brooding along, remote, inward, miserable. “Where are we going, in the end?”
“These fighting monks may assist us. The Yamabushi. They are Buddhi
st and thus enemies of Nobunaga and Hideo.”
“Buddhist? What is that?”
“A religion of peace and inner harmony.”
“Yet they are great warriors?”
“Yes. Very skilled.’
“A religion of peace?”
“There is emptiness and tranquility in the center of violence as in the heart of a great storm.”
“I saw none in the storm that cast us here.”
“It is like meditation: while you strike and defend you are still within.”
“Medit … ?” An unfamiliar word.
“When you empty your mind of thoughts and actions, peace may enter.”
“Where do the thoughts go?”
Nori shook his head.
“Ask the moonlight where it goes at dawn,” he said.
uMubaya pondered this and shrugged.
“One of my uncles is said to have an empty mind,” he commented. “It seems no advantage.”
uMubaya was startled as they came around a bend. Nori had just picked a few red berries from one of the bushes that lined both sides of the road. The Zulu had just followed suit, then looked up and saw two feet hanging in the air above his stooped head. Dirty feet with dark streaks that went suddenly red when a stray lance of sunlight penetrated the overhanging branches.
The man belonging to the feet was stiffly dead, contorted against the dark, leafy, sun-flecked background where he hung, swollen face down-tilted, the arms bound lengthwise to a thick branch, nails driven through the palms, too, in incomplete crucifixion, the unbound legs swinging free. A dark bird like a crow was pecking at the distorted face that was now partly lit by another sunbeam. The Zulu noted a flicker of flies around the body.
“A criminal,” said Nori, indifferent, picking more red berries. “Always severe punishment for brigands.” Shrugged. “Near big towns there are whole fields of these.”
“Spoils the view,” said uMubaya.
“Is there no punishment in your country?”
“The views are not as good.”
For a moment he remembered himself on the way to his near fatal lion hunt with the tall, graceful Mer’ce, passing through what amounted to a Zulu suburb of the main ikhanda: a circle of about 1000 huts, fenced-in, inclosing acres of open land where married men settled with their families. They crossed a high ridge that overlooked the softly rolling hills and fields, clumps of almost olive-green, twisted trees, the little semi-circles of the pale, mushroom-like huts scattered over miles of free land…
That was a good view, he reflected. Strange how memory does not come back the way it first was formed, in steps… it comes back, here and there, so that 100 months ago might have been yesterday…
“Why did you leave your country?” Nori asked. “To flee shames?”
“Not so,” uMubaya returned, shrugging. “I was tired of… of what was expected of me. Maybe. Doing sex, eating, sometimes hunting… talking about small doings every day … ” Shrugged and frowned. “Men smiling when they envied and sought favor… quarrels over small things like who harvested from another’s field or took a cow or … ” Shrugged. “Waiting for war… dancing was good. Drinking and smoking magical herbs and dancing … ”
“Dancing?” Nori considered that. “War and hunting and sex. Not so bad.”
“Dancing was best. I would feel… hard to explain.”
Around a bend screened by short, fat pines and thick bushes a welter of streaked, shattered light and shadow and rich sweet green and earth; then a sudden blast of sound that jarred uMubaya, startled Colin out of his inward reflections and brought a grin to Nori’s normally set face.
A short, bow-legged man in black, baggy clothes with hair, the Zulu thought, like wind-blown underbrush, beating a wooden bell with a short stick while wailing something between a chant and cries of mortal pain in a rasping, metallic voice while a young, round-faced, slightly pop-eyed, ample young woman in (he didn’t know yet) a Buddhist nun’s habit swayed and shrieked in chorus. The din shattered the drowsy day’s hot, heavy stillness. The monk’s face was blank as an actor’s mask.
As they walked the pair kept pace. Nori kept guffawing, holding his hand to his mouth.
“Quiet!” cried Colin. The volume increased.
“Are they possessed by spirits?” uMubaya wondered.
“Ah ha,” said Nori, extracting a few mon from his purse. “A mountain monk and his bikuni.”
“Eh?”
“A nun.”
As she swayed, bent and shouted her ample breasts popped free from her loose kimono and lopped and swung which got even Colin’s melancholy attention.
“What is she saying?” he asked in Spanish.
“She is like the women of the Spanish priests,” Nori said. “As I have seen.”
She made no attempt to cover herself. Moved closer to the Scot. They kept shrieking and banging.
“Better give her something,” advised Nori. “Else they will keep following and praying for us.”
“One of the monks we seek?” asked uMubaya.
“No. Independent mountain man. Give her enough and you can take her to the bushes.”
After the next bend the road ran through a cluster of huts and then straight up the hill towards the temple whose fluted red tile roof showed through the heavy haze and dense trees. The religious pair had fallen back with their coins.
“These are good,” uMubaya said, offering a handful of berries to Colin.
Colin took them, put one, idly, into his mouth, then let the rest dribble from his hand into the whitish dust. uMubaya was readjusting his head covering. Stocky Nori was marching ahead, wide-legged.
They look like drops of blood, Colin thought, looking at the berries that had clumped and scattered. He crushed some underfoot and paused to note the effect. This country swims in it… Shut his eyes, seeing her body, again. Her blood had spattered on the sandy pebbles where she’d lain, headless in the wet, gathering light.
“I long for a fight,” he murmured, moving on in the heavy heat.
Ten
Takezo was tired of limping and now strode, evenly, back towards Miou’s. He tugged the stuffing loose from his midsection and tossed it aside.
That servant girl at Hideo’s, he kept mulling over. A spy? For who? Why?...
By the time he got there the sun was at noon and pounded the landscape into a blurry haze. Sweat streaked his face. He went up the bright white stone path to the porch and door.
Inside it was dim and cool. Miou wasn’t in her room. He began discarding his disguise, then knelt by the futon and looked underneath: found an 8 inch, steel hairpin with a big black stone bead on the end. Frowned and held it to the light. No blood; clean and bright and sharp. Easy to grip and stab with.
What am I thinking? He asked himself, putting it back. Obviously she kept it for self-defense against a client gone violent. He’d heard such things were used by lady assassins and transvestite entertainers. Shook his head at himself. Miou’s best weapon is in her mouth…
Back in his usual semi-slovenly yet clean clothes, he went and sat in the shade of the porch and stared out at the sun-struck garden.
That ring, Chinese or whatever, might be Osan’s but… He arrived at no conclusion. The mother’s actions were strange… Now, I have to locate the foreigners…
Except he didn’t feel like locating anything. Thought about the hairpin.
What am I thinking? Shook his head. Miou crept out in the few moments I was around in back and killed a ninja with a single thrust and hid his corpse? Or he came in and she slew him there, then dragged him out? Rubbed his eyes and sighed. This makes my head hurt… Odd that it seemed he was killed by a weapon like that, though. Tried to imagine it. Puffed out his cheeks and blew empty air at nothing. Nonsense… Am I blind as well as dull?
Wiggled his toes in the sunlight where his feet were out past the shadow of the overhang. Sort of pondered them. He had no better ideas, at the moment. Kept considering what he was going to do with the
rest of his life.
While he was so usefully employed he heard sloppy footsteps coming around the side of the building. It was very quiet – he could hear a couple of faint voices inside, the tinkle of maybe cups or bowls being washed… The heat was draining… the humidity was dense and lay like a torpid blanket over the world…
I don’t feel like going to find them, he thought. I just feel like… what? Like… Not a drink. No drinking until something was accomplished. That leaves it open, Miou would say… where is she, now? Maybe at House Sanjuro? She usually didn’t like him to show up there. Not unreasonable. What do I do about her? They marry rich men if at all… She’d told him little about her life in the six months they’d been intimate. He assumed she came from a country family though her accent and manners didn’t betray it. He believed she cared for him.
A shadow cut across his reverie. A small, unpleasant shadow contorting as the little man bowed repeatedly.
“You,” said Takezo, laconically, “it’s too hot to beat you.”
“Master Jiro,” said furtive Yazu, the petty thief and informer, who always made the ronin feel he should only be encountered in darkness or badly-lit inns. Takezo had once caught him stealing a purse and, in his sometimes random sympathy, covered for him, returned the item and won an informer and sometimes reliable friend. He had on a bamboo hat and slightly soiled off-white tunic.
“It’s cool in the shade,” Takezo reflected. “Maybe I’ll beat you there.”
“No cause, mighty one,” said Yazu, starting another series of bows. “No cause. I have –”
“The new comb?”
“That rascal still eludes me.”
“You won’t elude me.”
“Something was overheard … ”
“Don’t pause for reward. Your reward is your skin.”
“I seek nothing for myself,” sinking into a semi-kneeling position. “Yet I had to pay a certain fellow for this knowledge.”
“Good. Deduct it from your debt. Now speak.”
The samurai finally looked up at him. Yazu was fairly sure he was in no real danger. Some said Takezo was soft.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 7
