“My Lady, I … ”
“Shhh,” she said motioning, then just touching his hand without having to change position. “There is no danger.”
“But… my lady … ”
“If I am your lady, I hope you find me desirable.”
Her hands were very warm and firm and surprisingly strong and, as her long fingers caressed his forearm, his blood felt thick and thinking availed him little, as Takezo might have said, in Mongol paraphrase…
Why? Was the only thought he really had and didn’t voice it. He may have said other things but there was no memory, later… not of words…
Sixteen
Yoshi’s Promotion
Rubbing the welted scar on his nose thoughtfully, Yoshi looked across the floor table at Chamberlain Reiko and indirectly at Captain Mori. They were outside on the polished cherrywood terrace, overhung and surrounded on three sides by dense five and six foot tall flower bushes, dripping with dark blossoms that, fallen, sagged into sourishsweet decay.
Sunset, shadows deepening as coagulate deep red seemed to actually spill over the leafy tops and drip through the broken spaces among the flowers so that the three of them were touched here and there by what might have seemed liquid spatters of blackening ruby.
Reiko nodded his head, almost imperceptibly. Mori was talking.
“It seems disloyal,” he was just saying. “Troubling.”
“A calm mind is desirable,” responded Reiko. “Great things are developing. The fate of our people is at stake.”
“Perhaps so,” said the trusty captain. “But to betray one’s lord is still treason.”
“After success there is no treason. Many silk threads must be twisted together to make a fine garment.”
“Are we tailors?” the captain wondered. “I have given my oath.” He nodded, once, hard. “Twisting can make a knot no one can untie, I fear.”
A dark stain of almost black red glow creased across the retainer’s face as if it had leaked there from his skull. Yoshi just looked at him, waiting. The Chamberlain sighed and shut his eyes, as if meditating.
“You are brave and loyal, captain,” he said, almost sadly.
“Why do you take this course, Lord Chamberlain?” asked Mori.
“For the sake of all,” he murmured. Opened his eyes but looked at nothing.
The red had virtually melted away into the colorless shadows of twilight. The men were blurs.
“Whom do you serve, Yoshi?” Mori wanted to know.
“Greatness,” was the response.
“Is not Hideo lord of all three here?”
“Silence,” said Reiko. “It is dark enough, now.”
Mori was already moving, twisting, left hand gripping his sheath (set beside him flat, as all were) as the right crossed over to draw, Yoshi already striking down from across the table and, like a cobra, Reiko’s right hand locked over the captain’s left wrist, turning the sword to delay the draw and hold him in place long enough for the arc of the clean, fast death blow that cleaved him neatly on a slight diagonal through his forehead and across his face, dividing him into two separate points of view, in a sense, blood and brainmatter misting over Reiko’s cheek and catching one eye so he had to blink and wipe at it.
The body fell backward off the porch into the pool of shadows under the bushes. Yoshi grunted and sheathed his blade after wiping it clean with a napkin. The red in the leaves had gone black.
“Thanks to that drunkard, Captain Bitchumokami Yoshi,” Reiko said, addressing him by his new title, “Izu will never kill himself and will be forced into war with Hideo.”
“Yes. Takezo served his purpose. Now … ”
The two shadows sat there in the odor of blood and overripe flowers. The slain man was emitting a slight, sighing whistle as his lungs labored erratically.
“There is still the foreign ring, captain. Then the fool’s head can feed the pigs.”
Seventeen
Two days later the little party of fugitives, three monks and Jiro Takezo, the only one on horseback, were fairly close to the coast. On their left, to the north, medium-sized mountains half lost in mist, walled off the fairly flat valley area they were passing through where vision was limited by stands of bamboo, heavy brush and clumps of oak trees. To the right were lower hills and dense forest of maple and spruce. The afternoon was gray with whitish-streaked clouds with occasional, sudden bursts of light rain doing no more than puckering the road dust, bringing no relief for the steamy heat that left the sweat beading on their bodies.
Takezo kept wiping his face and swigging water from one of the jugs the monks had strapped behind his saddle. He was glad there was no direct sun. Colin was the most miserable, being the least used to extreme, humid heat. It added a dazed quality to his brooding melancholy.
The ronin detective kept thinking about Miou. The problem of the ninja in her room who’d mysteriously been killed outside kept irritating his reason: something was wrong about it; she should have been more afraid; had she been hiding something under the futon? Whatever it was, when he’d looked later there was nothing… just the long hairpin…
I have that feeling and when I have that feeling I should act, he thought, as when you think “better move that scarf” in a public place and don’t and somebody takes it… I think she’s in danger, too… involved in something…
The road bent sharply through a misty, semi-swampy stretch of ponds and reeds and there was, suddenly, a low, flat, rail-less wooden bridge over a wide sluggish stream with a sign beside.
“What does that say?” uMubaya asked Nori.
“Village of Ota ahead,” was the reply. “I can read pretty well.”
uMubaya was thinking about women. It had been too long. He ached for the scent and heat of passion, the deep, thick need…
Takezo was still on the topic of Miou; and then it came clear, like a cold hand gripping his insides: she’d killed the ninja. She knew him. She was able to take him off-guard.
Am I mad? He wondered. Could she… even off-guard, a warrior could disarm a woman, even in surprise… unless… impossible…
Unless she were trained. Obvious. Or if he were in the heat of sexual passion. Worse… But there’d been no time for that…
Female ninja were generally recruited from the poorer classes. They were used to target men for information or to set them up for assassination. She was no samurai wife or child trained from birth in weapons (like the naginata favored by uMubaya) women like the legendary Kesa Gozen who, in battle on horseback, cut off the opposing clan lord’s head and brought it back to her husband.
But she could have killed me anytime she pleased… but could she have killed him and made love to me?
“Strange,” he murmured,
“What?” wondered uMubaya who was walking beside the pony.
A few drops of warm rain spit softly over them as they were just entering the village. Takezo spotted a typical lower-caste inn where a couple of old men were sitting on rice barrels and probably scratching for lice.
Rice and sake wouldn’t be too bad, he thought. I’ve abstained enough…
“Time to eat and drink,” he said, in general, gesturing at the tavern. Then to uMubaya: “What do they drink where you come from?”
The Zulu prince grinned unseen beneath his bizarre head covering.
“Water,” he answered, “when we are thirsty.”
“Water gives me a thirst,” the ronin said back, dismounting, heading for the inn door. “Best for washing.”
“There are different drinks for different thirsts,” the prince said, following him as they all did. He was weary of wearing the mad basket on his head, but amused trying to imagine what that Masi princess would say if she could see him now.
Maybe ‘improves your looks, Zulu’… ‘never remove it and I will marry you’…
“Sit in the shadows,” recommended Nori. “We will say you are from the islands of the Ainu and that you are a dark one. Who would be certain?”
“Sit in the shadows,” Takezo took up, good-naturedly, “and, unless you smile, who could detect you?”
uMubaya chuckled and was glad to be free of it for the time being. Nori looked thoughtfully at Takezo.
“Why do you want to help us?” he wondered.
“I was hired to find you,” the ronin said, with a shrug. “No more. I’m not sure I’m helping you, anyway. I’m not so popular. People keep trying to kill me.”
Nori grunted and nodded. They stood near the entrance.
“To find?” Colin asked.
“Yes,” Takezo said, nodding and tilting his head to one side. “In any case, did you kill the girl?”
“I am Child of the Cat,” Colin said coldly, in Gaelic. “We do not kill women.”
“Eh?” wondered uMubaya, in Spanish. “What words are these?”
“The good tongue,” he went on in Spanish. “My clan kills no women. Children of the Cat.”
uMubaya liked that.
“We have a group,” he said, “called the ‘Lion Men.”
“What do they do?” wondered Colin. “Is not the lion a huge cat?”
“Yes. You have to kill a lion after letting it almost eat you. You do this in front of a woman who laughs.”
“Are there many members of this group?” Takezo wanted to know.
“Just one, at present.”
“Surprising there aren’t less,” the ronin commented.
The Zulu was staring into the dull, still, oppressive afternoon where wisps of fog softly curdled on the breeze, blowing in gently from the swampy area just outside the village. Of course, he was thinking about her, again:
Heading north together into the dusk to lion country. Across the rolling, high-grass plains the moon rose immense, red and full just over the sparse treeline. He was looking for a good spot to build a fire and shelter for the night.
Her long, perfectly shaped feet were noiseless on the loamy turf as if she floated rather than walked through the pooling twilight. She undid her head covering and slung it around her shoulders. He carried the pack of blankets, dried meat and water jugs.
“What kind of hunter,” she’d remarked, deadpan and not-quite-scathing, “brings meat to the hunt?”
“I am not seeking food, woman.”
“True. You are seeking death.”
“We will see.”
“I will enjoy it.”
Now, on the crest of a steep slope under a cluster of wind-twisted trees they sat down with their backs to a big trunk. The soft light was dimming into deep ruby in a world of shadows and hints… cries and distant chittering, insect sounds, screeches and faint yippings as nocturnal creatures began to stir.
Against the dying light her face was a dark, rich gleaming as if her features were being seen under deep, still water and her eyes caught the last color before all was night…
“You,” he’d said, voice a little husky. “I want you.” Put a hand, without intending to, on her bare, sleek shoulder and felt his heart quicken and desire thicken.
She didn’t even bother not to move. Scratched an itch on the side of one knee; then began rubbing her feet as if he weren’t there.
“I am in your power,” she said.
“Are you?” Began stroking across her smooth, muscled shoulder then withdrew his hand. “I don’t think so. It is I who am in yours.”
“You are something different,” she allowed, working on her feet.
Now there was only the moonlight as the disk cleared the low hills.
“I am a man, whatever you think. I will kill this lion and return you to your people, if that is your wish.”
“Maybe they will kill you, if the beast does not. I can never be given to you.”
“We will see.”
She was now rummaging in the packbag.
“I am hungry,” she said. “Let us eat. I think you will need your strength for the lion. If you manage to find one.”
He looked at the moon that seemed, he felt, to gather a strange stillness into itself above the sounds, passions and hungers of the world. She gave him some meat and the waterjug. His roundish face was softly half-lit by the gentle light.
“Say what you like, woman,” he told her, “I am content here, in your company.”
Eighteen
At Izu’s near Edo
Gentile was back at Izu’s stronghold on the coast south of the city. He and Izu sat on folding stools by the beach at sunrise watching a duel with wooden swords. A newcomer was being tested for possible service with the clan.
The aspirant was young, stocky and strong. His opponent was wide and middle-aged, a first-rate martial arts instructor who fought stripped to the waist in breeches while the other wore a bright red kimono. Both were barefoot in the sand.
The Italian could see, already, there was a relationship between the style and line of the samurai masters and the artists. That was new. The dueling positions had a strange beauty; the fighters were more like dancers than the swordsmen of Europe. A dance of violence, beauty and death.
His eyes kept straying to the sheet of Edo bay, barely ruffled out to the horizon haze… His mind kept straying to Lady Issa.
‘Why not indulge an appetite?’ she said, he remembered. ‘Whom does it injure?’ A point. Maybe me, if her husband… of course, they’re not like Italians… customs vary and I don’t know enough to truly judge… He smiled, faintly, remembering. It felt very good… very sweet… yet, I was certainly being used… not such a bad way to be used…
The wooden swords of the duelists clacked as they made a pass at one another, up to their ankles in the low surf. The onlookers nodded and made quiet, approving comments. Izu said nothing. Then he turned to Gentile:
“Well?”
Then looked back at the sparring pair. The bright sea behind the shimmering horizon made them dark blurs like shadow puppets, in mechanical irrelevance, half-eaten by the light… Gentile vaguely thought these things, mind still distracted by images of Lady Issa, her golden, sleek body moving gracefully over him, amazed by the incredible cleanness of her flesh, the sweet, perfumed and subtle scent of her genitals rubbed softly and maddeningly over his face…
She was going to be part of the painting, too, he realized. They’d brought him a huge wooden screen the size of a wall with the surface treated red, as he’d requested. He’d already begun a light ink sketch of the developing composition. It wasn’t going to be very Japanese in style, he realized.
“Ah… well … ” He started to say nothing.
Izu, watched his man catch the newcomers wrists with an upcut. The thwack made the audience wince as the young man dropped his sword.
“Well struck.”
To Gentile’s unfocused sight the half-melted fighting blurs had simply coalesced and separated. Wondered if that was how the gods (or angels) saw men: blurs hard to tell apart whose actions were violent and obscure. That was part of the picture, too. Thought about the fast-drying ink water colors they’d provided and decided he’d work fast over the sketches as with fresco.
“Your report,” Izu asked. “What did you learn at Hideo’s?”
“Ah… I sensed… deception there.”
Izu liked that. Slightly creased his calm, bland, affable features with a smile.
“Amazing,” he chuckled. “Well, how did you find the Lady Issa?”
“Ah… her child died horribly, yet … ”
“She has a heart as cold as a snake?”
“I would not say that, Lord, I –”
“Would you say her heart is warm?”
“She made me… somewhat uneasy … ”
“She is willful and takes her pleasure as pleases her. She is cruel in love but also generous. Like the tragic lady Ono no Komachi who became a nun because of her cruelty to her lovers.” He chuckled. “Do your women not indulge themselves when it is possible?”
Gentile nodded and smiled.
“Yes, lord. They do, indeed. Many of them. But men are far worse.”
&nbs
p; “So women tell us. I need to know if I must fight or apologize with my life.”
“You say it so lightly.”
“I do not. Even knowing with the mind that life is a bubble, even then the heart does not rush to embrace the dark road. It is easy to say life is nothing when one feels death is far away. Or in old age when the body is a torment and the mind like smoke.”
“Yes.”
That would be there, too: the trapped samurai in the lower left corner (he saw it) his white robe a stain on the smoke that roiled from the burning earth in a landscape of flaming villages where steel-masked, mounted warriors fired arrows into fleeing villagers… as he drove the blade into his own belly his eyes would be turned to the viewer as if he saw the woman he loved… yes…
The screen has three parts, he thought. A triptych…
“When Prince Otsu was awaiting his execution in the morning, he wrote: ‘There are no inns on the road to the grave – Whose is the house I go to tonight?’” The bland, oval face turned back to him, briefly, the eyes slit against the rising sun and mirroring water.
“Beautifully put.”
Izu looked up to greet the approaching combatants.
“Yet, would he not have died as well in silence?”
“Ah, true too.”
“How sorely did the lady grieve for her poor daughter?”
“Hard to say, sir.” The Italian downtilted his long face and stared at the sand and tufts of swordgrass. “I think something is being concealed.”
“Learn more. I need just enough doubt to let me fight back. Talk to Takezo, the spy. Tell him I need a grain of sand to tip the scales.”
“Where is this man?”
“He’ll find you if you look for him.” The swordsmen were close, their long shadows almost reaching the clan lord and Gentile. “Improve your skill,” Izu advised the injured one. “Then come back when you can defeat my monkey.”
Everyone laughed at the reference to the famous sword teacher who’d had an aspirant face his monkey who’d been watching training for years. The student was defeated.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 10
