Four drenched men stood with a two pole palanquin that rested on the muddy street near the walkway. He was almost past it when he noticed the door was standing open: maybe the armed men in semi-concealment around the street were there to protect the occupant who might have something to with this aborted ambush.
He paused to peer in. Why not be rude? The worst they’d do is attack him and everybody kept doing that, anyway. It’s was normal to try and kill Takezo.
I should wear armor to bed, he considered. Not a bad idea…
Two samurai came around from the far side of the vehicle and watched him. They had on yellow rubber raincoats which he envied – not that it would have mattered at this point. They didn’t draw. Just stood there in the running mud.
“People who don’t want to kill me,” he commented.
“Get inside, please” one of them said.
It was dark inside. No movement.
“Why not?” he responded.
In a field of stones, he thought, dung is a soft bed…
He felt no threat, so he got in and instead of wet mud smell there was perfume and a soft, female chuckle – not a giggle, he noted. The door was shut behind him and they started away. The rain was a steady drumming on the top.
“Waiting for me?” he wondered.
“How arrogant,” the woman said.
The fading lightning flashes, screened through the lattice windows, showed her vague outline and pale silks.
“Are you kidnapping me?” he wondered, leaning back on the surprisingly soft pillows, trying to adjust his soaked clothing.
“Giving you a ride. Where do you want to go?”
“Fourth district.” That was where both Sanjuro House and Miou’s quarters were. “To whom am I so grateful?”
“Don’t recognize me?” He heard a rustle of silks as she knelt closer. The perfume was a little cloying but, clearly, high quality. A soft hand touched his knee and stayed there. “You’re so wet.”
“Strange how it happened. With little warning, moisture fell from the heavens.” He knew her now.
“And you, great warrior, were unprepared.” She moved the material and gripped his bare knee. “Here.” Handed him a towel cloth which he, gratefully, wiped over his face, neck and chest, and handed back to her. “I don’t want it. Do your legs and feet.”
“You’re closer,” he suggested.
“Do I seem a bath attendant?” she asked, tossing it hard over his face.
“No,” he laughed. “You’re Issa, the great lady. I let no one of lesser rank towel me.”
She liked that.
“You will, generally, stay damp, Takezo,” she told him, chuckling again, her hand back on his knee. That kept his attention. “In any case, I took you out of danger.”
“Because you love and admire me. How did I miss that in the past? I had a silly notion you sought my life.”
“Men are fools. And you are all man.” She leaned over his lap, now, and opened his kimono, softly fingering his chest muscles. “I wish to help you.”
“Why so generous?”
He just sat there, waiting for her to whip out a blade or maybe her nails were tipped with poison. He knew she was the real thing, a samurai woman equal to almost any man in combat. In Europe this would be improbable but in Japan, the refinement of martial arts and variety of weapons made speed and timing paramount.
“For selfish reasons,” she answered, whispering, leaning in and gently nibbling at one of his exposed nipples.
“Is the ring this important?” he wondered, enjoying the softly sucking lips, the sweetly heated aura of her nearness, the scent less intense now.
“Take-san,” she laughed, softly, “who can deceive you?”
“Any woman,” he replied. It’s not just the ring, his mind concluded, from somewhat far away as his consciousness concentrated into his body. She’s worried… “What do you really want? Were you at the play?”
“No.” She moved her hands down his torso and bit his lower lip, melding their breaths. “I think you are correct about my daughter,” she whispered into his ear which brought an involuntary sigh and a more involuntary thickening stir in his groin. “I want your help. I will reward you.”
“So you don’t want the ring?”
“Unimportant. Something else.”
She bit his ear, this time and he groaned.
“I’m a plaything,” he whispered. That amused her, too. “You want this toy fool?”
She pulled her face a little back, saying:
“I have you already,” she pointed out, one long-fingered, certain hand making sure down there. She was right, he accepted. He could see the glint of her penetrating, detached eyes in the fading, wavering glow of receding lightning, the thunder booms rolling lower, blurring together. “I want you to find my child.”
Her hand kept him prisoner. Why not? It was all madness. For all he knew, even Miou was in this expanding net of shadows and intrigue. The next soft set of flashes showed her smiling and adjusting her hair in strobic fragments.
“Ah,” he semi-sighed, cynical.
“I knew the body was not hers,” she said, still drawn back like, he thought, a confronted viper. “If she lives. You must keep investigating.”
“You are telling the flying bird to flap his wings,” he said.
“Report to me, first.”
“Ah.” Just a sigh, this time, because her mouth encompassed him and it might as well have been Miou, so far as talent went. And it went a long way. “I’m… ahh… being paid, I… ahhhh …”
“Double, my sweet, wet, irritating, warrior,” she murmured, then stopped her words with his craving, agonized, burning, helpless, hopeless flesh…
“My sweet enemy,” he murmured, closing his eyes, pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a dagger – yet.
The rain suddenly picked up but just spilled straight down, hitting as if to flatten the world.
“Ally,” she said, around him.
“You don’t have to do this… ahhh… I… I’d take just money …”
“I’m not doing this for you,” she broke contact long enough to say with a strangely almost painful sigh as her hands gripped and roved over him as if about to claw for blood at any moment.
And then there was only the rain and the slight swaying as the bearers chugged on through the mud and he felt a bubble of ecstasy stir deep within him, starting for the surface…
*
At some point he dozed off…
Woke up, sweating, in silence, blinking at the brightness where the morning light streaked in around the blinds, painful and unwavering. He was alone and still in the palanquin. Since he hadn’t been drinking things came together quickly.
He yawned and stretched and half-crawled out of the cab stiff from awkward sleeping. He decided his mouth tasted like unwashed socks. He spat and rubbed his eyes, looking at the shallow hillside where he’d been left.
Important not to think about last night, yet, he told himself. Get a bath and eat and… see Miou…
Something swayed, heavily, in the pocket of his robe and he didn’t have to actually check to know it was a purse of coins. He’d been bought or sold or whatever again…
His eyes hurt from broken sleep. The air was pleasant, almost cool. The streets were dry except for standing puddles here and there. The rising sun was behind a line of fleecy, grayish clouds. He recognized the district and knew he wouldn’t have far to walk.
He was taking a strange pleasure in wanting a drink and saying no. Smiled and shook his head like a waking dog. There was low morning mist softly flowing everywhere, folding and unfolding down the slope where the steel gray river Oi seemed to coldly smolder.
Twenty-Six
Naked but for their loincloths, the pair of tattooed coolies who belonged to the kaga were sleeping in a heap as if, he reflected, they’d been discarded like the empty sake jugs beside them. They were in the shade of a flowering bush where bees and small white butterflies were working the
blossoms.
The morning air wasn’t even cool, he noted. It felt as if the heat was stored in the earth the way it was in hearthstones after the fire went out.
He opened the small sack and saw gold ryo, again; estimated at least 20.
Shook his head and scratched his neck. Amazing generosity. He had enough, now, to take a few years off if he lived carefully. Get Miou and go to some distant province and forget this gathering intrigue – except he knew he couldn’t because he’d be a plain thief, then. Either steal like a lord or be honest and keep your word…
There was a note:
“Takezo,” it said, “there will be more when you expose the truth.”
Didn’t use her name, he thought. Someone else probably wrote it, as well… Considered things, as he started walking down the easy slope. The clue is Mora village and those gangsters and the “empty” inn…
He could always give the money back, too. Snorted. Improbable. Rolled his shoulders under his grayblack kimono. Wondered how often Issa liked to risk adultery. Obviously, she discounted any serious risk of paying the price.
As he crossed the street to House Sanjuro, the sun was higher and filtered by the heavy heat-haze. Still very humid; sweat beaded. He wanted a bath and to shave and pluck his scraggly beginnings of a beard.
He kept thinking about going north to the mountains he remembered from childhood. Crossed the garden, the brightness in his face, now.
Used to like summer, he thought.
Pictured the mountain forests, the cool nights and mellow days; waterfalls that creased and sparkled down sheer slopes into pools of mists… wildflowers, rich green, dense spruce and pine… clear, pure lakes shattering sunlight or awash with moonsilver…
Maybe I can send her ahead, finish my work… collect the rest of my pay… no more poetry for a while, just taking with ten hands…
The Issa business already seemed like a dream – except for the weight of the gold in his robe. The sex, he reflected, had about as much significance as a prostitute’s caresses in a public bath. The bath part he was now really craving…
She has a sense of humor, though, he thought, grinning, remembering.
The gardener was kneeling near the front steps, trimming a bush of deep red blossoms with almost jet black centers. The big namesake camellia trees lined the front and side walls of the corner lot.
The man’s face was sweaty under a loosely knotted bandanna. He wore a trowel and various short, hooked-bladed cutting tools looped to the rope that secured his tunic. He nodded hello to the ronin who knew him and nodded back.
“Hot day,” the man said, meaninglessly.
“Didn’t notice,” responded Takezo, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
The fellow grinned, brightly.
“Think she’s inside, sir,” he told him.
Takezo grunted and nodded and went up the steps into the relative coolness of the covered porch. Kicked off his sandals and gave his feet a perfunctory rinse. Passed a woman with a bundle of clean laundry on her head as he went into the dim corridor.
She was getting ready to go out. He stood in the already open sliding doorway and watched her in silence for a minute, kneeling at a bench-like table, tilting the mirror she’d been looking in so she could just see his reflection.
So alert, he thought. There was still that to get into. Maybe as good a moment as any since time insists on moving straight ahead, today… As opposed to last night sealed in the palanquin, sunk in softness and perfume. Or when I’m drunk or fighting or… time has many speeds, that’s well known… it races for the condemned man which worries me because I feel like it’s racing right now…
She cocked her head gracefully, without turning. Put down the mirror. Her underslip, was of the sheerest green silk. Still, on her knees there, she shrugged into an orchid-colored robe (almost as sheer) with immense, floppy sleeves.
He wanted to kiss her perfectly shaped, rounded and even toes where her feet pressed together. Like baby feet, he observed.
“How beautiful you are,” he said.
Still not turning, she wondered:
“Did you sleep in the flowerbushes, last night? Or a house of whores?”
“I wasn’t drinking,” he replied.
“Was that my question?” She wrinkled her nose. “I can smell you from here. Were you disguised as a woman of the district?”
“I need a bath. I –” This exchange wasn’t going to matter, he sensed, because she was worried about something else… was it him, as he hoped… or other business… ”I have to finish the job,” he said.
“I still think you should forget it, Takezo. Let the dead girl lie in peace.”
“I still can’t even prove she is dead.”
She turned now, looked at him. She was beautiful. He was addicted.
“Osan,” she said quietly. “An ill name, I think.”
Osan and Moemon had been forbidden lovers of an earlier century and their romantic and tragic story was well-known. A kind of Japanese Paolo and Francesca, as Gentile had noted in his readings, they were eventually executed for betrayal.
There was the poem feeling, for a moment, and he stood there, abstracted, close to tears for an inexplicable sorrow and longing: a feeling as if they were already lost, dead, buried for 100 years, none left to even remember they’d passed this way, nothing more than the mark left in sand by a rill of water tossed from a broken wave running back into the sea…
“The moon floats on the passing stream,” he said. “Teardrops of a god.”
She sighed.
“Here you are again, Zo-san,” she said.
“Do you wish me to be here?”
“The dew on the morning glory,” she softly uttered, “is gone as if looking melted it.”
He knelt and took her in his arms.
“What you smell was part of my disguise, last night,” he lied like truth. “I want to go away with you. I love you, in fact.”
She looked fiercely at him from inches away.
“I pretend, every night, to be shy and bending like a lily in the wind,” she said. “That’s a disguise.”
“I know.” Kissed her ear and whispered: “You were well-trained, I think. You are also talented.”
She understood.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“I don’t care who trained you. But am I a client, a target, a fool, or the one you care for?”
“Ah.” She buzzed his neck with her lips. “The fool I care for.”
“Love blurs the mind more than drink. You tried to warn me.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t care. I want to go away with you. I don’t care about anything. Just you.”
“You know what I am?”
“I’m supposed to be a good spy. People pay me to find things out.” He kissed her ear and cheek, adrift in her sweet scent. “You killed the ninja. Was he here for me?”
“No. For me, I think.” She leaned back and away. “I’m not certain. They expect you to stir things up to their advantage. They don’t want you dead, yet. But I’m not certain.”
He sat down on the floor, looking past her at the hanging scroll between the windows depicting a snowstorm, bamboo and trees bending wildly, two people in wide, conical hats struggling through deep drifts. He shook his head and smiled.
“You were spying on me,” he said. “Who knows what else.”
“You should leave the city. Give it all up. In the end, you’ll be killed.”
“You too. Look, Miou, I have no cause to die for pointlessly. Neither do you.”
“You have enemies. You should leave.”
“Enemies? I thought everyone was so fond of me.”
She went into his arms.
“Some are,” she said.
“You think I’m a heinan,” he murmured, holding her. Now he noticed how supplely strong she was under her smooth, soft grace.
He looked out the long window. Across the porch he could just see the tops of tall sunflowers swaying, s
lightly in the droning, late-morning heat. The thick air was rich with scents. He heard the gardener chopping at something with a hand ax.
“You’re not an outcast. You’re a true samurai.”
“Samurai means ‘to serve.’”
“You do,” she said, kissing him with simple tenderness.
“I won’t serve them. I still know too much and too little,” he reflected.
“No. Too much. I think we’re frogs hopping in the path of elephants.” She sighed. “I have to go.”
“Elephants have soft bellies,” he said with a cold near-snarl, staring at the bright window. “I won’t serve them. Not really. I won’t take pride in not thinking or knowing anything but how to grovel and cut.”
She held him softly closer.
“Yes,” she sighed. “I know that. I love you, Ezo. I have to go.”
“Meet a man?” He didn’t even pull back, saying it.
“Yes. Business.”
“I have business, too.”
What had Osan written? He’d read something, once. She wasn’t a poet, in his view, but her mind was a surprise: “The samurai becomes unfeeling when he is merely a slave who does the crimes he is ordered to do. Would they not slay the Maitraya Buddha if he comes again to this world in the flesh?”
Small wonder her voice has been stilled, he thought. One reason, anyway… I know too much and too little and I love this sweet spy who takes my breath away and might, indeed, take my breath away, say what she will… who can guard his heart except a man of stone?
She gently withdrew all the silk, softness and perfume from his arms and knelt back.
“I love you,” she told him. “I want you to live.”
“Which murderer do you work for?”
“No one, now,” she said. Behind her was another scroll painting, in pink and palest blue, of cherry blossoms raining down from a branch in a gust of wind. “I want you to live.”
“Business,” he said, distantly.
“I was in a bad way and he helped me.”
“Are you in danger, Miou?”
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 16
