Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha

by Richard Monaco

  “Big guns,” explained Gentile. “Powerful. Can smash down walls.”

  Takezo grunted and nodded.

  “Yazu,” he said, “I’ll toss you up. Then you pull me after.”

  “This must be the Santo Pedro,” the Italian concluded. “Why is it hidden here?”

  “Why does the assassin wear black at night?” Takezo responded, picking up the light, slim man and, in a graceful twist and strain, hurled him up towards the railing.

  *

  At Hideo’s about the same time

  The daimio was still in his traveling clothes: yellow and black silks pointed-shoulder vest and baggy balloon “knickers.” He was standing in the rock-garden where Gentile had received the dismissive poem from Issa. His expression was set in a grim mask. He tapped an iron fan against one knee, looking past his wife who was seated on a low, stone bench.

  Above the shelter of the long stone wall the tops of tall pines were swooshing and flexing their long, dark needles. The deepening sun-red seemed to coagulate in the branches.

  Chamberlain Reiko was standing near Issa under one of the blank, darkening walls. His head was tilted slightly forward as his lord spoke:

  “Let me say this. I have pledged my loyalty to Lord Nobunaga.” He considered the chamberlain who showed nothing readable. “This means no trouble with Izu or anybody else.”

  “As you say, lord,” Rieko responded, bowing a little.

  Issa seemed uninterested, looking up at the swaying branches over the blank, dark wall. A maidservant knelt close to her.

  “The wild days are done,” declared Hideo. “Gekokujo is intolerable.” Meaning when the lesser would betray the greater. “Understand this. We will be true samurai, not bandits.”

  Reiko revealed no discomfort. Nodded a bow.

  “Yes, lord,” he agreed. Issa glanced, sidelong, at him. “Tomorrow is the second trial of the outlander.”

  “What nonsense. If my daughter lives, why has he not been freed?”

  “Grave doubts arise, lord,” explained Reiko. “We don’t know she’s alive. Just that she was not buried here. Witnesses say the Black Devil and the traitor Kendo Nori, kidnapped her.”

  Hideo cut an even deeper frown into the set stone of his face.

  “This twisted business,” he snarled, “sickens a man. Armies of brigands, backed by certain clans and shadowy groups, are, even now, raiding villages and outposts. The Tokaido road is unsafe, again.” He shook his fan like a blade. “Nobunaga already has men in the field, moving up the coast to support our allies.”

  Reiko nodded again to mask reacting. Further sweat glistened on his forehead. He might have been the monkey reaching into the trap whose bait was irresistible.

  “That’s good, lord,” he said, reassuringly.

  “What of that crazy drunk with the talking head?” Hideo wanted to know. “What new latrine has he uncovered?”

  “Bah,” said the chamberlain. “Maybe he drowned in a barrel of sakekasu.”

  Wine dregs used to make pickles.

  “Mistake him not for a fool,” Issa spoke up.

  “Fool or not,” declared the Daimio, looking at his wife for the first time, “he is dangerous.”

  “He uncovered the false burial of our child,” she went on to say.

  “My lady,” interjected Reiko, “he is no more than a man who wakes in the dead of night and, groping in the blind dark, finds, by chance, a coin on the floor and then imagines himself a seer.”

  “Does not luck prevail over mere skill, Chamberlain?” she asked.

  “Enough,” commanded her husband, holding his fan in both hands now, level across his chest. “You begin to sound like Osan, however.” The cold anger that had set his face so hard was making him more impatient. He looked first at one, then the other. “When the smoke clears we will see what the fire burnt.”

  Reiko barely managed not to wipe his forehead. A salty sweat drop beaded down into one eye and blurred his vision slightly.

  His lord was walking towards the archway that went inside, feet silent as shadow steps on the flat stones.

  “My Lord,” he called after him, “ought we not take counsel?”

  “Counsel? Ho,” Hideo replied, not turning. “I go in search of good luck to outweigh my poor skills.”

  “Which skill, my lord?” his wife wondered blandly.

  This time he looked back; paused in the shadow of the arch. The late light fading and dimming gave the impression that still objects in the garden moved, slightly.

  “Which indeed, wife.”

  Went on, his form lost in the dimness inside.

  Reiko went closer to her, wiping his face with his sleeve. She didn’t quite look at him.

  “Weeping?” she wondered.

  “Eh?” he said, distracted, frowning and blinking to clear his sight. “We cannot wait any longer. No time left.”

  “No brains left,” she added.

  “He suspects,” Reiko whispered, checking behind him.

  “Some brains left,” she amended.

  “Nobunaga is on the move.”

  “It seems so.”

  Otherwise still, he clasped and unclasped his hands. Then wiped at the sweat, again. He needed to see Tanba. He never discussed that side of things with her. After tomorrow there would be almost no time, he decided. The wind picked up and moaned in the walls, the pine tops above the wall sloshing back and forth, detail-less outlines, now, as the light died.

  “The storm is nearly upon us,” she observed.

  “In every sense,” he said, clasping and unclasping his hands, not looking at anything. “I think we’ve been betrayed, my love.” He said that consciously, to gauge her mood.

  She didn’t seem one way or the other. She was actually thinking that maybe she’d gone wrong.

  “That might be true,” she responded. “But I don’t think so. My husband doesn’t like to hear any voice but his own.”

  “Or his daughter’s.”

  She inclined her head.

  “Yes, my love,” she said, expressionlessly, “that is so.”

  The wind picked up… then softened again…

  *

  At the ship

  They found a prepared unlit torch; Yazu took firestones from his pouch and they had light as the three of them went below decks.

  “This is called the ‘forecastle,’” said Gentile. “I have never actually been down here.”

  It smelled wet and salt-sour. The cargo door was padlocked. A big padlock. The door was thick and solid.

  “Looks Chinese,” opined Yazu, poking his pinky into the outsized keyhole in the hand-sized chunk of iron.

  “You’ve seen a few locks, I don’t doubt,” Takezo concluded. “Well, I have a key. Stand aside.”

  “It is not Chinese,” stated Gentile.

  Takezo drew his short sword and took a two-handed grip on the three foot weapon. Stared, indirectly at his target. He’d have to graze the door with the tip to cleanly strike the U-shaped piece of metal that fit into the body of the massive lock.

  “But it’s too thick,” objected the Italian. “The blade will chip.”

  “There are other blades,” said Takezo. “Yazu, hold it up straight.”

  The little man was uneasy and held the base of the lock with two fingers as if he were being made to touch a cobra. Takezo concentrated, preparing to hit with all the mass of the world flowing up into him, feeling it gathering an instant before he actually let the blade explode, guided by his incredible wrists and hands. His student shut his eyes.

  Chop, spark, crack! The lock swung free, as Yazu simultaneously pulled his hand away. For some reason this amazed Gentile more than all the dueling he’d witnessed- because the steel wasn’t chipped and the cut had been made as easy as a breath. The blade glistened in the wavering torchlight.

  “A good sword,” commented the ronin, pushing the door open.

  “Brilliant, sensei,” applauded the pupil, relieved.

  Gentile stayed asto
nished. The blade had sliced through the inch of metal as if it were bread.

  Inside, the headroom in the passageway was about five feet – so that even Yazu had to crouch. Both sides of the walkway were lined with stacks of muskets.

  The torch showed the passage probably went the almost length of the vessel. Each side was filled floor-to-bulkhead with stacks of muskets. Gentile estimated there had to be four thousand if there was one. Was this the cargo intended for China? In the hands of trained troops what would these weapons do to a bow and arrow opposing force? He’d seen them used once in a battle before Padua and. When either side tried to close the massed fire tore soldiers to bloody shreds, a single shot sometimes ripping through two armored men and half a horse.

  He tugged one free, hefting the very heavy piece of brass, wood and steel. Between the stacks of arms there were bags of 60 caliber balls capable of making fist-sized holes in human flesh.

  “Ugly things,” he said now, with disgust.

  “So,” breathed Takezo, “it comes clear. Now it comes clear.”

  “But what can this mean, sensei?” Yazu asked, holding the torch.

  His teacher shrugged, crouching over to a hatch in the floor, yanking it open and reaching back for the torch, which he poked down the opening into the pitch blackness.

  “What do you see?” asked Gentile.

  “Barrels. Many, many barrels. Like a warehouse full of sake.”

  He went down a couple of steps and pried at a lid with his dagger. He came up with a handful of black powder he didn’t immediately recognize, a lot of it streaming through his fingers. Held it close to the torch and it flared, in a hissing burst that seared his hand and face and he banged the burning end against a barrel and coals dropped down into the shadows where it had just spilled.

  So he was already turning, starting back up, yelling ahead:

  “Go out! Go out! Run!”

  “What?” asked Gentile.

  “Just run!” he shouted, shoving the tall Italian; Yazu was already in motion.

  They bolted at a crouch out the door, then up the steps to the deck under the canvas tenting. But Yazu slipped and reeled back against Gentile who bounced off Takezo and kept running; the ronin fell back partway before he could recover and sprint for the hatch opening just above him. Levered himself half out of the opening as the first explosion propelled him like a soft, giant hand up and out, setting fire to his silky outer robe and spinning him so the puffing rush of flaming chips and impact seared his face, stinging particles tearing into his eyes and he knew he screamed, soundless in the blast, barely aware of the fabric whooshing into fire.

  He blindly stagger-ran, fell over the rail and was partly caught on the dock by Gentile who cushioned his fall, then ripped away his burning garments leaving him in loincloth only. Then he took one arm and Yazu the other and half-dragged the stunned detective along the long dock as the ship gushed flame. It was about fifty yards to the first row of wood and paper houses.

  Not looking back, Gentile said, more than once:

  “Jesus Christus, regnum angelorum!”

  In partial shock, Takezo was getting his legs back. He knew the pain in his eyes was really bad, this time. Really bad.

  “Fire is… is not my friend,” he mumbled.

  His lips hurt, too. His whole face. There were redhot tacks hammered around his sockets and one more in each eyeball.

  Bad, his mind repeated, very bad… this… this is… now I’ve done it…

  He could feel the heat from the mass of flames at their backs, a pressure distinct from the wind gusts; heard the surf crumbling into the beach, distant shouts and alarm bells being struck; the tilts of the ground… and then they stopped.

  They were maybe 100 yards from the dock area when the bulk of powder blew. The impact was an almost soft shove that knocked them over a raised road into a canal as a ball of fire rushed over them, burning fragments spraying down like meteors over the trees and houses.

  “Ave Maria,” cried Gentile. “Grazia plenum!”

  *

  A little before

  Yoshi and a few of his men were sitting their nervous horses in the yard of the Pine and Crane tavern as the gradually building gusts filled the air with dirt.

  The stout man in red and white clothes, who’d left the inn while “Lady” Takezo and Yazu were outside, was standing on the low porch, addressing them with some authority.

  “He’s disguised as a woman, now.”

  Yoshi snarled and nodded. Rubbed the thick scar that cut across his nose with one hand while the other yanked at the reins.

  “So,” he barked from his belly, “finally he reveals his true nature.”

  “They were tracked to the waterfront. Not too difficult, Middle Captain. They are well-watched.”

  “Where?”

  “Bright Fish and Number 3 Dock.”

  Yoshi was already turning his mount, with needless violence. He was a knot of frustration and anxiety. The way to victory and greatness was open. No time to hesitate.

  “Ride men!” he commanded, cantering out into the street in swirls of dusty wind, galloping as the warriors strung out behind him, pedestrians scattering, clothes flapping in the warm gusts. “His luck has run out,” he muttered. “Now he’s finished. Rip him from the world like a bad tooth from the mouth.”

  They were, maybe, half a mile away when the ship exploded and Yoshi instantly grasped the import. Tanba had provided a demonstration with the ten muskets the pirate captain had given them as samples before the rescued, battered, mastless Portuguese ship had been hidden. The late Osa-Kame had been well cursed for foolishly trying to get the goods with violence rather than the promised gold, creating needless problems. Kame erred further thinking the ring a mere identifying token.

  Yoshi had witnessed the demonstration where three condemned criminals had been dressed in armor, given spears and told they’d be freed if they could charge through a line of ten men with muskets, from thirty paces away. The desperate characters had rushed forward behind their long spears and got very close before the volley was fired and the lead balls, in a gout of flame and smoke, literally shattered them. It was clear what masses of them could do to unprotected troops and charging cavalry. It was clear that Tanba had a weapon that would alter warfare and break his enemies. Except, now, he didn’t…

  So Middle Captain Yoshi knew what the terrific fireball that shook the earth and obliterated the docks and boats probably was, as their horses reared, bolted and bucked as the riders tried to hang on. And he raged:

  “Repellant dung-stink!” Virtually shrieked because he knew with a sinking knowing that it was Takezo. None other – even as flaming chunks of wood and torn metal arced like shells into the flimsy buildings all around. “Arrrr! What filth! Wouldn’t let me kill him! Wouldn’t let me kill him!”

  Weeping with anger he and his men rode away and around the bend of the bay in a wider arc than that taken by the ronin detective and companions who were on foot, hugging the shoreline as they fled.

  The fireball fluffed up higher and higher in roiling smoke over the already burning city as the deadly and growing winds came to bear like great gears of fate, bending the massive cloud like a striking fist above the buildings caught in streams and torrents of racing fire…

  *

  The baffled leading the blind

  They struggled across the canal and climbed the far side. Takezo in his loincloth, led by Gentile with Yazu out in front. They went along the shoreline of rock, sand, rough bushes and contorted pines. The red-orange glow shifted with the veers and twists of the wind, the curdling clouds now stretching, thinning then balling up, the mounting, wildly-spreading fire running in rivulets, streams, rivers of flame up towards the heart of the tinderbox city, fireballs staining the sky and falling like cannon shells.

  The heat, even at this distance, pressed at their backs. The massive surf slammed into the shore.

  “Edo is burning up!” Yazu cried out over the general roar, a
s if he’d just realized it.

  To the blinded Takezo, there was just noise, wind, heat, spray and the incredible needles around his eyes and cheekbones as he struggled over the uneven combination of rock, mud and damp sand as the world shrank into wobbling earth, pushing and crashing as he stumbled into the wall of spikes that jabbed into his face. For the first time he really considered ending his life.

  At least, he thought, I cannot do any more harm… so many have died because of me and now this!… One more blind action and maybe I’ll set off an earthquake and sink our island…

  “Aiihh,” he voiced, gripping Gentile’s long-fingered hand. “Yet, all my actions will be blind, now.”

  “What’s that?” the Italian asked, leaning closer.

  It will be all mistakes and so… no harm will be done… because…

  “What is time to a blind man,” he asked, “since he sees nothing move or change?”

  “Try to be calm,” said the other. “We will get clear and rest. Then …”

  “Then. Yes. Then.” Takezo had a thought. He had many thoughts; at the same time, he had none. “Miou,” he said like a sob. “Ai, my Miou …”

  “We’ll hide and rest.”

  The ronin tried to concentrate. At least this was a kind of goal.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “By the sea,” said the Italian. “It’s all fog and smoke. Can barely see.”

  “Be grateful. You are like one who barely lives and I a breathless corpse.”

  “Ai,” cried Yazu, falling back, “there are shadows moving ahead.”

  Takezo heard sounds of horses and men shouting.

  “Samurai or bandits,” he declared.

  It will be good to die but I do not wish to be mad, he told himself. I must think carefully… It’s the pain… worse than a fever… twisting my senses into unsupported conclusions…

  “Samurai, master,” said Yazu.

  And then a voice he knew well, over all the other sounds, saying:

  “Here he is! Here he is! Ah, by the gods. By the gods!”

  Yoshi. That had to be bad. That had to be the bottom of bad…

  *

  To the sticking place