Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha

by Richard Monaco

  “My daughter,” Issa said.

  Takezo felt something… her voice showed feeling he didn’t expect. There was a tremble there. The judge fidgeted; wind blew; big raindrops sailed wide and scattered, slanting nearly sideways in the veering gusts.

  “What is the purpose of this trial?” the blind ronin addressed the mask-face, the only thing he could see.

  “To reveal evil!” the metal face answered – except he knew Reiko’s voice.

  The chamberlain raised his gold and red fan over his head as a clump of horsemen came barreling through the gates, armored, led by Yoshi, his face set, it seemed to Osan, in anger so deep it had been carved into his flesh.

  Habits set bars of steel around our souls, she thought.

  “Where is my father, my mother?” she asked.

  “Dead,” Issa said, eyes looking like she might laugh or weep.

  “Slain, while helpless, by Nobunaga’s puppets!” declared Reiko, looking at Izu so that the daimio gripped his swordhilt and his men bristled.

  Yoshi and his men arrived, sandy dust swirling as they reined-up, closing around the proceedings in a loose half ring. The judge was frowning.

  “What does this mean?” he demanded.

  Osan held the old-man-mask up at Reiko as if it were a talisman. He was glowering at her.

  “Here is your true face, vile deceiver,” she informed him.

  Her mother’s eyes seemed calm while her features tensed. Big raindrops spattered loudly on the wooden overhang.

  “Quiet!” he responded. “I am your father now.”

  “Would my father put his hands on my body?” Osan demanded.

  “What words are these?” cried Issa.

  “Silence!” ordered the judge. “This is a trial, not a dispute in a tavern!”

  “Your lover betrayed my father,” Osan said, holding up the mask. He –”

  “Quiet!” yelled the chamberlain, again, raising his fan. To his men: “Take her away and protect her! She has been given evil potions. Her mind is not her own but filled with Nobunaga’s evil fumes!”

  “Let us have order!” shouted the furious and confused magistrate, leaping to his feet – unusual. “Let the young lady speak!”

  Two clan bodyguards moved in position behind the young woman, hesitating because Izu’s men had moved with them, faces set for combat. The tension was peaking. Yoshi leaned down, studying Zato Takezo with one eye on Reiko.

  “This man,” Osan said, pointing at Reiko whose fan rapidly tap-tapped along his leg “came upon me alone in my bath. He declared his passion.” She covered her face with the mask and spoke with a coarse, guttural voice. “You must be mine, you are so sweet that no heavenly spirit can match you. I wish your sweet feet to tread upon my helpless body as if I were a poor mat.”

  “The poison potion speaks!” cried ever resourceful Reiko as all eyes were on him, Yoshi curling a semi-smirk across his harsh lips.

  “The chamberlain is not on trial here,” observed the judge, nevertheless clearly interested in the irrelevant testimony.

  “Take her away for her own good, as I commanded,” Reiko repeated. Having to repeat was not good and everyone knew it. He looked at Yoshi who smirked wider but nodded.

  Gentile was ready, hand on the dagger he’d acquired. uMubaya was looking back at the burning city, the wildly curling and scattering flames as if, indeed, somebody’s hell had burst through the earth.

  “He groped his hands all over me,” Osan said, “all in a lecherous sweat.”

  Then dropped the cruel-faced old-man mask from her extended arm, sleeves fluttering, as you’d drop, Gentile thought, a rotten fish.

  “Seize her” yelled Reiko, lashing out with his fan.

  Issa was in front of him, now. Two of Yoshi’s men dismounted and stood and added weight to those around the girl. The raindrops were hitting hard enough to sting.

  “Who is next to die?” Issa asked. “Am I next?”

  “Be still, woman,” snapped Reiko.

  Their retainers seemed undecided. The captain who’d witnessed Reiko’s strange antics with the bloodstain, looked troubled and considered his superior with leveled eyes.

  Issa moved closer to him. She seemed to be following the storm clouds or studying the billows from the great fire that (as the massive, oncoming sheets of rain poured down) threw up fresh gouts of steamy smoke. Distracted, Reiko didn’t look at her.

  “My daughter?” she asked, semi-shouting over the increasing windsound, shielding her eyes from the dust with her fan.

  Three

  Takezo Zato

  Takezo was listening, but the voices were filtered through the mouths of black-armored riders on steel-looking horses who were clambering up out of the blazing pit that had just opened there, wrung gusts clinging around them, buffeting the landscape, wilting trees as they passed, charring houses, setting peoples’ clothes aflame. A man walked in front of them. He had armor but no head.

  The leader was mounted and masked and Takezo knew him by his fire-eyes and palpable fury: fury like radiant heat from gouting lava. His own rage was cold but a match for it.

  He wasn’t sure the voices made any sense – why would they? The waking world or whatever it was that time chewed and swallowed was basically a meaningless jumble outside the clarity of fever. The darkness blended it into a soothing, motionless silence. Maybe that was all he ever wanted.

  The flame-men were coming to him. Fine. He had questions and answers for them. The leader had to be there. Which? One more mystery… maybe the last…

  “Come,” he said. “I’ll cut off your mask and see the true fire of your face!”

  Four

  uMubaya

  The rain whipped past faster and faster. He glanced back over the south wall where the smoke from the city massed thick, he thought, as root soup. The rain seethed heavy down there and deeper billows of steamy smoke boiled up into the sweeping stormwind.

  uMubaya felt ready. He was there and his history had no more substance than a dream. Gripped his naginata and nodded, a little amazed by the curse of his fate: he’d turned to the ship and the sea; headed up the gangplank keeping his back to the shore. He never looked behind at his diminishing country as they worked their way out of the South African bay less than two years ago. He faced what lay out before him, never measuring time or distance like the obsessively “civilized.” He simply was where he was.

  He wasn’t bound to duty, yet unlike his father the King or a married man. And he didn’t even have to think about her; but he did. That was incurable…

  The first day he could get to his feet /,he moved shakily out of the netting of thorns, vines and branches she’d built around him. He had a gnawing hunger and terrific thirst. He felt faded, dried-out and vague as a twist of dew mist.

  It was a clear morning. Blue shocks of water left from last night’s downpour showed on the plain as the sun topped the ragged, bare hills. He was near the line of twisted trees where the lioness had charged him.

  He took a few steps and knelt to cup a drink from the nearest puddle. The earth-scented coolness was a miracle in his mouth. Nothing had ever been so good and complete.

  She’d even left dried food in his bag and he chewed, slowly, squatting over the imperceptibly shrinking puddle as the sun tilted higher, intent on the wet, green scent, blinking like a child at his own reflection cut up by bright sky and spiny grasses.

  Then movement… a caterpillar was working its way around the splash as if it were a lake, steady, legs ceaseless, fat body struggling on, barely moving but maybe racing breathlessly from its own point-of-view.

  He felt vague, tentative. After half a day of semi-tracking he believed more than saw; decided he was like the caterpillar: straining his entire being to move inches in a world of miles.

  The landscape was a drowsy murmur under the hot, bright sky. The redbrown, ragged mountains hemmed in this long, rolling valley.

  He finally stopped at a crease of stream that zigzagged across th
e fields, then waded into the middle (maybe 3 feet deep) and just stood there, watching his reflection emerge as the ripples settled, as if his dark shape coalesced, backtilted, from the soft flowing…

  ‘Look there,’ he said, ‘see a fool.’

  He went on, anyway… didn’t count days… now and then believed he’d glimpsed her far ahead, a shadow a movement… on… sometimes thinking he was back in his fever sleep when he got weak and tired and the hills and clumps of trees reeled by in rocking blurs… after a while he was sore but getting stronger and the forest he’d entered was getting denser. His scars were stiff but she’d done a good job and they were healing well.

  Leaning against the shifting gale, it came back to him as he watched the now smoldering city above the wall.

  I followed the shadow of a ghost then, he thought, turning back to the gathering violence in the yard. Maybe I still do…

  Five

  Takezo Zato

  “Get me a sword!” he said to Yazu over the wind.

  “Master?”

  “Sword. Now. How it begins is how it ends.”

  He was listening as if his ears had eyes and that other strange sense was reaching out.

  The fever seemed low. Felt clear: there was nothing to see but nothing. Felt his disciple press the swordhilt into his right palm.

  He gradually closed the hand, listening to Issa, Reiko and others bickering, demanding and accusing in the wind’s undulations. The smoke in the air was thickening. Felt like he was gripping shattered glass: his fingerjoints were pure pain. As he clamped shut the blood started to flow and made a sticky paste of his scabs.

  “The sword sticks to your hands,” he quoted, too low to be heard.

  It locked. The pain was now glue. Cocking his head, he started moving forward a few steps, Yazu beside him.

  Please, he sort of prayed, no more fever… no pictures…

  Heard Osan’s wind-twisted voice shouting into a welter of counter-shouts and curses:

  “This… man is… betrayer of …”

  And the Italian:

  “Release her, schiavettzi!”

  “Cease! Cease! Cease!” cried the judge.

  Cocking his head, the blinded ronin moved towards the voices, blade clamped to his hand. The weight felt good.

  “No seeing,” he muttered. “No more mad pictures.”

  Outcries and struggling sounds. A gust shoved him sideways and he felt Yazu stumble and then a sting of rain.

  Voices for and against the chamberlain were being raised. Yoshi shouted something lost in a snapping gust. A clash of arms behind him and outside the walls.

  “Where are you, enemy?” called out the blind ronin.

  In a burningly vivid scene the blaze peeled back like a curtain and there was the masked and armored lord resembling a giant frog with his widespread feet and bulky armor.

  Six

  Gentile

  Madness, he thought. What next?

  As the smoky clouds blotted past, for a moment it was a picture with figures emerging into movement, robes flapping, swords waving, horseshapes looming and over the low wall a mass of foot soldiers and riders coming down the middle-distance slope formed and unformed into a two dimensional sketch…

  For that moment he lost concentration as if the deadly reality around him was less intense and real than its design. At the same time he was already moving, reaching for the samurai holding Osan who was yelling at her mother:

  “Your husband dead! Why is your hair so long?”

  Loose, cape-like outer robe flapping like a flag, Issa looked wildly around and snatched the three foot long tail of silk-bound hair from behind herself and sliced it near the neck with her short dagger, then flung the length into Reiko’s face where it looped and was held by the wind.

  “Rapist and traitorous murderer!” she cried as he swung his fist, missed her and she got her blade somewhere into his side as his second blow caught her cheek and sent her spinning into the smoky clouds of wind.

  Fighting broke out between his committed men and the other Hideo clansmen. Yoshi’s fighters went after Izu and the others. Gentile got a hand on the massive man holding Osan who was struggling like a butterfly in a net as a gust of thickening, wind-blasted rain tipped him. He staggered past, ripping the floppy sleeve as the samurai’s instant draw and cut just clipped his shoulder. The blade was so keen it barely hurt.

  Seven

  Yoshi

  Yoshi was worried about the storm’s effect on the armies advancing to the city. He was cursing the foreign weapons that had proved a disaster.

  “Temptation,” he muttered to himself. “See the result!”

  Rain ripped into them. His always simmering anger and frustration bubbled up. Fear, too, because there was no space to fail in. He tried to decide what to do first.

  And here was that Takezo, back like a ghost in a play; not singing or dancing, at least. Was he really blind? He’d been ordered not to kill him with weapons except in self-defense – which explained the technicality of the crucifixion.

  “Time to strike,” he said. “Too late to think.”

  One of his men leaned from the saddle close enough to talk.

  “Orders, captain?”

  “Take the girl. Kill Izu. Protect Reiko. I’ll deal with the rest.”

  He was thinking what fools they all were to stand in line and bow to authority. One reason he resented Takezo was because he didn’t have to pretend to bow. Yoshi dreamed of chaos where he could step over the lords and take their seats. He concieved that when the war was won, Tanba would choose to remain in the shadows he so loved and let Yoshi rule. The idea was less than real but more than fantasy.

  Holding his mount in place, he watched Takezo shuffling forward against the wind.

  “Blind fool,” he hissed, “take your final steps to nowhere.” He felt it like a cold well rising within: he could displace them. Anyone could be killed, just strike first. He had that from his father. Consider Iaysu, who put sandals on samurai’s feet, now Nobunaga’s chief general. “A man can rise.”

  Bending into the wind, he chucked the horse close to Takezo and swept a cut at him. Either a gust or the ronin’s sixth sense shifted him clear. A miss. Yoshi pulled his horse aside to avoid a possible counter. His ankle still hurt from the clipping cut the ronin had landed in the rain-blasted garden after the Noh drama.

  Takezo was lost behind a screen of dust, smoke and sheets of erratic rain. Yoshi’s horse shied and fell back from the terrific gust. Struggling figures were all around. Then Yoshi was close to Colin, the Scot, who was on his feet, tilted, still wrapped in rope like a roast beef.

  Yoshi kicked his rearing horse, yanked the reins, as the animal plunged and threw him, already running with the gale, vanishing into the blinding atmosphere.

  He was close to the Scot who could only move his legs a few inches at a time and was, painfully, trying to hobble towards the dimly visible porch, wobbling, crouching, falling forward, then back, then sideway, reminding the samurai of an ant in an empty sake bowl.

  “Where are you going, foreigner?” Yoshi said, stepping close. He felt a cold rush of spite and anger. “You are helpless,” he sneered. “I am not!”

  The day before, in the same inner garden where Miou had sat with Tanba and pondered the bleak pebbles and gray walls around the circular, fishless pool ten feet across, full of lily and lotus, Yoshi conferred with his master. His steps crunched as he paced around the rim, wrapped in a dark robe, looking at the slim leader who was sitting crosslegged on a low bench, staring into the water as if to read something in the broken reflection of the gray, fast-moving clouds.

  ‘You protect him,’ Yoshi said, ‘though he’s a threat.’

  ‘I protect you, too, though you are a fool.’

  Yoshi stopped, then started pacing again; Tanba didn’t look up.

  ‘I am your son,’ the stocky Captain declared, stopping across the pool and glaring.

  ‘But not the only one.’ His father did
n’t look up, hands folded inside his dark kimono. ‘I know what you want, but you will take your place when our enemies are thrown down. Take pride in your training and not in yourself.’

  His son stood still as stone and wasn’t even not looking at him, now, as he said:

  ‘I do my duty.’

  ‘Do more. Do this: after you dispose of the obvious opponents, finish the one who thinks he is our friend.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Reiko is weak and subject to women.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do not trouble yourself about your position.’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘No reason for anger. Just duty.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Your “yes” sounds like no.’

  After that conversation Yoshi took a closed kaga to a big, gold-gated teahouse behind a harsh-looking garden of sharp dark rocks and a wide, sluggish stream that almost suggested a moat, reflecting dull gray clouds darkening as twilight seemed to seep from shadows. A few spatters of rain plinked down.

  Passing serving women and one courtesan with a pile of hair she seemed to be actually balancing on her head, he went directly to a private second floor room. It was lavishly decorated with flowers almost to the point of bad taste. The air was thick with perfume and incense.

  On a mat behind a floor table full of orchids and lotus, sat a very young beauty with lustrous hair held with combs and picks, full, pouty lips and big eyes that showed a kind of general, lewd contempt as if they’d been stained by what they’d had to see in so few years. Yoshi knelt-sat opposite and extended his thick, short-fingered hand for a sake.

  The courtesan hesitated, just a beat, before pouring one and holding it out to the stocky Captain through a break in the floral excess. Yoshi didn’t react to the subtle near discourtesy – which would have surprised those who knew him. He just kept looking at the exquisite downtilted face across the flowers from him; the long, delicate fingers, knowing, mocking eyes.

  Sweating in the humidity, Yoshi knocked back the sake and said: