‘Come close.’
Again the hesitation, pink tongue moistening the lower lip as if some sweet juice lingered there.
‘Ah,’ the soft voice said, ‘as you wish, handsome Captain.’
Yoshi opened his robe, bare barrel chest gleaming in the fading, gray daylight.
‘You want a present first, you greedy whore?’ he wondered.
‘Ah, you have a present, my handsome Captain?’
Yoshi sneered, as the beauty slowly unfolded and in a shimmer of pale silks and flowerscent knelt-walked, very slowly, around the table.
‘Like to kill you,’ Yoshi sighed, reaching with suppressed violence for that delicate, fluid breath of loveliness.
‘Then must I die, Shi-san.’ Placed one perfect, even-toed, golden foot on his knee. ‘How sad.’
The sweaty, blocky samurai took it by the heel and pressed the soft toes to his lips, like a greedy gourmand with a delicacy. He growled in his throat with desire and frustration.
‘This passion sickens me,’ he said as the remote-eyed whore pressed the tasty rounded bits into his mouth.
‘I have a cure,’ was the reply.
Yoshi’s blunt hands groped, almost violently over the completely naked, infinitely smooth, firm flesh under the kimono. Opened the long, slim legs holding both feet and looked down at the dark gleamings between the parted thighs. Inhaled the musk and perfume as he dipped his head down, heart pounding, body knotted, desire’s flesh achingly hard, powerful, unstoppable and utterly weak because he was helpless before his desire, a slave of a slave, he had already contemptuously thought.
Bent there, as if to drink at a pool, he closed his hand on the hard, hot, agonizing shaft and rubbed as tenderly as a mother might caress a baby, gasping, holding himself back so close all the sleek, golden flesh was a blur in the blurring twilight.
‘No other can have you,’ he choked out, stroking up and down. ‘No one!’
The boy sighed with pleasure.
‘Mmm,’ he voiced, both hands fluttering over the blocky, obsessed lovers cheeks and shoulders. ‘Difficult, Shi-san.’
‘So beautiful,’ Yoshi gasped, taking the tip with his tongue and lips, a hint of salt and sour-sweet crushed flowers. ‘I… I will buy you a house …’ Sucked, longingly and deep, pulled back. ‘Ahhhh… gold… soon I will have gold and… no other can have you!’ With a shudder of need he took the sugary stick as deep as he could until he choked, a little.
‘Ahh, you are my joy, Shi-san.’ Smiled as the dimness closed down. ‘Turn me over, sweet slave, and kiss the place you love best.’
With a groan of helpless need, the samurai gripped the sleek, resilient buns and twisted the boy around without his tongue losing contact with the delicious flesh and buried his face and his being as he’d been commanded, there, in the reek of too-rich flowers and cloying clouds of thick incense.
‘You… ’ he mouthed, as he helpless lapped and suckled. ‘I will kill you, someday… I will kill you… ’
‘Yes, lord,’ the boy sighed, facedown, now. ‘Spear me to death, now… now… ah, now… ’
“You are an insect,” Yoshi told Colin who stopped struggling on and turned to face him.
“What say me?” Colin wondered.
“Stupid insect. So stupid. Unimportant.”
“What?”
“Meaningless sack of guts. Die and nothing changes. Live and nothing matters. So I step on you.”
Red hair, pale skin, blue eyes like bright chips of glass: a foreignness that sickened. Emblem of a curse. Powerless against Yoshi. Actions about to be stopped forever; brain about to be emptied of foreign thoughts… emptied.
Smoke and clouds swirled around as he struck at the alien paleness and jarring colors. Behind his battered face the Scot looked remote, uninterested.
“No more, I free you,” said Yoshi. “Ha-Ha. Free myself, too.” Saw the delicate neck of the boy whore in the almost sickening room of flowers and sweet smoke, the lips, the painted face, the sweet contemptuous passion. Saw his expression change as the blade parted the head from body, the perfect, infinitely sensual eyes showing a soul that could no more be truly possessed than smoke could be held in the hand. “Die, homosexual!”
Eight
Colin
Thought about ducking and trying to roll away into the storm-blast’s obscurities as the fighting erupted all around. Couldn’t make himself. He was staring up at the hillslope where the two armies jarred together: now blurred… now solid… now gone…
He refused to actually look at his killer. Why give him the satisfaction? So he stared off into the blinding, swirling air where sudden clumps of men clashed, swords and spears sticking and ripping, blood and shouts and screams torn away by the wind.
Then looked up at the clouds, piling in thick and wild, rain slashing through harder so that the stocky armored killer was a shadow at the edge of his sight and that was alright because he’d accepted it all and was ready for the wind, to let it lift him and ride it, wondering why it was taking so long to happen… long enough for an unbidden memory:
A fast-flowing mountain stream cut by dense trees, sky like shattered crystal. Spiky red flowers lined the banks. He was a boy barefoot in a ragged kilt, stepping with infinite care through the raspy long grasses and brush to where he overlooked the water, saw himself in the shimmering brightness.
Looked through his reflection at the rippling fronds, quirks and swirls of current where a cluster of trout hung, swimming just enough to not move.
The seven hung there fragile as a breath. He’d never seen them feed or go any distance without coming back and taking the same positions again.
He’d tried tossing pebbles, larger stones, poking sticks to break up their formation. They came together, each time, as if drawn back, the way water itself could only be momentarily hollowed, splashed or blocked.
Now, one suddenly began moving upstream and he followed. His memory was an impression: as he followed, close to the bank, pushing through bushes, hopping rocks, gripping branches, slipping; keeping it in sight, the sliver glitter always just ahead of him, zipping and then lazing through light and shadow as if it meant to lead him. He chased on as if it were life or death, losing all sense of time, spatters of sun and shade flicking past… then a sudden wall of overhanging rock, wet and too sheer to climb so the last thing he saw was the slim, steady, effortless fish flashing like an arrow around the bend and then, winking into the shadows beyond… gone…
So he wasn’t surprised by the cold push through his neck, a pressure like a violent cough that tilted away his head. There was just the stream that wasn’t just a memory anymore and he was following the fish, this time, up around that mysterious bend into the mystery he’d been blocked from solving so long ago, in childhood…
Nine
uMubaya
The big Zulu rushed to help the fallen Italian.
“Help her!” Gentile cried, staggering against the wind which was ratcheting up towards full typhoon level.
Horses were struggling with their riders and loose ones were bolting; the sound of clashing armies from the slope above. Gentile stagger-stepped after Osan and her captors as they made for the door of the court building where others were taking shelter.
Clutching a post as the smoke blotted past, uMubaya saw the cloudy, armless-looking outline he didn’t realize was Colin, bound like a sausage, being struck by a squat machine-like shape he didn’t know was Yoshi… cloud gust… then the bound shape was a head shorter.
Another vicious gust sent shingles flying… then the blot of Izu ducking under a spearthrust and then pirouetting in the vicious draft, vanishing… blotted… Colin’s bound body still leaned on the air as the Zulu crouched closer, then went down in a slow spin.
In a blast of rage and recognition he charged the armored outline…
Ten
Colin
As the fish went up around the bend into the mysterious shadows of his childhood’s highland hills, he was still see
ing a blurred swarm of shapes, that might have been men and horses, going up on a wild tilt; then a silent, jarring but unfelt impact as the world soundlessly faded. The sandy ground spun, then half- spun… rocked… stopped at a tilt… a shrinking tunnel of vision as memory slacked away and he recognized a woman struggling to her knees, her cheek crunched flat into the sand, her eyes so close and big… nothing moved, just the shrinking circle of fading that melted her expression into mist… shadow… nothing…
Eleven
Osan
Having only partly slipped the grip of Yoshi’s samurai, Osan was staring, inches away, eye-to-eye with the blue wide stare of the nearly upright head where (she wordlessly grasped) light was dying nothing like a sunset or shutting windows or a blown-out candle flame.
And her voice lost in the wind and his silence, her tears breaking up her sight into a burning blur:
“I apologize! So, so sorry! So …”
As she was jerked back upright, brutally, back up into roaring wind, shouts, screams and clash of arms… dragged away she glimpsed the blind Takezo crouching forward suddenly surrounded by samurai.
She saw him, through the boiling atmosphere, slash them away or maybe it was the wind because they twisted, flew and vanished in what might have been magic or illusion.
Twelve
Takezo Zato
He felt a close miss snap just short of his head. He didn’t know it was Yoshi and didn’t bother to counter. Let the wind move him because the fever-things were back; in fever-logic, with speed beyond even the air of imagination, he sliced and shredded the headless attacker who spurted flame from his open neck (as other demons in black armor) closed with him. His sword was finally the same as his mind and struck like a thought and they fell like bad ideas, and flopped and shrieked around him. He wondered, somewhere in the fever, if anything were actually happening. Then the vision faded, again.
I am supposed to get to the bottom of this wash of sewage and, I suppose, swim… so they pay me in gold and…
In the blinding atmosphere, jerked and pummeled by nature or things unnatural his blindness was no longer a true disadvantage. In the right circumstance, bad could be good.
As if they moved far and near he heard Reiko’s shouts… Issa and others… the words became wind…
The fever moved far and near, too. It was moving away, just then, so he wanted to help Issa. He felt closer to her and it wasn’t just because their bodies had beaten together.
He followed her voice, when he could track it, groping along the porch, crouched into the full, steady typhoon pressure. No visions now, just blankness. The rain slashed.
I am here because I get to the bottom of things… like empty holes… and careers…
Felt the fever pulsing back and didn’t care. Liked the sudden glowing landscape where the atmosphere was slowly billowing coals and seemed to softly sustain him like water a fish so he didn’t have to struggle along. Forms were visible in the lee of the glowing wind like shadows in the sun.
There was Issa, Reiko and others in what seemed a forest of sword-bladed rock-like trees where dwarfish, taloned, fanged creatures shifted and prowled.
Two of them were pulling a beautiful female who seemed an unearthly shape of soft, cloudy light, their harsh hands blotching her with blackness. He swam in pursuit.
He understood: a gout of darkness like a mouth formed a cavern in the fire and it seemed to be swallowing everything into that steel and stone landscape.
The fever heat seemed to clarify his mind; he saw with supernatural focus and concentration. There, there was the mystery’s source and the one he sought, the last face behind the last mask of his life, down there in whatever incomprehensible fortress sitting on whatever razor-edged and steel-clawed throne.
So he swam into a charge, sword growing from his arm, sweeping up to strike…
Thirteen
uMubaya
The black man reached the porch ahead of Gentile. As he sprawled down again, a samurai bounced off him going the opposite way.
In a flap of blinding air he saw small Lord Izu clutching one of his men, spattered with blood, crouching, protecting his eyes.
The Zulu held a post in one hand, naginata in the other watching Issa, Osan and the samurai reeling along the porch to the doorway; the magistrate, oversized robes snapping like a flag, sailed out into the yard, was knocked over, then disappeared into the smoky dust. The clash of arms was all around now, formed then unformed by the wind.
This is worse than at sea. I think we may all die…
He was crawling into the semi-solid wall of air as boards pulled loose from walls and flip-flopped past. Things hummed in the air. A deep roar filled everything. He imagined the world being blown smooth, people sailing like helpless birds…
Pulled himself into the doorway. The room was full of friends and foes. Inside, the noise was worse; all hissings, whistlings, howlings and wavering shrieks. And then, there was Reiko, in the dim, secondary, streaky gray daylight, standing on a raised platform like an actor shouting, Osan under one arm, sword in the other hand, two bodyguards with glazed looks of blind loyalty beside him, his voice a raw rasp of furious authority.
“Our armies cannot be defeated!” he yelled. “I am lord of the clan! I marry Osan! Her mother is maddened by the murder of Lord Hideo by sworn enemies!”
He noted men in plain robes all through the room, armed like samurai.
When Issa and Gentile made a move towards Reiko they took them down, almost instantly. They had to be ninjas.
He threw off his robe and crouched, in his tunic, black skin gleaming, huge muscles reminding some there of the life-sized guardian statues of the gods of war come to life. Headed for Reiko, spear low and ready.
Everyone paused because he wasn’t acting anymore Japanese than he looked: semi-dancing from foot-to-foot and chanting, deep and powerful from his slightly protuberant, muscular belly. The warriors felt the chi gathered in him.
Reiko’s face was locked in insane rage. His left hand clutched the girl. The spots of blood from the slight wound Issa had inflicted stained his side. Dust streamed and puffed in through the shutters.
“Black foulness!” he cried. “Die!”
Thrust Osan into the arms of a bodyguard and came at the prince who snarled in Zulu:
“You are bad!”
Other warriors attacked at the same time. uMubaya was unmoved. He snatched up a thick wooden stool for a shield and blocked the first downcut from a ninja and countered with a thrust to the thigh, then parried the next cut as Reiko slashed and danced into the fight.
“You,” cried out Osan from the platform, “you are …” But she was lost for words. Unheard of. “You are …”
And she twisted and whirled herself loose from the easy grip of her captor who was concentrating on the fight in the center of the room where the Chamberlain had just chipped the stool-shield and uMubaya creased the face of the second attacker with his naginata blade.
To her mother’s amazement and admiration the daughter leapt onto Reiko’s back and clawed his face, effectively saving the black man from the sidecut that would have split his side open.
“Her new intellectual ideas,” Issa said.
Fourteen
Takezo Zato
Thousands of armored dwarves were swarming in waves over the black, harsh, razor-edged landscape. They dribbled flame like shaken braziers. He was pleased because he welcomed a chance to hit back at the shadows, even if he drowned in their darkness. He’d had enough lies and edges and blurs. Now he had eyes that saw only the nightmares sprung from burning sickness.
And then they were gone. The fever popped, again, like a bubble on a stream. They were gone and he was staggering to his knees as the stormwind dragged him backwards and across the yard he couldn’t see towards the gate he didn’t know was there.
Clash of arms, shouts, horses screaming. He brought up against what he didn’t know was the gatepost; held on. A rider crashed past. Heard the chukk
of a blade hitting flesh and armor, the sound sucked past on the intolerable wind. A following groan…
“It’s dark,” he said.
Voices suddenly close by, separating out from the general din and roar. He caught fragments.
“… Nobunaga men hold hills… we… impossible to …”
A voice he knew, the masked ninja master:
“Wait for the storm center… all must lie flat until …”
Have I found you? He asked himself. In fate and wind?
Held the thick post that made him think of being onstage, his right hand was dully throbbing, sword locked in his swollen fingers, ready to strike. Tried to hone in on the source of the voice. Then another, even worse:
“… so… refuse …” Yoshi yelled. “I… kill and …”
“Here I am!” cried Takezo. “Are you blind men too?”
Let’s finish this, he thought.
“Who’s that?” Yoshi wondered.
“Over there,” another yelled.
“Where?”
“Here, you shit-squeezings!” the ronin yelled. “Let’s finish!”
“I see the filth!” screamed Yoshi. “There!”
Takezo felt him coming through the mad wind. Was relaxed and ready.
“No!” commanded Tanba’s voice through the mad wind.
Too late. Takezo felt Yoshi strike and countered like lightning; except a terrific gust spun him halfway around the post and he heard and felt the sword hit the wood as his own blade cut air. He tried a follow-up but was blown spinning away. The voices were drowned by the massive roar. Bits of detritus spatted into him. He rolled across the sandy ground, rolled back into the fever-world…
Fifteen
Issa
She whipped the deadly spike from her coiffure and jammed the needle through the ear and into the brain of the man holding her. Felt him spasm as she jerked herself away.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 38
