“Have you prepared her for… you know…”
“I don’t think there’s any way she’s not going to make a scene. You’re taking her little girl away. There will be tears.”
“I know, Mom. But she’s my girl, too. It’s not like I can’t sympathize.”
“Have you given any thought to how Stone will take the news?”
In fact, this very question had dominated her every waking hour for the last several days, and she’d discovered no new wisdom to offer. “He’s sure to be very unhappy about it, I know.”
“Maybe we can take him to Hokkaido. The mountain air may take his mind off it, Andie’s too. But this could be the last time he sees her for a long time. The only thing that’s really going to help him get over it is time with you. Do you have any sense of when you can come back home?”
“Embassy postings are normally for two years, minimum. I don’t see how I can get out sooner without a prejudicial eval in my jacket.”
The thought of being stuck in a post she hadn’t requested for two years, enduring the ongoing resentment of Jepsen and his favorites, when she desperately wanted to be with her family, and especially with Stone – it all began to make the air feel extra heavy. Breathing became difficult and her head began to throb.
“Mom, we’re going to lose this connection soon. Tell Stone how much I love him… and we’ll just have to figure something out when I get there.”
The shinkansen tunnel connecting Kyushu to Honshu, the main island of the chain, brought some welcome darkness to her eyes. She stared at her reflection in the opaque glass of the window and had to admit she’d behaved in a way that must have seemed irrational to Wu Dao. The woman with the jet-black ponytail across the aisle turned and Emily caught her eyes for a brief moment – politely embarrassed, she blinked and turned away just before the lights cut out. Now the wall of the tunnel could be dimly seen, horizontal lines of the blocks used to stabilize the tube wavered ever so slightly in the dim glow of the exterior lights. The vertical lines were rendered invisible by the train’s velocity, which probably exceeded two hundred miles per hour at that moment.
The lights of the carriage flickered on again, and Emily confronted her own face, eyes wide and black, and she started at the intensity she saw there. The lights flickered again, letting the blocks of the outside wall show themselves in intermittent flashes of darkness, and then the carriage lights went out again and she pressed her forehead against the glass. The train slowed and the blocks became visible again – perhaps they had entered an older portion of the tunnel, where natural stone had been used instead of pre-fab concrete slabs.
The rough, irregular shapes had been fitted together in more complex ways, not merely rectangular joints and straight edges, but acute and obtuse angles here and there, as well as curves and bumps. Shadows in the stonework brought out the skill of the craftsmen who’d poured so much of their vital spirit into the effort, like building an enormous wall, a monumental edifice, at the bidding of the daimyo. The basic principle of their work was equally visible everywhere: one stone on top of two. A noise from above caught her attention, almost like the scrape of shoe leather against a rough surface, and a child’s high-pitched voice, and she craned her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse of the source. The noise of the shinkansen seemed to drift into an obscure distance and the light on the stones grew brighter, and Emily shielded her eyes until they could adjust.
“Hurry, Go-Go,” a girl’s voice giggled. “You can do it… just a little higher.”
The scene came back into focus and Emily saw the scuffed sole of a girl’s mary-jane directly in front of her nose. But how could she go any higher, if her eyes couldn’t find the handholds?
“Wait for me, Taka,” another voice cried out. “I can’t go that fast.”
The second voice didn’t seem to come from her mouth, though she felt the same sentiment, and she glanced below her feet on the steep curve of the castle’s great defensive wall, and saw the top of someone else’s head, shiny black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, grubby fingers probing to find an opening between the stones. The girl looked up and her eyes met Emily’s in one of those eternal moments, and the scene shifted to the faded elegance of an old mansion, perhaps two hours or two decades later. A ceremonial sheet spread across the floor had caught the first few drops of blood, and the girl had glanced up into Emily’s eyes, her face twisted in agony as she drew the dagger across her belly.
“Not yet,” she cried. “I owe this to Haru-chan. An honorable death is the only thing I have to leave her. Please forgive me, Taka.”
From the landing above the drawing room, the first girl’s voice cooed at them. Emily turned to see her, still dressed in a school uniform with scuffed mary-janes on her feet, and an expression of sweet sympathy and resoluteness on her face.
“It is enough, Go-Go,” the girl called out. “It’s time to go under. This brave spirit will be ready for Haru-chan’s hour of need.”
Gyoshin looked over her shoulder once more, but this time her eyes were at peace, and she fixed Emily with her gaze. The sword swung down, whistling in the breeze it created, and severed Gyoshin’s head from her neck. It all flashed into clarity for Emily – perhaps only now fully recognizing that the kaishakunin was herself, once again, as always – and she hefted the bloody sword, dimly aware of the many souls it had scoured from the land of the living, and contemplated the head lolling gently on the sheet. Would it have any last word for her… or even a meaningful glance? But the eyes were empty – Gyoshin had already gone under.
The light in the nearly empty carriage flickered on again behind her, for an instant, like lightning in a pitch dark night, and in the reflection her eyes met those of the two young women seated across the aisle, one resolute and kind, her hair pulled tight into a ponytail, the other grateful to have been relieved of a great burden. Emily tried to nod to them, but the light disappeared too quickly, and in the darkness of the window and rush of the tunnel outside she spied the child’s face, little Haru-chan, running ahead through the woods, glancing back over one shoulder, wearing the lavender tennis shoes her Auntie Go-Go had given her, on the familiar mission to show anyone who would follow where her dragon was buried.
Emily woke with a start, a little bit of drool trailing from her otherwise dry mouth, and glanced about the carriage, and saw mainly men in business suits. Only a few seats were unoccupied, and an elderly woman sat across from her, accompanied by a small girl wearing what was probably her fanciest outfit, a pink skirt and jacket over a white, button-down blouse, and shiny black shoes. She dangled her feet over the edge of the seat, legs too short to reach the floor. Emily signaled the carriage attendant, who brought her a warm, moist napkin to refresh her face and hands.
The expedition had begun with vows to stick together, which was easy to promise at the base of Mt. Inari, and the long procession of torii gates created enough of a distraction to keep the kids from running too far ahead. But the path to the top was steep, and Andie made them rest at the first opportunity, a flat stretch of the path which was an exhausting twenty five minutes in, and Yuki insisted on getting a photo of Emily and the kids at a railing overlooking the city of Kyoto.
“This whole mountain is really a shrine dedicated to foxes?” Andie asked.
“More like fox demons,” Yuki said. “They’re sort of messengers between the realms of the sacred and…”
“… the profane?”
“Something like that, I suppose,” Emily said. “Aren’t all gates and doors and arches the same, you know, passages between one kind of place and another? The little foxes, they’re called kitsune, and passages are their special province.”
“But what do they have to do with rice?” Li Li asked. “The sign said they guard the rice.”
“Rats, I suppose,” Andie said. “Just like cats.”
Stone began to fidget with his backpack, and Emily glanced over to Li Li, as if to signal her. When Li Li nodded and tapped Stone on t
he shoulder, Emily turned to Andie and Yuki, shrugged and said, “I guess we’ll meet you at the bottom in an hour or so.”
“An hour,” Emily heard Yuki say as she started after the children who were already almost out of sight over the next rise. “More like two, I expect.”
Emily turned to wave and then headed up the hill at a dead run. For long stretches, the torii were placed so close to each other as practically to form a bright orange tunnel, and wherever the sun found a way through the upper foliage, they glowed like burning embers. Businesses paid large sums for the privilege of erecting them to honor the fox god, who was closely associated with prosperity of all kinds, even though he may originally have been thought of as a protector of the harvest.
Near the summit, some twenty or thirty minutes later, she found Li Li and Stone resting against a low retaining wall, flushed and panting. She could have caught up sooner, but didn’t want to give them an excuse to stop before they had fully exhausted themselves. It was also good to see that Li Li could hold her own against Stone, her competitive spirit keeping her from letting him have the glory of reaching the top first. That spirit would probably serve her well in the next few years, as she navigated the adjustments to a new home.
Emily stopped at a nearby refreshment stand to get some water for her charges. Fountains abounded along the route, and there would be even more on the downward slope, but these were not for drinking. Like other ancient faiths, the central distinction in Shinto seemed to be between the clean and the unclean, and purification rituals always involved water. Tourists climbed wearily past the three of them, a thinner trickle than lower down the mountain, where it had seemed crowded in some stretches, and a few looked enviously on the perches the children had found.
A nearby collection of little shrines captured Stone’s attention, and he was eager to investigate the inscriptions. Fortunately, Emily had remembered to bring his sketchpad and pencils, which she extracted from her pack.
“Show us what you find,” she said, and he trotted off with a new mission.
“He really wants me?” Li Li asked.
“More than anything, sweetheart. It’s all he talks about whenever I see him.”
“Will she like me, too?”
“Her name is Kit Yee, though she says people call her ‘Kitty.’ I’m sure your uncle Jiang wouldn’t choose someone unless he thought she’d like you.”
This last bit of reassurance failed to ring true in Emily’s heart, though she said it anyway – and she knew Jiang himself undoubtedly felt this way. But she harbored misgivings about Kit Yee, even if she couldn’t really justify them. Still, she could hardly express them to Li Li at such a moment, since the girl’s entire world was about to be upended and she didn’t need to have her confidence undermined by vague and unfounded doubts. Not even doubts, these were more like bodiless phantasms, ineffable, lacking any definite shape.
In fact, everything about Jiang’s plan left Michael with doubts, and he’d said as much earlier over lunch, once Andie and Yuki had taken the kids on a shopping expedition. Stone groaned on hearing of the errand, but followed along dutifully behind the women anyway.
“Why should you know anything about Choi?” Emily had asked, once the main plates had been cleared away and they had a free moment. “He’s Jiang’s contact, not yours.”
“It’s not that we know nothing about him,” Michael said, perhaps with a note of defensiveness in his voice. “After all, the National Intelligence Service coordinates with us across a whole range of interests. It’s just that his career is surprisingly undistinguished for a twenty year veteran.”
“What does that say to you?”
“Either he’s incompetent, or he’s deep cover.”
“Oh,” Emily said, and paused to think this latest tidbit over. “I assumed he was corrupt… at least, in some sense, since he’s willing to do this favor for Jiang.”
“The thing is, the NIS is not some petty dictator’s goon squad.” Michael ran his fingers through graying hair and leaned over the table. “We’re talking about the security service of a very sophisticated surveillance state. I don’t think corruption is their weakness. If Kyung Min Choi is willing to do a favor for a high-ranking official in the Chinese counter-intelligence bureau… and he has this profile… I have to suspect there’s a double game going on.”
“What sort of double game?”
“I don’t know, but if I suspect it, the thought must have occurred to Jiang, too, which means he’s already taken precautions.” Michael passed an envelope across the table. “And speaking of precautions, here are Li Li’s documents, just like you asked.”
“… and you’ve run the paperwork past the ambassador?”
“Yes. Bambrough’s Deputy Chief of Mission has signed off on everything and all the forms have been processed by the Chinese. As far as they know, she’s your niece, and under the Vienna Convention, she’s entitled to the same immunities you are. Her passport reads Li Li Tenno, born in Alexandria, Virginia.”
“How far back does her legend go?”
“Two generations. We’ve linked her to your grandmother, but further than that we couldn’t go without a physical insertion into the Koseki, the official Japanese registry of families. They’re pretty sensitive about that sort of thing, and we didn’t want to risk a diplomatic incident.”
“Will it withstand official scrutiny?”
“Within limits. If you’re just talking about border control, yes… especially since you’d be entering under diplomatic cover. But if you’re detained under… unusual circumstances, shall we say… and they pursue a sustained inquiry, they could find grounds to claim she’s not an American national, and then neither of you would be covered by diplomatic immunity any longer. They’d be within their rights to detain her… and you.”
“So, we’re safe as long as no one looks at her too closely. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“If all goes well, you shouldn’t have to use these papers at all, right?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
At a side shrine along the way, Li Li paused a moment to tighten a shoelace, and Emily admired the sharp part in her hair – Andie must have worked on her braids the better part of the morning – and she recalled the flutter in her throat as she spoke to Michael. The fake passport, the legend, all of it was the product of her anxiety about Jiang’s plan, but there was no way on this Earth she was going to take her girl to Seoul without a back-up plan.
An older couple, wearing cargo shorts and speaking German, stopped nearby looking exhausted, and Emily nudged Li Li to give up their little perch for them. Standing up to stretch and let a few more weary pedestrians squeeze past, she noticed two men in gray suits loitering some distance away, studiously avoiding eye contact.
That morning, at the top of the main escalator in the Kyoto train station, which spans five stories, a young man with a large backpack had jostled her, and as she glanced at the length of the tumble she’d narrowly avoided it occurred to her that a man standing nearby had snapped her picture. It seemed insignificant at the time, an overreaction to a meaningless convergence of chance events, but two men in suits trying to appear inconspicuous near the summit of Mt. Inari gave her second thoughts.
“Go find Stone,” she whispered to Li Li, and took a step in the direction of the two men. Should she confront them? Only a few years earlier, she wouldn’t have hesitated, but now she had the children to worry about. Perhaps it was enough to stare them down from a distance. The fact that they hadn’t removed their jackets in the course of a very sweaty ascent must mean they needed to conceal weapons of some sort. It also meant whoever sent them had limited resources in Japan, no time to send a team in better camo.
And who had sent them – Jiang Xi, perhaps? It would make a sort of sense that he would want to keep track of Li Li over the next few days, but it would also mean more people in his bureau would know his secret. No, that’s a risk he wouldn’t take. But if not him, then wh
o? The only other person she could think of was Wu Wei, though she couldn’t imagine what his motivation would be. If another party was keeping tabs on her, which seemed unlikely at that moment, a deeper reconsideration of their plans for Li Li might be in order.
She considered the two men for a moment longer, and noticed a perspiration stain soaking through the back of one jacket. Beads of sweat had probably formed and dried on their faces on this autumn afternoon. Should she just tell them to wait for her at the bottom of the shrine? It would be a mercy, she supposed.
“Who were those men?” Li Li asked, once Emily had caught up to the children.
“I have no idea,” she said, relieved to be able to speak truthfully, and quite impressed that her little charge had noticed them, too. “I don’t think they’re worth worrying about, though they did look uncomfortable in those suits.”
“Should we bring them some water?”
“Aren’t you the considerate one?” Emily put an arm over Li Li’s shoulder and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. “I think it’s time we explored the rest of this mountain.”
The downhill half of the trail led into much quieter forest glades. Very few tourists made it this far, and the torii had thinned out as well, which suggested that the spiritual incentive to sponsor a gate was linked to the likelihood of its being seen. The trees had grown taller here, and the canopy created by the branches and foliage reached well over fifty feet in some places. One consequence was the moss that crept across every stone surface, and festooned the various shrines along the way. Even the path itself was encroached upon by little moss microcosms. Stone wanted to examine the largest of them.
“It’s like a miniature forest,” Li Li said, when he gestured to them to see what he’d discovered. “This would look great in your terrarium back home.”
Stone nodded vigorously, and reached into his pack for the sketchpad.
“Why don’t we rest here for a moment,” Emily said.
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 23
