Black Lotus

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “But I’m not lying this time,” Haru said, frantic. “You’ll get hurt if we go inside the temple. Please, heed my warning.”

  She clutched at Reiko, babbling, “We’re the third sign. Anraku will send forth his army to destroy the world. If we don’t turn back, you’ll be the first to die.”

  “Be quiet! Leave me alone!” Pulling away, Reiko pressed her hands over her ears. “I won’t listen to any more of this!”

  The Zj temple district was dark except for a halo of light crowning the Black Lotus precinct.

  “It’s as if they’re expecting us,” Sano said, disturbed to think that spies within the bakufu had forewarned the sect. He’d hoped to take it by surprise and thereby quickly subdue the members.

  “They won’t keep me away from Midori,” Hirata said in a hard voice.

  The procession reached the temple gate, which stood wide open and unguarded. Although Sano sensed danger in the temple, Midori’s presence there beckoned him. He led the procession into the precinct. The lanterns along the main path burned; light shone in the windows of all the buildings. As Sano, Hirata, and the other mounted samurai filed up the path, their horses’ hooves clattered on the paving stones, echoing across hushed, vacant grounds. The foot soldiers and palanquin followed. Sano’s detectives had orders to take troops into the buildings and arrest the occupants while Haru led Sano, Reiko, and Hirata on a search for Midori, but before they could proceed with these plans, a wild cry shattered the night.

  Out of the gardens and woods stormed hundreds of nuns and priests, their voices raised in a deafening chorus of howls, white robes flying. Brandishing swords, daggers, spears, torches, and clubs, they charged the procession.

  Alarmed, Sano drew his sword and shouted to his troops: “Prepare for battle!”

  Nuns and priests surrounded them. Sano had expected resistance from the Black Lotus, but not this full-scale attack. Dismay flooded him. He’d hoped to rescue Midori and dissolve the sect without anyone getting hurt, but the Black Lotus gave him no choice except to fight back. Now his men fended off priests and nuns. The air resounded with wild yells and the clang of striking blades.

  “Stay together!” Sano ordered his troops, but they scattered, forced apart by the mob. He saw white-robed figures swarming around the palanquin, and horror gripped his heart.

  Reiko, though probably armed with her dagger as usual, was no match for so many attackers. The intensity of his fear for her told Sano how much he loved his wife, in spite of everything. And he needed Haru alive to locate Midori. Anxious to protect the women, he urged his horse through the melee, toward the palanquin.

  A young priest assailed him with a spear. Sano parried and reined in his rearing horse. He slashed the priest’s chest. The youth dropped his spear; blood spread across his robe, and rapture illuminated his face.

  “Praise the glory of the Black Lotus!” he cried, then fell dead.

  Sano saw Hirata and his detectives cutting down more priests and realized that the sect members were inept fighters—probably peasants, without the benefit of long-term training. He was loath to slay weaker opponents, despite their determination to kill him.

  “Surrender, or you’ll all die,” Sano shouted at the horde.

  But the priests and nuns continued attacking. More cries of praise arose from the defeated. They seemed like mindless puppets sacrificing their lives to defend their leader’s territory. Still, their sheer numbers overwhelmed Sano’s forces. Each samurai battled multiple attackers. Several soldiers lay dead, trampled by the mob. New legions of armed nuns and priests poured from buildings to replace those killed. Blades jabbed and clubs pounded at Sano, and he cut down more sect members as his horse plowed a path to the palanquin. Then he noticed nuns and priests moving toward the gate. Some carried only weapons or torches, but others lugged bulky bundles on their backs.

  Sano realized that his arrival at the temple had set in motion the Black Lotus’s deadly scheme. The members were heading off to attack the city.

  “Stop them!” Sano yelled to his troops. “Don’t let them out of the temple!”

  “Merciful gods,” Reiko said, horror-stricken as she gazed through the palanquin’s window at the battle outside.

  “See? I told you the truth,” Haru said eagerly. “Now can you believe what I say?”

  The bearers had set down the palanquin, which now sat stranded on the ground, its thin walls offering scant protection from the horde. Reiko relived the terror of the ambush in Nihonbashi, yet this was far more serious. The troops formed a protective circle around the palanquin, but the nuns and priests fought them ruthlessly. Reiko and Haru were sitting targets for savagery.

  “If you knew this would happen, then why didn’t you say so before we left town?” Reiko demanded of Haru.

  The girl shook her head in chagrin.

  “We could have brought more troops,” Reiko said, “but now it’s too late. And do you know what I think?” She grabbed the front of Haru’s robe, yanked the girl close, and shouted, “You didn’t really know what would happen. You’re just trying to turn circumstances to your own advantage.”

  Then a disturbing alternative occurred to Reiko. “No. You knew, and you wanted us to come and be killed!”

  She let go of Haru and peered out the window, looking for Sano. She heard him shouting, but she couldn’t see him in the chaos of darting figures. Blood-spattered corpses lay strewn across the ground, mostly Black Lotus, but some samurai; horses ran free, their saddles empty. Fires smoked in the grass, ignited by fallen torches.

  “High Priest Anraku’s day of destiny is here,” Haru said in a wondering, exultant voice.

  As fear for her husband’s life chilled Reiko, she became aware of a compelling need to set things right with Sano. She loved him and desperately wanted him to love her again. The thought of them dying estranged from each other tore at her heart. She longed to help him fight the Black Lotus, but she’d promised to watch over Haru.

  A gang of nuns broke through the defense and stormed the palanquin, their faces contorted in maniacal fury. Shrieking, they beat clubs against the vehicle. Some grabbed the poles and rocked the palanquin, throwing Reiko and Haru from side to side. Others thrust spears through the window. Haru screamed. Reiko drew the dagger strapped to her arm and struck at the blades. Soldiers closed in, slashing at the nuns. Reiko saw women release their spears as their eyes went blank and they fell away from the window. But one nun lunged through the window, snarling and clawing.

  Reiko struck out with her dagger and gashed the nun’s throat. Warm, thick blood spurted on Reiko. She cried out as the dead nun collapsed across her legs. Then she heard the palanquin’s door open. Turning, she saw Haru scramble out.

  “Haru!” Reiko called in alarm.

  She grabbed for the girl, but missed. Thoughts raced through her mind: If Haru got away, Sano would never forgive Reiko. In a flash, she was out of the palanquin.

  35

  Follow me, and I will lead you

  Out of the wilderness of illusion

  To the place where you can attain wisdom.

  —FROM THE BLACK LOTUS SUTRA

  Reiko cast a frantic glance around the precinct and saw Haru scurrying through the battle. Small and unobtrusive, the girl dodged fighters who took no notice of her. Reiko sped off in pursuit, shouting, “Stop, Haru!”

  Haru kept going. A screaming nun charged at Reiko, swinging a club. Reiko lashed out with her dagger and cut the nun across the abdomen. More nuns chased Reiko. She saw Sano, astride his horse, battling four priests.

  “Haru has escaped,” Reiko called to him. “I’m going after her.”

  But Sano didn’t even look toward Reiko: He couldn’t hear her over the noise. The deranged nuns chased her away from him. A mob of priests and mounted troops blocked her path, and by the time she’d detoured around them, she’d shaken off the nuns, but lost Haru. Then she spotted the girl running into a thicket of trees at the north side of the temple. Reiko hurried toward
her.

  This area was deserted. The dense foliage screened out the battle noises and the light from the buildings. Reiko saw her quarry’s shadowy figure race down a gravel path and disappear beneath an arbor. She followed through the leafy tunnel and emerged into open space. Before her loomed the abbot’s two-story residence. Reiko halted, gasping in exertion and anxiety. Haru was nowhere in sight, but the door to the residence stood ajar.

  Reiko raced up the steps. She hesitated at the door, fearing that there were Black Lotus members inside. Emboldened by her determination to catch Haru, she slipped through the door. Beyond the entryway, a corridor encircled the building’s interior, which was dark except for a dim glow visible through openings in the partitions that divided the rooms. Listening, she perceived wheezes coming from the direction of the light: Haru was there. Reiko groped her way through the chambers.

  The light was a lamp that shone through a paper wall. The wheezes were louder now, accompanied by the scrape of something heavy against the floor. Then came scuffling noises, and creaks. Reiko looked into a room that was empty except for a cabinet, a lacquer chest, and a table upon which the oil lamp burned, and quiet except for a hollow, rhythmic clattering noise.

  “Haru?” Reiko said, puzzled because the girl had mysteriously vanished.

  Then she noticed that the chest stood at an odd angle across the floor, and the shadow beside it wasn’t really a shadow, but a hole from which the clattering emanated. Dismaying realization struck her. Haru had moved the chest and gone through a secret entrance to the temple’s underground realm.

  Moving to the edge of the hole, Reiko spied a ladder leading down to a dimly lit cavern. She considered and rejected the idea of fetching Sano. If the tunnels extended beyond the temple district as Pious Truth claimed, Haru could be far away before Reiko returned with help. Besides, it was Reiko’s fault that Haru had gotten away, and Reiko’s responsibility to get her back. Donning courage like an armor tunic over her fear, Reiko slipped her dagger into the scabbard strapped to her arm and descended.

  She had an unsettling sense of the earth swallowing her. Her heart hammered, and a chill draft shivered her skin. The underground seemed alive, breathing pure malevolence. Reiko alighted in a junction of three tunnels. Drawing her dagger, she looked around, expecting to see a horde of armed nuns and priests, but no one appeared. The clattering pulsation accompanied rushes of air that wavered the flames in oil lamps on the walls. Haru’s wheezes and footsteps echoed from one branch of the tunnel.

  In the temple precinct, Sano lashed his sword at the priests clamoring around him and his horse. “Get away!” he shouted, trying to clear a path to Reiko’s palanquin.

  White-robed figures poured out the open gate, chased by soldiers. Wounded sect members gulped the contents of vials that hung on strings around their necks and expired in violent convulsions, having poisoned themselves to avoid capture. Though the grounds were covered with fallen priests and nuns, the temple yielded up a seemingly endless supply of new attackers. The fires caused by the torches had lit the shrubbery. Anraku’s conflagration had begun. Sano feared that his army wouldn’t be able to contain the violence, and he would fail in his duty to prevent the destruction of Edo.

  As he fought his way closer to Reiko’s palanquin, an object the size of a teapot soared through the air ahead of him, trailing a short tail with a burning end. It thudded to the ground amid a nearby group of combatants and exploded with a tremendous boom and blinding flash of light.

  Sano exclaimed in shock. His horse reared. A huge smoke cloud burgeoned at the site of the explosion. Out of this flew bodies hurled by the blast. Agonized screams arose. The Black Lotus had begun deploying gunpowder bombs intended for the destruction of Japan. All around the temple, priests ignited fuses and flung more bombs. More explosions produced more screams and maimed corpses. Injured survivors moaned. Then Sano saw a bomb land on the roof of the .palanquin.

  “Reiko!” he yelled, horrified. “Get out! Run!”

  He vaulted from his saddle, over the priests around him, and landed hard in a crouch. The impact rolled him heels over head, across rough grass, until he halted some ten paces from the palanquin. Still gripping his sword, he leapt to his feet, just as the palanquin exploded.

  The blast threw him backward. He felt intense heat. Broken boards showered down upon him. Gunpowder fumes seared his lungs. Then he was crawling through the smoke, frantically pawing the wreckage of the palanquin.

  “Reiko!” His ears were ringing from the explosion; he could barely hear himself. A dark afterimage of the flash obscured his vision. “Where are you? Answer me!”

  Heedless of the flames that licked his hands, he flung aside splintered panels. A motionless, bloody form appeared.

  “No!” The violent denial erupted from Sano.

  Then he noticed the corpse’s shaved head: It was a nun. Yet Reiko must be here somewhere. Willing her to be alive, Sano worked furiously until he’d cleared all the debris off the palanquin’s shattered base. But he found no trace of Reiko, nor Haru. Sano’s relief was transient, obliterated by fresh horror. He looked up and saw Hirata running toward him.

  “They’re gone,” he shouted over the noise of more explosions.

  “What?” Hirata, grimy and sporting cuts in his armor, halted and looked at Sano in confusion. “Who?”

  “Reiko and Haru.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” As Sano looked around for the women, dread sank icy roots deep in his heart. “Help me gather some troops. We’ve got to find them.”

  Gripping her dagger, Reiko hurried down the tunnel, stumbling over rocks embedded in the floor, past closed doors. The lamps cast her fleeting shadow on the walls; the passage wound on. Reiko couldn’t see Haru, but the tunnels amplified noises, and she followed Haru’s wheezes. She became aware of other, distant noises—marching footsteps, garbled voices, and the ring of metal on stone. Her heart seemed to expand with her fear, thudding against her rib cage. If the Black Lotus discovered her, they would surely kill her. But she had to catch Haru.

  A turn brought Reiko to a fork in the tunnel. From one branch came the unexpected, chilling sound of children laughing and chattering. The Black Lotus had evidently hidden their young underground. From the other passage came a loud pounding, and Haru’s voice shouting, “Let me in!”

  Reiko ran down that passage. She rounded a curve and saw Haru banging on a door. It opened inward, and Haru tumbled through it. The door creaked shut. Reiko halted, panting. Her terror burgeoned as she wondered who had taken Haru in and a likely answer occurred to her. Still, she was duty bound to stick with Haru. She crept to the door.

  It wasn’t completely closed, and there was a small, barred window at eye level in its iron-banded surface. Cautiously, Reiko peered through the window. Color dazzled her eyes. The spacious room inside was lined with curtains printed in brilliant, swirling abstract patterns of crimson, orange, and purple. The curtains shimmered in the light of lanterns, bathing in garish radiance the people in the room.

  At the back, High Priest Anraku sat cross-legged on a platform. His white robe glowed ruddy; his brocade stole sparkled. To his right stood Priest Kumashiro, like a bronze statue in saffron robe and armor tunic, swords at his waist. Abbess Junketsu-in, clad in white robe and head drape, was kneeling on the tatami at the left side of the room. Opposite her knelt Dr. Miwa, in formal dark kimono.

  Reiko realized that this was where the Black Lotus leaders planned to wait out the conflagration they’d devised. Eight priests—evidently high sect officials—stood along the walls. Everyone stared at Haru, crouched on hands and knees in the center of the room, facing Anraku.

  Dr. Miwa said to her, “How did you get here?”

  “The ssakan-sama brought me. I sneaked away.” Haru spoke as if proud of her cleverness.

  “Did anyone see you enter the tunnels?” Kumashiro said, / obviously concerned about security in the temple’s underground.

  He looked towa
rd the door, and Reiko ducked beneath the window. She heard Haru say, “No, there was so much confusion, nobody knows I left.” Haru was still lying, Reiko observed with irony; the girl couldn’t have forgotten that there was one person who would have noticed her absence. “Oh, Anraku-san, I’m so glad to be with you again.” Haru’s voice trembled with emotion, then faltered, “Aren’t you glad I came back?”

  “After you traded our secrets to get better treatment for yourself?” Junketsu-in said incredulously. Reiko understood that the sect had learned the results of Haru’s trial. “You betrayed us. And now you expect us to welcome you? Hah!”

  Reiko risked another peek through the window and saw Anraku appraising Haru in thoughtful silence. Haru beseeched him, “Please let me explain. I only did what I did because they made me.” Though Reiko couldn’t see Haru’s face, she could picture its expression of wounded innocence. Haru was still making excuses, Reiko noted in disgust, and still blaming other people for her actions.

  “Wicked little traitor,” Junketsu-in hissed at Haru.

  “I’ll get rid of her,” Kumashiro said. Striding over to Haru, he grabbed her arm.

  “Let me go,” Haru cried. As Kumashiro hauled her toward the door, she appealed to Anraku, who sat grave and still on his altar: “I can’t bear to be separated from you again. If you throw me out, they’ll catch me and kill me. I’m sorry for causing you trouble. I beg you to forgive me. If you let me stay, I’ll prove how loyal I am.” She was crying now, and Reiko glimpsed her panic-stricken face. “I promise!”

  Anraku spoke with quiet authority: “Release her.”

  Kumashiro hesitated; his brows slanted downward in displeasure, but he obeyed. Haru thudded onto the floor. Anraku held out his hand to her.

  “Come,” he said.

  With a glad cry, Haru crawled over to him, seized his hand, and pressed it to her face. “I knew you wouldn’t forsake me.” Now she wept for joy. “I’ll do anything to repay your mercy.”