She lowered the dagger and struggled up into a sitting position. Blood dripped in a steady beat from her chin. “Is she dead?”
“No, fled,” he said. “I think she will come back. We must get ready.”
She touched her face. “It hurts.” Through the detritus clinging to her face, a gash leaked blood.
“Is anything broken?” he asked.
“I do not think so....”
“Let me help you up.” He hooked an arm under her shoulders. She yielded to his aid and stood, shaky and sore.
He called out to Yahei and Naohiro.
“She killed them.” Kazuko’s voice quavered.
Ken’ishi nodded. “Come to the water.”
“She clawed me.” Her fingers gingerly touched her cheek. She moved as if in a daze.
“We must clean your face.”
“Is it bad?”
“I’ll know after it’s clean.” He took her arm and guided her toward the water.
She squatted in the shallows and splashed water onto her face. The blood dripped faster. “Part of my cheek is numb.” Fear glimmered in her gaze. “I think it is bad.”
Washing away most of the blood and detritus revealed a deep gash that crossed her cheek from chin to nose. A steady rivulet of blood dripped from her chin. It was the kind of wound that would leave a deep scar.
“You smell terrible,” she said.
“Hatsumi’s blood. I wounded her.” The effluvium smelled as if he had been lying in a bed of corpses.
With tender fingers, he touched her cheek and pinched the gash shut, but when he removed his fingers, the blood flow resumed.
Her eyes searched his face for comfort, and he did not know what to say. Here was a heinous disfigurement upon the face of beauty itself.
With a frown, she pushed him aside and leaned over a pool along the stream bank to look at herself. A sob came out of her, and her hand clamped back a second one. Her breath came in short gasps.
“My lady,” Ken’ishi said. “We must bandage it.” He wished he knew more about such things, but he knew only how to kill, and precious little about healing.
Blood and tears dripped from her chin into the pool.
He cleared his throat. “And then we must retrieve more weapons from the horses. She will return.”
“Yes.” Kazuko straightened, her voice dropping low. “This is far from finished.”
Ken’ishi produced two strips of clean cloth from a pouch tied to his obi. One he folded into a square, and the other he wrapped around her head to hold the square onto the gash.
By the time he was finished, their faces had somehow gravitated nearer.
He stepped back and offered his hand to help her out of the water.
The kami had created a rhythmic buzz in his mind, like the song of cicadas. The air itself seemed to tighten with danger.
“Come!” He snatched up his zori and ran barefoot for the horses.
Together they crashed and snapped through undergrowth, dodging stream-side boulders, splashing through the water, sliding in the mud until they emerged onto the road.
Two horses lay in motionless piles of savaged meat. A quick survey told Ken’ishi that the other two had broken their reins and bolted downhill. Relief that Storm had escaped assuaged the thickening sense of doom.
Kazuko’s naginata lay splintered in the dirt. Her wakizashi, still in its scabbard, lay bent at an angle.
For several long moments, they stood over the wreckage of their hopes.
“How are we going to kill her with just your sword?” Kazuko said. “Your arrow did no harm. Killing Hakamadare took both of us working together. We had to cut him to pieces.”
“I fear we’ll have to do the same to Hatsumi. I took her head, but she picked it up and fled.”
“We must entreat the gods for aid.”
Ken’ishi thought about the power that Silver Crane had granted him during the invasion, the way the blood of slain Mongols had seemed to feed it. “Perhaps.”
His gaze trailed over the ripped horseflesh and puddles of blood. Kazuko’s naginata blade was still sheathed. He picked it up. The haft was broken and splintered, but when he pulled off the leather sheath, he found the blade intact. “We can fashion a new pole.”
A glimmer of hope returned to her eyes.
Then a horrid howl echoed through the treetops and rocky slopes.
“She has reattached her head,” he said.
“Then we must hurry.”
* * *
“We must not draw her down to the village,” Kazuko said. “She could hurt more people.”
Ken’ishi nodded. “But which direction is most advantageous?”
“While I was talking with her, she sniffed the air several times.”
“Like a dog.”
She nodded.
“Then we must move with the stream. It’ll cover our scent.”
“If you are concerned about scent, you must wash off her blood. She will be able to smell you all the way from Hakata.”
He knelt in the stream and washed himself, his gaze scanning for signs of Hatsumi, listening for the songs of the kami. Then he took a breath and steadied himself, calmed himself, settled himself. He assumed seiza among the sand and pebbles of the streambed and let the water gush over his legs.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Asking questions.”
He settled Silver Crane across his thighs and sought the Void.
As the concerns of future and past fell away from him, he found the vast web of silver threads that vibrated with the flow of destiny and time, a web that coalesced upon the sheen of steel in his hands.
Your cut is true, Silver Crane, but Hatsumi is powerful, Ken’ishi thought. How do I defeat her?
No reply came.
Ken’ishi grew more insistent. You follow the bloodline. If I am blood of the Taira clan, you must obey me.
Vibrations rose from the great depths of some formless abyss and slowly coalesced into thoughts and impressions that formed a whole in Ken’ishi’s mind. If the man dies, another of the bloodline will be found.
Ken’ishi let his indignation flow through him and seep away. Until then, you serve me. Now tell me. How do we defeat such a creature?
Like the flow of time, inexorable, rejuvenating and destructive by turns, there is power in the flow of water.
Kaa, the old tengu, used to tell Ken’ishi that mountains were places of power, bridges between the celestial realms and those of men. Ken’ishi had once felt the power of the kami of the water, when Kaa had taught him to swim in a hot spring lake. Kappa, like the one he had defeated near Aoka village, drew their power from the kami of the water. Perhaps he could entreat such kami to lend him their power.
Find water of power, and the man will have his answer.
Ken’ishi bowed in thanks to the sword and roused himself.
Kazuko sat on the bank, staring at him. “Something was happening there. I could feel it. Like the...the rhythm of a loom’s shuttle in a distant room.”
Ken’ishi eyed her. “Perhaps I should teach you how to commune with the kami. You seem to have a knack for it.”
Her eyes brightened. “Oh, please! Teach me.”
He smiled. “I will, but first we must go upstream.”
“Why?”
“We must go higher, where the spirits have more power, where more things are possible. And I was right, we must follow the water.” He stood. “And look for saplings as we go. We must find a suitable replacement for your naginata haft.”
* * *
For the rest of the afternoon, they followed the stream up the mountain. The stream meandered back and forth down the clefts and undulations of the slope, through the verdant pine forest, adding its music to the songs of warblers and sparrows. High in the trees, monkeys leaped and chattered. That the birds were singing and monkeys chattering told Ken’ishi that Hatsumi was nowhere nearby. They would go silent at the approach of such a creature.
&nbs
p; As time passed, his wounded ankle grew ever more painful. A puffy, scarlet weal encircled it, and the punctures still leaked blood and some pale fluid. A burning sensation spread across his skin in the areas where Hatsumi’s blood had touched him, and he could not wash it away. Worry niggled at him that some splinter of her remained embedded in his leg, perhaps bone-deep.
As the afternoon wore on, he found himself growing irritable for no discernible reason. All the struggles of his life, all the heartaches, all the forks in his road that led to even greater miseries, leaped to the forefront of his mind, and he could not put them aside. He grew angry with Kazuko that so many of his troubles were centered around her. His life would have been so much simpler if he had not chosen that particular road on that particular day, or if he had come along only a short while later, when Kazuko and Hatsumi would surely have been dead, and he could have avoided Hakamadare and his bandit gang. How much less trouble he would have experienced. He grew angry that she fell behind. He grew angry that she made too much noise, when his own woodcraft was nearly perfect. He grew angry that she had not banished Hatsumi long before she could degenerate into such madness and evil. He had not asked for his life to be destroyed by love. He had not deserved to be hounded as little more than a criminal or a miscreant from the moment he set foot in the realm of human beings.
Kazuko asked him a quiet question, but he did not hear her words. Instead he turned and snarled at her. “Shut up! This is all your fault!”
She flinched as if he had slapped her. A terrible moment passed as her eyes filled with tears. Her hand rose and touched her bandaged cheek. Her lip began to tremble. Then she swallowed hard and steadied her voice. “Yes, I know. There are a hundred ways I could have prevented this, but I did not because...” She took a deep, shuddering breath, “…because of love and loyalty.” Then her voice grew hard. “But if you shout at me again, I will send you away.”
Ken’ishi’s anger melted, and the realization of its unjustness prompted him to apologize. Had they been in the castle or in public, his outburst would have been a grievous breach of etiquette, punishable by banishment, or even seppuku.
Could it be the influence of Hatsumi’s blood? Could anger and jealousy become solid things?
As they climbed, the jagged unease hounded him like a pack of wolves on his scent.
At dusk they reached a sharp rise that became a cliff, perhaps the height of five men. The stream cascaded over the lip and plunged into a pool with thunderous, silvery spray. Amid the roar and mist of the falling water, the voices of the kami rose in an endless, crashing dance.
“Here,” he said. “Can you feel the power here? It’s like a swelling of wonder in your chest.”
She smiled at the immense beauty of the glade, the sun shining through the scattering mist. “Perhaps...”
“I was so small when Kaa taught me to listen for them, it seems I’ve always known how. It is easiest when one’s mind and heart are still, like a pool. The voices of the kami are like ripples on the pool.”
She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. “I think, perhaps, I felt them. They are like multitudes of bees buzzing in the water. But I only sensed it for a moment....”
Ken’ishi smiled. “Keep practicing, and it will get easier.”
She opened her eyes. “Darkness will come soon. Shall we make a fire?”
“Not yet. First we must make you a weapon.”
In a stroke of good fortune, he found a suitable pine saplings less than a cho from the waterfall and cut one to fashion a makeshift naginata haft. While Kazuko kept watch, he trimmed the bark and branches, shaved it as smooth as he could until the light failed, and then slotted one end to mount the tang of the naginata blade. Silver Crane simmered with annoyance at being used as a woodcarving tool, but he ignored it. Once, it even cut his thumb. He sucked at the blood and kept working.
“This is not going to be as strong as an oak haft,” he said. “The wood is very green and much softer. I hope you might get a handful of blows before it breaks.”
Using stones as hammer and anvil, he disassembled the splintered haft and fittings, and drove the iron pins through the wood, through the holes in the tang of the blade. It was during this stage that the unnatural frustrations came roaring back. Every missed blow, every mashed finger, every misalignment of the pins, every time the green wood failed to cooperate with his carving, he cried out with uncharacteristic vehemence. Nevertheless, he forced himself to calm down and keep going.
The final step of construction was to wind his bowstring, salvaged from his splintered bow, around the slotted end of the pole to tighten the wood’s grip on the steel tang. By this time, dusk had faded to night.
“Try it, my lady,” he said, offering it to her with both hands.
The haft was moist, knobby, and too flexible, but the blade felt solidly mounted. She spun the weapon and made a few practice strikes.
Meanwhile he stripped himself to his loincloth and approached the pool, sword in hand. She gasped and turned her back until he slipped into the water. It swallowed his ankles like the frigid snowmelt pools of his youth in the far north. He found this strangely comforting. Then he waded deeper. The pool was waist deep when he stepped beneath the bone-chilling waterfall. The sensuous richness of moisture flooded his nose with the scent of life itself. The icy cold dashed a headache into his skull, but he lowered his head, held Silver Crane horizontally in both hands, took a deep breath through his mouth, and sought the Void. His skin numbed, even as the tumbling water thumped against his weary muscles, loosening them like the fingers of a hundred blind masseurs. The kami were alive with teeming abundance, flowing over him, through him, around him, swimming over his flesh, washing through his mind.
He concentrated on taking one breath after the next, calming the shiver in his flesh, stilling his instincts that cried out to remove himself from such penetrating cold.
Infinite moments passed into numb serenity. He felt only the slick, round stones beneath his bare feet and the hard, sharp weapon resting in his palms. Infinite silver threads filled the universe with possibilities across time and distance, at the heart of which lay Silver Crane. The threads entangled his body and disappeared into vastnesses he could not comprehend. The threads encompassed the trees, the mountain, the water, the kami, unseen multitudes of creatures. Every movement of so much as his finger sent subtle vibrations through the web in a dizzying cascade of after-effects.
And here, in this place, at this time, lay a powerful center of possibilities.
Bathed in kami and communing with the sword, he could see the threads, the possibilities, but not their likely outcomes.
Other vibrations came from other directions, others whose efforts formed their own webs. From one direction came a cluster of threads that trembled with variations of hunger, rage, and fear, but also yearning, sadness, and the anguish of betrayal. Hatsumi’s nexus.
From another direction, closer to him, scents came to him of courage against fear, resolve against danger, and love against duty. Kazuko’s nexus.
What if he could manipulate the threads of others through the power of Silver Crane? What if he could determine outcomes that worked in his favor, and then guide others into them?
The man begins to understand.
Ken’ishi’s focus intensified. How to accomplish that?
He envisioned a scene with Hatsumi lying dead at his feet, Kazuko unharmed. Then he dragged a fistful of Hatsumi’s threads into the scene until they merged. The image wavered, however, with flashes of him lying dead next to Hatsumi, or images of himself mortally wounded gasping out his last breaths in Kazuko’s arms.
Crude, inelegant. But understanding grows. Remember that many other threads pass through this place.
Ken’ishi reached out to look at moments up and down the threads of this physical area, seeking possibilities for his advantage. A stout-looking branch weakened by insects. A precipitously-balanced boulder. A sharp rock slick with water. Instances of K
azuko striking in which her makeshift naginata haft remained whole. His feet finding solid earth, not loose dirt. As if he watched through the ripples of a pool, the image of Hatsumi’s defeat began to coalesce.
But then Kazuko’s shout of warning found its way through the roar of falling water.
We hark to cricket
And to human chirpings...with
Ears so different
—Wafu
Ken’ishi leaped out of the water, raising Silver Crane.
Kazuko stood on the bank, her naginata interposed between herself and Hatsumi.
Hatsumi lay on her side at the foot of a thick pine tree, extricating herself from a thick branch. Her head was back in place, but now cocked at a grotesque angle. Black venom dripped from her lips, and her horrific, black legs splayed from under her robes, part spider, part octopus.
Kazuko shouted, “Her branch snapped! She was coming through the treetops!”
He plunged across the pool, ignoring the rocks tearing at his feet, and scrambled onto the bank.
Hatsumi tried to right herself, but struggled with one of her legs still pinned under the heavy bough by her own weight.
Ken’ishi charged at her, gathering a powerful kiai to focus spirit, sword, and body into the perfect strike.
A spray of glistening, white filaments burst from between Hatsumi’s legs and ensnared his arms. Two of Hatsumi’s legs seized the filaments, yanked him off his feet, and began to drag him toward her. She giggled like a child with a new toy.
Kazuko leaped forward and slashed at the silken tangle. Her blow severed only a few of the silks, others just clung to the naginata blade. She sawed frantically, and still Hatsumi dragged Ken’ishi nearer. He swung himself feet-first and scrabbled for purchase, but the carpet of pine needles slid under him.
Kazuko’s blade managed to sever Ken’ishi’s bonds. He scrambled to his feet, struggling to free his arms of the sticky fibers.
Hatsumi tried to charge forward, but the bough still trapped her leg.
Ken’ishi snatched a handful of Kazuko’s robe and dragged her after him toward the rock face leading to the top of the waterfall. The rocks offered enough purchase for a careful climber to pick his way to the top without much danger. But they did not have time. “Climb!” he shouted.
Spirit of the Ronin Page 19
