Spirit of the Ronin

by Travis Heermann

  His voice was a croak. “All for you.”

  He let her peel off his torn, stained robe. The dried blood of untold foes was caked thick under his clothes. With her gentlest touch, she washed it from him while he stood weaving as if about to collapse at any moment, running her fingers through his hair, over his hard shoulders, across his back, across his breast. He trembled under her touch. The front of his trousers stood out before him. She untied his obi, and his trousers fell around his ankles, leaving only a strained loincloth to cover him. She gently lifted each of his feet from the trousers, then she washed the blood from his thighs, from his calves, feeling the heat building under his skin.

  The heat bloomed within her as well. Each droplet of rain across her breasts was a shock, her nipples exquisitely erect, her thighs hot and sensitive.

  She could not see his downcast face.

  His voice was ragged. “We...we...”

  She touched the deep scar on his breast, over his heart. Streaks of stubborn crimson surrounded it, and would not be washed away.

  He seized both of her wrists.

  She gasped at his strength, but his grip relaxed before hurting her.

  His palms went to her shoulders, slid down her arms. Then his hands dropped to her obi and untied it.

  She shrugged out of her robe, then her under-robe, until she stood naked to the waist, her breaths short and quick.

  Standing there under his gaze, shrouded in shadow, she had no wish for comforts, no futon, no fire, no shelter. Her heart thundered in time with the sky, with a primal need.

  His hands fell to her waist, and a brief tug let her trousers slide down over her hips.

  They were no longer the man and the woman they had been when last they faced each other this way. Scars crisscrossed their bodies and souls. But suddenly she felt like the virgin of that first night, unsure what would happen next, but knowing without question that it must.

  She hooked her fingers into his loincloth and pulled it down, then stood and faced him.

  He took her face in infinitely gentle hands, hands full of carefully restrained power, and stroked her cheek; and then he kissed her.

  A rush of molten fire blazed through her from crown to toenails. Her knees weakened, but he caught her.

  The next ripple of lightning revealed a bed of spongy, green moss not far away.

  They took each other’s hands.

  More naked than at any time she could remember, she gently pressed him down onto his back and settled herself atop him, guiding him inside. He convulsed with a gasp beneath her, driving himself deeper. The intensity of his gaze sent heat gushing through her.

  She moved on him, fell upon him, kissing him, tumbling into a shrinking point of ecstasy, that place she had not experienced but one night before.

  A serenity filled Ken’ishi’s face, wonder, joy, as if what they were doing was what they had waited their whole lives for.

  When he cried out and bucked and she felt the hot flood inside her, her own pulsing ecstasy exploded as well, shattering her into pieces only the gods could reassemble.

  Light stroked the black sky like fingers, and he did not stop. He seized her and rolled on top of her. The mossy earth cushioned her against his driving thrusts, each one sending spasms of pleasure through her. The rain fell into her face, mixing with tears of joy.

  But then a strange tension crept through his body. His face turned away from her.

  With each thrust he whispered, “No no no no...” in a haunted voice.

  * * *

  Ken’ishi closed his eyes against the appalling images flooding his mind, images the pleasure only blurred. Beneath him, this porcelain goddess, more beautiful to him now than ever, clutched at him and gasped and cried out in waves of pleasure. It was as if he were one with Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess herself, shining in heaven, and only her light kept him from drowning in shadow.

  Terrible thoughts, slaughter and drowning and trackless rivers of blood, chewed and writhed at the edges of his awareness until the only way to escape them was to lose himself in the bliss of Kazuko’s body.

  She clutched at him with her deepest core, seized his hips with both hands, and pulled him deeper.

  When he could not bear to gaze upon her beauty, she took his face in her hands and forced him to look, as if she knew his anguish, for the anguish had been hers as well. She understood his pain, as no one ever had. And she forgave him for all of it.

  She pulled him down close to her, clawing at his back until he could bury his face in her hair, in the scent of her neck, and her warm lips kissed his face with tenderness he had never known existed.

  Her cries drove him harder, until a tsunami of ecstasy exploded out of him again.

  And in the aftermath, as he subsided and rolled off her onto the wet, spongy moss, she pulled him close again in the rain and stroked his hair, whispering soothing things he would not remember.

  When the afterglow faded into the tumult of the storm, they found a rock outcropping that kept off most of the rain and wind, and piled their clothes there for comfort, and huddled together for warmth. They made love again, this time for the sheer, exuberant pleasure of it.

  Neither of them spoke. Neither knew what to say.

  In the early morning, they made love again, this time languorously, savoring every moment, but with a looming sense of the inevitable, that with the coming of morning, this night of dreams and nightmares would be over.

  Then Ken’ishi dressed and armored himself while Kazuko huddled under the rocks with her robes covering her nakedness.

  He drank from the cascade of rainwater, relishing the surging caress of the kami filling him with their power and wisdom.

  And then hearing their warning.

  He spun in time to see a figure across the glade, a pale smudge against the foliage. A face painted with shock. A face he knew.

  “Yasutoki,” he growled with a voice deeper than any man’s.

  The smudge of face disappeared.

  “Stay here!” he said to Kazuko.

  * * *

  With Silver Crane naked in his hand, he charged the foliage where Yasutoki had stood. The criminal would not survive to see the dawn, and his death would save the lives of ten thousand, and perhaps erase a bit of the debt upon Ken’ishi’s soul.

  Kazuko called after him, but her words were lost in the deluge.

  At the edge of the foliage, no sign of Yasutoki remained.

  Ken’ishi pelted through the torii and down the steps. Something sharp stung his arm. He stopped to pluck out a small blade, a shuriken, and tossed it aside. Dizziness washed over him. His limbs turned to lead and sackcloth.

  The wound in his arm released a silver glimmer before it sealed like a pair of lips.

  In the silver weave of fate, Ken’ishi saw the truth. Yasutoki had brought the Mongols to kill him. Yasutoki had been a traitor all along, in more ways than his double identity as Green Tiger. Even now, he would return to Tsunetomo and tell of the tryst between Ken’ishi and Kazuko, for no other reason than to destroy Tsunetomo’s spirit once and for all. Without the spirit of their leader, the Otomo troops would collapse and be swept away like chaff before the Horde.

  Down the pitch-black tunnel of slippery stone steps he pounded and stumbled, but he kept his feet, Silver Crane aglimmer with lightning.

  He burst through the bottom torii.

  No sign of Yasutoki.

  Nothing moved between Ken’ishi and the rain-hazed distance. The cookfires of friend and foe were extinguished, and the dark mounds of the surrounding hills kept their secrets.

  Clustered around the torii, however, were the bodies and pieces of the Mongols he had slain.

  Suddenly the walls of denial crumbled, and death deluged his mind. The storm—no, a typhoon bigger than the last one—had seized the enemy fleet in its pitiless swells and was even now grinding it to bloody splinters, pounding it with rain and wind. The threads of destiny yanked taut in his imagination, and he saw the entirety of
the enemy fleet, more thousands of ships and men than he could count, numbers so large they lost their meaning.

  Yet another enemy force had already landed farther west and had been moving east to rendezvous with the army at Takashima, crushing all resistance in its path. Eventually, the defense forces would meet them and the fighting would continue for a while, but without their supply lines, the enemy armies would wither like a tree with its roots severed.

  These images blasted through his mind, through the silver weave of his own making.

  The ships that had brought them bobbed and struggled against towering waves, only to be crushed under them. The ships lashed together for defense in Imari Bay were being torn apart and pounded into splinters by the very defenses that had preserved them. Hundreds at a time, smashing themselves to flotsam. Thousands of souls—helpless in those ships’ holds—cast into the waves, only to drown as they sank to the bottom of the sea where sharks would feast and crabs would gorge upon dead men’s eyes and soft, fleshy morsels.

  The carnage that had choked Hakata Bay in the aftermath of the last storm would be nothing compared to this. Thousands of dead men would wash ashore for weeks to come across the entire north coast of Kyushu.

  The defense forces would scour northern Kyushu and the other coastal islands, catching tens of thousands of stranded invaders in their sweeps. Bereft of supply lines and reinforcements, those men would never see China again.

  All these things he had blocked from his awareness by driving himself into this woman he worshiped, losing himself in the softness of her.

  Kill them all, Silver Crane had said.

  And Ken’ishi had killed them all.

  The sword was an endless loop, a bottomless well of destruction and power, gorging itself upon death and feeding its infinite power to its wielder, a circle ever building and tightening until the wielder was ultimately destroyed, like a man trying to grasp at lightning.

  All of these men were dying at his wish.

  All of this knowledge flooded over him at once.

  He could not breathe.

  But he was going to lose Yasutoki to the darkness.

  Until another thread, one scarred by cruelty and tragedy, appeared from a weave as complex as Ken’ishi’s. And just ahead, it intersected Yasutoki’s.

  The night grew darker and darker until the blackness overtook him.

  There goes a beggar

  Naked, except for his robes

  Of Heaven and Earth

  —Kikaku

  Yasutoki fled through the lashing rain, glancing over his shoulder as he tried to follow the dikes in the dark, stumbling often into the muck of the rice paddies. The world was incomprehensible shadows amid sheets of rain. The downpour drenched his clothes, slowing him down. Mud sucked one of his zori free, and he ran on with only one sandal.

  The time for intrigue was over. He would find Tsunetomo. Ken’ishi must be destroyed. The two of them could no longer both exist in the same realm. Yasutoki had never flinched from killing a man, had never believed that killing any particular man was beyond his power. Yet when he saw the blazing fury and strength in Ken’ishi’s eyes, his bowels had turned to water, and all he could do was flee.

  He had never fled in the face of peril before.

  It angered him.

  Nevertheless, the force of Ken’ishi’s pursuit would not allow Yasutoki to turn and face his enemy. This rain had doubtless weakened the poison from his shuriken, and his only other weapon was a tanto. And in this darkness, he would not be able to see his pursuer, nor could his pursuer see him.

  A flash of lightning split the sky wide open, revealing a figure before him, standing on the dike as if waiting for him.

  He gasped and skidded to a halt. The after-flicker of the lightning revealed a figure, but it was not Ken’ishi. The build was too slight and the figure wore a conical straw hat.

  All he saw in the flash was two piercing eyes peering from under the brim of the hat.

  The figure’s drenched robe and peasant’s trousers clung to womanly curves.

  What was a woman doing here? In this weather?

  A woman with a wooden staff.

  He could hardly hear his own voice through the roar of the rain. “You’re looking for me.”

  The woman remained still.

  He flung two shuriken at her face, but she remained on the path.

  Had she dodged or had he missed? The darkness made him unsure.

  She gripped her staff with both hands.

  “What do you want?” he shouted.

  Between flickers of lightning, she moved.

  Suddenly she was upon him.

  He fended off a blow to his skull with his left wrist and felt something crack.

  Then the staff came apart in her grip, and steel flashed from within. He caught the hidden blade on the guard of his dagger. The rasp of steel on steel. He tried to reach for another shuriken in his sleeve, but his fingers would not grasp.

  The staff swept against his ankle, but he moved with the blow, shifting his weight out of the path of the sweep in a technique he had learned decades before. A moment of astonishment grabbed him that his body still remembered the training of his youth, even as he realized the technique now used against him was just as familiar, and may well have been taught in the same training hall.

  A whisper-thin touch across his breast, and the pain an instant later as the blade’s edge stroked him like a lover. The front of his robe fell open and blood flowed.

  He regained his stance and slashed at her face.

  She dodged—barely—and his up-sweeping hand knocked off her straw hat. He tried to glimpse her face, but the darkness and rain obscured her.

  “Bah!” he snarled. It did not matter who she was. Someone had sent her to kill him—a rival gang lord, perhaps, and the dancer-like precision of her movements bespoke a long, thorough training.

  He kicked at her, but she danced away.

  In the distance between them, he managed to fling a shuriken at her. He had only one left. The throw had felt good, but the darkness denied his eyes.

  His skills were too rusty. He prepared for another flash of lightning; in that moment he would strike—

  Agonizing pain exploded deep in his knee. A shuriken—his own shuriken—protruded from his kneecap. The leg crumpled under him.

  And then the lightning flashed, and he saw her face.

  He did not need to say her name.

  He raised his dagger in defense, a weak, desperate gesture.

  Steel licked through the rain, and his severed arm jumped free halfway from his elbow. It splashed into a puddle beside him. He snatched for the dagger with his left hand.

  Another whish of steel, another jolt of hot, gushing pain. His other arm spun away through the night.

  Her fist twisted into his robes and dragged him up to his knees. The shuriken ground deeper into his knee joint with pain that stole his breath. His strength gushed from the stumps of his arms.

  He stared up into Tiger Lily’s face. It had once been so beautiful. But now it was nothing more than a soulless, porcelain mask. Only her eyes lived now, and their sustenance was hatred. In them, he saw every cruelty he had ever enacted upon her, every “correction,” every “night of play.”

  He had indeed trained her too well.

  She raised her straight-bladed sword, point down, glimmering with runnels of bloody rain water, and jammed it between his lips, splintering his front teeth, filling his mouth with blood and metal and agony, splitting his tongue, prying his face toward the sky.

  And as he screamed around the cold steel, she pressed the point deeper, where it slithered into his throat and went all the way down.

  * * *

  Kazuko dressed herself, waiting for Ken’ishi to return. She donned her armor and took up her naginata.

  The last few moments she saw him kept repeating in her mind.

  Unmistakably, he had said, “Yasutoki.”

  But the voice had been like that o
f Hakamadare.

  “Stay here!” he had said.

  Had his eye glinted like a red coal as he looked over his shoulder at her?

  She thought she had seen someone at the edge of the forest, but she could not be sure it was Yasutoki. His presence here made no sense. Vast, unknown truths lurked beneath all of this, of which she knew none.

  She waited for Ken’ishi to come back as the blackness of night faded to dismal gray.

  He did not.

  The storm lashed the hilltop. Somewhere nearby, a tree branch cracked and fell.

  Ken’ishi might need help. She hurried down the hillside, trusting the forest to conceal her from any enemies. From her concealment, she tried to fathom the breathtaking carnage littering the earth at the foot of the hill. Surging sheets of rain drowned visibility beyond a hundred paces. The valley had become a sea of muddy rainwater, broken only by the lines of raised dikes and the bodies of the dead.

  She picked her way among the corpses at the foot the hill, looking for him, but they were all barbarians and the scant handful of her Dragons. She wept for her brave women.

  How far had Ken’ishi pursued his prey?

  Safety must lie to the southeast, where the defense forces were gathered before the storm started. She dared not stay here. But she might become lost without sight of any landmarks.

  Even atop the dikes, the mud was deep and the going slow. At times, she felt like she must be walking across the surface of the sea itself. The wind slapped at her like the hand of the gods, driving the rain against her flesh like pellets.

  Bodies littered her path. More of her Dragons, a handful of dead Mongols and their ponies.

  And then a familiar face.

  Yasutoki’s dead visage stared up at the sky, rain filling his gaping mouth.

  Ken’ishi had caught him. A sliver of justice in a world of suffering.

  But where had Ken’ishi gone from there?

  She already knew the answer.

  She wept again, this time for him, but kept moving.

  After what seemed like hours of slogging through the mud and storm, the dark hulks of the southern hills came into view, and she turned toward them.

  She wandered like a ghost through abandoned encampments, exhaustion sucking at her limbs. Finally she found the road they had traveled from Hakata. For a ri she followed it until she found a village, and there were tents erected in the shelter of trees.