Dai-San - 03 (12 page)

Then the foundation of the island began to dissemble.

Atop the shuddering pyramid, Kin Coba averted her ashen face as Kukulkan spoke:

‘Climb upon my back, my son.’

Ronin gestured. ‘My friend. I will not leave him here.’

The Great Plumed Serpent shook his head but said nothing.

Ronin turned and raced down the stairway of the pyramid. The blue and green lightning had ceased at the approach of Kukulkan.

‘Come on!’ he called to Moichi. ‘Come on!’

Dazedly, the big man began to climb.

Shards of stone flew through the air while larger chunks slid downward as if in slow motion, colliding, cracking. His nostrils filled with dust and he caught the pungent stench of newly released sulphur. He slipped as another tremor ripped through the valley. Jagged lines appeared along the breaking causeways. Faint red glow from the depths.

They fell against each other and, together, raced for the summit. Up the crumbling stairway, they leapt over the still form of Kin Coba. Her topaz eyes stared downward, hard as glass, away from the enemy of Tzcatlipoca, past remembering even the dark god whom she had served so well in this arcane city.

The wind was rising and now fully half the structures were obscured by smoke.

They were air-borne in a great flutter, the ruined city dropping swiftly away from them, its precise geometry askew and disappearing until it was just another vast pile of stone and dust and bones.

And then the sea.

My life is nought but a dream filled with surprises, Ronin thought now, alone with the Creator of the Sun. There is no past. There is no future. There is only a present more compelling, more fearsome, more beautiful, than any vision I could imagine asleep or awake.

The ship awaited them, or so he had thought, but dipping so low that they skimmed the tops of the creaming waves, Kukulkan said: ‘For the other, only. You rise with me, my son.’

Thus Moichi and Ronin had parted.

‘When next we meet—’

‘I will know you.’ And Moichi dropped to the wooden deck.

Creaming coral reefs fell behind them as out across the jade deep they flew, where lurked the unknown, unfathomable wonders born at the dawning of the world, still alive in their dim world of perpetual shadow. Passing the violent trenches that still shuddered from eon to eon, causing the seas to rear up, swallowing ships or islands, lying low on their basalt foundations. Past gorges immeasurably deep where no life or again the beginning of all life dwelled. Past vast shelves of layered granite worn smooth where myriad multicolored fish swam lazily in the sun-dappled waters, serene and uncaring.

The planet turned below them as they sped upon their way, Ronin dozing at last for, he suspected, night would soon be upon them.

Yet, though the sun dipped in its arc, heading downward, Kukulkan flew so high that they were, in fact, within a region where darkness could not engulf them. Here the sun, still resplendent in all its life and warmth, reigned supreme, where night had never, in all the countless millennia since the creation of Time itself, been even a brief visitor.

Thus Ronin slept, his body resting, his strength renewing itself from the terrible ordeal which had expended itself across the southern face of the Sacred Pyramid, defeated gods whose time had come and was now gone.

And Ronin dreamed.

Of a giant cat with the form of a woman, who purred to him, lulling him to sleep with her warm, susurrant body, her jutting breasts, her curving thighs, her soft lips. Who rocked against him with her hips, scraping her nipples against his chest. Whose eyes were like glowing stones. Whose cruelty was such that she desired pain instead of tenderness.

Of a headless statue, cracked and tilted in the silt of a swirling lagoon, encroached by weed and long eels, the glyphs along its base already worn smooth by the churning tides.

Peering down at the disappearing answer, Tell me, he cried in an explosion of white bubbles.

Tell me, crooned the feline woman as her legs drew him inward.

Of a shadow approaching now out of the deep green expanse of a forest filled with the sharp points of pine needles, starred weapons. A pungent animal smell in his nostrils. A deep whinnying, so familiar. A guttural snort, the blasting of cold air. Black antlers, rimed with frost, shaking the cluster of branches, heavy with snow. The sun behind a bank of lavender clouds. The fierce, human eyes. The fear—

Tell me now: two voices just out of synch.

He steps forward.

Into the dazzling splendor of the darkness.

Beneath him, mighty Kukulkan delights in his swift flight across the face of the world. Long has he waited for the day when he would feel the small weight of a body upon his undulating back. He feels the heat of the sun upon his fluttering feathers and rejoices in the energy.

‘Wake up,’ he calls softly. ‘Wake up, my son.’ Ronin opens his eyes, looks downward, through the marbled clouds, past the gyring gulls below him, to a distant shore of steep cliffs, rearing out of the jade sea.

‘Behold,’ whispers Kukulkan. ‘Ama-no-mori.’

T
HE LAVENDER AND LACE
dragonfly leapt into the air. The warm breeze sizzled with the quick beats of its double wings, spread like shining fans in the moonlight.

From budding twig to budding twig it went, its long, tubular body as straight as a blade. It hovered, alighted, the beating of its transparent wings never ceasing, then leapt heavenward again. At length, it came upon an opened flower with pink, belled petals, its cupped center damp and fragrant, and it headed downward.

Ronin moved.

The dragonfly froze, clinging to the blossom which swayed slightly from the tiny weight. Even its wings were at rest, like obliquely angled hands in a gesture of supplication.

The night beat on around them.

Far away and below him, he could hear the echoing crash and hiss of the breakers rushing endlessly at the base of the steep cliff. The chirruping of the insects surrounded him. An owl hooted close by. He remained still for some time. In the darkness, away from the cliff’s edge, he could hear the croakings of frogs.

Reassured, the dragonfly came to life and resumed its darting, erratic flight amidst the thicket of flowers. Light from the sliver of horned moon low in the sky splashed over the blossoms in a chill, silver shower.

Ama-no-mori.

The name echoed in Ronin’s mind for perhaps the hundredth time.

They had descended at last out of the golden sun-drenched realm, dipping earthward. Dusk, evening, then night rushed up to embrace them as they fell through the sky.

Rolling off the back as the great coils floated centimeters above the land, letting moist clods of soil run through his fingers, hearing only the echo of the voice as Kukulkan rose into the air with a silent flutter, a brief wind.

‘Good-by, my son.’

Ronin stared after him as he ascended towards the sun, hidden now below the horizon of the world.

Ronin sat in the meadow bordered, in the direction he was facing, by a hanger of maples. The night air was clean and mild. Soon, he knew, he would set off in search of the Bujun, the people of Ama-no-mori, of the great mage dor-Sefrith, whose enigmatic writing he still carried with him, sealed within the hollow hilt of his sword, writing that once translated could turn the destiny of all men. But for this brief moment in time, he savored the exquisite taste of victory, at last upon the soil of Ama-no-mori, his long, arduous quest at an end.

He lay back, watching the winking stars wheel high above him, dew seeping through his shirt, dampening the skin of his back. He thought of Kukulkan in his domain of sun. He thought of flying, the trembling of power, the emerald sea drifting by far below him. The rush of a warm wind against his face as the world spun beneath him. Soon. He closed his eyes.

He awoke to the soft rustling of the grass about him. A night bird called, unseen, in a jeweled voice. The trilling returned; a brief clatter of busy wings.

Silence, save for the quiet chirruping, the distant soft croaking.

He stood up, hearing the sighs of the maples as their tops swayed in the wind off the water. His gaze swung left and he saw the intermittent crystalline spark of a small fire. He set off in that direction, stretching his sore muscles, glad of the easy exercise. He breathed slowly as he went across the meadow, consciously exhaling more than he inhaled so that his automatic reflexes took over and he was breathing deeply and naturally once more. His lungs filled with the perfumed air.

Away from the hanger, he passed a stand of tall, slender pines, lonely and spectacular, regal in their aloofness, on a ridge of land, the verge of a shallow drop to the interior of the island. The sickle moon rode their shivering tops.

Down the incline of brown earth and tangled roots, through a copse and into the reeds. To his right he could make out the black bulk of a forest, gaining dominance over the land as he moved obliquely into the interior.

Soon he heard the ripple of water and the rhythmic singsong of the frogs filled the night. There came a soft splash and the croakings ceased momentarily before starting up again. Abruptly, the fire bloomed before him in a glow of oranges and saffrons.

He paused just within the circle of firelight. A figure, a chiaroscuro of black and orange, squatted before the fire, turning pieces of food skewered on a green sapling stick. The head turned and an oval face, flat and yellow, peered up at him with dark eyes. They took in his entire figure.

‘Would you join me, warrior?’ The voice was soft and musical and, while some of the vowels seemed distorted to his ear, he had no trouble understanding the man.

‘Yes, I—’ His sword felt heavy at his hip. ‘I
am
hungry.’

‘Well then.’ The head swiveled. ‘Come and sit down, by all means.’

He hesitated.

‘Are strangers always so welcome here?’

The man laughed, a silvery sound which mingled gently with the rich clatter of the river somewhere near on their right. ‘Would you slay me then for the mouthfuls of food which are already yours? Or perhaps you desire my fishing poles and bait.’ He laughed again. ‘Sit. Sit.’

Ronin went and sat cross-legged near the man. The shining face peered at him, the wide cheeks, the flat nose, the almond eyes giving the face a humorous countenance even when the features were at rest. It was neither an old face nor a young one.

‘Hoshi is my name, warrior.’ He handed Ronin a chunk of hot vegetable.

Ronin held it in his finger tips, watching the steam disappear into the night. The frogs’ song was a steady reverberation.

‘I am Ronin,’ he said. ‘I am not from this island.’

‘That is quite apparent from the cast of your face,’ said Hoshi. He selected a lump from the stick, popped it into his mouth, chewed slowly, almost reflectively. His black eyes never left Ronin’s face.

‘What—is the name of this place?’ After so long, he could not hold back; his tongue almost caught on his teeth.

The oval face cocked at an angle, the wide lips licked the charcoal from the blunt finger tips.

‘Ama-no-mori, Ronin. The Floating Kingdom.’

Ronin’s exhaled breath was yet another sigh borne upon the rustling night.

Hoshi looked down for a moment, offered him another piece of hot vegetable.

‘Where are you bound?’

‘I search for the Bujun.’

‘Ah.’ The fisherman nodded to himself. ‘I should have guessed.’ He ground the point of the bare stick into the white ash in the fire’s center. ‘Well, my repairs are completed and I travel upriver at dawn. I can take you part of the way, at least, hm?’

‘Part of the way where?’

‘To Eido, of course.’

Firstlight was surreal.

A pearl mist turned all the countryside into a pointillist painting. Tall brown reeds floated by them on either side as Hoshi poled the long thin boat. The trees along the high banks were pastel greens and faded browns and, farther off, the rounded hillsides and the forest were the gray wisps of a waking dream.

The air was cool and moist. Hoshi poled with rapid, powerful strokes in a rhythmic cadence. A crane blew out of a bamboo break to their left as they passed, its blue body grayed and subdued in color. The wet clatter of its rising began a chain of calls by nearby frogs and upriver there was a brief silvery flash and a shivering of the ghostly reeds.

Hoshi stood amidst the slimy fruits of his work. The unskinned fish sloshing back and forth to the boat’s movements in the few centimeters of water he had provided for them.

Ronin sat silently near the boat’s bow, watching the land rising from the mist, trying to clear his mind of the thousand tumbling questions he wished to ask but was sure that the fisherman could not answer. He was not Bujun.

Surprisingly, the rising sun merely warmed the fog but could not burn it off and the world continued to float by him serenely with little or no signs of life. Insects buzzed in the mounting heat and, occasionally, the low-bowing branch of a weeping willow caused him to duck out of the way of its lacy embrace.

They paused under the shelter of a spreading maple just past midday. Hoshi sat on the aft bench, produced a knife with a curving, serrated blade, and proceeded to skin and filet a fish. He offered Ronin half. They chewed silently, enjoying the stillness, the peace. They shared the last of Hoshi’s clear rice wine.

Just before dusk, Hoshi altered their course again and headed toward the right-hand shore. When they had moored the boat, Hoshi fileted another fish, wrapped it in oiled paper for Ronin.

‘Your way lies to the east,’ he said, pointing. ‘Along the Kisokaido.’

Ronin thanked him and set off along the indicated path. The mist was turning a pale lavender and the world glowed like a lovely amethyst held up to a light as he strode down the winding road. The forest had finally dropped away from them during the long afternoon and now the road led him through rolling grasslands, rich and fallow. He sniffed, smelling animals and looked around. He saw none nearby and the mist made a wider search impossible.