The Nicholas Linnear Novels (124 page)

One came. Lithe and slender, he blended into the darkness so that he was almost upon her before she became aware of his presence. She turned her head, startled despite herself, giving a strangled little cry, angry with herself for not sensing him sooner.

“What do you want?” Her voice was a husky whisper, little more than the night wind which rustled the leaves of the cypress above her head.

Sound, too, could betray him, so he remained silent. And now, unbidden, Akiko felt fear flutter her heart. Her eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated to their maximum as she peered into the blackness in order to pick out some tiny gleam that would make of him something more than a wraith.

“I know you’re there,” she said softly, willing her voice not to tremble. “If you come near me, I’ll kill you.” But despite her bravado, she began to tremble. She felt chilled to the bone and everything around her seemed strange and forbidding.

On the verge of tears, Akiko made a decision. She knew that the longer she waited the more certain it was that she would lose her nerve. Already tremors coursed through her tightly coiled muscles, wracking her like ague. It was now or never, and she would just have to trust her eyes. She had not seen him move from the patch of shadow so close to her so that must mean that he had not. Visions of ghosts and shape-changing creatures were for children.

I am afraid, she told herself in the calmest inner voice she could summon up. But he’ll kill me if I let him or, at the very least, drag me back to
Fuyajo
, which would certainly be worse than death.

She was just bringing the pistol out from behind her when she felt the presence to her left and thought, The second one! She felt pressure on her larynx and, of course, reflexively tried to breathe. When she could not, panic rose within her and she cried out, bringing the pistol up in a blur, her forefinger already squeezing, squeezing, anything to get oxygen into her straining lungs.

The roar of the discharge caused her to scream in rage and fear. Concussion struck her eardrums like a physical blow and she staggered, already retching from the intense stench of the cordite and the heat, searing and instantaneous, that had brushed by her like the hand of death.

Light blinded her and she fetched up against a wooden wall, sliding down it as her legs gave out. Something was in her eyes and she put her free hand up, wiping at her forehead. Her hair was matted and wet, filled with grit that rolled slickly through her fingers.

Blood black on the night, its coppery stench filling her nostrils, making her gag all over again, making her wipe again and again at her face, crying now in great gulping sobs.

A shadow looming over her and instinctively she brought the pistol upward, almost all control gone now so that the barrel weaved back and forth. She tried to get at the trigger again but her finger wouldn’t respond to her commands and then the gun was gone from her weakened grasp and she was broken, sobbing still, whispering through it, “Don’t take me back, I don’t want to go back.”

Lifted bodily off the street, a breeze against her hot, streaked cheek for an instant and then a creak, a slam, the noises of a bolt being shot home and the warmth of a house, stealing over her, a place unfamiliar but only one fact surfacing: it was not
Fuyajo.

Her head went down…

A face swam into view, like the man in the moon, pockmarked and huge, descending through a network of sere branches as spiky as a stag’s antlers.

Akiko cried out, tried to throw her arms across her face to protect it. She had the sensation of falling and shooting forward at the same time, spinning like a leaf in the wind, toppling from the safety of…what?

The man in the moon lifted away, and it was like a weight being pulled off her chest.

“Is this better?” The voice was soft and lilting, a country accent.

“I can’t…breathe.” Her voice was like a rodent’s squeak and she realized that her mouth and throat were so parched that she could not summon up saliva.

“In time you will be able to do everything.” The man in the moon smiled, or so it seemed to Akiko. She still had trouble seeing as if she were peering through a windowpane streaked with running rainwater.

“You look blurry,” she whispered through cracked lips.

“When you stop crying,” the gentle voice told her, “you will no longer have that problem.”

She slept for a time after that, sliding down into a vertiginous whirlpool, a troubled slumber in which her fear, brought to the surface, would not allow her to slip deeply into unconsciousness.

Rather, she fought in a series of battle-scarred dreams, on the cusp of sleep, her eyelids fluttering constantly, her limbs thrashing and twitching like a dog’s.

When, at last, she awoke it was near night again and it was as if no time had passed though, in reality, more than eighteen hours had elapsed from her ordeal in the street.

“Where did you get this weapon?”

It was the first question he asked her. She knew the answer of course, but the effort required in opening her mouth and translating thought into speech seemed beyond her.

He put an enormous lopsided wooden bowl of
larmen dosanko
in front of her and, sitting cross-legged on the
tatami
beside the
futon
on which she lay, laced his fingers beneath his chin and contemplated her silently.

Akiko rose to her haunches. The scent of the steaming noodle soup was overpowering, blotting out all other sensation or thought. Only when she was finished eating did she notice the sleek metal and pearl of the pistol lying by his side. It was this he was referring to when he had asked her the question.

She looked back at the rumpled
futon.
Its fabric was light but in spots deep, rust-colored stains had turned the beautiful cotton leathery and stiff. The sight set Akiko’s heart to hammering again, and something must have showed in her eyes because the man sitting across from her smiled and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, Kodomo-gunjin.”

Akiko put her fingertips up to the right side of her forehead, near her hairline. A cessation of hunger had made her aware of a painful pulsing there. She felt the bulge of a bandage. “Why do you call me Little Soldier?”

“Perhaps,” he said softly, leaning forward to push the pistol across the
tatami
toward her, “for the same reason you carry this weapon.”

He cocked his head. It was no wonder she had first thought of him as the man in the moon for his face was as round as a full moon’s, with pockmarked cheeks and a flat Chinese nose. He had a long, wispy mustache drooping down around the corners of his mouth but little other hair. Overall his face seemed as soft as raw dough.

He bowed now. “I am Sun Hsiung. How may I call you?”

“You have already named me, haven’t you? Kodomo-gunjin.”

He nodded. “As you wish.”

She leaned forward and took the pistol off the
tatami.
It seemed quite heavy to her now. She did not look at him when she spoke next. “What happened…last night?”

Sun Hsiung put his forearms on the points of his knees. “You shot the…man who was holding you. You discharged one bullet, which entered his skull through the socket of his left eye. It splintered the ridge of bone just above and lodged in his brain.”

“He’s…dead?”

“Quite.”

She swallowed hard. “And the other one?”

“He was coming for you when I arrived on the scene. He was going to kill you, I believe. I had to stop him.”

Akiko opened her mouth to ask another question but immediately thought better of it. “They may send more.”

Sun Hsiung shrugged. “Perhaps.”

She put her finger around the trigger and hefted the pistol. “I’ll shoot them, too.”

Sun Hsiung considered her for a moment. He had not asked her who it was who might send more thugs after her or even why these had been dispatched. “That would be most unwise, I think.”

Her look was defiant. “Why? It saved my life.” He rose, leaving her there in silence to learn her first lesson.

It was not the pistol that had saved Akiko’s life but the advent of Sun Hsiung’s intervention. When she had worked that through sufficiently so that she could see the ramifications, she unwound from her sitting position and went to him.

He was outside, in back, tending to his tiny, exquisite bonsai garden. Akiko stood at the edge of it, a giant blundering into a minute world.

“I want to learn,” she said softly.

The rice-paper lantern swung from its black iron hook, its light falling across Sun Hsiung’s shoulders as he toiled. He did not turn around or make any motion that he had heard her or, indeed, was aware of her presence at all.

“I want you to teach me what you know.”

She looked down at the weapon she was still holding in her hand. There was an odd kind of security in its heft and warmth in her hand. And it was something of her mother’s.

Slowly, carefully, she made her way through the tiny sculptured trees to where he was working on hands and knees.

“Please,” she whispered, kneeling down as best she could in the narrow stone path and bending far forward in a kowtow. She extended the firearm in her open palm. “Take this as payment. It is all I have.”

Sun Hsiung set his gleaming tools aside and slowly turned around. He bowed to her and, lifting the pistol from her open hand, murmured, “
Dōmo arigatō
, Kodomo-gunjin.”

She had almost killed herself that night as well as the thug. That was why her forehead was bandaged, why, when she finally removed it, there was a reddish weal that gradually metamorphosed into a small white furrow of puckered skin. The bullet that eventually killed her assailant had nicked her as well. Too close. She was glad she had given the pistol to Sun Hsiung.

The beginnings of her training surprised her. Days commenced at five in the morning. Pupil and
sensei
began their exercises in the dark, building wind, the cardiovascular system. In the pale light of dawn they were into
Tai Chi Chuan,
slow, languorous movements that increased a sense of balance and limb coordination not unlike ballet.

From midmorning to midafternoon Sun Hsiung left her alone in the house to read selections of certain books he would provide for her. Akiko was an excellent reader, with superb retention and a large vocabulary. She was diligent in her studies, at times even rapt.

When Sun Hsiung returned from his daily errands abroad they would retire to the bonsai garden and the variables of the weather, each with a rice-paper pad, a small sable brush, and a pot of ink. At first Akiko was nonplussed. Her heart was burning with fury and often she shook from an excess of released adrenaline. Her head buzzed with swirling emotions and she would call up those memories from that night, all fear leeched from her, instead, a cold, calculating hatred growing wildly like a weed in an untended garden.

So she balked at the idea of painting. She could put up with the rather gentle
Tai Chi
, the long hours of studious repose but this…this was just too much.

The first time she was handed the pad and brush, she said as much. Sun Hsiung looked down at her and said, “Kodomo-gunjin, I fear that I have named you too well. You must learn peace before you can be taught the ways of war.”

“But
painting…
” Her tone made the word synonymous with garbage collection.

Silently, Sun Hsiung considered whether he had made a mistake. He wondered if this wild young thing could be taught the most difficult lesson of patience. He shrugged inwardly. Her own
karma
would determine that; it was his
karma
to teach her. After that…

“Before we can start on
the protective
aspects of your training, your heart must be purged of hatred,” he said. “To do that you will require a conduit. I place the leech on the inside of your arm and blood is drained from you.”

“But they will not wait long to come after me again.”

“You are no longer alone in the world, Kodomo-gunjin,” he said, placing the pot of ink beside her.

Her eyes swung away from him and contemplated the vast, snowy expanse of the paper lying on her lap. “But I don’t know how to paint,” she said in a plaintive voice.

Sun Hsiung smiled down at her. “Then let us begin with the fundamentals.”

Over the succeeding months painting became her favorite part of the day, and she came to cherish the sound of her
sensei
’s key in the lock at precisely the same time each day. Lifting her head up, she would look out the window to see the sun striking the bamboo wall of the tiny garden and recognize the light for the finest of the day. Eagerly, then, she would close her books and gather up their painting materials, meeting him at the
fusuma
out to the garden, her mind quivering in anticipation of the new lesson.

Too, at first, the advent of afternoon rain would depress her, for that certain light would not be present and they would forsake their painting and turn to other lessons. But later on, when she became more adept, she would look forward to the rain for then they would sit just inside the open
fusuma
where it was warm and dry and begin to use the diffuse light, the oblique intermittent lines of the rain as the basis for their paintings.

How could Akiko have ever thought that she would be so elated by foul weather? When others were slowly wending their way home through the slicked streets, bent over beneath their
am-gasa
against the rain and wind, shivering and damp, she would be busy dipping her brush in ink, putting it to paper.

And, so gradually that she was not at first aware of it, the hatred did indeed fade from her heart, flowing out through the creative conduit Sun Hsiung intuited was right for her. Her paintings softened, flowing more easily over the paper, gaining a kind of organic power that gathered in her lines and spaces, impressing even the
sensei
who had spent so long at this pursuit.

Thus there came a time when Sun Hsiung judged it right for her to begin the more difficult aspects of her training. On a day when the snow had fallen heavily, a sere blanket covering the greens and browns of Japan, he kept her up all night, beginning the long process. He did this with full knowledge of what this might do to her and to him. For in truth he had never before had a female pupil and had he been of another temperament he would have felt a certain trepidation.