The Nicholas Linnear Novels (125 page)

In fact, he recognized that on some level it was odd that he had accepted her sex so readily. His native China was so different in its concept of women. Sun Hsiung knew that his father found intelligent women who showed any kind of talent troublesome. “Sooner or later,” he would tell his son, “they will open their mouths and talk back to you, and then what use is their talent?”

In Japan as well as in China a woman was expected to follow the dictates of her father until she was married. Then she was required to obey her husband and, in the event of his death, her eldest son.

The worst sin a wife could commit was to fail to bear children. In that event, according to certain ancient codes, she was expected to leave. In some cases she could choose to accept her husband’s siring a child via a mistress or, failing that, adopting a child of one of her husband’s relatives.

A wife’s adultery caused her to be immediately divorced, but a man could have as many mistresses as he chose. In fact, a law enacted in 1870 in Japan established kinship between parent and child to be in the first degree and kinship between a man and his mistress to be in the second degree. Although this was rescinded ten years later, the custom of taking mistresses continued unabated.

When the emperor Mutsuhito ended his reign in 1912 it was rumored that the son who succeeded him as the emperor Taisho had been borne not by Mutsuhito’s wife but by his mistress. Taisho’s reign was brief; in 1926 he was succeeded by his own son, Hirohito.

In recalling all this history Sun Hsiung again reminded himself what a renegade he had been and still was. He had fled mainland China many years before because of the oppressive nature of the society. The fact was that he did not find subservience in anyone attractive, particularly in a mate. He had, consciously or no, dedicated his life to the pursuit of strength, and he differed markedly from the feudal Japanese
samurai
who fed on strength by day and by night wished only for the obeisance of gentle women.

He looked at his Little Soldier’s working body now in the coppery lamplight, a thin sheen of sweat turning her pale skin glowing and burnished.

He asked himself whether he would look upon a male body with the same set of conflicting emotions which seemed to plague him. Would he be so acutely aware of the play of her back muscles, the rippling of her thighs as she stretched and twisted in the
Tai Chi
? She performed it with such startling skill and agility, it was difficult for Sun Hsiung to believe she had been at it for six months rather than six years.

His eyes stole down to the workings of her buttocks as she lifted one leg and spun, and he was profoundly ashamed of the instincts which rose within him. And yet he could not help them.

He was a man who had always dealt with his desire in precisely the same way he did all his other requirements: when he felt the need for it he entered the new
karyukai
district and slaked his thirst. Yet those times had all been of his own choosing and his iron control had dictated the nights he would perform those erotic exercises to the delight of not only himself but his partner as well.

Now, for the first time since he was a young, untrained lad, his desire rose unbidden, a deceitful serpent twining about him, enlacing him within its languorous coils. Angry, he steeled his mind against the onslaught, but his mind had nothing to do with it. He was a man, after all, who was in touch with the totality of his being, and he knew full well that only modern man chose to live completely within his mind.

And it was Sun Hsiung’s body that was speaking now and he knew deep down where his essence resided that he must respond to its calling in some manner.

That morning, while his pupil still slept off the night’s lessons, he stole from the house and availed himself of the pleasures of the willow world. But now, though he felt the pleasure rippling through him at what was being done to him, though he shot his seed twice within the span of time he was with the
tayu
these were only surface sensations and while the storm raged, in the depths there was only motionlessness and silence.

He could not say that he had not enjoyed his stay within the precincts of the happy field. He had felt the clouds and rain but yet his spirit was roaming restless. Though his member was for the moment satiated, still the core of him remained unfulfilled.

Sun Hsiung wondered at this all the way back to his house and, turning the key in the lock and entering once again the sanctum of his domain, he at once understood the nature of his agitation.

For as he went through the silent rooms, he came upon his pupil’s sleeping quarters. The
fusuma
was partly open, as it always was, and Sun Hsiung paused to check on her. She was still asleep, her face turned to the side, toward him. She was on her back, one leg stuck straight out, the other bent sharply at the knee so that she had the electric appearance of leaping even in repose.

And like the clean edge of a gleaming knife Sun Hsiung felt the flick of his emotions flutter his heart as his eyes drank in the sight of her.

What mysterious essence could a woman of her young years possess to affect him thusly? It was a question that he could not possibly answer for it belied the use of years and experience, the commodities with which he was most familiar.

And as Sun Hsiung knelt just outside the threshold to her room, enrapt by the serenity of her
wa
, he felt a pulsing in the nether reaches of his lower belly, a kind of tidal pull that the Awabi divers spoke of where in a lake none should be.

So, too, now with Sun Hsiung. And he craned his neck, staring hard at her sleeping face to make certain. For it seemed to him that something was reaching out across the brief gulf that separated them and was massaging him internally. It was not that he thought of this feat as impossible. He knew too much of
jahō
to rule such a thing out. But from such a one as his Little Soldier? Why, she had had no training.

And yet he could not dispute what was occurring inside his body. He looked around. The day was almost done. Long shadows stretched through the house like animate pets, and the light was fast failing. Night was coming on.

So near him Akiko stirred, both legs extending, arms raised over her head as she, too, stretched like some great cat. Her eyelids fluttered open and her irises were upon him as if in her slumber, through the membrane of her lids, she had been watching him all the time.

“Come here,” she murmured in a totally undisciplined voice. And when Sun Hsiung made no move, said no word, her lids pulsed and he felt the kneading in his lower belly increase, radiating downward to the base of his member. All at once his testicles began to tingle and it was as if a silken hand had grasped him about the base of his penis. He began to stiffen and grow.

No!
a voice inside his head shouted, but he had no recourse. As if he were a dreamer immersed in water, he swam lazily across the threshold of her room, felt her arms come up and like oiled serpents slide across his muscled shoulders. The long fingers caressed the nape of his neck and the base of his skull.

Sun Hsiung could no longer feel his hands or his feet. He was aware only of an inordinate pleasure pooling in his loins.

Magically, majestically, she parted his kimono, her left hand tracing circles across his chest, belly, nipples. Her eyes, still heavylidded with sleep and perhaps something more, stared up at him, their pupils dilated so completely there seemed no iris at all. Her lips had softened, becoming sensuous, parted slightly so that he could scent her sweet breath.

There was a part of him that did not want to see her naked. But another side, the one she had provoked, would not be denied. And slowly, softly, he pulled apart her thin cotton kimono so that inch by inch her glowing flesh was revealed to him, at first the sections he had already glimpsed, areas in their tempting proximity to the more intimate parts that had already begun to inflame him.

Then, when all of those had been revealed to him, he held his breath as first one breast then the other slid out from beneath the concealing shadows of the kimono. They swelled into the light, capped with nipples and areola as dark as the encroaching night. If Fuji-san was the most perfect mountain in the world then surely these must be the most perfect breasts.

A tiny cry escaped Sun Hsiung’s lips as he bent his head in worship. And Akiko, closing her eyes in rapture as she felt his lips encompassing first one nipple then the other, stroked the back of his neck in the expert manner she had observed for so long in
Fuyajo,
sensing now with her own newly learned knowledge the proper nerve bundles and, running her fingertips down their buried lengths, how to keep them burning with electric energy or to calm them into a euphoric stupor.

And yet it was not enough; she was impatient and her right hand snaked between their bodies, seeking to grasp in physical substance what she had reached out for during the last rising moments of sleep when something inside her had become aware of a presence beside her, then sensing that it was Sun Hsiung, and, lastly, picking up the intensely sexual emanations emerging from him. Thus she had reached out for him while still in the beta level of twilight cerebration and, on the cusp of consciousness, she had moved her
wa
across the infinity of space between them.

Now she had in her hand what her mind had touched, and she cupped his heavy scrotum in her palm while her fingers gently probed the soft skin just beneath, midway to his anus.

Sun Hsiung, who had been involved with the pristine symmetry of her breasts, abruptly felt the exquisite invasion of her fingers and thought he was going to perish with joy. She was moving to the core of him, accelerating his pulse rate. He felt inordinately heavy and ponderous, a human put into a sun bear’s shaggy body. His mind no longer worked correctly, all the crystal passageways that had led him so successfully through the labyrinth of logic had crumbled. He felt caught up in a power beyond his imagining.

Involuntarily he groaned as her astounding ministrations accelerated his passion further. With a low growl, he finished stripping them both of the robes. Swinging her around on the
futon
, he put his calloused palms flat on her thighs, moving them slowly inward along the incredibly soft flesh there. With infinite slowness he parted the stems of her legs and gazed lovingly down at the moist petals of the flower thus revealed.

His nostrils quivered at her musky scent. He felt his erection leap in her hands, the crown expanding, straining for release. It was as if she possessed a natural aphrodisiac that turned the air heady and thick as honey.

Her soft, high mount was within reach of his lips. Never had he hungered for another with such profound desire. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on these next few moments.

Her hair, just beginning to come in, grew only along the center strip of her pubic mound, leaving the sides as smooth and bare as a small child’s gully. This only increased his ardor since he had before him both woman and girl. Without another moment of hesitation, he pulled apart her shining lips with his thumbs.

When Akiko felt the heated stab of his tongue in her core, she arched up with her hips, crying out in inarticulate delight. She felt as if the sun had detached itself from the heavens and had been pressed up between her thighs. Too, she found that if she worked on him at the same time, her pleasure was increased tenfold.

She moved upward slightly on him, craning her long neck until she could press her lips to the skin just behind his scrotum. She felt the heavy trembling of his member as she did so and she began a low vibratory growl in her throat, pressing more directly against him in order to pass on the sensation.

Above her, his nose and tongue gliding along her slippery surfaces, Sun Hsiung’s eyes almost crossed with the intensity of the ecstasy he was experiencing. It was as if he had not just recently been drained twice by the
tayu
in the
koryukai
; it was as if he had not had sex in many years.

His tongue laved her from crown to stem and back again as if he could not get enough of her taste. Soon he felt the quivering of her powerful muscles high up along the insides of her thighs and he concentrated feverishly on the core of her, now expanded and pulsing in delicious surrender. He heard her gurgle and gasp beneath him, felt the electric swipe of her pointed nipples against his belly as she worked busily on him.

He wanted to give her her first real orgasm but he did not know how long he could hold out. She had not directly touched the crown of his erection yet he knew that soon he must jet his seed even with no direct touch.

Part of him marveled at this feat as he continued with his erotic stimulation. And now she was in spasm, the ridged muscles rippling just below the surface of her skin, her thighs pulled wide apart and her buttocks as hard as rocks. He could feel the ultimate vibrations beginning inside her.

And then, unexpectedly, he felt her insinuate herself out from beneath him, felt himself turned on his back, watched, wide-eyed, as she mounted him, inserting just the tip of him inside her.

He gasped, and involuntarily his hips lept upward off the
futon
as the liquid electric first contact threatened to overwhelm him.

Her hips moved back and forth, stimulating the crown of his penis, first the top then the underside, back and forth in a rhythm that took his breath away. Then she was sliding down farther and he had to put his hands on her waist, her own over his, pushing, helping himself through the natural barrier of tissue.

And then like the burst of a cannon’s fusillade he was through, his shaft sliding all the way up her. He felt her puffed-out lips against his scrotum and then, as she reached around, her fingers caressing him there, urging him onward.

She crouched over him, sliding her breasts and nipples hard against his flesh, her small, white teeth bared slightly as she worked her hips against him, building an irreversible tension within him.

Sun Hsiung gritted his teeth, the cords at the sides of his neck standing out like steel cables. He grunted continuously, all the way inside her now, but his eyes were open, staring up at her face, wanting to wait for her.