The Nicholas Linnear Novels (156 page)

“Yes,” he agreed. “I know the legend of Hsing, the shape-changer; the
akuma
he created with
jahō.
”

She was laughing at him. “And you believed all of that?”

“I believe in the
Kuji-kiri
,” he said. “In the
Kobudera
, and in the
Wu-Shing.
I knew one
mahō-zukai…
” He had kept his inflection up so that she would know that he had not finished. She was no longer laughing. “You knew him too, Akiko-san. Saigō.”

He had brought the key in his pocket and now he had offered it to her. He thought that she had taken it but might not yet be ready to use it on herself. He continued.

“Now I know the truth. Your twin dragons spoke to me with tongues of fire. Before he was murdered by his jealous compatriots, Hsing had branded his
akuma.
Hsing was
sensei
to many arts; tattooing was only one of them.

“He did this, so it was said, so that he might be able to identify his pupil for all time, so that they would be inexorably linked on the wheel of
karma.

“Did you have a
sensei
, Akiko-san, who marked you so with such skilled hands? I cannot think you went to a common parlor off the street.” He might, of course, have said more, mentioned Kyōki by name, but in doing so he would give up an enormous advantage.

“So you know about
Wu-Shing
,” she said, inserting the key he had given her. She nodded. “Perhaps it is a relief to me that someone else knows. That that someone else is you.” And all the while she thought, Amida! I can’t believe it. I look upon him and my love for him is so strong that I need to clasp my old hate to me with white fingers; I must concentrate on it every single moment or it threatens to slide away from me like sand.

“Hsing’s
akuma
had just cause to enact the age-old vengeance. As do I. My family name is not Ofuda—”

“No,” Nicholas interrupted deliberately. “It is Sato. And Sato-san, your husband, is dead.”

She inclined her head. “I suspected as much. I am sorry.” Her eyes blazed in the cruel starlight. “Sorry I could not end his life by my own power, using the fourth state of the
Wu-Shing.
”

“
Kung
,” Nicholas said, using the Chinese word for “palace,” the eunuch’s punishment. “You would have castrated him before you killed him.”

“He deserved no less,” she said with venom. “As does his friend, Tanzan Nangi. He has yet to experience my terrible power. Together they conspired to destroy my real father, Hiroshi Shimada.”

Nicholas was truly surprised. “Your father was Vice-Minister Shimada?” He knew the name well and in a quite personal way because Shimada had been one of the Colonel’s prime postwar targets. “But his wife bore him only two sons.”

“His mistress was my mother,” Akiko said proudly. “She was
tayu oiran
in the
Yoshiwara.
She was the best there was.”

“Shimada committed
seppuku.
There was a huge scandal—”

“Cleverly concocted by Nangi, Sato, and their mentor, Yoi-chiro Makita.”

Nicholas knew that this was patently untrue. The evidence against Shimada had been overwhelming and incontrovertible.

“They made up lies, half-truths, innuendoes. It was enough”—her face was twisted with her hate—“
more
than enough in an atmosphere that bordered on phobic hysteria when it came to the subject of the war.” He felt a gathering of her forces. “But it was your father, Colonel Denis Linnear, who insisted on making these falsehoods public knowledge. Linnear had wanted my father out of the way ever since he had championed a hard line against SCAP’s interference into MCI policies.”

Nicholas remembered what his father had told him on the day Vice-Minister Shimada was found near his wife in a pool of blood. “Never rejoice over the death of another human being. Rather take satisfaction that a source of evil has been expunged. In this case elements within MCI were perpetuating the power factions begun years ago by members of the prewar
zaibatsu,
in their
kanmin ittai
, control associations. If a man aligns himself with evil, we have our duty before us. We must act. Mankind could not long tolerate life without this weeding-out process.”

“There was nothing false in the accusations leveled against your father, Akiko,” he said. “You cannot deny the symmetry of crime and punishment.” But his words seemed distant to his ears for he found it enormously difficult to disassociate himself from the face so close before him. It seemed to make no difference that he knew that she was not, in fact, Yukio. That was an intellectual response, and what he was feeling was emotional. It bypassed the intellect, the rational completely. What did he see inside her that caused him to react this way?

It did not vitiate in any way the danger he felt himself to be in; it merely clouded the issue, turning the translucent into the opaque.

And he was truly amazed in an entirely different manner as well. Despite what Itami had told him, despite what he already knew of Akiko, plus what he suspected, it came as a shock to probe and feel nothing but the glow of her
wa.
Harmony. Whatever she was actually feeling toward him he could not say. He felt no aggression, no animosity, nothing negative whatsoever. And again he found himself wondering whether this was what the mysterious Masashigi Kusunoki had felt just before Akiko had reached out with
beijaho
and had freed him from life.

“They used the Colonel,” she said. “You must see that.” Eyes like stones. “They fed him their garbage and he ate it all up.”

“Whatever Sato and Nangi deserved had no bearing on the three innocent people you destroyed in the process,” he said, ignoring her line.

“Don’t talk to me of innocence,” she spat. “There is no innocence inside that company at all. Two are guilty; all are equally to blame.”

Nicholas thought of Miss Yoshida and he was as sad for this woman sitting not a handsbreadth away as he was for her. Look what can become of life, he thought. After this, there is no hope.

But he had accomplished one of his goals; had found out all that he needed to know. By her words he knew that she would not allow him to rise and walk away; that, whatever her personal feelings might be, she had been trained too well, her spirit in the end as weak as her first husband’s, the spell of
jahō
taking her over. He could never convince her of the truth. As Akutagawa-san had said, the force of
jahō
was so corrosive to mind and spirit that one always ran the terrible risk of succumbing to it rather than, as one did with all martial arts, harnessing it to one’s own needs.

Now he gazed upon her with eyes filled with new knowledge. For at last he saw who it was he was truly facing. She was
miko
, a sorceress who could reach out at any time, masking her true intent, and snuff out his life. It could come in the midst of a kiss or an embrace; he would never know the difference, never feel the flickering of her
wa
, the breakup of harmony by the spitting of aggression. He would never even know that she had reached for the Void.

Her intent was forever beyond his knowing, and he knew that he had been right to wait up in the tree for so long. He knew that he faced death. It did not seem ironic to him that it should come to him in the form of his first true love, only just and fitting. If he should die now, hers would be the last face that he would see. He would go down dreaming of Yukio.

“It is very still,” Akiko said softly. “The animals are hiding, the birds are nested, the insects sleep. Even the wind has ceased to blow. All for us.”

Her eyes were luminous. He imagined that he could see the moon reflected in their convex surfaces. They had the sheen of finest silk; they reminded him so much of Yukio’s eyes.

“For we are lovers, Nicholas. The last two true lovers alive on the face of the world. When we made love it was not just our bodies that were entwined, penetrating and being penetrated. It was our spirits as well.

“The clouds and the rain made our spirits one, Nicholas. Now we have our own tattoos, as indelibly etched as my dragons. We shall know each other for all time. However we may be reincarnated, whatever our
karma
dictates we must be, still will we recognize one another. As human or badger, plover or serpent. The spirit dance we performed will preserve our link.”

Had she moved perceptibly closer? Nicholas could not tell. Her words had become as luminous as her eyes, as the starlight that partially enveloped them where broad fans of shadow from the surrounding trees did not.

Was she leaning forward now? Did he feel the hard press of her jutting breasts against his chest? Did he feel her warmth bathing him, her breath like the scent of lilac on his cheek? In all the states he summoned up, both exalted and common, he felt only her
wa
, a glowing beacon, as constant as the sea.

He remembered their fevered night in Sato’s garden and thought he wanted that onrush all over again.
Sato.
Felt one of her arms coming around his back, lying along his shoulder, fingertips caressing the side of his neck. Remember Sato, he thought, and how you tailed him. Failed in your sacred oath to protect him. There was only one possible way out for him now.

“No!”

His cry echoed into the night. “I cannot allow this! I cannot love you, a
miko
!”

And as he pulled away from her half-embrace, he withdrew the short-bladed knife he had taken from Itami’s house. Though it belonged in her kitchen still its blade was finely honed, still it was a weapon of honor.

Without hesitation Nicholas drove the blade to the hilt into his abdomen. Blood flashed out, black in the darkness, glinting on his knees, the grass, Akiko’s lap.

Nicholas’ face was distorted by agony. His head trembled as he slashed horizontally from left to right across his lower belly. The place where
hara
resided.

Akiko was in shock. Her eyes were open wide. “Amida!” she breathed. There was so much blood! It ran in a torrent from him, from the center of his being, draining him of strength, of life.

So many conflicting emotions strived for dominance inside her. Elation and sorrow, shock and panic. Satisfaction and fear. Was this the end she had been seeking? Was this the culmination of her long thought out vengeance?

She knew that it was, but now she was beginning to suspect that it was not what she wanted. She had struggled all her life, it seemed, to be free of woman’s traditional role as servant to man. Her rejection of all that her mother had been, her revulsion for that lofty state of
tayu
had this as its basis. As did her decision to train in the most demanding of the martial arts: man’s work. All her life she had fought to take her place beside men as an equal.

But now she was coming to see that that obsession had put her in the position of becoming a pawn to the drives and hatreds of those certain men who she had thought she was closest to: Kyōki, Saigō, and, ultimately, Vice-Minister Shimada. She understood that more than any other person, her father had shaped the direction of her life. Just as Saigō’s father had done his. They were the same, then, she and Saigō. Exactly the same. Totally evil.

Too late had she made this discovery. It had taken the death of one she now knew she loved in a way she had loved no other man or woman.

She opened her mouth to speak, she opened her arms to show him her intent, but at that moment the earth beneath them commenced to roll as if it had been transmuted into water by
jaho
beyond even her ken.

Cannonfire crossed them, echoing eerily into the night, the sound bouncing off obstructions that had just a moment before not been there.

For in truth the world was dissolving, had opened up like a pair of gaping jaws. Wildflowers and bushes, trees and grasslands were eaten up, swamped down into the yawning pit that had no end.

Raw gases stung her nostrils, sulphur and the stench of molten metal.

And then she had lost her balance, was falling, rolling end over end, filled with vertigo so that she had no idea of where the sky was and where the earth. All she could do was reach upward, stretching and grabbing at fistfuls of crumbling soil.

Nicholas, too, was tumbling and rolling in the grip of the first earthquake shock, whose epicenter, as the Soviet satellite had accurately predicted, was not more than a kilometer away to the east.

He was sent flying, in fact, away from the spot where he and Akiko had been kneeling, away from the glistening pools of blood which had spurted out when he had knifed into the freshly killed fox he had strapped like, a cincture around his abdomen, beneath his kimono. He had suspected, rightly, that only a shock of the first magnitude could deflect the
jahō
for long enough.

He fetched up hard against rocks made sharp by fissures forming in their midst, dividing them, cracking them open like eggs.

Nicholas tried to regain his feet but the earth shudders were still too violent and he tumbled downward again. He had been thrown perhaps ten or fifteen meters from where he had been and now he lifted his head, searching for Akiko. He could not see her, but that was not surprising in all the chaos.

He was in the midst of a world gone mad. Where trees had been was nothing now but great holes like wounded gums. Those trees now protruded from the agonized earth like arrows shot into it by a giant archer far above his head, their webby root structures shaking themselves free of huge clods of earth.

In a moment, Nicholas began to crawl back the way he had come. It took him some time. He was obliged to make many detours and to stop several times while aftershocks vibrated beneath his hands and knees like the angry shouts of the gods.

He came finally to the fissure, a mighty, jagged rent in the universe. It was awesome to see open space where just moments before solid ground had been. It gave one pause, even one such as he who had been born here and thus was not a stranger to quakes. One never got used to them or ceased to be humbled by their titanic display of force.

In the hollow silence after the grinding of the quake, he thought he could hear a voice. Slowly, he crawled to the edge of the fissure. Its sides were as jagged and irregular as was its face.