The Nicholas Linnear Novels (72 page)

Using the
iai
draw, he lifted the blade of his
katana
in time to deflect the pair of
shaken
Saigō had flicked at him almost nonchalantly. They buzzed away like angry bees clattering down the brick steps behind Saigō to the lower plaza of the building. Beside him a modern sculptured waterfall crashed and splattered downward to rectangular “rocks” in a pool on the plaza.

Their
katana
clashed together in the Fire and Stones Cut, shuddering them. Only the superbly forged Japanese weapons could survive such power intact.

Saigō seemed frantic. His pupils were so large his eyes seemed all black, so alien that Croaker was transfixed by the
hsing-i
, which he perceived as an almost physical blow.

Saigō attacked strongly and swiftly. His strength seemed appalling, even to Nicholas. He felt engulfed in a kind of magnetic storm which, swirling him around, threatened to disorient him completely. And he fell back under the onslaught.

He saw Saigō’s lips moving slowly and softly and found himself wondering how high he was; how much of the drug was now coursing through him; and how he could use this to his own advantage.

He shook his head as a strike almost slipped through. Abruptly, his arms felt enormously heavy. His eyelids flickered. And there was a wolfish grin on Saigō’s face.

Nicholas staggered back, felt running water against the backs of his legs. He was in the waterfall, a steep drop at his back. How had he become turned around?

He felt a sharp pain in his arm, saw Saigō’s
katana
streaked with a line of blood like saliva from a mad dog and he knew what was happening to him.

It was the
Kōbudera.
The magic not even the most fanatic of the
Kan-aku na ninja
would touch. Except for Saigō.

Back went Nicholas under the ferocious attack until they were both in the water. Magic was all around him, turning the night crimson. He seemed not to be able to feel his legs; he staggered. His fingers were numb, the grip on his
katana
faltering. His breath came in pants.

And all the while, Saigō came mercilessly on, striking and grinning, his lips invoking the
Kōbudera.

Nicholas’ foot slipped on a slick piece of sculpture which he could not feel and he almost went down. He was immediately slashed again. Blood sparked the night air. His blood. Agony filled him and it seemed as if he could not breathe. Whatever Fukashigi did during the night, he thought, it is not enough.

The rushing water drenched him and he shuddered. And in that great breath, which reached from his throat all the way down to his toes, came a thin stream of crystal clarity, piercing the fog that had shrouded him.

He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. “What is the ‘Body of a rock’?” he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply, the Master stayed his hand, saying, “That is the ‘Body of a rock.’”

This, then, Nicholas did, reaching down inside himself where something he did not even know existed lay in wait. He dragged it up with all his strength and, as Musashi wrote, ten thousand things could not touch him, not Saigō’s
katana,
not even the
Kōbudera.

In a blur, Nicholas cut from left to right with his
katana.
In shock, Saigō lifted up his own blade, his eyes wide and staring.

Blood spurted, brilliantly red as a cardinal’s plumage and Saigō’s torso arched back, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a rictus.

Water sloshed and sucked as they both struggled to maintain their balance. For Saigō, who had been cut through skin and flesh and even sternum, it was a herculean task. His
katana
hung from his nerveless left hand, the fingers twitching relentlessly as they sought to do what their torn nerves no longer would allow them to. He weaved from, side to side like a lush on one last monumental drunk. He grasped the top of his chest, near his shoulder blade, but Nicholas, using the point of his
katana
, flicked away the deadly
shuriken
needles he had clutched.

Groaning, Saigō held on to the hilt of his
katana
now, using it like a walking stick to prop himself up. Without its aid, he would have collapsed like an old man.

“Kill me now.” His voice was a harsh gurgle over the restless bubbling of the water rushing over the fall. “But not until I tell you, cousin, what I have waited long years to tell you.” His shoulder twitched. “Come closer.” His voice cracked, dropped abruptly in volume. “Come closer. We cannot have you savor your triumph, ah no!”

Nicholas took a step toward him. His chest and belly were streaked with blood and the iridescent seeping of his organs. For Nicholas, the pain was a dull throbbing all down his arm where Saigō had slashed him.

“You should have cut me when you could,” he said. “Your spirit was not resolved; the
Kōbudera
consumed you and you slashed me instead. You see what one cut can do.”

Saigō staggered. “What is that you say, cousin? Come closer still. I cannot hear you.” He grimaced in pain, a fleet passing cloud, and then it was gone, hidden behind all the layers that they had both acquired. This was, perhaps more than any other thing, what set Japan apart from the rest of the world, this bit of hard unflinching stone beneath all the wrappers—the many many layers—of distilled duty and filial love. This was why they must go forward always and never take a step back. But, O Amida, their memories were long indeed, stretching beyond, it was said in many tales, the grave itself.

Nicholas wanted to sleep now. His body had dealt with the shock and now, as it damped down on the pain, he was calming. A kind of lassitude was running…

“You think that you have won but you haven’t,” Saigō gasped out. A thin trickle of blood was seeping from one corner of his mouth. His busy tongue flicked at it, as an adder’s might, tasting it. “I see that I had better get on with it—But won’t you come one step closer, cousin, so that I don’t have to shout? Good.” His eyes burned coldly. “You believe that Yukio is alive, somewhere, living the life of a married lady perhaps, and thinking every so often of the old days with you. But, oh no, this is not so!” He began a laugh which ended in a ragged cough. He hawked and spat pinkly between them. He looked into Nicholas’ eyes as he said, “She lies at the bottom of the Straits of Shimonoseki, cousin, precisely where I dumped her.

“She loved you, you know. With every breath she breathed, with every word she spoke. Oh, I could drug her as I did that night with you and, for a time, she would forget you. But each time she would awake and it would be as before.

“At last it drove me out of my mind. She was the only woman, the only one… for me and without her there were only men and more men and still more….” His eyes blazed like coals, red-rimmed and mad. The trickle of blood had thickened, running like heavy drops from a careless painter’s brush, darkening the water.

“You made me kill her, Nicholas,” he said in sudden accusation. “If she had not loved you—”

“If life was not the way it was—” Nicholas said harshly. His arms were already in motion and the
katana
was a crescent of living light, as if he were the Lord’s true messenger, whirring like a living entity through the hot wet air.

In a bright arc, Saigō’s head sailed upward, tumbling over and over on its final journey like a miniature planet, a crimson streamer like a kite’s or a comet’s tail laced behind it. Over the edge it went, bouncing downward across the white steps, a child’s lost ball, coming to rest at last at the bottom of the waterfall: on the ninth step from the top.

“—but it is,” Nicholas said, finishing the sentence. At his feet, the water spun, rocking gently as if on a faraway tide, shivering. Caressing Nicholas’ spread legs.

Of course, after it was all over, Croaker wanted to know just how he had done it, so he made Nicholas come down to the morgue with him to look at the body.

“Can’t tell a goddamned thing from this,” he said. “Christ on a crutch, we’d never have known.”

Nicholas looked down at the battered and broken body. It was Japanese, the same height and weight as Saigō. An exhaustive autopsy would turn up the difference in the musculature, of course; this man could not have been trained as Saigō had been. But that would have happened only if you were
looking
for a difference.

He reached out, turned the head to one side, peered at the neck, touched the side with his fingertips. “There,” he said.

“What?” Croaker looked at the spot. “His neck’s broken. So what? Happens all the time in a fall.”

“No, Lew. It’s the
way
the neck was broken. I’ve seen that done before, years ago. Bones sheared through as if someone had used a surgical scalpel. No fall can do that. It’s
koppo
, Lew. A ninja technique.”

“Christ,” Croaker said. “He killed a man just to snooker us.”

Nicholas nodded. “Plans within plans.”

He listened, with nothing but the screen door between him and the coolness of the evening, to the quiet. To the breakers sighing as they rose, curled, and fell again and again like his own tidal breathing.

He was thinking of Japan. Of the Colonel, of Cheong, of Saigō, and especially of Yukio.

All in their rightful places now, the revenge done, all the impossibly tangled cords laid out in their skeins, just as they had once started out; dying as they had been born.

The rage which had filled him up when Saigō had told him seemed like yesterday’s ember now. He recalled his dream and the faceless woman was no longer faceless. Only now was he coming truly to understand the enormity of Yukio’s sacrifice. She could have, at almost any time, run away from Saigō. And where do you think she would go? Where she wanted to be; at his side. And Fukashigi had said:
You
w
ere not ready then. He would have destroyed you….
Nicholas knew the full measure of the truth of those words. By staying with Saigō, Yukio knew she held in check a measure of his deep anger; at least he had her and Nicholas did not. She gave her life for me.
Migawari ni tatsu.

Why do you weep so bitterly, my lady? What ill has befallen you? A most dishonorable death, sir, and until it is avenged, my spirit must wander—wander here.

But no more.

He felt Justine coming quietly up behind him and he felt a vast peacefulness, like coming upon one’s own stone cottage at the edge of the sea, guarded by the tall pines one knew so well from infancy. A warm wind blew through his soul and he closed his eyes as he felt her arms steal about him, her lips trace the contours of his cheek.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes.” They stirred together like two leaves on a branch. “The sea is so blue now. Bluer than the sky.”

“Because the sky is mirrored in it. See how they’re both there?”

“It’s the artist in you. You see in colors.”

“But you see it too, don’t you?”

“Now you’ve pointed it out, yes.”

She put her cheek against his shoulder. “I miss Doc Deerforth.”

“So do I.” He looked out to sea. “His daughters will be here soon.”

“Saigō must have been at Gin Lane looking for Father, but why Doc?”

“I don’t know,” Nicholas said softly. “Perhaps he saw him and became suspicious.” But his thoughts were far far away.

After a long time, they made dinner and ate it outside on his porch and the wind, taking her hair and pulling it to one side as a gentle mother might, whirled their paper napkins out across the dunes to disappear in the surf, platinum and mauve.

A couple walked hand in hand, their bare feet scuffing the sand, leaving a trail of their passage like a pair of crabs. A sleek Irish setter, its glossy coat burnished crimson by the setting sun, ran ahead, barking happily at them, its long tongue lolling as it danced at the edge of the sea.

“Do you want to go back, now?” she asked, her hand in his. “To Japan.”

He looked at her and smiled. He thought about her father’s offer. “I don’t think so.” He sat back in his chair and it creaked a little, a comforting sound like the rattle of lines in the wind aboard ship. “Oh, one day, perhaps—We’ll both go to have a look, as tourists might.”

“You could never be a tourist there.”

“I could try.”

On the near horizon, boats were running back for shore, their sails high and billowing. It might have been a regatta except for the time of day. Music came from somewhere down the beach and was abruptly cut off, as if a door had slammed.

Justine began to giggle.

“What is it?” He was smiling already as one does sometimes, in anticipation of a funny story.

“I was just remembering how you came and took me out of the disco that night.” Her face abruptly sobered. “I wish you’d told me,” she whispered, “all about it.”

“I saw no point in frightening you.”

“I only,” she said, “would have been frightened for you.”

He stood up, his hands in his pockets, a very Western stance.

“It’s all over now, isn’t it?” She was looking up at him, her face tilted so that the last of the light, reflected off the water, toned her skin, cooling it, making it glow.

“Yes,” he said, rubbing his bandaged arm. “It’s all over now.”

He was on his side, half dreaming, when Justine came out of the bathroom. She turned off the light and, to him, it seemed as if the moon had sunk beneath the rim of the horizon.

He felt her silently get into bed, moving her pillow to a more comfortable position, then the warmth of her body close against him: the line of her spine, the soft curve of her buttocks, her knees against his thighs. Electricity seemed to flow from one to the other.

He thought of Yukio, as the exhaustion rose like fluid, suffusing his limbs and beginning on his torso. He knew now that his fear was the same as his love for her. Her purely elemental sexuality was what drew him to her, what continually aroused him when he was with her. But he had been unwilling, and thus afraid, to acknowledge the balancing half of the equation, that there was, to him also, an elemental sexuality. That Yukio had been able to draw this out of him he had both loved and feared at the same time.