Blood Ninja (39 page)

Heiko leaped, sword extended, and with a ringing clash her sword blocked Kira’s strike.

But one of the samurai was there, his sword swinging with a perfection of form that seemed to Taro in that moment unutterably grotesque.

The blade bit into Heiko’s side, almost severing her in half.

She fell to the dust.

Taro let out a strangled sob.

Kenji Kira calmed his horse, then swung easily out of the saddle and landed beside Heiko. He bent down and tore off her scarf.

“It’s a
girl
!” he exclaimed.

“Fooled … you …,” murmured Heiko.

Kira straightened up, his expression furious. “Find the boy!” he screamed.

“Too late,” said Heiko. “He’s gone. Wasted your time … killing me.”

Kira spat. His face was livid with anger. “You’re not dead yet, vampire,” he said, and with a single stroke cut off her head.

Kenji Kira turned to his men. “The girl was a distraction. Taro is probably far from here by now. Let’s go.” He jumped neatly onto his horse. “But first check the cart quickly. You never know.”

The samurai walked toward the canvas slit at the back of the cart. His companions were mounted already, waiting to set off in pursuit of the boy, who had fooled them again—this time convincing a girl to die for him
.

The samurai wondered if it maybe wasn’t so stupid after all to think that one day this boy Taro could threaten Lord Oda. It seemed that he naturally inspired those around him—even peasant girls—to protect and serve him as a samurai would, even dying for him when required
.

The canvas was light in his hand, and moved aside easily. A smell of rice greeted his nostrils. He cast his gaze around the confines of the wooden walls. Rice was piled up high in soft mounds that extended all the way back to the far wall. He had put a foot up on the board to get inside, when one of his companions called
.

“Anything?”

He turned, putting his foot back down to the ground. “Only rice.”

“You hear that?” said Kenji Kira, speaking to the man whose cart it
was. “It seems your life is not forfeit. This time, at least. But in future, learn to speak when spoken to. It is a valuable gift that makes conversation
so
much easier.”

The peasant stammered. “Y-y-yes, samurai-
san
… S-s-sor—”

“Oh, shut up,” said Kira. He raised his voice. “Let’s go!” he ordered. “Fusaku, leave that rice alone and get on your mount. You are tolerably well fed, are you not?”

The samurai sighed and hurried back to the others
.

He did not notice that the far wall of the cart was a little closer than the true length of the vehicle
.

Yukiko bent over the body of her sister, wailing. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her agony was painful to watch. It shocked Taro that in the usually pleasing melody of her voice these notes of dissonant, high-pitched grief had been hiding all along.

A moment earlier they had dropped through the hatch, everyone else having risen groggily to wakefulness when Taro had splashed cold water in their faces. Taro estimated that a single incense stick might have burned in the time since Kira and his men had left. As the others began to stir, he heard peasants whispering outside, clearly afraid to approach the cart, or the body before it.

Finally the potion had worn off, and he had been able to stand. Then he had taken water from a skin and doused the faces of his companions.

He had led Yukiko out first, holding her shoulder as they approached the body of her sister.

Now the younger girl crouched over the corpse, something animal in her pose and the choking sounds that escaped from
her, as if the human soul in her had been drowned out by grief.

By the side of the road huddled groups of peasants, their heads held low.

Shusaku knelt by Yukiko and touched her hair. “We need to move her,” he said gently. “We had better not stay here with the cart. They will be back.”

Yukiko looked up, and Taro took a step back. Her face when it turned to him was twisted by anger, her eyes narrowed to predatory slits. He barely recognized her.

“You killed my sister,” she said, her voice devoid of any apparent emotion—something that was worse than if she had spoken through tears, or a throat choked with wracking grief.

Taro stared at her. “I d-d-didn’t.”

Shusaku stroked the girl’s hair. “Taro didn’t kill her. Kenji Kira did.”

“Kenji Kira works for Lord Oda. Lord Oda wants Taro dead. Therefore it is Taro’s fault that Heiko died.” She glared at Taro. “I wish you had never come to our house! You have destroyed everything. The abbess. My sister. What else would you take from me?”

Taro felt his knees weakening. “I didn’t mean … She … Your sister surprised me. I couldn’t stop her from leaving the cart.”

“Then why didn’t you save her?”
she hissed.

“I was … I told you, I couldn’t move.”

“You moved for Little Kawabata. You saved
him
. Afterward—after she was dead—you could have turned her.” It was as if she were tearing the words from her throat. Taro half-expected them to come out covered in blood, and drip down her cloak.

“I tried,” said Taro. “I wanted to, but she’d drugged me. She drugged you. She knew what she was doing. I wish …”

He began to cry.

Shusaku stroked Yukiko’s hair. “Even if he had been able to get out of the cart, they’d cut off her head. He could not have done for her what he did for Little Kawabata. And this is assuming that the samurai had not killed him, which they would have, for sure. There were too many of them.”

“So you say,” said Yukiko. Her face was as white as the snow that gave her her name. “Perhaps Taro merely felt that Heiko was less important than becoming shogun.”

“She did it for honor!” said Taro. “She said I had to kill Oda and become shogun! That I had to tell you she had died in steel and in honor!”

Only then did Yukiko’s features soften. A tear traced the contour of her cheek. “Perhaps. That sounds like her.”

She turned back to her sister, touched her head, where it lay separated from the body. Then she looked up, a troubled squall of emotions raging on her face—sympathy, anger, shock.

“That man,” she said to Shusaku. “Who killed my sister. He works for Lord Oda?”

Shusaku nodded.

“Then I will accompany Taro on the mission. I’m not a vampire. I can go abroad in daylight. I will help him to kill Oda, and if I see this man who laid low my sister, I will kill him, too. Do you understand?”

Shusaku placed his hands together in the
gassho
mudra, as if to underline the seriousness of his words. “Yes. You shall go with him.”

As they continued toward Lord Oda’s castle, Yukiko remained quiet, withdrawn—her features seeming drained of blood and life. They had abandoned the cart, of course, and now they made slow progress, skirting the road to walk through the limited cover of the rice fields, and the occasional tree. Yukiko walked among them like a pale ghost.

On the road, which they kept always in sight, few travelers passed. The land seemed benighted, exhausted, and even the frogs and birds called with weak voices. Aside from the odd peasant hurrying home, they passed only one larger group, a sorry collection of
eta
, the tattered rags they wore almost indistinguishable from their sore-ridden skin, carrying what Taro presumed to be bundles of leather, to sell to the samurai of Nagoya.

It was only when they drew close to the castle that Taro saw the bridge over the river and remembered the checkpoint. He pointed it out to Shusaku, and the ninja grimaced.

“I had hoped to think of something by now,” he said.

Hiro was looking at the ninja suspiciously. “I’m not pretending to be a leper again,” he said.

Yukiko stared blankly at the guards. “We could just kill them,” she said, her voice flat. Looking at her, Taro felt guilty and ashamed. Heiko had died for him, though he hadn’t asked it of her. She believed that he would be shogun, that he would bring low those men who had wreaked so much devastation on the land—Lord Oda, Kenji Kira.

But what if he couldn’t? Then she would have died in vain.

Taro looked away from her, his face burning. He had left Heiko and Yukiko once, crept away in the night so that they would be safe. And what had he achieved? Only the death of their foster mother, and the destruction now of Heiko, who had believed of all the stupid things that she’d been sacrificing herself for him.

Whatever I do
, he thought,
I will always bring pain and death to those around me. Even when I try to avoid it
.

A tear spilled onto his cheek.

When he looked up again, Shusaku was indicating the guards at the bridge with his hand.

“There are too many of them,” said Shusaku. “We’d be killed.”

Yukiko shrugged, as if that was a matter of little consequence.

If anything, the samurai presence on either side of the bridge had been increased, and Taro could see the fires of other encampments at regular intervals along the river, so as to stop clandestine crossings by boat, or by swimming. He cursed. They could
see
Lord Oda’s castle now, its four towers rising sharply into the night sky, as if to bite the heavens. Yet this checkpoint stood in their way.

But what Hiro had said was tickling at the back of his mind.

“That thing, with the finger,” he said, thinking out loud. “It was clever, because no one wants to touch a leper. But also because no one would be fool enough to dishonor themselves by
disguising
themselves as a leper. So the samurai didn’t expect it.”

“I was tricked into it!” said Hiro, wounded at being called a fool. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” said Taro. “What I mean is that the disguise was
powerful because to impersonate a leper is literally unthinkable. We know how much the samurai cling to their honor, even if their lords exploit it. It would never have even entered their minds that a person might pretend to have leprosy, might deliberately throw away their honor like that.”

Shusaku was nodding. “Yes. You’re right. Did you notice, when we saw Kenji Kira kill that peasant in the mountains? He asked if the man had seen two boys and a man, and he said that one of the boys was a leper. Even he, with all his experience of lies and interrogation, was influenced by his samurai preconceptions. It didn’t occur to him that the leprosy might be faked.”

Yukiko turned her dull eyes on the pair of them. “So?”

Taro took a deep breath, hardly able to believe he was about to say this. But he’d learned a lot about honor, hadn’t he? He’d learned that an idea—such as loyalty—is only an idea. It is the behavior of the individual that counts. A person could talk grandly about loyalty without possessing as much of it, even in his most self-indulgent daydreams, as Hiro.

Shame, too, was only an idea. If humiliation had to be endured in order to achieve something great, then wasn’t the humiliation only a step in the journey, an obstacle to be overcome? If shaming himself was the price he had to pay to avenge his father, then so be it.

“Back there,” he said, watching his companions’ eyes anxiously to gauge their reactions, “we passed a group of
eta
.”

Taro adjusted the rope belt around his ragged cloak, and picked up a bundle of leather. At the bottom of the bundle, hidden beneath the skins, were his short-sword, ninja clothes, and other sundry weapons. The boy before him wore Taro’s clothes, and such was the closeness in age between them that Taro had the uncomfortable sensation of looking into a glass.

“Thank you,” said Taro. “It fits well.”

Shusaku had spent his remaining gold coins buying not only the leather the
eta
carried, but also the clothes from their backs. Four of them, including the boy of Taro’s age, were now outfitted in clothes that, despite being peasant garb, were still elegant in comparison to the
etas
’ patchwork rags. Yukiko, Hiro, and Shusaku wore cloaks as stained and torn as Taro’s.

Taro had expected that Yukiko might object to the plan, but she had only nodded silently, and now she stood unflinching in the rough raiment of an untouchable, her eyes on the road before them, thinking, no doubt, of her sister. Taro could almost admire
her single-minded focus on revenge, though he wished that she would not stand and stare like that, without saying anything. It made him think of a statue.

Now the boy in front of Taro gave a little bow. “We will return to the mountains, then,” he said.

“And forget you ever saw us,” said Shusaku.