Linnear 01 - The Ninja (11 page)

‘I laughed only at a rather odd coincidence,’ the Colonel reassured her. ‘It was nothing you said.’ He patted her hand. ‘Now tell me why we must go to Tokyo.’

‘Because Itami is there. She is Tsuko’s sister.’

‘I see.” She had told him, quite naturally, of her previous marriage but, beyond that, they rarely spoke of this portion of her life. ‘And what has she to do with our karma?’

Tm sure that I do not know that,’ Cheong said. ‘But I had a dream last night.’ The Colonel was well aware of how much stock these people put in dream messages. They were not unlike the ancient Romans in this respect. He himself did not, in fact, totally disbelieve in their import. The unconscious, he knew, had more to do with the direction one took in life than most people were willing to admit. And, in any event, dreams were closely linked with the concept of karma and karma was something in which the Colonel had a strong belief. He had spent too many years in the Far East not to have.

‘The dream was about Itami,’ Cheong said. ‘I was in a city. In Tokyo. I was shopping and I turned into a quiet side street. All about me were shops made of wood and paper the way it was in Japan when Tokyo was named Edo and the Tokugawa ruled the shogunate.

‘I passed a shop that had a gaily decorated window and I stopped. In the centre of the window was a doll. It was the most beautiful doll I had ever seen. Its aura was very strong.

‘She was of porcelain, this doll, white-faced, dressed elegantly in the bushi fashion. Her eyes stared at me and I could not look away. “Buy me,” they said.

‘The shopkeeper wrapped her up for me in a silken cloth and I took her home. And, as I was unwrapping her, she began to speak. Her voice was imperious and commanding and very, very firm. She was obviously a lady of a high house.

‘It was Itami and she said that we must come to her. She said that we must leave Singapore and come to Tokyo.’

‘Have you ever met Itami?’ the Colonel asked.

‘No.’

‘Did Tsuko ever show you a picture of her?’

‘No.’

‘Yet you are certain that this doll in your dream was Itami.’

‘It was Itami, Denis.’

He leaned forward at last and took her hands in his as he had longed to do for some time. Her long nails, he saw today, were lacquered deep scarlet. He traced their satiny smoothness for a moment, savouring the feeling. ‘We will go to Japan, Cheong. To Tokyo. We will meet Itami, just as your dream said.’

The smile that spread across her face was like the rising of the sun. ‘Oh, yes, Denis? This is really true?’

‘It is really true.’

“Then tell me why, for my spirit is happy and cares not but my mind, my mind cries out to know.’

The day before they left, she took him to see So-Peng.

He lived outside the city, to the northwest, in a village of oiled paper and bamboo where no Westerner had ever before set foot. It was not on any map of the region that the Colonel had ever seen. In fact, when Cheong had told him of the location, he had laughed, saying that their destination would be naught but the middle of a mangrove swamp. Nevertheless, she was undeterred and he eventually acquiesced to her wish.

It was Sunday and Cheong insisted that he must not wear his uniform. ‘This is most vital,’ she had informed him and as he donned his wide-lapelled cream linen suit, white silk shirt and navy regimental tie, he felt somehow spectacularly naked: a daub of crimson in an otherwise emerald jungle, the bull’s-eye in an unmissable target. For her part, Cheong wore a white silk dress, embroidered with sky-blue herons, mandarin-collared, floor-length. She looked a dream.

There was brilliant sunlight as they left the city; the heat washed over them in slippery waves. A listless breeze brought with it the foetid stench of the mangrove swamps but always from their left. Twice they were obliged to stop, standing perfectly still as long black and silver vipers writhed obliquely across their path. The first time this happened, the Colonel made a move to kill the serpent but Cheong’s firm hand upon his wrist deflected him from his purpose.

Far away, yet seeming as close to them as the flamboyantly painted backdrop to some stage play, the eastern horizon was fairly choked with dark grey clouds piling themselves into the sky like ungovernable children pyramiding themselves dangerously. Above, the sky was a peculiar yellow; no blue was anywhere to be seen; and now and again silent white lightning flickered and forked through the grey, turning its softness for moments to marble. It was difficult to believe that it was so calm and tranquil here where they walked up the winding road, rising along the spine of a sprawling hillock.

Singapore had long since dropped from sight and, like a ship’s anchor sent overboard, it seemed to be absolutely gone, part of another world which they had stepped out of and, passing through some invisible barrier, now found themselves in a land quite apart. At least mat was how it seemed to the Colonel on that magical afternoon, how it came to him again and again throughout his life in dreams during the mornings’ drowsy early hours.

On the far side of the forested hillock, all indications of the road they had been following disappeared and not even the semblance of a path through the foliage presented itself. Yet Cheong seemed to have no difficulty at all in reorienting herself and, taking his hand, guiding them to the village of So-Peng.

It lay in a leafy shallow hollow with the beginnings of a basalt mountain at its back, a natural barrier behind which, perhaps, only the stormy sea lay.

They came upon one house that seemed in all respects similar to those around it and, having climbed its three or four wide wooden steps up from the mud of the streets, now stood upon its front porch, wide as a veranda in the old South of America, covered against the torrential rains and the baking sun of the seasons. Here Cheong bade Denis remove his shoes even as she was doing.

The front door opened and they were ushered into the house by an old woman with steel-grey hair, elegantly coiffed, dressed in a long silk robe the colour of swirled ash. She put her hands together in front of her breasts and bowed to them. They returned the gesture and, as she stood upright and smiled at them, the Colonel saw that she had no teeth. Her face was lined, to be sure, but the flesh still retained a hint of the vitality and beauty that it had obviously radiated in youth. Her black almond eyes were as luminous as lanterns, shining with the inquisitive innocence of the little girl from out of the past.

Cheong introduced the Colonel. ‘And this is Chia Sheng,’ she said without otherwise identifying her.

Chia Sheng laughed, staring at the Colonel’s bulk, and shook her head from side to side as if to say, ‘What can one do with young people today?’ She shrugged her thin shoulders and clucked her tongue sharply against the roof of her mouth.

Cheong, the Colonel noted, spoke only Mandarin and, without being told in so many words, he was aware that he should do the same.

They were in a room of some considerable size. No other house he had been in Singapore, not even the main house of the estate bordering the mangrove swamps that had once been his, could boast of such space. The outside facade, he saw, had little relevance once one was inside.

More odd, however, was the fact that this room was covered in tatamis - Japanese reed mats of a specific size by which all rooms in traditional Japanese houses were measured. But more surprises were in store for the Colonel.

Chia Sheng led them wordlessly through this first room, sparsely furnished with low lacquered tables and cushions and little else, down a short dimly lit hallway. Its far wall consisted of an enormous piece of jade so heavily carved that it became a latticework. In its centre was a round doorway known, the Colonel had somewhere heard, as a moon gate. These existed on the mainland of China in the houses of the very wealthy during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Across the moon gate’s opening a long bolt of silk hung from a bamboo pole laid crosswise. It was grey. Embroidered upon it was a royal-blue wheel-and-spoke pattern. This seemed oddly familiar to the Colonel, and for long minutes he racked his brain until he recalled that he had seen the self-same bolt of cloth reproduced in a ukiyo-e print by Ando Hiroshige. It was one of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokoido series; he could not remember the title of the print in question. However, it had shown the design to belong to a travelling daimyo. Another mystery. The Colonel shrugged inwardly as Chia Sheng led them through the moon gate, white shot with black and green.

They found themselves in a room only a little smaller than the first. On three sides were folding screens of exquisite manufacture, dark colours coming to vibrant life, passing through the years as if they were but veils of smoke.

Scents now invaded his nostrils, the chalkiness of charcoal, the muskiness of incense, and there were others, subtler, delicate cooking-oil, tallow and still others impossible to define.

‘Please,’ Chia Sheng said, leading them past a low red lacquered table. Freshly cut flowers in a bowl spread themselves at its centre. They disappeared between the ends of two of the screens, which revealed a doorway of blackness, as if it had been cut out of the heart of a piece of onyx.

‘The stairs,’ Chia Sheng murmured and they ascended. It was a narrow spiral staircase with room enough to climb in single file only.

The stairwell debouched at length upon a kind of tower which struck the Colonel more as a garret. A green-tiled roof was supported at the four corners of the structure by wooden beams. Otherwise there was an unimpeded view on all sides save the one where the basalt mountain, like some awesome leviathan out of mythology, loomed close enough to serve as guardian.

As they came into the garret, the Colonel’s eyes fell upon a tall figure gazing out at the riding storm, a long glass held to one eye. This was So-Peng.

‘Welcome, Colonel Linnear.’ His voice was rich and deep and seemed to set the garret vibrating. His Mandarin was oddly accented; in Western terms one might have said clipped. He did not turn round, did not in any verbal way acknowledge Cheong’s presence. Chia Sheng, her mission perhaps at an end, left them, silently descending the winding stair.

‘Please come over here and stand by me, Colonel,’ So-Peng said. He wore an old-fashioned formal Chinese robe the colour of mother of pearl. It was woven of a material totally unfamiliar to the Colonel, for even the slightest movement of the old man caused its surface to pick up and reflect the fitful light in a most marvelous way.

‘Look here,’ the old man said, thrusting the glass at the Colonel. ‘Look to the storm, Colonel, and tell me what you see.’

The Colonel took the polished brass spyglass, closed one eye and peered through it with the other. Now within the elevation of So-Peng’s eyrie, he felt the first tentative touches of the storm they had earlier observed; the wind was rising.

Within the confined circle of his extended vision, he saw the bloom of the clouds, now purple-black like bruises, and, too, the colour of the sky behind the storm had changed. The solid-seeming yellow tinge had been struck through with tendrils of a pale green; such a hue the land-bound world could never produce. Deep-throated rumblings could be heard now and again, rolling over the earth like an invisible tsunami, a tidal wave. Dutifully, the Colonel related all he saw.

‘And that is all you see,’ said So-Peng. There was no hint of an interrogative in his inflection.

Yes, the Colonel was about to say, that is all I can see. But he checked himself at the last moment, certain that there was something out there that the old man wished him to see.

For long moments he moved the eye of the glass over the terrain an inch at a time but he saw nothing new to report. Still, it nagged at him and he moved the glass upwards, scanning. Nothing. Then downwards towards the earth. Below the onrushing storm, he saw the women in the rice paddies, the flat wet fields without the protection of a single tree or even a makeshift lean-to. Almost in concert, the women bent to their tasks, leaning over, reaching for and pulling at the growing rice. Their skirts were pulled up in the centre, tied in huge knots between their bent legs; woven sacks encircled their backs so that they had the aspect of beasts of burden; water covered their bare feet to the ankle.

‘The women are still working,’ the Colonel said, ‘as if the storm wasn’t there.’

‘Ah!’ So-Peng said, nodding. ‘And what does this tell you, Colonel?’

The Colonel took the glass from his eye, lowering it to his side, looking at So-Peng, at his yellow hairless head, the grey wisp of his beard hanging straight down from the ultimate point of his chin, the dark serene eyes regarding him coolly as if from some other age.

‘Hmmm,’ So-Peng murmured and nothing more. He was fully aware.

‘They know something we don’t,’ the Colonel said.

By that ‘we’ the Colonel had meant, however implicitly, Westerners. Yet So-Peng now had to make up his mind whether the Colonel was being serious or merely condescending. So-Peng, not unlike every Asian on the continent, had had far more experience with people expressing the latter sentiment. Yet he did not dismiss the Colonel summarily as he very easily might have, so that even at this early stage he must have had an instinctive reaction to this man.

For his part, the Colonel knew only too well that he had come to a crucial nexus in his relationship with Cheong. This man’s blessing was imperative for her. Why it had not been necessary at her marriage he could not understand. Yet he-knew that for her to depart from Singapore, So-Peng had to become an active agent.

That this house, this town were so isolated, so totally unknown to the Western population, made the Colonel all the more apprehensive. He was painfully aware that many Chinese had no great love for Westerners, those barbarian giants from across the sea. That this dislike - indeed this enmity - was, at its core, mostly justifiable, made no difference to him at this moment.

But the Colonel had a great love for these people, for their life, their history, religion and customs, and it was this knowledge, chiefly, which heartened him now, which prompted him to say, ‘There is no doubt, sir, that we have much to learn here but, I feel too, that the most advantageous of situations involves an exchange, initially, of information but, more important, leads from there to an exchange of - confidences.’