Linnear 01 - The Ninja (63 page)

Tm jealous,’ she said. She thought she might be taking an awful chance. ‘I’m jealous of how much of yourself you gave to her.’ He was quiet, beside her. ‘Never again, Nicholas?’ Only her side and hair touched him. ‘Who is being punished?’

When he spoke, his voice was tight. With what was he struggling? ‘She made me … feel…”

‘What?’

‘Feel, just feel.”

‘Is that so terrible?”

‘And then she left me. She went off with…’ And he told her what he had never told anyone, flooded with shame.

Justine put her warm lips against his ear, whispered, ‘Unzip me, Nicholas.”

He reached out. It came as the rasp of a log cracking, burnt through, subsiding into the hot ashes of the grate.

The top of her breasts shone palely in the firelight like the swelling crests of the sea at dawn. Here, too, there were depths to be plumbed. But the tugging he felt now went beyond his loins; a kind of tidal wash, covering his whole body, sweeping into his head. ‘I missed you so much.’ And not, any more, Yukio.

She could feel how that had been torn out of him. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I can see that now. I felt old and tired without you there.” She shrugged out of her shoulder straps.

‘Let’s not make love right away.’

Her eyes were glittery so close to him, the little fire in the far one like a beckoning beacon homeward bound.

‘Say it again.’

‘Justine, words sometimes have no meaning at all.’

‘Then what does?’

His arms encircled her. ‘I’ll hold you,’ he whispered. ‘And you hold me.’

Her fingers brushed his skin, moving.

Fukashigi, the kenjutsu master, awoke at first light with the tendrils of something still in his mind.

The world, this early, was fog-shrouded, familiar landmarks rendered as in a pointillist painting.

Not a dream. Fukashigi did not carry such things into the waking world.

Something had dragged him away from sleep. The tendrils swirled.

And immediately he thought of Nicholas.

It must be time then. And despite all his wisdom, Fukashigi felt the slight thrill of fear shiver him.

He had thought about this time often during long nights when sleep eluded him and now he knew that he had been deluding himself, thinking that this day might never dawn.

Here it was, after all this time.

Time, he knew full well, meant absolutely nothing.

Even with the distances involved, he felt the psychic tuggings like a storm pulling at the moorings of a ship.

The long years in China and Japan seemed like a mist-shrouded dream to him, like the world he saw outside his window. The mind, he knew, could do much, play many tricks, and he wondered this morning which world was truly more the dream. In a way, America could never be as real as those days and nights on the Asian shore with their spices and their mysteries.

There had been time then, unlimited time, it had seemed once, to plunge into each more involving puzzle. And the joy he felt at their eventual unravelling was still unequalled in his life.

There had been, of course, several times when he had cause to regret the life he had carved out for himself. It was, after all, a most perilous path, fraught with real and imagined dangers every step of the way.

Jealousy racked them all like a perennial ague that could never be fully assuaged. There was resentment of anyone new. And especially of one who sought to plumb the depths that had frustrated them all.

And-conquered.

Fukashigi sat up on his futon, hearing his bones creak. Magic, he thought. What a misunderstood word. Typically Western. He had to laugh.

Then he thought about Nicholas. He did not envy him but then there was no envy in Fukashigi’s heart; Had there been … Fukashigi shrugged his thin shoulders.

Who knows? He thought. But there was excitement inside him again.

Now he thought that he could see clear down to the bottom.

The floor was full of silty hills and fish without colour wove the pattern of their changeless lives through the mud and rocks and sand.

This section of the Straits of Shimonoseki had been haunted for seven hundred years or thereabouts. Ever since the infant emperor Antoku Tenno perished here in a spectacular sea battle along with every other man, woman and child of his Taira clan at the hands of the Minamoto.

There were frequent reports of sightings of the strange Heike - another name for the Taira - crabs which have human faces on their carapaces and are said to house the kami of the long-dead defeated warriors.

They cannot, it is said in legends, find peace and thus, on fog-blanketed nights, fishermen swear they can see odd spectral fires upon the unquiet waters and they refuse to launch their boats, even when the fish are running, for during these terrible nights, the Heike would rise from the deeps, interfering with passing ships, pulling unwary swimmers downward to their deaths.

And it was to help assuage these lost and unhappy kami that the Buddhists built the temple of Amidaji there.

But now, Saigo thought, it is more than ever a haunted place, this Dan-no-ura, for an outpouring of my own soul lies dead and defeated in those waters, come to join the joyless Heike in their endless journey: there would be no burning fire, no golden lotus hearth for either.

He could see the perfect face lying on the bottom undisturbed as if there were no intervening waves; perfect only now as the features composed themselves in death. A traditional heroine: the pious daughter, the loyal wife, heart filled with sacrifice; all her grievous sins expunged.

It was good, he told himself. It was right; it was just. A death decreed by history.

What else could he have done?

He felt the shortness of breath and the burning tears threatening to destroy his dead eyes with their pitiful flow and he automatically began to chant the Hannya-Shin-Kyo: Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form … What is emptiness - that is form … Perception, name, concept and knowledge, are also emptiness

… There is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind…

In darkness there is sin; in darkness there is death. Sin negates spirit; and the killing of beings without spirit can only be looked on as an act of charity.

But, but, but - how could there be love where sin exists? This was a question that had tortured him for years, more than any other one thing, shaping his life. And as he asked himself the impossible question again, he pounded his closed fists against his forehead and cheekbones, seeking to destroy that within himself which remained perversely recalcitrant. He could no more drive the memory of her from him than he could relinquish his name and it was just this terrifying obstinacy within himself which had driven him to the drugs. Besides, he believed now that they enhanced his powers.

But surely it had been Nicholas Linnear who had brought him to this sorry state. If it had not been for him, he would not … they would not … there would not…

Lights blazed against his closed eyelids as he beat himself but even they would not drown out the visions of the gentle pale fish at play in the straits. And, O Amida! How the wind howled on that night, snow swirling down like lace curtains, disappearing upon the changeless waves with the black sky so low that neither Kyushu nor Honshu was visible. Alone in the rocking boat. Did the howling increase at the heavy splash? Did the Heike know they were about to receive another unrepentant sinner? Unrepentant they must be or why else lie upon the darkest nights as unappeased kami?

Ghost lights upon the straits, just as the tales told, and he recited many prayers, as many as he knew, repeating them without surcease until the prow of the boat touched the wooden quay at Shimonoseki and he stood on solid land, shaking and wet with seawater and sweat despite the snow and the chill north wind.

Still today he could hear that eerie howling like demons calling him back, to complete terrors that had somehow been left undone, circling within his head like black kites descending upon a bloody carcass.

At last, his breath heavy with the aftertaste of psychedelics drenched in so much sweat that he might have just come from the bath; he fell into a sodden sleep filled with dreams and, worse, the trumpeting echoes of dreams.

Nicholas dreamed: of land’s end. And out from the near shore, the very end of it at least, arched a bridge of wood and stone very much like the one at Nihonbashi. And as he started across this bridge, he saw that to either side there was nothing but a hanging mist. He turned round, looking back the way he had come, and was astonished and not a little afraid to see that the strange mist had obscured the land from which he had come, so effectively that he forgot which land that was as well as not knowing towards which land he was bound, as if the mist stirred about inside his head as well as without.

When he was approximately half way across, he thought he could discern a sound, dim and muffled by the mist, but as he drew closer he became more and more convinced that it was the sobbing of a woman.

In time, he was able to make out a darker shape within the mist which, as he approached, coalesced into the form of a young woman. She was tall and willowy and she wore a clinging dress of white silk. It was, he saw now, dripping with water, as if she had just climbed out from the sea, which he supposed this bridge spanned.

She stood with her slim back against the bedewed balustrade, weeping into her hands, and such was the power of her lamentations that Nicholas felt compelled to move closer.

When he was only a few steps from her, he heard her speak: ‘Oh, you’ve come. At last I At last I I had given up all hope!’

‘Pardon, me.’ His voice reverberated within his chest as if it were a cathedral-like cavity. ‘My lady, I do not think that I know you, yet you seem to have recognized me. Have you, perhaps, made some error?’

As he said this, he moved his head back and forth in an attempt to get a clear view of her face for, as it was now, he could not truly say whether she was known to him or not. But this seemed quite beyond his present capacity. Between her long dark hair, spread like a sea-fan and strewn with small shells, and the long-fingered hands she continued to press to her face, she remained hidden from his gaze.

‘No, there is no error. You are he whom I have sought for all these years.’

‘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.’

‘I do not see how I can be of help to you, my lady. But if you will allow me to see your face…’

‘It will do you no good to look upon me,’ she said so sadly that he felt his heart must break.

‘Then I was correct. I do not know you.’

She said nothing and thus he did not know what her answer should be.

‘Take your hands away from your face,’ he said to her. ‘Please, my lady. I cannot assist you otherwise.’

Slowly, as if most reluctant, her long fingers drifted down through the mist and he gasped.

Where the features of her face should have been - eyes, nose, lips and the rest - her skin was as flat and smooth as an egg…

‘- God, Nicholas, what is it?’

His chest heaved as if he had just struggled to finish a marathon, and sweat glistened across bis face like rime.

Justine’s face, lined with worry, hovered above him, her long hair draped on either side, an electric curtain, a tenuous link.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. You cried out in your sleep -‘

‘What did I say?’

‘I don’t know, darling. Nothing recognizable, at least not in English. Something like, oh’ - her brow wrinkled in thought -‘minamara no tat-something.’

‘Migaurari ni tatsu?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘Are you certain? Really certain?”

‘Yes. Absolutely. You said it more than once. What does it mean?’

‘Well, literally, it means, “to act as a substitute”.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘In Japanese folklore there is the belief that a person may give his or her life in order to save another’s. It needn’t even be a person. It could be a tree, just about anything.’

‘What were you dreaming about?”

‘I am not certain.’

‘Nicholas,’ she said with her typical objective intuition, ‘did someone give their life for you? - In the dream, I mean?’

He looked at her, put his hand up to her cheek, but it was not her soft flesh he seemed to stroke, certainly not her voice he heard in his head then.

In that heated room of perfect death with his toes touching the hem of his mother’s exquisite, perfectly folded kimono and, just a little way beyond, the rivulets of blood dropped like rubies along the floor, Itami said, ‘We both must leave now, Nicholas. There is nothing left here for outsiders such as ourselves.’

‘Where will you go?’ His voice was as dull as lead.

‘To China.’

His eyes tracked upward to her white face. ‘To the communists?’

She shook her head slightly. ‘No. There are others there -who were there long before the communists. Your grandfather, So-Peng, was one such.”

‘You would leave Saigo?”

Her eyes were as bright as a bird’s. ‘Nicholas, did you ever wonder why I had but one child? But no, why should you?’ Her lips were turned in a grim smile that chilled him. ‘I can only say that with me - with me - it was totally a matter of choice, though Satsugai believed otherwise. Oh yes, I lied to him. Willingly. Are you surprised? Well.’ She stirred slightly like a sapling in a sudden gust of wind, giving way, giving way minutely. ‘I would not have another like him.” Her dark eyes were slits now. ‘Do you understand me? I trust you do.’

She looked down briefly at her katana, standing on its bloody point. ‘Do you hate me? I would not be surprised … But no, I see that you do not. That gladdens my heart, I cannot tell you how much.

‘I love you, Nicholas. Were you my own I could not love you more but I think you already knew that deep inside yourself.’ Her head jerked as if she had been abruptly reminded of something. ‘These days of kwaidan pass through my fingers like so much sand. Time is short and I have much to do.’

He stood in front of her, pale and drawn. He shivered once though no breeze stirred in the room.