Read Linnear 01 - The Ninja Online
Authors: Eric van Lustbader
He was thinking of Japan. Of the Colonel, of Cheong, of Saigo, 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 Saigo 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, at almost any time, have run away from Saigo. And where do you think she would go? Where she wanted to be; at his side. And Fukashigi had said: You were not ready then. He would have destroyed you … Nicholas knew the full measure of the truth of those words. By staying with Saigo, Yukio knew she held in check a measure of his deep anger; at least he had her and Nicholas had 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?’
‘Y”s. 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 colours.’
‘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.’
‘Saigo 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.
It saddened him greatly that he should have been living a lie for all these years, believing that she had deceived him. But to know now that she had loved him as he had loved her was enough. She was gone from him, had been for a long time, except in his dreams. That memory was his and he would do for her what he did for his parents, light incense and say the prayers for them on the days of their births.
Justine stirred beside him and he turned over on his back. Her right arm was beneath her head, the hand buried to the wrist beneath the crumpled pillow. He heard her soft, even breathing…
In the high house filled with bars of bright golden sunlight and deep shade falling obliquely across the bare wooden floors Nicholas encountered So-Peng. He seemed not to have aged at all since the time the Colonel and Cheong had come to visit him. Tall and thin with bright black eyes and’ long hands, longer fingernails which clashed softly like the mandibles of some mythic creature, he stood in the centre of the vaulted room, studying Nicholas.
‘You have brought me a fine present. I am most grateful.’ Nicholas looked around, saw nothing. Only he and So-Peng. He did not understand.
‘Where am I?’
‘Somewhere,’ said the old man, ‘east of the moon, east of the sun.’
‘I don’t remember how I got here.’ Nicholas felt panic overtake him. ‘I’ll never find it again.’
So-Peng smiled and his nails clashed together, the brittle sound of cicadas at noon. ‘You came here once. You will find your way again.’
And then Nicholas was alone in the high house, staring at himself in a long panel mirror.
Dawn light, gentle and pale, woke him as it came in through the bedroom window. Justine was still asleep. He lifted the covers lightly, got out of bed.
He washed and dressed silently, went down the hallway into the kitchen to make himself a cup of green tea. He whirled the crushed leaves around and around the cup until they had dissolved. There was a fine froth on top, as pale a green as the mist in the mountains of Japan in autumn.
He sipped once, very slowly, savouring the bitter taste that was like no other in the world. Then he went into the living room. He turned on the light in the fish tank, fed the inhabitants.
It was a remarkably clear day. Clouds, very high up, stood sharply delineated, their striations as well defined as those in marble. They swayed in the high wind aloft. He opened the door, leaving only the screen door closed against the beach insects. The breeze swept in off the sea, rich and moist.
Justine was dreaming of a man whose face seemed to be all mouth. It was a lipless scar, like the horizon on the brink of a savage storm, black and ominous, opening and closing as lurid lightning forked and flickered far out.
It was screaming at her, over and over, the voice just a whisper; each whisper a lash dial stung her heart, raising a welt, leaving a scar in its insidious wake.
She tried to get her mind in gear, to think coherently, but the screaming mouth confused her and she lay idling like a car in neutral.
The words the mouth was screaming at her poured down on her like hard rain, making her mind hurt until the only thing she wanted to do was to put her hands over her ears to blot out the terrible noise. But it went on and on and on.
The only way to make the mouth stop was to do what it said.
Now she wanted to wake up. Or she did not. She could not tell which. She began to whimper and cry. In her dream? Or for real? Which did she want to do? Wake up? Or continue to sleep? She was terrified and every moment she remained asleep her fear intensified.
She began to struggle. She felt steel crossing the palms of her hands.
Then her eyes snapped open.
Nicholas was on his knees, sitting straight-backed, facing the windows, the water and the dawn, when Justine came into the room. His eyes were closed, the handleless cup of green tea steaming in front of him. His spirit expanded, gyring high into the clear sky, reaching towards the high clouds.
Justine, eyes opened wide and burning quiet cold fire, stole silently past the bubbling fish tank. Her pale yellow nightgown swirled about her as if she were immersed in mist, rising up from the floor she walked, enwrapping her torso.
She turned and, reaching upwards with her two hands, unsheathed the katana which hung on the wall just below Nicholas’s dai-katana. She would have taken that but it was just out of her reach.
Now she turns, transfigured. Her eyes are not her own. The colour is all wrong and the crimson motes have been obscured by the new blackness of the irises. Her face, she feels with a mixture of terror and exhilaration, is no longer feminine, though her figure is not altered. Like dark lightning flickering: adder, ant, man-thing. She shakes her head as her vision blurs. Colours seem strange; shapes bulk at her in different proportions. All of it has lost the extra dimensions with which she once saw the world. It is a cold and hateful place; joyless and as sere as the ‘ great Gobi.
Air bellows in and out of her lungs as if through some baleful force outside her ken and she curls up inside herself, crying and shivering.
Still her hands are calm and controlled as she places them one over the other around the wound leather handle of the katana, feeling its weight and its balance, knowing - and not knowing how she knows - the perfection of it.
Now her bare feet are placed slowly one before the other, at precise angles, as she draws ever closer to the muscular back at the front of the room.
Cool light floods her as she comes out from the shadows and she pauses a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the glare.
Now she is so close that it seems her harsh breath must brush his skin. Her arms are raised high over her head in preparation for the one lethal blow. One instant and it is all over: the striking of a match in the dark, the flick of one fingernail against another. The difference between life and death.
The tip of the katana begins to quiver as the killing energy is built up. One cannot use the \iai in this situation - the great scream that releases so much energy. How does she know this? she wonders. One must draw the power upwards from the lower abdomen - more, more, the muscles are so weak.
And it is at this moment, as the katana commences its dark downward rush, that her core, at last seeing, begins to uncurl.
No! she screamed to herself. No no no!
But the blade was already a blur, cleaving the air as it went down and down and, despairing, she knew that it was far too late.
In flight, his spirit seemed to take on the characteristics of an old man. Not any old man but a particular one.
Nicholas, unbound, was old yet seemed not to feel the years. Rather, they hung over one bare, insubstantial arm like a series of silk scarves, each one a different colour, corresponding to its memories.
In the sky of the new day he danced the dance of life, a delighted child who has nevertheless seen many things, experienced many days and nights. He fashioned stalks of wheat from the stuff of the clouds and, grasping one in each fist, swirled them around and around his head like crepe paper streamers.
Below him the continent of Ask stretched itself like an enormous tiger, yawning in the early morning, just beginning to stir. Yet it was the Asia of another time, before the advent of heavy industrialization, the revolution in China, the devastation of Vietnam and Cambodia. The air was like incense.
Nicholas became aware of Justine and the katana at the same instant. Had he not been so far away, the haragei would have picked up the intent far sooner. But he was relaxed and, for that moment went unaware.
But in this last instant he had heard the bolt of black thunder and was already turning as the katana rushed down upon him.
There was, of course, no time for cerebration. Had he paused to think, even for the barest of instants, he would have died. As it was, it was closer than he liked to think about.
There are various methods of winning a battle without a sword. The one he knew best was Letting Go the Hilt and he used it now, instinctively reaching up with his arms crossed just past the wrists so that he came hi within the arc of the blade, slamming Justine’s forearms away and up.
He was on his feet and she came at him with a horizontal cut from left to right and he knew then what had happened.
With a shattering cry, he extended his left leg, bending at the knee, and crossed hi$ right arm over his left, applying a blow to her fists with the flat of his hand.
He stamped, startling her, and broke towards the katana. Half way there, he realized that the blow he was about to deliver would shatter the bones in her wrists and instead grasped them, wrenching backwards, right over left, until she cried out and the blade clattered to the floor.
Her knee came up and struck him in the pit of his stomach. He bent over and she pounded his back with both her fists.
The breath whooshed out of him but, in falling, he managed to use his forearms to sweep her off her feet. She fell heavily half on top of him and immediately began to strike out.
Nicholas reached up through the rain of blows, touched the side of her neck. Something screamed. It came from her wide-open mouth, it used her vocal cords, but she never could have made that sound on her own. Her strange black eyes flew upwards in their sockets until only the whites showed and then the lids came down and she slumped, unconscious, across him, her long hair half-covering the shining steel blade of the abandoned katana.