Lord Oda's Revenge (22 page)

She pounced, striking high with the
wakizashi.
Taro didn't know if it was a feint or not, but it didn't matter. The whole system of feints and strikes was obliterated by the simple, horrific addition of a second sword. What possible difference did it make whether she intended the strike or not, when she had another blade, which could come at him from anywhere?

His wrist snapped up, without conscious thought on his part, blocking the short-sword. He saw a gleam from the corner of her eye, and his hand came round, but it was too slow – pain seared into the back of his leg, causing the world in front of him to brighten for a moment, and then he went down heavily on one knee.

He tried to stand but hammered down again on the knee, and could only raise his sword to try to fend off the strikes that came faster than ever, and then, suddenly, his hand was twisted painfully, and the sword dropped from it to the grass.

Wearily he opened his robe, exposing his chest. He touched the skin above his heart. ‘Make it quick,' he said.

‘All right then,' said Yukiko, and she tossed her short-sword into the same hand that held the
katana,
and advanced towards him, her index and pinky fingers out in the
mudra
for banishing evil.
She's going to kill me with her bare hands,
thought Taro. She bent down, smiled at him, and then struck his neck, hard, with the extended fingertips. Agony exploded at the front of his mind, a constellation bursting into being before his eyes, and he thought,
This is it, now I die.
He knew she had aimed for a pressure point of some kind, imagined that the blood to his head would cease in an instant to flow.

He waited. The stars faded, and the tree and the grass came slowly back into focus. Yukiko still stood in front of him, smiling. She slid her
wakizashi
into her kimono. Taro didn't understand.
He wasn't dead. What was she doing? He held his hand out to push himself up from the ground, only his hand wouldn't move.

His legs wouldn't move. Yukiko stepped to the side, and he tried to turn his head to follow her. He couldn't move it.

She's paralysed me.

Yukiko disappeared from view, and Taro strained against the numbness in his nerves, trying to see where she had gone. What seemed an eternity passed, as the blossoms gently fell from the plum tree above.

Finally Yukiko stepped daintily into his field of vision. She made a beckoning motion to her side, where Taro couldn't see.

Two samurai approached, and between them, supported or dragged by them, was Taro's mother.

Yukiko laughed that delicate laugh. ‘Do you remember,' she said, ‘what you said after my sister died? How you were paralysed, and could do nothing to help?'

Taro couldn't speak, couldn't nod.

‘I'll take that as a yes,' said Yukiko. ‘I never believed you, of course. But I thought this would be fitting.'

She weighed her sword in her hand, letting it slash the air. Then she gave a signal to the samurai and they stepped away, leaving Taro's mother lying below the gnarled bough of the tree. Tears were running down her cheeks, but when she turned to Taro, what he saw in her face was not fear so much as urgency.

‘Taro, my love,' she said quickly. ‘If you live. . . That thing we were talking about before. It's not—'

Yukiko sighed, stepped forward, and plunged her sword into Taro's mother's heart. She let go of the hilt, and the blade hung there a moment, so perfectly still, before the body holding it horizontal fell backward, and the blade stood shining then from
the chest, as if marking the spot where the worst thing of all had happened.

Taro wanted to scream, to cry, to run to her side, but could do nothing.

Yukiko turned to him with a businesslike air. ‘Best to just get it over with, I thought. I can't stand all that emotional goodbye stuff.'

 

A
BSENTMINDEDLY
, Y
UKIKO WIPED
Taro's mother's blood from her sword so that it mingled with Kira's on her sleeve, and Taro thought that was perhaps the greatest insult of all;
he
would have killed her without hesitation at that moment, woman or not. His mother's body lay still on the ground, blossoms drifting down through the air towards it. He could not speak aloud, but he spoke a mantra in his head.

Please kill me please kill me please kill me. . .

But her sword remained in its sheath. She stopped in front of him, still smiling.

‘I'm not going to kill you,' she said.

Taro stared at her.

‘And I'm not taking you with me either.' She bent down till her lips almost touched his ear. ‘Don't tell the samurai this, but I was meant to bring you to Lord Oda.' She stroked his hair. ‘Well. Lord Oda can find you himself. I've had
my
revenge.'

She turned to face someone out of Taro's vision – one of the samurai, presumably – and then pointed to Kenji Kira's corpse. Taro could just see the man's feet, and the pool of blood in which he lay.

‘Pick that up,' said Yukiko. ‘We'll find an
eta
grave somewhere
and throw it in.'

But just then there was a clattering of feet on a wooden floor, and someone burst through the door of the main hall.

‘Lady Yukiko!' he shouted. ‘The monks are rallying! They must have kept men in reserve, hiding in the buildings. We're overrun!'

Yukiko cursed. ‘Back to the camp,' she ordered. ‘Leave Kira here. He's dead – that's the main thing.'

And then she left.

For what seemed a long time, there was just the space in front of him, the corpses, and the rain. His field of vision was limited to the gnarled trunk of the tree – he came to know its every whorl and knot – his mother's dead body, Kenji Kira's motionless feet, and the grass before him.

It was a kind of meditation, but it was the meditation of a demon, not a follower of Buddha – a punishment from the deepest bowels of Enma's hell. He couldn't raise a single finger, or even move his eyes – all he could do was look on his mother's dead body, and see the flowers fall. His tears would not come, but his thoughts raced through his mind, as if in mockery of his body's immobility. He remembered everything: his mother's head breaking the surface of the water, her arm upraised as in triumph, holding a bag of abalone torn from the reef. Her face in firelight, as she prepared rice with fish for himself and her father. The love and terror in her eyes, when he had been wounded by a shark, and his father carried him back to the village, expecting only that he would be able to lay his son's corpse at his wife's feet.

From what seemed a long way away, he could hear the sounds of battle. Screams, music of steel on steel. But it was
fading, all the time, and Taro could tell that the fight was all but over.

He thought,
She has taken away what I love, the way she thinks I did to her.
Then another thought came to him, and soon it was repeating itself over and over, till he thought he would go mad.
What if she knows where Hana is? What if she takes her, too?
If that was true, then his only hope was Hiro. But what chance would Hiro have against Yukiko, now that she fought with two swords?

But there was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do but lie there, with the damp grass pressing into his cheek, and the smell of blood in his nostrils.
I should have stayed at the mountain,
he thought. He'd known it must be a trap, deep down – had realized as soon as the pigeon arrived that it couldn't possibly have taken so long, that he was a fool if he thought he was just going to find his mother, and start his old life again. And now what had he done? He had brought death to his mother's sanctuary. He was a curse. Because of him, his father and his mother were dead – Heiko, too.

He cried, but no tears came – he was crying without moving, his whole being and soul were crying, and then the heavens joined him, because rain was falling on him, pricking at his skin.

Gradually, impossibly slowly, the light grew brighter, and the stars above the
ume
tree faded from sight, to be replaced by a reddening that was not fire, only the sun rising. A half-moon still hung in the lightening sky, as if a reminder to the world that even in the light, things of darkness could hold their sway, and death could come at any time. All he wanted to do was sleep, to disappear into blackness, and not to know anything any more. But he couldn't even close his eyes.

He could hear people running and shouting on the other side of the accommodation hall. He heard no clashes of steel, though,
no gunfire, and he supposed that the fighting was over. He couldn't tell who had won. He didn't even care any more. He supposed that when someone made their way to the courtyard, he would find out.

If it was the samurai, they would kill him.

If it was the monks, they would help him, make him live.

And that would be worse.

 

W
ITH THE DAWN
came another fire, and this one spread from the tips of his fingers to their knuckles, crawling like burning bugs, ever so slowly. This torture inched its way up his forearms, then spread across his chest, and in its wake, he was left with the ability to stretch his fingers, joint by joint, then his arms, and finally his legs and the rest of his body. Gasping at the pain as the blood filled his extremities, he began to pull himself to his feet, and so foreign was the bulk of his body to him that he felt as if he were hauling another person's heavy carcass into the air; his legs were no longer his, but belonged to someone altogether lumpier and more clumsy.

He was staggering towards the door when the abbot stepped through it and – seeing Taro's state – rushed forward to put a hand under his arm, supporting him. Behind him came Hiro, and when he saw Taro he gasped and ran to take his other arm. Hiro's face was blackened with soot, his eyebrows and eyelashes singed. Taro wondered vaguely what had happened to him, could not for the moment remember when he had last seen his friend. Everything seemed very confused.

‘Oh, gods,' Hiro said. ‘Taro. . . your mother.'

‘Yes,' said Taro. It was all he could manage.

‘Was it. . . Kenji Kira?' Hiro was looking at the man's body on the ground, seeming so weak and emaciated in death that it was hard to imagine what a powerful enemy he had been in life.

‘No. Yukiko.'

Hiro made a choking sound. ‘She. . . was here?'

‘Yes.'

Inside the hall, men lay on all sides, some dead, some wounded. There was a sweet stench of blood, and the air was full of the groans and whimpers of the hurt. Taro looked around blankly. ‘The samurai?' he asked.

‘Gone,' said the abbot. ‘I was leading our strongest fighters. We were hiding among the trees by the meditation area, in case the samurai should breach our first defences. We were lucky – we escaped the guns. Thousands did not. But then, when the rain came, the guns were made useless. The samurai attacked with swords – and we were waiting for them.'

They emerged, finally, from the hall into the light, and Taro could see what the abbot meant: dead samurai lay everywhere. There were no monks, giving the impression that the samurai had been struck down by some vengeful act of god – the bodies of the defenders having been carried already into the halls, Taro guessed.

A single samurai knelt among the dead, his hands together, and Taro was about to question his survival when he turned, and Taro saw that it was the man who had been haunted. What had his name been? It all seemed a lifetime ago now.

The man nodded to Taro. ‘I owe allegiance to Lord Oda,' he said. ‘But these monks saved my life. I had to fight by their side.' It was a statement, but it carried the inflection of a question, of a plea.

‘Yes,' said Taro, and the man nodded, a tear in his eye that
might have been relief.
Hayao,
he thought.
That's his name.