Lord Oda's Revenge (38 page)

‘It gets worse,' said Little Kawabata.

‘Worse?'

‘Yukiko said Lord Oda was a vampire.'

Taro's jaw dropped open. ‘A vampire?'

‘That's what she said.'

Taro shook his head. ‘No – he can't – I mean—' Everything that had happened, the people who had died. . . if Lord Oda was alive, then that was one thing – he could always be killed. But if he was a vampire, then it would be infinitely more difficult. Taro felt himself swaying.

‘You don't look so good, Taro,' said Hiro worriedly, and his voice seemed to come from a long way away. ‘As a matter of fact, you look terrible.'

‘Just. . . a shock. . . that's all,' said Taro. He hadn't even killed the man who killed his father. He hadn't succeeded in anything. The ball didn't work. His father and his mother and perhaps Hana had died for
nothing
.

‘No,' said Hiro. ‘You haven't looked well from the start. It's like you're wasting away.' He was examining Taro closely, and his eyes were full of concern.

Taro smiled at him. He was glad to see his friend again, even if everything was falling apart. ‘It's my mother's ghost,' said Taro. ‘I think I'm being haunted.'

Little Kawabata looked at him as if he were mad, but Hiro had seen the haunted man on Mount Hiei too, and he gasped with horror. ‘Are you sure? But you could die!'

‘I'm sure. She comes to me all the time, trying to tell me something.'

‘Trying to tell you what?'

‘I don't know,' said Taro. ‘Her mouth moves, and there is a sound of sorts, but I don't understand the words.'

‘Is it about the ball?' said Hiro. ‘Is she telling you where it is? Is she trying to help you?'

Taro shrugged. ‘I don't know. I went to Shirahama. I dived the wreck, and I brought up the ball. It didn't work. It's just a ball of gold.'

‘But a ball of
gold
?' said Little Kawabata, unable to conceal the greed in his voice. ‘You could do a lot with—'

Hiro shot him a look, and he shut up. ‘What will you do?' he asked Taro.

Taro looked down at his emaciated arms, the tendons and bone visible through the paperlike skin. ‘My mother's ghost. . . it's consuming me. I need help.'

‘Help?' said Hiro. ‘What help? Just tell me.'

‘I need to go back to Mount Hiei,' said Taro. ‘The priest in Shirahama. . . He told me a story about a man who went to hell, to speak to his mother who was haunting him. Maybe the abbot can help me do the same. My mother's body will not have been
burnt yet. . . I don't think. . . Are we still in the Month of Leaves?'

‘You want to go to hell?' said Little Kawabata incredulously.

‘Taro,' said Hiro. ‘This is madness.'

‘Just take me to the abbot,' said Taro. ‘Do you promise?'

Hiro sighed. ‘Yes, of course I promise.'

‘I want to know what my mother is trying to tell me,' said Taro. ‘Otherwise I'll die.'

Hiro put a hand out to steady Taro, as he swayed again. ‘I won't let you die,' he said.

Taro shrugged. He sat down on the ash-strewn ground. ‘If I die, at least I'll know what she's saying,' he said.

 

L
ITTLE
K
AWABATA SUPPORTED
Taro's weight with his arm as they climbed the stone steps. The stumps of burned trees lined the sides of the path, and Little Kawabata wondered whether trees knew they were burning, and felt the pain of their loss.

Little Kawabata had to admit the place was beautiful. He could see why the monks would choose it for their meditation. The land spread out below them like tatami mats laden with seeds and bowls of water, which were lakes. The perfect dome of the mountaintop loomed above them.

Someone, though, had gone to a lot of effort to erase the mountain from the map. Everywhere, the ground was burnt, and Little Kawabata saw what looked like bloodstains on the rocks.

At one point they had passed the ruins of a building, and Taro had groaned as they walked past it. A small wooden structure was being erected in the middle of the destruction, as if the temple had the ability to regenerate, like a worm's head, and was rebuilding itself from the inside out.

‘That's where Hana is,' said Hiro, who was carrying Taro on the other side.

Little Kawabata looked at the monks working, and felt a
sense of wonder. In that great oblong of ash, grey and long as an enormous grave, the unburnt body of Hana lay hidden from view.

He shuddered. There was something unnatural about it. But then, thought Little Kawabata, there was something unnatural about all of this. Sometimes, when he was sleeping, he would hear noises and wake up, and Taro would be staring into the shadows of the forest, talking softly.

‘Tell me,' Taro would say. ‘Tell me what you're trying to say.'

The empty forest never answered.

The last few days, Hiro had been giving Taro his own blood. Taro had protested at first, but Hiro had insisted. Anyway, Taro was so weak he could barely refuse. Occasionally he would become lucid and talk about Lord Oda and the ball and Shusaku, whose ghost he seemed to have seen on a ship somewhere. Little Kawabata wondered whether something had torn in the boy's mind, and now he saw the ghosts of his dead all around him.

Must have lost his mind
, he thought,
to let that ball of gold get away from him
.

Most of the time, though, Taro seemed to be moving through another country altogether, peopled with different personages. He addressed trees, rocks, temples. He asked them what they wanted to tell him, sounding increasingly distressed, as if angry with these objects for not giving up their secrets.

Sometimes he called them Mother.

 

T
HE WORLD WAS
moving back and forth gently, and Taro thought,
I'm back on that ship. I knocked my head and imagined everything after that.

I'm not haunted after all!

Then he opened his eyes and the abbot was before him, sitting cross-legged in front of him on the floor of the training hall, and his own hands in his lap were so thin they were like the hands of birds. It was all real, and he was still dying. Hayao stood beside the abbot. He looked at Taro with eyes full of infinite sadness.

‘Is that what I looked like?' the samurai asked the abbot.

‘Yes,' said the abbot. ‘But you had Taro to save you. He has no one. I fear for him.'

‘Can't you do anything? Give him spells. . . sutras. . .'

‘I have tried everything, when he was sleeping. I have given him the charms. I have read him the texts. Nothing has helped. With you, he saw your ghost. None of us can see his.'

‘He mustn't die,' said Hayao. ‘He's. . . I don't know. He's necessary, I think.' This was an odd thing for Hayao to say, and Taro wondered if he was hallucinating, if this was all a dream.

‘I agree,' said the abbot. ‘But I don't know what I can do.'

‘Help. . . me,' said Taro softly, and he was shocked by how weak his voice was.

The abbot looked at him, startled. ‘You hear us?' he said.

‘Yes,' said Taro.

‘Hiro and your other friend tell me you see your mother,' said the abbot.

Taro managed a nod. The whole world was grey and colourless, and it was an effort just to keep his eyes open. He was not aware of how he had come to be on Mount Hiei. He had a vague memory of being carried by Hiro.

‘Hmm,' said the abbot pensively. ‘Does she grow more solid?'

Taro thought. Yes, it seemed to him that the light no longer shone through her when she appeared to him. ‘I. . . think so,' he said.

The abbot frowned. ‘And you are weak. I can see that for myself.'

Taro croaked a ‘yes'.

The abbot sighed. ‘This
gaki
will kill you, if we don't do something.'

‘I know,' said Taro. ‘I want. . . go to hell.'

‘I'm sorry?' said the abbot.

‘My mother. . . she speaks. But I can't understand.'

‘She is speaking in the language of the dead.'

Taro nodded – the movement caused his neck to ache, and he wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep, but he knew it was important to get the abbot's help.

‘Need. . . to know. . . what she's saying.'

The abbot's face fell. ‘It's impossible. Only the dead know that language.'

‘Send me. . . to hell.'

The abbot blanched. ‘I don't know what you are talking
about,' he said.

Taro sat up, gasping with the pain of straining his muscles. His mother was standing behind the abbot – she was always there now – and she was nodding at him, encouraging, and he knew this was what he had to do.

‘Mokuren. . . went to hell,' he said. ‘I need. . . also. Tell me how he did it.'

The abbot was staring at him in horror. ‘You don't understand,' he said. ‘Here at the monastery, it's said that Mokuren sat on the mountainside, and didn't eat or drink for weeks. You want to know how he went to hell, Taro? He
died
.'

‘Died?'

‘The monks said he stopped breathing. They began to prepare him for his funeral, but then he opened his eyes again. And he said that he had been to hell, and had spoken with his mother.'

‘Good,' said Taro. ‘Then I. . . will die. . . too.'

 

A
BIRD LANDED ON
his shoulder. He was glad, because it meant he was still, and the bird did not recognize him as a threat.

At first Hiro had tried to bring him blood, to sustain him, but he had pushed it away.

He sat on a rock, overlooking a ravine that stretched down and into the far valleys below, though he didn't look at anything but the blankness inside his head. The abbot had told him that Mokuren, when he wanted to find his mother, had sat in this exact place. His fellow monks visited him every day, and one day they found that his heart had stopped – just for a moment. When it began beating again, he opened his eyes, and that was when he told them what he must do, in order to save his mother.

Taro didn't know how to make his heart stop, but he believed that if he could only
feel
every part of his body, and its joins with the world, he might be able to learn. He knew the abbot was angry with him – or disappointed, anyway. He said that Taro was suffering from
kokoro no yami
– darkness of the heart. He said that if Taro could only let go of his mother, stop loving her so much, everything would be all right again.

But Taro couldn't stop loving anyone, and he knew that even if he could, not everything would be all right. Not for his mother.
And of course that was the problem, that this idea bothered him, and so he was back at the start again, and could not do what the abbot wanted of him. He had seen in the abbot's eyes that the man thought he would fail, that he would die on this rock, bled dry by his mother's ghost.