Enzan: The Far Mountain (10 page)

Eventually, I would have told them everything. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true. I had nothing to hang on to. I couldn’t stall in the hopes that someone would find me—nobody knew I was gone. And I wasn’t harboring some secret that would save mankind. I was just blundering around, trying to find the wild child of a Japanese diplomat.

I wasn’t going to drown for Chie Miyazaki.

It’s a rationalization, of course. An excuse for my weakness. And stupid as well. Which shows you just how good they were at their trade. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Because later, once they had what they needed, they
would
kill me. It’s the major escalation factor in most kidnappings; the penalties are so severe, you might as well kill the victim if it improves your chances of escape.

What saved me was a phone call. The pale face drifted over me and the lips parted for a question. Then I heard the chirp of a cell phone. Annoyance crumpled the skin around his mouth and eyes—a fleeting glimpse of the human being behind the torturer’s mask—and then it was gone. The face disappeared as my torturer stood up straight and answered the phone.

The shaped charge went off at almost the same second he started to speak into the phone. The shock wave that blew in the metal door to the basement was incredible. I could feel the pressure of it in my chest.

There were some smaller explosions as well, but the noise was muffled since my auditory system was still shorted out from the first bang. The flashes of light were intense. I lay there on the board and all around me I could sense smoke and movement, but it was hard to get a clear idea of what was happening. My mouth sagged open and I turned my head from side to side. The sound in my head was like the churning roar you hear when you get dragged down into the massive swell of an ocean wave. I blinked to clear the flashes and sparks from my vision, but it was no use. All I got was a jumbled impression of motion, of shadowy forms spinning and moving.

A hand on my chest. One to my neck, checking my pulse. Another face, goggled and wearing some sort of black ski cap with a facemask, looked down at me. He pulled the mask down. I saw his lips move, but his voice was washed out by the roaring in my head. He tried to speak to me a few more times. Then he turned away.

They cut my bonds and I would have tumbled off the board if they hadn’t caught me. I was way too wobbly for any real movement, but I tried, my arms and legs jerking spastically. I was desperate to get away from the board. I’ll die before I let anyone do that to me again.

Calming hands. They sat me down with my back against a wall while someone—a medic, I supposed—did the usual things with a little flashlight, shining it in my eyes and doing a body inventory to look for the sign of any obvious wounds. I sat there, slumped and fog-bound.

In time, the world returned. Or I returned to it. I could smell the residue of explosives and gunfire. My hearing was starting to come back. I noted the chirp of radio voices and the terse, murmured response from men in black clothing who were still policing the area. There were other background sounds that I was struggling to make out, but I gave up. I shifted and concentrated on another ragged breath. It felt so good.

The man with the flashlight held my chin in his hand and looked into my eyes. Then he turned and called over his shoulder: “
Jefe
, he’s coming around.”

I made myself focus. On the room, on the moving men, on the still forms lying on the wet concrete. I tried to get my brain working again, but was distracted by a faint undercurrent of noise. I could hear a distant gurgle, and it claimed all my attention.

“Shut that damn hose off,” I rasped.

Chapter 10

Mori’s Journal

You didn’t break.

As with all of us, he wore you down, but he never broke you. The lines of your face grew sharper, the bone pushing out against skin as training rendered you down into a lean, corded, lethal version of your former self. You were one of us, stoic in the face of the unrelenting demands of our teacher, your training uniform limp with sweat, battered everywhere, toes and fingers and wrists taped. Eyes wide open, wary. A predator in the making. But when I looked more closely, Rinsuke, I could see a difference.

You bowed to Takano, but you never groveled. For some of us, I expect the force of the old man was too much to withstand. The physical demands were punishing in themselves, but they paled beside the toll he took on our spirits. Takano’s skill was so great, his demands and expectations so extreme, it seemed we all walked a path that would never end. In the night as we lay, nursing wounds and twitching in half-sleep as our minds and bodies replayed the day’s struggles, we sought comfort in the sense that all this suffering was leading to a goal. We all cherished the idea of skill, of mastery. We had come to Takano of our own volition, convinced he had skills to teach us what we could learn nowhere else. And we were right. The stories told about him were true enough. But as the days and months churned on, grinding us down in the process, we sometimes wondered whether any of us would ever reach the level of competence he demanded, whether we would survive long enough to be granted a certificate of mastery.

For some, the combination of Takano’s devastating technique and his emotional remoteness made him seem otherworldly, an ancient warrior-god looking down on mere mortals, dispensing favors or punishment with chilling dispassion. He became a teacher not merely to emulate or obey, but to worship. In some strange way, some of his disciples surrendered to him. In retrospect, it was an act of desperate self-preservation. Swept along in the current of his powers, they surrendered to the pull, no longer fighting him, but becoming one with his will. They grew to love him because there was no longer a separation in their hearts between sensei and student. They were one with Takano and so became devoted to him. It was a perversion.

But you did not surrender, Rinsuke. Your unarmed skills were already excellent, but after the first year, you were holding your own with the senior students in weapons drills, taking to the Way of the Sword as if you were born to it. By the second year, you were peerless. But to many of us, you, too, were a mystery.

I remember one incident clearly. A winter’s day when Takano had worked us with a particularly savage intensity. The dojo was set on the grounds of an old monastery, high on a wooded ridge. The day was a grey swirl of icy rain and snow. Off to the west, the view beyond a range of smaller hills led to the ocean, a churning expanse of water so cold it looked almost black. We ran barefoot through the snow, down the slippery stone steps of the monastery’s pathways, up hills and down. Grunting with the jolt of hidden rocks, our exposed skin needled with ice. Back to the dojo courtyard, where we stood, wooden swords in hand, our bodies steaming in the cold.

In the hours that followed, we cut the air in the seemingly endless series of practice strikes the old man called for. The snow and earth were churned up by our movements: there was the white of snow, the deep brown of mud, and the bright flecks of blood. We paid no mind. We were like machines that day. If our bodies burned, it was a fire we had all grown familiar with. Our minds floated along, empty of any thought other than the specifics of the orders the old man barked at us. He paced the courtyard, snarling corrections, watching us with narrowed eyes, the lips of his wide mouth often pressed into a thin line of disapproval. Occasionally he would stand in front of a student as an opponent, blocking the prescribed blow and countering it in turn, checking for a flaw, a weakness. But his actions were always within the parameters of the drill.

As the hours passed and the light began to fade, Takano seemed oblivious to the toll the practice session was taking on us. At any given time, some of us were injured. Bruises, strains, the small muscle tears that burned and pulled. We worked through the snag of injury, secretly favoring our wounds with slight shifts of balance, minute adjustments to movement. But as the training continued on that day, fatigue and cold made us stiffen. Our movements grew slightly less precise as we struggled to keep up. The skin on our hands felt thick as we tried to maintain a numbed grip on our wooden swords. Occasionally, one of us would slip, and the jerking struggle to stay upright did additional damage to a body on its last reserves. Eventually, someone would be seriously injured, and that would snuff out a promising career.

Surely the old man must have seen it. He was too experienced to be oblivious to what was happening. He circled us, impervious to the weather. His leathery face was streaked with freezing rain, but his eyes burned. Then it struck me: he was precisely pushing us beyond the breaking point. He wanted to winnow out the weak. It was a relative term, of course. We were, despite our injuries, in peak condition. But he was searching for flaws, the tiny shade of difference in muscle tone or ligament strength, in density of bone, differences that could only be revealed under the most extreme conditions. Takano would not rest until he had driven us into exhaustion, until we were incapable of more. Because that was when the flaws would become apparent. We all sensed this. We knew there was no escape. It was a matter of our pride pitted against his ruthlessness. And he knew exactly what we were thinking and feeling. He used our own ambition against us. We would never surrender because if any one of us stopped due to exhaustion or injury, Takano would humiliate and expel that student. And we had come too far for that. Each of us was strapped to this wheel, wondering if it would crush us before it lifted us up. Perhaps that was Takano’s lesson: for the warrior, there is no real way to escape suffering.

From the vantage point of all these years, I find myself surprised by this thought. At the time, all I knew with certainty was we would hold out as a group and this stubbornness would only feed his intensity. He would continue to batter us into the icy night. It seemed utterly cruel to me then. Now I wonder whether there was a deeper point to his actions, a profound lesson embedded deep in all that agony.

Perhaps he was a god.

See what a hold he had on us, Rinsuke? Even now, the memory of his face makes me flinch, and I worry I have been an unworthy student.

But that day we endured to the point where our tendons snapped and burned. We staggered. We retched and gasped, lost our footing. Then we straightened up, took another ragged breath, and gripped our swords in anticipation of the next command.

I was leading the group, facing the rows of trainees, so I saw it all. Takano was working his way down the front line, engaging each man. His wooden sword arced up, smacking his opponent’s shaft, pressing to see how firm a grip each person was able to maintain after all this time. He had just swung into position in front of you, Rinsuke, when the man to your left stumbled. Takano’s eyes lit up and he began to move toward him.

But you didn’t let this happen. As Takano’s eyes shifted to the stumbling man, you came forward with an attack. In an instant, the old man’s head snapped around, his face taut with anger. And truly, the attack was an unexpected one. You came at him as if you meant to cut your sensei down. Perhaps in that moment, you did.

It was a measure of Takano’s skill that he recovered, a quicksilver shift and parry; the blow was deflected. But you pressed him, coming at him again and again. And now it was truly joined. This was no longer a simple training exercise. You meant to punish him much as he had done to us.

The twilight was upon us. The snow in the courtyard seemed to glow in the dim light. The freezing rain pelted down on us, a cascade of needles, and you and the old man snorted and cut, your swords barking out with the fury of the force you put in the blows. As you whirled, the lines we had been standing in were broken to make room for you. Your maneuvers swept you both around the courtyard and we were pushed to the perimeter to watch, slack-mouthed with exhausted astonishment.

Finally, you slipped. Or so it seemed to me at the time. It was all that Takano needed. He swarmed inside the striking range of your sword. An iron fist doubled you over—a vicious twist and your sword went flying.

Takano swept your feet out from under you. You collapsed with a thud on the wet, muddy flagstones. As you rolled over and tried to stand, he caught you in the side with his sword. It was a precise blow, one measured to inflict the maximum of pain without actually breaking your ribs. You recoiled, exposing another target. Another blow. They continued in a seemingly unending series. We stood. Mute. There was only the hiss of the ice-rain, and the meaty thwack as yet another of Takano’s strikes went home, again and again and again.

And here was the most frightening thing about what he was doing: the absolute precision of the beating. We could see Takano was furious with you, Rinsuke. And the beating he gave you was relentless. But despite the rage that sparked deep in his eyes, he never totally lost control. His blows were precise and calculated, unerringly executed. Exquisite in their form. In that freezing courtyard, he burned like ice.

You had ultimately stopped moving, incapable of defending yourself, but the beating continued for a while longer. Finally, Takano raised his oak sword high above his head. He gathered himself for one last, finishing blow. I gasped out loud, certain the old man had finally lost all control and he meant to kill you.

A gong sounded from within the temple grounds and the distant chant of the monks murmured through the sound of the frozen rain, gathering in strength as the light failed. The old man cocked his head, a slight movement as if he were being tugged by its call. He closed his eyes against the sleet, then lowered his sword. He glared at us all, silent in the gloom, then spun on his heels and left us to gather you up.

You crawled to your place in the dojo the next morning, hoisting yourself upright to sit with the rest of us as we waited for Takano. We all expected your dismissal. You must have expected it as well. But it was a measure of what we had become that not one of us helped you to your place. Not one of us thanked you for what you did. Even I watched silently as the old man swept into the training hall. He sat down and glared at us. I called the class to attention and we bowed. Takano stretched his hands out in front of him on the mat and inclined his torso forward, like a rock settling into place, a slight shift and no more. If he noted your presence, Rinsuke, if he was gauging the extent of the injuries he had inflicted, it didn’t show. Takano’s eyes swept along the silent rows of students and it seemed to me that he lingered on nobody. He stood and nodded, grunted to me, and, amazingly, class simply began.

There was no mention of the previous day’s event in the courtyard. You were not expelled for your almost unimaginable affront, for the challenge to our sensei’s authority. None of us ever spoke about it. And from that day forward the old man watched you with more intensity than ever. I think he was surprised you were even able to continue. And as the months passed, he was grudgingly impressed with your ability to master the new techniques he revealed to us, despite your injuries. But more than anything else, I saw that Takano was puzzled. None of us would have done what you did. The risk of dismissal was too great. Each of us would have kept at it in the courtyard that evening until someone died. It would have been a waste of life, but that was the ordeal our master set for us. It was our duty to simply obey and endure. And we were young and ambitious and sure it would have been someone else who fell.

You shared the same confidence in your ability to endure. Certainly you could have survived whatever the old man threw at us that night, yet you chose to stop it. I wonder why.

I would have liked to ask you that question, Rinsuke, but never did. What would have been your answer? Compassion? Disgust with our master’s lack of control? Pride?

None of us was sure what you were thinking. Not even Takano. And this, I have come to believe, is what fueled his veiled, intense scrutiny. He was a man of great powers. He could see into the core of people. He knew their fears and hopes. He could measure his students’ potential and their weaknesses with brutal precision. But there was a part of you that was closed off to him, and he was not used to that. The old swordsmen spoke of the need to hide something of yourself from your opponent, to dwell in kage, the shadow. But Takano had long ago learned how to pierce the barrier each of us erects as protection. He dominated his enemies both physically and spiritually.

But not you. As your training continued, he labored to fully understand you, but could not. He kept you on as a student even after your affront and it was not because he was being magnanimous. I am not sure he was capable of generosity. Everything with Takano was cold and calculated. You continued as his student, Rinsuke, because he did not understand you and could not accept that fact fully. He refused to be defeated by you in this regard.

Or so he must have thought. But while partially true, it was not the whole truth. In reality, I think he kept you close because he feared you like he feared nothing else on this earth.