Samurai (23 page)

T
OKYO’S SUBTERRANEAN FIRES FIZZLED
out at exactly the moment of the Japanese Dragon’s death in Bombay. The nightmare was over.

For days afterward, the sound of the screaming flames stayed in people’s heads, lingering even in their dreams, until at last subsiding.

In Bombay, recovery was already underway the morning after the cyclones struck.

When Simon and Key went back through the streets to get to their ship, they saw rubble being cleared. It was apparent, as Sachiko and Taro trailed a distance behind, they were giving their son more space than he’d ever been given before. He’d earned it.

But everyone’s mood was dark; the Samurai had been deprived of giving Akira a proper funeral. His
body had been thrown to the fire by the Japanese Serpent, and nothing remained of him but a memory. No one spoke of it. The pain was too fresh. They were simply relieved to be going home.

As the boys weaved through the crowds, they were startled as Fenwick and Katana leapt from the Ship with No Name and darted
past
them. The creatures had seen the Indian girl who had led them to the tiger trap, and who was now shadowing them as a pickpocket.

“Let me go,” she moaned, kicking at the snarling bobcat. Indignantly, Aldric took his wallet back from her. She explained that she and her father worked in the Tiger Palace caring for the big cats. They had begun doing the tiger feedings on the side because they were in terrible need of money.

Evil has so many colors,
thought Simon.
So many layers.

They left her behind in the street without a word, hoping she would find a better way of making a living than robbing or killing people for profit.

Simon and Key traveled the street in quiet back to the docks.

Trying to catch up, Fenwick climbed a crate and shot Simon a glance, a burning link to his mind, allowing him the fox’s version of all that had happened: the animal’s travels through Bombay, trying to
find help for the boys, his own view of the terrible storm, and how he ended up returning to the ship for shelter.

Fenwick leaned forward to lick at Simon’s burned cheek, which hadn’t yet healed completely under Alaythia’s power.

With a sigh, Simon lifted the fox, and in this way they forgave each other for the mutual abandonment. Key’s bobcat nuzzled his legs. Neither boy wanted to admit their closeness to the animals. They’d headed over to the Ship with No Name, which was battered from the storm but seaworthy. As he made his way impatiently, Simon heard a street vendor’s radio.

BBC News was reporting on the atmospheric disturbance that had hit Bombay and Tokyo, “a mystery scientists will puzzle over desperately for many, many years.”

The Black Dragon had been given the task of disposing of the Tiger Serpent of Bombay. He asked for it, as a sign of trust, and the Warriors had agreed; it was the ultimate show of confidence in him that they would let him do it alone, keeping themselves free of danger as he requested.

However, while she remained trapped in her own palace, Issindra was still useful. She possessed information about all manner of illegal and wrongful
operations around the world.

But it was no simple matter, stealing information from a Tiger Dragon.

It was a high-risk business.

It required touch.

The Dragonhunters had been sent away, to protect them from a dangerous—and, in fact, secretive—endeavor. Dragons did not like to give away the secret to thought-theft, a most shameful practice in their culture. The Black Dragon would meet the Hunters in three days’ time to share information.

So Ming Song, the Black Dragon, now stood alone before Issindra, the Tiger Dragon of Bombay, watching her from above the glass-roofed cell.

“You know what I’m here to do,” he said.

“You have to touch me,” she purred. “And to do that, you must open my cage.”

“You have, by now, exhausted yourself of fire. My own flames can destroy you if you try to escape.”

“So you say.”

The Black Dragon pondered the predicament.

“You have left me no choice, Issindra,” he said in sorrow. “If you will not speak, I must break your mind.”

He opened the cell, and clambered down, blocking out the light, filling the cage with darkness. She was weak, and he moved fast. His claws struck at her
head, and tore at her thoughts. What he saw surprised him, for there was a loneliness and sorrow that filled her, and—if it were possible for a Dragon—he saw gentleness, even playfulness. She was not a kind soul, but over the centuries, she had killed relatively few, and that mattered to the Black Dragon. He knew the taste a Serpent had for pain and misery—they fed on it to survive—he knew how difficult it was to resist these hungers, because he had them himself. She could have done far worse to the world.

And then he saw in her mind’s eye that over the years, she had captured several Indian police investigators and left them imprisoned somewhere in the jungle. They had to be freed. The problem now, of course, was how to locate them? Where were they? He could not find it in her head.

In the end, she agreed to show him, if he spared her life. “Even if it means living in a prison forever,” she pleaded.

He gave in to her demands. But as she gave up the location of the imprisoned men, he climbed away, and with the cage open for a mere instant, she called a spell to her ancient palace.

The Black Dragon found himself hypnotized and convulsed, as the enchanted hissing of a thousand snakes echoed in the vine-wrapped chamber. Cinders blew from the mouths of the carved snakes.
As his canary twittered helplessly, the old Dragon rolled in the ashes of the burnt jungle plants, folding his arms and legs up into his chest, unable to move.

“How they despise you out there,” Issindra said, rising, coming close to his face, “but I have come to respect someone of such cunning. You have bested the greatest of the Dragons, and you have won over the hearts of human beings—no one else has achieved such greatness. I think…perhaps…there is more to you than treachery.”

Bestilled by magic, he looked into her eyes, and only the fire within him moved.

“Such genius should not be lost,” she said, “but passed on.”

She purred, a rasping sizzle in the throat, like a cat and a snake together. “Don’t trouble your mind. I don’t plan to kill you, old one. But I do have need of you. The goodness in you can be a blessing…”

The Black Dragon’s skin wanted to shudder, but he could not even blink.

“You still have a use to the Dragon world,” she said, and her tail looped around his, coiling…

Simon and Aldric, along with Alaythia, escorted Key and his family and protectors to Kyoto on the Ship with No Name. The way back was heavy with grief. Simon and Key promised to keep in close contact;
having gone through battle together, they had new common ground. Key couldn’t wait to get back to his Windmill School. He began writing in a journal. The Ice Dragon had given him the idea.

Alaythia was protected now from her emotions by the power of the Black Dragon’s spellcasting. The Serpents would no longer find it easy to locate her. She told Simon she had learned the Dragontongue words, and the secret of the “turning,” as she called it. She said it was something you did in your head, like trying to imagine what your heart looked like as it was functioning. Simon didn’t really know what she meant, but he understood what she’d done was difficult.

In his hand, Simon had a letter from the Black Dragon, left behind to be read later. “The cost of fighting evil can be great, it can be small; it can take something from you in a quick, iron grip or in a slow, greedy pulling out, as from a needle taking blood; but there is always a cost. To fight the darkness, you must enter the darkness. What you lose first is the foolishness that says evil is far away, that evil will always be vanquished and destroyed. You rid yourself of that. And then you become a man.”

Simon looked up, not sure what he was getting at, and read on: “The purpose of all you are doing is not to make you more closed-off, closed-in, and selfish,
but to get you to serve others…without losing yourself. You need not become your father.”

Become his father?

What had he done to deserve all this? He didn’t think of himself as a cold person. He tossed the parchment into his pack.

To pass the time, Simon sat in a hammock on deck, quietly pondering Akira’s sacrifice. Simon, and all of them, would be dead if it hadn’t been for this one Samurai, who bought Simon the few extra minutes he needed. Before now, Simon hadn’t thought much about Akira at all. He gave him no more thought than a toy soldier; he was almost an adversary. The Warrior had never even liked Simon, never said so much as a kind word. And yet he had died protecting him, protecting them all.

Simon looked at the other faces.

Would they have done the same thing? Give their life for a stranger? Attack when it meant suicide? Could I have done it?

Simon was not sure he could answer even for himself. In his moment of terror in the cyclone’s path, he could hardly think, but his mind was clear in one purpose: survival. How had he set that aside to attack the Dragon? He knew he would not have had the courage if it hadn’t been for Akira showing him the path…
using
his anger to a purpose.

“What are you thinking about?” Key asked from across the deck.

Simon tried to smile. “Girls.”

Hours later, they said good-bye at Sachiko’s mansion, and while Taro tried to stop Fenwick from tearing up a garden trellis, Aldric glanced over at Sachiko. “It’s strange, isn’t it? You knew the spell that hides emotion. You knew it from the start. I keep wondering if there’s a word for ‘irony’ in Japanese. I mean, you would’ve helped Alaythia if she’d known to come here in the first place, wouldn’t you?”

“This group doesn’t welcome people easily,” she answered. “In the end, we may have
needed
to battle a Dragon just to know she was trustworthy. Taro would have needed a long time to make that decision.”

“He’s that selfish?”

Sachiko’s face hardened. “‘Samurai’ means to serve others. It means sacrifice. He is not afraid of that. He has a responsibility to Japan above all else; it is written in the code we follow. Loyalty number one is to the island. I do not know what he would say, but he is learning to trust more as time goes on.”

“I can tell you one thing,” said Aldric, and he looked over at Alaythia across the Japanese garden. “This Warrior code has not been served well by keeping secrets.”

Sachiko smiled. On this they agreed.

Mamoru gave Simon the Dragon netsuke, to show he forgave him for conking him on the head, and Kisho wandered over, crushing flowers onto Simon’s shirt, for reasons no one understood. He told Simon, “Always set your clock by nature’s hand.” Whatever that meant.

Simon just nodded. “Thank you, Kisho. Thank you.” Key seemed relieved Simon withheld his laughter, and treated the man with respect.

Later on, Simon watched Alaythia and Aldric find each other in the garden, and they seemed right together, as maybe they always had.

The evil wrought by the world’s Dragons would be divided now, Simon knew, by two sets of Warriors on either side of the globe, though it was likely their paths would cross many times over. In this conflict alone, two entire cities had nearly been burned away. Unity was needed.

The war seemed limitless. On the journey back to Japan, Simon had remarked that there seemed no end in sight to their battle, with scores of Dragons in the White Book of Saint George still remaining. And Taro had replied, “Why should we want it to end? We would have no purpose.”

It seemed they saw the world as fighting to achieve balance, not as a war in which one side would dominate. It was the fight itself that mattered. It was
supposed to go on and on.

It was Simon’s honor, before he left, to see Key given his proper swords of battle, long and short, the
daito
and the
shoto
. Taro placed them in his son’s hands, and Sachiko laid before him two beautiful fabric containments for the swords, and atop them,
fusahimo
, ornate gold cords used to tie the bags closed.

It was the beginning of something, and the end.

At last, when the Ship with No Name was finally ready to leave the island, Sachiko gave Simon a gift, too. It was a package of ordinary pills for his stomach, marked in Japanese, though he hadn’t ever told her about the anxious, burning pains he suffered. She said to him, “The trick is to bear the weight of the world, and still smile
despite
the burden.” At the time, it seemed like she was joking, but Simon would think about it for a long time afterward.

S
IMON RETURNED TO
N
EW
E
NGLAND
, and to Emily, the girl from the novelty shop.

He rode his horse beside her on the way to school. But it was as if, in the months that had passed, she had forgotten him. She behaved as if he were a passing acquaintance, as if they had never spoken to each other. Life in this little town had gone on without Simon, and there was no way he could fit himself back into it.

“I thought,” he said, “you might want a ride.”

“A ride?” She gave half a laugh. “I don’t think so. It’s a long way to fall.”

He would rather she had been disappointed in him, or angry. Instead, she was polite, and sort of looked at him sidelong with half a smile, as if he were
an odd quirk of Ebony Hollow to be enjoyed, but at a distance.

“I was afraid, all this time, people were, like, going around thinking I was a pyro or something,” Simon said, letting the horse set its own pace. “I didn’t start that fire at your shop.”

“No one really thought that,” she said. “The firefighters said it was a freak accident.”

And so the conversation went. He wanted to explain everything to her. Every last detail. But she was keeping him so far away.

She had been flirting with him, that’s all. She was a nice person. She wasn’t going to be rude, but it was all the same to her, whether he was there waiting on the morning walk to school, or not.

When he returned home, Simon tried to tell Alaythia what happened with Emily, but the words couldn’t find a way out.

On the television, there were images of war in Africa, and coal miners lying sick in Virginia who were kept away from doctors by the company they worked for, and there were reports of children in a North Korean orphanage who were starving because their headmaster had taken the food and resold it.

And it seemed incredible to Simon how many Serpents there must be to have caused all of this
rottenness in the world. How the Dragons must love this planet, what pleasure they must have felt in finding so many people who, instead of adding candles to the darkness, were blowing out the light.