The Miko - 02 (18 page)

It must have been Gōtarō who pulled him out of the ruined, twisted cockpit because Nangi never remembered climbing out himself. Many years later he would have recurring nightmares about those few terrible, confused moments, no true images coming, only vague impressions, unease, terror, the sense of suffocation, of immobility.

Then the bright sky was above him, a harsh wind scouring his cheeks and the rocking motion of the waves far out at sea. He opened his eyes to a red haze. Pain lanced through his head, and when he tried to move, he could not.

“Lie still,” someone said close beside him. “Lie still,
samurai.
”

His breathing was labored and he fought to speak. But something seemed to be clogging his voice box. His throat felt lined in fire and his mouth was full of cotton. He had a sense of heat again, flames running along his cheeks like tears. A great crackling filled his ears and the stench of smoke clogged his nostrils, choking him. He vomited and someone held his head, wiping his mouth with a smudged white cloth unwound from his head.

His vision began to clear and he saw, rearing up over them, blotting out everything, what he took to be the black fluke of an immense sea creature. He began to whimper, an irrational fear turning his skin wet and cold. Then his head cleared and he saw it for what it was: the tail section of the Mitsubishi. He closed his eyes and lost consciousness.

When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he noticed was that he had lost some depth perception.

“One eye’s out,” Gōtarō said from beside him. “And don’t try to move. Something’s happened to your legs.”

Nangi was silent for a time, digesting this. At last he said one word, “Explosives.”

Gōtarō smiled at him. “That’s what took me so long down in the Ōka. I was working the nose loose. I jettisoned it at about eighteen thousand feet. It made quite a bang.”

“Didn’t notice.”

Gōtarō shook his head. “You were too busy.” His smiled washed over Nangi again, easing his pain. “You saved us, you know. The minute those rockets misfired I was certain we were dead. We would have been but for what you did.”

Nangi closed his eyes. Saying three words had depleted all the strength that was left him.

When he awoke again, Gōtarō was bent over his legs, trying to do something.

“What’s going on?” Nangi said.

Gōtarō turned quickly away from what he was doing. “Just checking on your wounds.” His eyes slid away from Nangi’s toward the heaving sea.

“No land.”

“What?” Gōtarō said. “No. None at all. I thought we might be close enough to one of the Marianas, but I don’t think that’s the case now.”

“Noguchi will find us soon enough.”

“Yes,” Gōtarō said. “I suppose he will.”

“He’ll want to know what went wrong. All the vice-admirals and admirals in the Imperial Navy will want to know. They’ve got to get us back safe and sound.”

Gōtarō said nothing, his gaze roving this way and that across the water.

“Where’s that storm we saw before?” It was difficult for Nangi to talk and he was monstrously thirsty. But he would not give it up. In the silence the thought of the awesome yawning Trench falling away below them would fill his mind with dark twistings and his stomach would lurch and he would begin to retch in irrational tenor.

“The wind hasn’t shifted yet,” Gōtarō said absently. “It’s still hanging in the northwest.” Clearly his mind was on other matters. What they were Nangi could not guess. Nor would he ask.

There was a silence between them then. Just the wind whistling, a constant force against them like an invisible wall, and the long up-and-down motion caused by the swell of the sea, sickeningly regular. Nangi longed to see even one gull, pulling and swooping across the barren horizon, harbinger of land.

He was still wet, and the wind crawling through the rents and gaps in his uniform caused his skin to raise itself in gooseflesh. His bladder was uncomfortably full and, grunting with the effort, he turned heavily away from Gōtarō, urinated awkwardly, trusting for the wind and the motion to take it away from them.

It was true, something was wrong with his legs. He willed them to work and they would not. Painfully he raised himself up and grabbed at his flesh. He could feel nothing; his legs might have been made of wood.

To take his mind off the numbing thought of paralysis, he began to look around him. For the first time he noticed what it was they were riding on. It was part of the heavily baffled bulkhead from the Mitsubishi. In this case the modifications had worked to their advantage. All the heavy insulation against ground and air fire which would have pulled them down into the sea had been stripped away, replaced by lightweight baffling that trapped air in its webbing.

Nangi grunted to himself. Noguchi and the admirals would be happy with that knowledge, he thought ironically. Even if their precious
Cherry Blossom
refused to fall.

Exhausted, he lay back down, closing his eyes, but the lurch and drag of the heaving tide was not conducive to rest. He looked at Gōtarō. He was sitting cross-legged, still as a statue. Perhaps he was praying. Perhaps he felt no fear. If that were the case, Nangi envied him.

Fatigue and shock caused his mind to wander. He was no longer aware of whether he was awake or asleep. On the borderline, in twilight cerebration, all the black unnameable fears he had been harboring took hold, gaining ascendancy in his world.

He was aware of his own isolation, of himself as a lone bobbing speck, totally exposed and defenseless. He saw himself on the makeshift raft, felt the pain of his wounds, even the intermittent bursts of warmth amid the otherwise chill of the unforgiving wind.

And abruptly he was no longer alone, for rising like some demon phantasm from the bottomless depths of the sea below him was a terrifying shape. Oh, and how the waves rose higher all about him as if an invisible storm had come up. Great black pyramids built and crested dangerously high, pulling him downward, spinning him into cavernous troughs as endless as tunnels.

Terrified, he clung to the rough surface of his raft, his heart beating triphammer hard, paining his chest, as he waited for what he knew must come.

And then it did breach the water, a monstrous creature from the lightless ocean depths, so enormous it blotted out the stars in the sky: a kraken with glowing eyes and gaping jaws and long writhing tentacles like cables.

Nangi’s eyes bulged and he screamed.

Gōtarō shook him awake. “Tanzan. Tanzan!” he called urgently in his ear. “Wake up! Wake up now!”

Nangi’s eyes flew open. He was drenched in sweat which, cooling in the gusting wind, sent chill shivers running through him. It took him several minutes to focus his good eye. Then he saw the look on his friend’s face.

“We’re in trouble.”

“What is it?” Nangi had to talk around his tongue which seemed swollen and recalcitrant. “The enemy?”

“I wish I
had
made a sighting,” Gōtarō said. “Anyone.” His arms held Nangi close, his warmth calming the other’s almost constant shivers. “I held off telling you because I thought I could do something about it. But now…” He shrugged. “You have some wounds. How serious they are I cannot tell. But you’ve been losing some blood.”

Of course, Nangi thought, angry that he had not realized it himself. That explained the weakness, the brief periods of warmth he felt.

“I’ve tried everything I know to staunch the loss of blood. I’ve brought it down to a trickle but still…” His eyes were very sad.

“I don’t understand,” Nangi said. “Am I dying?”

At that moment their makeshift raft gave a shuddering lurch. Apparently Gōtarō was prepared for it because he grabbed Nangi hard with one arm, held on with the other. Still, such was the force of the jar that they both slewed around on the hard surface of the bulkhead.

Gōtarō’s face was very close to Nangi’s. Nangi could see the reflection of his own frightened face in the curve of the ebon iris.

“Look out there.”

Gōtarō’s voice sounded like a death knell to Nangi as his gaze followed his friend’s lead.

“No!” His voice was a sharp bark, a terror-filled exhalation. For there just off their starboard flank was the great black triangular fin of a hunting shark. As Nangi watched, bile caught in his throat, the slightly curved fin swung around, and now it headed straight toward them. It loomed large, so large. And Nangi could imagine the size of the beast beneath. Thirty feet, forty. Its gaping jaws…

His eyes squeezed shut at the next lurch, his stomach turning over and he was retching again, what little there was left in him spewing up all over himself and Gōtarō.

“No,” he moaned. “Oh, no.” But he was far too weak to raise his voice. It was his worst nightmare come to life. Death held no terror for him. But this…

“That’s why I was trying to stop the bleeding so completely. He picked us up over an hour ago, when you were still gushing. I thought if I could stop it in time he’d get tired of hanging around and go after something else. I couldn’t.”

On the shark’s third pass, a section of three tubular baffles, already weakened by the crash, broke away. Something at least ten feet in front of the slashing dorsal fin snapped the baffles in two beneath the unquiet surface of the ocean.

Nangi began to shiver anew, and this time even Gōtarō’s human warmth couldn’t deflect him. His teeth began to chatter and he felt blood leaking from his ruined eye.

“This is no way for a warrior to die,” he whispered. The wind took his words, flung them away from him like a hateful child. He put his weary head against Gōtarō’s shoulder and at last broke down fully. “I’m afraid, Sato-san. Not of death itself. But the manner in which it has come. Ever since I was a child the depths of the sea have terrified me. It is an uncontrollable fear.”

“Even a warrior must feel fear.” Gōtarō’s deep rumbling voice filled Nangi’s ear. “A
samurai
must have his nemesis, just as he must do battle.” His arms closed more tightly about his friend as the bulkhead rocked and shuddered. Metal shrieked and then was silent. The sea climbed around them. The fin moved away from them and swung in a tight arc.

“This nemesis may come in many forms, many guises,” Gōtarō continued as if nothing at all had happened. “He may be a human foe of flesh and blood. Or then again he may be the force of an avenging
kami.
Or even a demon.”

Light was fast going out of the sky, the encroaching night seemed vast and close at the same time so that one had the uncomfortable sensations of utter isolation and intense claustrophobia at the same time. The clouds were too near for there to be any stars visible. The darkness, when it came, would be absolute.

“The world is full of demons,” Gōtarō said, his eyes on the approaching fin, “because life is haunted by creatures who cannot experience it as we can. As their envy turns inevitably to hatred, they gain in evil power.” One hand reached out like a bar of iron to grip the bafflings as tightly as he could. “Or so my grandmother would tell me at night. I could never understand whether it was to frighten me or to make me more aware that one must fight in life. Always fight to get what one wants.”

It was very bad this time, the bulkhead screaming and canting at an extreme enough angle to allow a wave to wash over them. Nangi felt them sliding sideways, and beside him Gōtarō desperately scrabbling to halt their slide. Nangi, too, did what he could to help. It did not seem much to him.

When they were righted, Gōtarō gathered Nangi back to him, as protectively as a mother will a small child. The raft still shuddered and groaned, complaining in the aftermath.

Gōtarō felt for the rift forming beneath them as he said, “I thank God now that my younger brother, Seiichi, is being taken care of by her. She’s very old now but so very wise. I think she’s the only one with enough force of will to stop him from illegally enlisting. He’s almost sixteen, and God knows the war would chew him up and destroy him utterly.”

Abruptly, his voice changed and he said, ‘Tanzan, you must promise me you will look Seiichi up when you get home. My grandmother’s house in Higashiyama-Ku in Kyoto, just off the southern edge of Maruyama Park.”

Nangi’s vision was going in and out of focus. There was a pain in his head like a steel spike hammered home and it made all coherent thought an effort. “I know it well. The park.” He could see the cryptomeria and cherry trees, youthful and vibrant, their myriad leaves shivering in the warm breeze of summer. Bright shirts of the children contrasting with the precise patterns of kimonos and oiled paper parasols. Music drifting over the carefully mowed grass, mingling with the laughter.

“‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’” Nangi heard the strange litany as if from a great distance yet he felt the vibrations from Gōtarō running through him as if they were connected, and some of his terror abated, knowing that this great bear of a man was here beside him. And he thought, Somehow, some way, we’ll make it until Noguchi finds us.

“Pray for me, my friend.”

And abruptly Gōtarō was no longer beside him. Nangi felt the chill wind tearing at him mercilessly and he rocked alone on the baffled bulkhead. A muffled splash came to him, and his good eye began to burn as he turned his head this way and that. There was just enough illumination to see the foam from Gōtarō’s powerful kicks as he swam away from the rocking raft.

“Come back!” Nangi called. “Oh, Sato-san, please come back!”

Then he gasped, his ragged breath coming like fire, as he spotted the great curved dorsal fin rising out of the water. It drew him as it repulsed him, and the fear and loathing stuck in his throat as if it were a physical thing. He wanted nothing more in the world than to kill the monster and he cried aloud, his fists beating impotently against his useless thighs as he saw the black shape cutting through the crests of the waves.

Gōtarō reared up once as the thing hit, spinning up and around, half out of the water, hurled there by the force of primitive nature.

Nangi’s vision blurred with bitter tears and he struck at himself over and over as his head bent, the wind moaning in his ears like the voices of the damned.