The Miko - 02 (48 page)

“The merger! The merger!” Sato exploded. “I am sick to death of thinking about the merger. You have my word that when Nangi-san returns from Hong Kong the merger will be immediately consummated according to the agreement already outlined.”

For a moment Nicholas was so stunned that he forgot what he was about to say next. He had been prepared for debate, not capitulation.

“Then it is settled between us.” Nicholas found that his mouth was dry. “By deed as well as by word.”

Sato unhesitatingly held out his right hand. Nicholas did the same with his left and, using his free hand, tied a length of cord around their wrists. Thus bound together, they put the palms of their free hands over the sword.

Nicholas unbound them. In a moment, Sato said, “Some moments ago you were about to tell me what, other than the Sphynx T-PRAM, this KGB traitor would be after. Or was it merely a ploy with no documentation to back it up?”

“The KGB involvement is real enough,” Nicholas said. “I have firsthand information that cannot be disputed.”

“What do they want then?” Sato said, a bit sharply.

“Tenchi.”

At that moment they both heard movement from inside the house and, turning their heads, saw Akiko, haloed by the inner room light, step down onto the smooth pebbles of the garden in which they knelt.

Returning from her mission in Yoshino to fulfill her last promise to Masashigi Kusunoki, Akiko felt the thrill of fear race through her like a shock of freezing water.

She had been caught totally unaware; no one had seen fit to tell her that Nicholas Linnear was returning so quickly, and now she cursed Koten for not having the common courtesy to tell her that Sato was entertaining a guest.

“Akiko!” Sato jumped up like a puppy seeking its master’s lap. “I did not expect you back until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Auntie was feeling poorly,” she said by rote. “There was no point in my staying longer.”

“You remember Linnear-san. You met at the wedding.”

Akiko lowered her eyes as she advanced across the shining moonlit pebbles. They were so white against the darkness of her shadow as she passed over them. “Of course. I am so sorry about the passing of Tomkin-san. Please accept my condolences.”

For the longest time it seemed as if she did nothing but stare into his shadowed face. She barely paid attention to Sato’s fussing as to drinks and something to eat for her after her long and tiring journey. It occurred to her that her husband wanted to be rid of her; she wondered what it was the two men had been discussing when she had broken in on them.

To Sato’s ire, she sat down on the stone perch he had used earlier in the evening. She wore a brocaded traveling kimono with flights of white herons crossing its dark blue background. Japanese invariably wore their best clothes while traveling. She held the bone handle of a rice-paper
janomegasa
with its point down against the pebbles.

Sato was doing all the talking but it was as if an aura surrounded her and Nicholas, as if they were the only two people left on earth. And inside the overlapping field of their powerful
wa
something was happening, something Akiko could never have anticipated.

She felt giddy, lighter than air. All
hara
seemed to have left her; she could not ground herself and without that centering she was utterly powerless.

She felt the first painful flutterings of panic take wing inside her and decided that she must do something immediately to forestall this loss of the Void. What was happening to her?

The more she stared into that face she had come to know so well, to hate with an almost inhuman passion, the greater her sense of helplessness became. She was spinning out of control. Why? What was he doing to her?

Dizzily she downed the hot sakē Sato had brought her, heard herself ask for another in a thin, strangled voice she could barely recognize. This too she tumbled down her throat, almost choking on it.

Yet she went on watching him, tracing each contour of his head and face as if she were touching him physically. She felt as if she were being embraced and she felt her thighs tremble, her throat constrict. She felt a tingling at the back of her neck as if she were being caressed there and the fine hairs were raised like the whiskers of an animal.

She closed her eyes in an effort to steady herself, but found, instead, that she was compelled to see him again. Her eyes snapped open. He was still there. Sato was still prattling on about Buddha only knew what.

Years raced before her opened eyes like veils parting before a freshening wind. Years of laborious training, obsessive dedication. A heart filled with burned love and from those bitter ashes a thirst for revenge that smoldered and, fanned by hate, had burst into full flame.
Vengeance will be mine.
How often during the painful years of growing up had that one phrase given her the courage to close her eyes and sleep so that she could live another day. Without that phrase to hold to her like a blanket on a frosty night, she might never have survived unto this day.

To become aware of this moment, an arrow piercing her heart. Dear Amida! she cried silently. Now she began to tremble in earnest with the knowledge of what Nicholas Linnear was engendering in her. Wildly her mind sought this avenue and that in order to avoid what she already suspected was an inescapable truth.

Oh, Buddha, she thought, I want him. I want him so much I can’t see straight.

I
KAN LIVED WITHIN THE
pale green and caramel walls of
Fuyajo.
The Castle That Knows No Night had been her home ever since she was eight years old.

That year, so long ago now, had been a time of ill omens and poor crops throughout the countryside. Bow-backed fanners had no money and little hope of making it through to the end of the year.

It is said in Japan that hard times are the best friend of tradition for it is during these periods that the people fall back most heavily on the ways of their ancestors.

And so it was with Dean’s family that year. Her father’s crops were no better than those of his neighbors, which was to say no good at all. It was as if the earth refused to release its nutriments that year.

The first Ikan suspected something serious was amiss was when she returned from the fields with a handful of reeds and saw her mother weeping.

The next morning Ikan was driven from the farm in a dusty, backfiring truck that smelled of cabbage and tomatoes, a small bag filled with the pitifully tiny pile of her possessions, the savior of her family destined for the precincts of the
Yoshiwara.

Like many young girls throughout the ages before her, Ikan was to be sold into prostitution by her family in order to retrieve them from the indignity of bankruptcy.

Yet unlike the Western view, the Japanese view of prostitution was filled with nobility mixed with an odd poignancy. As he did with many other institutions, the Shōgun Ieyasu Tokugawa created the legitimate need for
baishun
, the selling of, as it is known in Japan, spring.

Because he was obsessed with his own power—the only force able to tame the multiple feuds of the regional
daimyō
that had kept feudal Japan in a constant state of civil war for years before his ascendancy—he required that each
daimyō
make a pilgrimage to Edo, now Tokyo, every other year, along with his
samurai
, where they would stay for a year. This
sankinkotaiseido
served two purposes. First, it cut into the
daimyō
’s solidification of his own power in his native
ryochi
and second, the long, often arduous trip helped deplete his coffers of accumulated wealth.

The
daimyō
and the wealthier
samurai
were able to avail themselves of the services of their mistresses. But the poorer
samurai
were forced to turn to prostitutes for, as Ieyasu himself said, prostitution was needed in order to negate the possibility of adultery.

In 1617, a year after the Shōgun’s death, a feudal lord in Edo petitioned the Tokugawa government to allow him to create a sanctioned area within the city for
baishun.
He found a desolate field filled with reeds, hence the name
Yoshiwara.
In the succeeding years, a different character was substituted for “reedy,” and the
Yoshiwara
became known as the happy field.

The original red-light sector was destroyed in a fire and in 1656 was rebuilt in the Asakusa district of Edo, where it remained until April of 1958.

In 1649, Ikan subsequently was taught by her
sensei
, the government declared that all rice grown was subject to confiscation by the Imperial
samurai.
In its place farmers were told they had to subsist on millet.

Stricken, fanners were forced to put their wives to work sewing or weaving and to send their young children to toil in the city. Yet even this was not enough, and so often one female child was selected to be sold to the brothels in order for her family to survive.

There was no loss of face in this: On the contrary, these young girls were looked upon with a mixture of great respect—for submitting to their
giri
of filial piety—and pity, for it was generally known that while a prostitute might on a very rare occasion become the mistress of a wealthy
samurai,
once she crossed the moat that surrounded the
Yoshiwara
she surrendered all hope of becoming a wife and creating her own home. So there was always an air of mystery tinged by the purity of sadness that drew men into the arms of
geisha
in the same way it drew them to Ueno each spring to view the cherry blossoms.

Ikan began life at
Fuyajo,
the most ancient of such establishments in the
Yoshiwara
, as a
kamuro
, a kind of apprentice who fetched for the
oiran,
the higher-level prostitutes, when she was not busy cleaning and polishing.

In this capacity she was constantly busy yet she always found time to observe and to learn from her observations, often imitating the motions and delicate swirls of the
oiran
early in the mornings before, exhausted, she fell on her
futon.

When she was twelve, Ikan took a strenuous examination and passed on to the level of
shinzo
, where she began her courses in the study of
baishun.
These included singing, the difficult art of
haiku
,
ikebana
,
chano-yu
, dancing, a study of literature, and, of course, lovemaking.

Her training took five years, at the end of which she was required to take another exam. This was the crucial one for, if she failed to pass it, she would return to the level of
kamuro
and spend the rest of her days at
Fuyajo
doing nothing more than taking out the garbage.

She had no serious trouble and, at the age of seventeen, rose to the exalted station of
oiran.
For four years she plied her difficult and complex trade diligently and well, her open, inquisitive mind allowing her to absorb the best from the more experienced women around her, her innate sensitivity to creating all forms of pleasure in a man, intellectual, esthetic, as well as physical, creating an ever-expanding world that she alone could explore.

And on the day of her birth, twenty-one years after she was born, Ikan became
tayu
, the loftiest of the three stations of
oiran.
Never in the history of the Castle That Knows No Night had there been a
tayu
of such tender years, and a celebration was thrown in her honor.

And it was in that most festive of atmospheres, when the sakē was flowing freely and the
samisen
spangled webs of music in the steamy air, that Ikan first encountered Hiroshi Shimada.

He was a man of quiet intensity, not a handsome man by any but the broadest of standards, yet possessed of a strength of spirit that she found most attractive.

For his part, Shimada had singled her out almost at once. His eyes fell upon her stately alabaster beauty and his heart turned to water. He felt a great cry rising up from within him, and for a moment he had to put a hand out to grasp the knurled wooden stairpost for support. When his knees stopped shaking, he began to breathe again. His head felt light, as if he had been drinking sakē long into the night; there was an odd metallic taste in his mouth as if he had bitten down into a piece of tinfoil.

It never occurred to him that he might be falling in love. One did not fall in love with a
geisha
, one came to her for comfort, relaxation, and a night of total enjoyment. And yet at the moment he first saw Ikan, her awesome physicality struck from his consciousness any thought he might have held of any other woman, his wife included.

There was an aura about Ikan that was undeniable. Even the other
oiran
whispered of it in clandestinely envious tones among themselves. For she had achieved what all members of the floating world aspire to: that ineffable merging of the ethereal and the animal that unfailingly set men under its almost magic spell; an aphrodisiac for all the senses, all the pleasures. For her clients loved her just as strongly when she was reading to them from
Genji Monogatari
, when she arranged day lilies just for them or wrote a
haiku
in their honor, as when she bedded them.

Thus Shimada found himself drawn to Dean’s side, his gaze lovingly caressing each elegant fold of her glittering kimono, the three translucent tortoiseshell
kanzashi
angled through the gleaming black pile of her hair, the
kushi
, the simple traditional comb of
tsuge
wood at the back of her head.

And when he spoke his first word to her through cracked lips, merely the gesture of her turning her head in his direction sent flutters of desire through his chest.

There was, of course, no chance for them to be alone at the party and, in any event, a proper assignation had not been arranged beforehand as was the strict policy at
Fuyajo.
But the next week, when Shimada could take time out from his busy schedule, he returned to the
Yoshiwara.