The Miko - 02 (52 page)

And like the clean edge of a gleaming knife Sun Hsiung felt the flick of his emotions flutter his heart as his eyes drank in the sight of her.

What mysterious essence could a woman of her young years possess to affect him thusly? It was a question that he could not possibly answer for it belied the use of years and experience, the commodities with which he was most familiar.

And as Sun Hsiung knelt just outside the threshold to her room, enrapt by the serenity of her
wa
, he felt a pulsing in the nether reaches of his lower belly, a kind of tidal pull that the Awabi divers spoke of where in a lake none should be.

So, too, now with Sun Hsiung. And he craned his neck, staring hard at her sleeping face to make certain. For it seemed to him that something was reaching out across the brief gulf that separated them and was massaging him internally. It was not that he thought of this feat as impossible. He knew too much of
jahō
to rule such a thing out. But from such a one as his Little Soldier? Why, she had had no training.

And yet he could not dispute what was occurring inside his body. He looked around. The day was almost done. Long shadows stretched through the house like animate pets, and the light was fast failing. Night was coming on.

So near him Akiko stirred, both legs extending, arms raised over her head as she, too, stretched like some great cat. Her eyelids fluttered open and her irises were upon him as if in her slumber, through the membrane of her lids, she had been watching him all the time.

“Come here,” she murmured in a totally undisciplined voice. And when Sun Hsiung made no move, said no word, her lids pulsed and he felt the kneading in his lower belly increase, radiating downward to the base of his member. All at once his testicles began to tingle and it was as if a silken hand had grasped him about the base of his penis. He began to stiffen and grow.

No!
a voice inside his head shouted, but he had no recourse. As if he were a dreamer immersed in water, he swam lazily across the threshold of her room, felt her arms come up and like oiled serpents slide across his muscled shoulders. The long fingers caressed the nape of his neck and the base of his skull.

Sun Hsiung could no longer feel his hands or his feet. He was aware only of an inordinate pleasure pooling in his loins.

Magically, majestically, she parted his kimono, her left hand tracing circles across his chest, belly, nipples. Her eyes, still heavylidded with sleep and perhaps something more, stared up at him, their pupils dilated so completely there seemed no iris at all. Her lips had softened, becoming sensuous, parted slightly so that he could scent her sweet breath.

There was a part of him that did not want to see her naked. But another side, the one she had provoked, would not be denied. And slowly, softly, he pulled apart her thin cotton kimono so that inch by inch her glowing flesh was revealed to him, at first the sections he had already glimpsed, areas in their tempting proximity to the more intimate parts that had already begun to inflame him.

Then, when all of those had been revealed to him, he held his breath as first one breast then the other slid out from beneath the concealing shadows of the kimono. They swelled into the light, capped with nipples and areola as dark as the encroaching night. If Fuji-san was the most perfect mountain in the world then surely these must be the most perfect breasts.

A tiny cry escaped Sun Hsiung’s lips as he bent his head in worship. And Akiko, closing her eyes in rapture as she felt his lips encompassing first one nipple then the other, stroked the back of his neck in the expert manner she had observed for so long in
Fuyajo,
sensing now with her own newly learned knowledge the proper nerve bundles and, running her fingertips down their buried lengths, how to keep them burning with electric energy or to calm them into a euphoric stupor.

And yet it was not enough; she was impatient and her right hand snaked between their bodies, seeking to grasp in physical substance what she had reached out for during the last rising moments of sleep when something inside her had become aware of a presence beside her, then sensing that it was Sun Hsiung, and, lastly, picking up the intensely sexual emanations emerging from him. Thus she had reached out for him while still in the beta level of twilight cerebration and, on the cusp of consciousness, she had moved her
wa
across the infinity of space between them.

Now she had in her hand what her mind had touched, and she cupped his heavy scrotum in her palm while her fingers gently probed the soft skin just beneath, midway to his anus.

Sun Hsiung, who had been involved with the pristine symmetry of her breasts, abruptly felt the exquisite invasion of her fingers and thought he was going to perish with joy. She was moving to the core of him, accelerating his pulse rate. He felt inordinately heavy and ponderous, a human put into a sun bear’s shaggy body. His mind no longer worked correctly, all the crystal passageways that had led him so successfully through the labyrinth of logic had crumbled. He felt caught up in a power beyond his imagining.

Involuntarily he groaned as her astounding ministrations accelerated his passion further. With a low growl, he finished stripping them both of the robes. Swinging her around on the
futon
, he put his calloused palms flat on her thighs, moving them slowly inward along the incredibly soft flesh there. With infinite slowness he parted the stems of her legs and gazed lovingly down at the moist petals of the flower thus revealed.

His nostrils quivered at her musky scent. He felt his erection leap in her hands, the crown expanding, straining for release. It was as if she possessed a natural aphrodisiac that turned the air heady and thick as honey.

Her soft, high mount was within reach of his lips. Never had he hungered for another with such profound desire. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on these next few moments.

Her hair, just beginning to come in, grew only along the center strip of her pubic mound, leaving the sides as smooth and bare as a small child’s gully. This only increased his ardor since he had before him both woman and girl. Without another moment of hesitation, he pulled apart her shining lips with his thumbs.

When Akiko felt the heated stab of his tongue in her core, she arched up with her hips, crying out in inarticulate delight. She felt as if the sun had detached itself from the heavens and had been pressed up between her thighs. Too, she found that if she worked on him at the same time, her pleasure was increased tenfold.

She moved upward slightly on him, craning her long neck until she could press her lips to the skin just behind his scrotum. She felt the heavy trembling of his member as she did so and she began a low vibratory growl in her throat, pressing more directly against him in order to pass on the sensation.

Above her, his nose and tongue gliding along her slippery surfaces, Sun Hsiung’s eyes almost crossed with the intensity of the ecstasy he was experiencing. It was as if he had not just recently been drained twice by the
tayu
in the
koryukai
; it was as if he had not had sex in many years.

His tongue laved her from crown to stem and back again as if he could not get enough of her taste. Soon he felt the quivering of her powerful muscles high up along the insides of her thighs and he concentrated feverishly on the core of her, now expanded and pulsing in delicious surrender. He heard her gurgle and gasp beneath him, felt the electric swipe of her pointed nipples against his belly as she worked busily on him.

He wanted to give her her first real orgasm but he did not know how long he could hold out. She had not directly touched the crown of his erection yet he knew that soon he must jet his seed even with no direct touch.

Part of him marveled at this feat as he continued with his erotic stimulation. And now she was in spasm, the ridged muscles rippling just below the surface of her skin, her thighs pulled wide apart and her buttocks as hard as rocks. He could feel the ultimate vibrations beginning inside her.

And then, unexpectedly, he felt her insinuate herself out from beneath him, felt himself turned on his back, watched, wide-eyed, as she mounted him, inserting just the tip of him inside her.

He gasped, and involuntarily his hips lept upward off the
futon
as the liquid electric first contact threatened to overwhelm him.

Her hips moved back and forth, stimulating the crown of his penis, first the top then the underside, back and forth in a rhythm that took his breath away. Then she was sliding down farther and he had to put his hands on her waist, her own over his, pushing, helping himself through the natural barrier of tissue.

And then like the burst of a cannon’s fusillade he was through, his shaft sliding all the way up her. He felt her puffed-out lips against his scrotum and then, as she reached around, her fingers caressing him there, urging him onward.

She crouched over him, sliding her breasts and nipples hard against his flesh, her small, white teeth bared slightly as she worked her hips against him, building an irreversible tension within him.

Sun Hsiung gritted his teeth, the cords at the sides of his neck standing out like steel cables. He grunted continuously, all the way inside her now, but his eyes were open, staring up at her face, wanting to wait for her.

And the trembling came to her again, this time in great wracking pulses, shivering her hot sheath around him. It was the last straw and he felt himself melting, all his energy, all his reserves of strength flowing down the ribboning muscles of his thighs to his loins, pooling like quicksilver in his scrotum. As her cupping palm urged him onward, as her sheath fluttered around his expanding penis, he felt a great series of throbs, an unutterably delicious warmth overpowering him combined with an enormous desire to penetrate her farther than he had any other woman.

Then she was crying out as her hips blurred, as she worked herself on him, rubbing and stroking, her sweet breath with a hint of his own musk in his face, her damp unbound hair a tender veil across his eyes. A heavy undulation across her abdomen and belly, her muscles fluting in spasm, and he felt silken fingers grasping him, stroking him anew with such tenderness that, miraculously, he felt a return of his waning orgasm, gathering once again in him as if he were a female, regenerating another form of pleasure entirely, one of which he had been ignorant all his life.

Something inside her—that same thing that had reached out to him in slumber and caressed him—lifted him up with her so that they experienced her orgasm together, united in a kind of spirit dance Sun Hsiung had previously only experienced at the very height of the highest level of combat, when lives hung in the balance and death hung by his side.

Shaken like a leaf in a tempest, Sun Hsiung allowed the full force of her marvelous power to blast through him. He rose with her on wings of ecstasy and, his renewed erection quivering, shot again within her dripping sex all that he could muster.

Years later, the memory of that evening remained fresh inside him. And so it was that she came before him, now fully a woman, and said to him, bowing as she did so, “
Sensei,
I wish to learn one more thing.” Sun Hsiung’s belly contracted and his heart went cold, for he had known of this moment almost from the first. And dreading its coming, he had erased its specter from his mind. Until now. For now was the time.

“And what is that?” he inquired, his voice faint in the flickering lamplight which served to illuminate one small patch of the surrounding darkness.

Akiko’s forehead was against the
tatami.
Her shining black hair was pulled tightly back from her exquisite face, tied in a long ponytail—a Chinese fashion unknown to her but pleasing to Sun Hsiung—that lay curled across one shoulder and her upper back. She wore a kimono of crimsons, golds, and flame oranges, a match for the autumnal foliage beyond their front door.

“I wish to learn how to disguise my
wa.
” Her voice was calm and free of excess emotion. She had proved to be an enormously gifted pupil. “Ever since I discovered the talent in me, I have longed to know this.”

“Why is that, Kodomo-gunjin?”

“Because I feel somehow incomplete without it.”

Sun Hsiung nodded once. “I understand.” He thought about saying more.

“There is no need to warn me,
sensei
,” she said, catching the essence of his emanation.

“It is more dangerous than even you can suspect.” Their eyes locked, Akiko submitted entirely to his will now, her whole being attuned to his words, sensing their import beyond the fact that nothing could dissuade her from her
karma.

“I am not afraid of death or dying,” she said softly.

“Corporeal death is far from the worst eventuality.” Abruptly the room seemed webbed with bioluminescent strands, the building of their spirits, pulsing with vitality, making of this place a power spot. “These forces you seek are beyond even our understanding; they are so elemental that they may only be controlled partially. And in those other moments they may change you; they may corrupt all that you have learned here.”

Within the echoing silence that engulfed them both, Akiko bowed her head. “I understand. I will guard myself carefully against just such corruption.”

“Then this is where you must go,” Sun Hsiung said, sliding a folded slip of paper across the
tatami
to her.

The next morning, as she finished her packing, he took her painting pad and brush from her. “You cannot take these where you are going, Little Soldier.”

And for the first time Akiko had a sense of the depth of the darkness into which she was descending. “This saddens me,
sensei.
”

Those were the last words Sun Hsiung heard her utter. They drank one last cup of tea together. Moments later she hefted her bags and, bowing formally, left him.

It was the first time that she had performed
chano-yu
for him, the pupil serving the
sensei
as new
sensei.
For a long time after that Sun Hsiung sat before his tiny cold teacup, the dark green leaves clinging tenaciously to its bottom like a vine refusing to die.