The Miko - 02 (67 page)

Turning his back to the gnarled trunk of one great grandfather tree, Saigō slid down until he was on his haunches. Akiko knelt beside him at right angles. He did not turn toward her but continued to stare straight ahead at the puzzle of crisscrossing branches, white with snow and ice.

Akiko stared at his proud profile. In many ways he was still an enigma to her. But then she suspected that he was even more of an enigma to himself. Though he was inordinately introspective for a young man, it was not self-examination that occupied him. The eternal flame of his hate had to be nurtured and, on occasion, fanned. Akiko suspected quite rightly that with the cessation of his hatred Saigō would perish. It was his primary nourishment; mother’s milk to his spirit.

Already she suspected that he was wholly evil. Yet she was drawn to him. Was it despite this knowledge or because of it? She felt frightened when she was near him, as if the blight eating away at his soul was contagious. But at the same time she felt a distinct lessening of the anomie which at times buffeted her spirit with the viciousness of a riptide.

With Saigō she felt that she belonged. Time and place coalesced into meaning, for he had the spirit of the outlaw not the outcast, which she had always assumed herself to be. An outcast had no status, no dignity, no honor. She recalled her feelings that night in the restaurant when she saw the
geisha
with their snapping black teeth and faces coated with white rice flour.

It occurred to her then that she thought about Ikan infrequently; and then it was with a painful lurch as if she were fighting to disengage herself from a particularly loathsome creature. Ikan had no status save that of
tayu oiran
, which, of course, was meaningless outside the
Yoshiwara.
Ever since Akiko had escaped from there, her contempt for courtesans was boundless.

Had not Ikan been sold into what was, effectively, slavery? Had not the very fact that she had worked in the happy field rendered her undesirable as a wife? Where was the dignity in this way of life? Where was the honor?

Akiko could not even summon up anger at her mother; her emotions had gone beyond the stage where she resented Ikan’s inability to accept her. She felt only contempt for what her mother had been, what she had done.

Ikan had been an outcast, and without even knowing it Akiko had cast herself in the same mold. But now Saigō had shown her that there was another path she could take. For an outlaw possessed status, dignity, and honor. Japan’s ancient tradition of the nobility of failure—the triumph of ideals over actions—proved this beyond any doubt.

Beside her, Saigō felt a spasm grip him. He felt as if something inside him were being pulled in opposite directions. Spite surged within him, and a fulminating desire to hurt her. “There must be an ending,” he said.

The wind snatched at his words, sent them hurtling among the snow laden pines. Still he did not turn toward her. There was a minute trembling to his head and she felt the tension in his frame.

“You may have wondered at the identity of the girl I brought home some weeks ago.” His head lowered until his chin almost touched his chest. “She is the one that I love.” Akiko felt the knife in her ribs, turning slowly, as he had wished. “Her name is Yukio and she has betrayed me. Betrayed me to my cousin; to a
gaijin
!
Iteki
!” The last two epithets were spat with such vehemence that Akiko was obliged to close her eyes against the force of the rage.

Saigō’s lips curled back in the semblance of a smile that was more a snarl. “You may well ask yourself how a
gaijin
came to be a cousin of mine. Well, my mother, Itami, had a brother, a fierce and loyal man of great
samurai
blood. His name was Tsūkō and in the winter of 1943, following the death of his superior, he was given command of the garrison at Singapore.

“There he served his Emperor long and well until September of 1945 when, outnumbered, he tried to hold the city against the advancing British forces. His men were surrounded. They died defending the honor of Japan as befits true
samurai.
Tsūkō was the last to perish, shot many times by
iteki
while he slashed their limbs and heads with his
katana.
The British, like all barbarians, have no concept of honor.

“At the time of his death my uncle was married to a woman who was quite beautiful but of dubious parentage. That is to say it was suspected that she was at least part Chinese. She must have bewitched Tsūkō, for he apparently ignored these rumors.

“I know that she could not have been Japanese. No
samurai
blood runs in the veins of a woman who will not avenge the murder of her husband. This Cheong, instead, married the man who commanded the enemy’s attack on Singapore. Perhaps he himself fired one of the bullets that fatally wounded my uncle. She did not care.”

Saigō’s head lifted. “The offspring of Cheong and this barbarian Colonel is Nicholas Linnear.” With that one last foreign word Akiko felt a prescient thrill shoot up her spine. Could it be so, she asked herself. Could the wheel of life have brought her to the one person on earth who could truly help her. For it had been this same Colonel Linnear, this
iteki
, as Saigō called him, who had pressed for public disclosure of Akiko’s father’s so-called indiscretions, thereby murdering him. She concentrated further, anxious now to absorb it all.

“It was he who came to the precincts of our
ryu
, hand and hand with his lover, Yukio,” Saigō continued. “She and I were lovers before he met her. Like his halfbreed mother did to Tsūkō, Nicholas has somehow seduced Yukio’s spirit. Now I must drug her or she would seek to escape and fly to him. Now only I have her.”

“You make love to her…still?”

Saigō’s head whipped around and his dead eyes glared at her, challenging her. “I take her whenever I choose to do so.” He turned again to stare out at the Crosshatch of branches. “She betrayed me; she deserves no less.”

Akiko remembered his words from before,
There must be an ending.
“Now you wish to kill her.”

Saigō said nothing for a time. Then, “I wish for revenge. For myself; for my mother. Most of all, for Tsūkō.”

And she thought,
K’ai ho. I see a
gap; I must enter swiftly. But softly she said, “Two weeks ago you left abruptly. I did not see you at home or in the
dōjō
for four days.”

“In Tokyo,” he said, “I attended the funeral of my father.” He closed his eyes. “I wished to take you but I could not.”

She bowed to him. “I am honored.”

“He was a great man.” Again tension gripped him. “But eventually he was destroyed by the invading barbarians…by Colonel Linnear. The
iteki
garroted him. Now I have begun my revenge. I have administered a poison to the Colonel. It is absorbed through the pores of the skin and is untraceable. It is slow acting, creating a deadly accretion day by day.”

“And then?”

He nodded his head. “You are right. Yukio must die. But this fact must not reach my cousin, Nicholas. He must wonder…and wait until the time is right. Then I will confront him and just before I deliver the death blow I will tell him of his beloved’s fate. Thus will all the unquiet
kami
who hover about me, demanding retribution and rest, be assuaged.”

Death, death, and more death. It surrounded them as if they were adrift in a sea of skulls. The
giri
Saigō bore seemed a burden of unconscionable weight to Akiko. No wonder his spirit was being trampled into dust. How well she saw now the twining of their
karma.

Without thinking she reached out, her fingers sliding up his arm. His head whipped around, that red challenge back in his eyes, and she said, “Let me banish your
kami
…if just for a moment.”

Something seemed to melt inside him, a barrier swinging down, and the proud warrior collapsed into her embrace, a child at its mother’s comforting breast.

The cold was no deterrent to their fire, and for the first time in his life Saigō felt the hot surge of blood into his penis at a woman’s touch. Always, before, there had been a certain violence to his coupling with Yukio—and more often than not he would take her from behind as he did with his young men lovers, so that there was nothing about it that could be termed lovemaking.

But with Akiko it was different. Perhaps it was because he had allowed Akiko to melt him, to take the lead. It was he who now acquiesced to her lovemaking, responding as she led, using hard-calloused hands given to inflicting pain and death in long legato caresses across the snowy contours of her steaming body.

The moment he felt the movement of her moist lips beneath his, the moment he became aware of her tongue emerging, probing, he was as hard as a rock and as ecstatically eager as a virgin.

And in regard to lovemaking he
was
a virgin. Tenderness and compassion held no domain inside him. Love was unknown.
Mi-chi.

Her breasts swelled to his touch, sensation buzzing from her erect nipples. He wanted to enter her almost immediately, such was his excitement. But Akiko persuaded him otherwise with her lips, her deft, knowing hands, and the clamp of her trembling thighs.

Near the end she held the base of his erection as tightly as she dared so that he would not ejaculate before either of them wanted him to. Meanwhile she teased his nipples with the tip of her tongue, his scrotum with a wave of her fingers, the head of his penis with the tender flesh of her inner thighs.

She rolled him around and around in that pliant grip until the friction became unbearable and he was so engorged that she took pity on them both and placed him at the font of her vagina.

With a long drawn-out groan he pushed into her, his eyelids fluttering, his chest heaving, until his slender hips crashed into hers and he was fully hilted.

She would not let him move, fearful that just one bull thrust would send his twanging emotions over the edge. Instead, she cupped her hands against his buttocks, fitting her to him as closely as possible. Then she commenced to squeeze and relax her inner muscles. The resulting contractions caused far less friction than if he were stroking into her. He would last longer though he was on the verge of orgasm when he entered her.

Akiko watched his face, feeling her emotions soaring not only from the liquid erotic contact but from what was written across his features. She reveled in the pleasure she was giving him; the banishment at least temporarily of the
kami
that haunted him day and night.

Sweat froze along their backs, riming them, making them into creatures of the winter countryside. Where they made contact their bodies were slick with juices as if hot oil had been poured between them.

Akiko’s eyes lost focus and she found her mind wandering as if in a dream. She was close herself. She made herself focus on Saigō. He was past seeing or hearing anything. His hard, lean body surged continually against her in minute ripples. Cords stood out along the sides of his neck and his teeth were gritted hard in his effort to continue the ecstasy. But he could not.

“Ohh, yes!” she cried, beside herself, biting his neck as she, too, lost herself in pleasure.

For a long time afterward he did not seem his old self. Remnants of what he had been, lost in her embrace, continued to hold sway like beautifully architectured ruins on a bloody battlefield.

He continued to cling to her, his breathing taking an unaccountably long time to return to normal. Even when they both became chilly and were forced to don clothing he did not wish to be apart.

Once, he began to weep silent tears. When she asked him what troubled him, he said, “I was remembering that bamboo we passed earlier. Oh, how I wish I could be like that tree, so resilient, so able to free itself of the greatest burden!”

But then, slowly, he returned to the Saigō she had known and, at length, they sat apart, not even their shoulders or hands touching. It seemed to Akiko that in some strange way he had become embarrassed by what they had done here, as if he had allowed himself to transgress against internal rules only he was aware of. She wished she could say that it was only the tears of which he was ashamed, but she feared that was not so.

It seemed to her that he was regretting the fact that he possessed emotions and needs just like every other human being. Akiko had been around him long enough to understand that Saigō had built for himself the concept of his own separatism from the entire human race.

If he believed in a god at all, it was this one. For his separation gave him power as the Void gave most others power. It allowed him to accept all that he did as necessary and right. Without that belief he—like a priest without Buddha—would be bereft.

But in this one instance, this turning away had hurt her terribly and she could not hold her tongue. Watching his face, she said, “You did not enjoy our joining, Saigō-san? You did not feel the outpouring of love as I did?”

His face screwed up derisively. “Love! Pah! There is no such thing!”

“Yet, before, you told me that you love Yukio,” Akiko persevered, though she felt a foreboding building inside her.

“What I feel for Yukio is none of your concern,” he snapped. “As for what I said, I used an equivalent word. What I feel for her is inexpressible in language. But certainly it is not love.”

“And for me?” She knew it would come to this, but her fear of what he might or might not say was insufficient for her to hold onto her words. “What do you feel for me, Saigō-san? Is it, too, inexpressible?”

“Questions, questions, and more questions. Why is it that all women know how to do is ask questions?” He lurched drunkenly to his feet. His breath was a steamy cloud before his lips. He was fully the warrior again. “I find questions insupportable, Akiko-san. You already know that about me yet you persist in asking them.”

“I am only human,” she said sadly. “Unlike you,
oyabun.
”

He laughed then, a low guttural sound. “
Oyabun
, eh? That is good, Akiko-san. Very, very good. You see me as your mentor, your overlord. Well, I’ll say this for you, you certainly know how to keep me in good humor.”