The Miko - 02 (68 page)

But already he suspected that the supposedly immutable continents of his being were shifting off their divine axis. Now with a brilliant flash daylight had begun to pour in through the resulting rent, flooding his world, scoring demarcations to a landscape alien to him. And in the shadowed recesses, flickering fires licked, funeral pyres to what had once been.

Looking at her now, it seemed abruptly clear to him that he, indeed, had never loved Yukio; had, in fact, not understood that feeling could be warm as well as cold.

As his eyes drank Akiko in he felt a return of the deep sexual throbbing she had elicited from him. He felt none of the aggressive rage toward her that he had felt toward Yukio or his many male lovers. He was astonished to find that with Akiko there was no anger at all, only this warmth that, belatedly, he could identify as comfort. And now he knew that all that he had said to her today was not as he had thought, to hurt her, but to unburden himself.

The sky had grown dark with low, surging clouds. The air was damp and leaden. It would rain or snow soon, depending on the balance of the temperature. A premature twilight was coming on, as purple as a new bruise.

“Storm coming from the northwest,” he said. “Time to go.” He wanted to pull his eyes away from her but he was like a child who had discovered his love of sweets; once in the shop he was reluctant to depart.

Yet at the same time he felt a need to break the tenuous connection that still linked them like a length of twined silk. It was important for him to regain a sense of himself, to know that all of him had not been transformed by this new feeling; that the iron warrior still beat strongly within him.

Thus he began without her, walking as if he had forgotten her existence. Then, as Akiko rose to follow him, she saw that something that was hidden from her vantage point had caught his attention. She watched as he turned off the path, heading into the pines on his left.

In a moment he was back. In his left hand he held a squirming ball of gray fur by the scruff of its neck.

“Eeya! Akiko-san, see what I’ve found! A wolf cub!”

Smiling, Akiko came toward him down the path. For just an instant he had the happy, carefree aspect of a little boy. It was so good to see that spark in him, she thought. If only this time could be extended.

At that moment, she became aware of a blur hurtling through the air toward him. She opened her mouth to scream a warning but it was already too late.

The great gray thing was already atop Saigō, snarling and clawing. Saigō staggered and fell sideways beneath the fury of the onslaught. Instinctively he dropped the cub but the mother was oblivious, attacking him with insane ferocity.

Akiko ran up, saw them twisting back and forth on the snowy ground. She bent down, trying to grab the wolf behind its neck in order to pull it off him.

But Saigō must have hit a patch of ice for he spun beneath her and, tumbling head over heels, man and beast flew over the embankment, down twenty feet to the riverbank.

Akiko, running to the edge, saw Saigō’s back arch, agony contorting his face. Then she was half sliding, half scrambling down the rock-strewn embankment. Landing on her buttocks, she lashed out with her foot, catching the wolf on the snout with the toe of her boot.

The animal leaped high into the air, yelping, and when it landed, turned and loped upward into the rising copse of pine where its cub still wandered, lost and bewildered.

Akiko knelt beside Saigō. His face, shoulder, and forearms were a mass of slashes. She saw a set of teeth marks just above his left wrist. All these were minor. But his spine was canted at an unnatural angle and his rolling, dilated pupils showed how much pain he was in.

With the utmost care she turned him onto his stomach. It was immediately clear to her that in his fall he had smashed part of his upper spine against the outcroppings of rock spiking the embankment.

Delicately she ran her fingertips, as a surgeon might, along the ragged, jutting spine. At least three vertebrae were involved, perhaps four.

She took a deep breath. Among other things Sun Hsiung had been a
koppo sensei.
With two fingers he could break any bone in the body of his enemy. That was
koppo
’s most commonplace and well known expertise. But Sun Hsiung had taught her the other aspect of
koppo: katsu.
It was a form of deep resuscitation.

Once she had seen him use
seikotsu
, an adjunct to
katsu
, and had begged him to teach her this more esoteric and difficult art. It was a form of bone-setting.

She slowed her breathing, knowing that if she began the process and failed, she would most likely doom Saigō to a life of partial paralysis. For him that would surely be a death sentence. But what was the alternative? She could not move him. She could not leave him for the time it would take her to search out a telephone. He was already in shock and unconscious. She could not ask his permission, and if she did not act swiftly the cold would infiltrate his natural defenses and kill him.

Without another thought, she put her fears aside and went to work on him. For twenty minutes she labored with only one brief interruption. As she had suspected, a fourth vertebra was involved, lower down than the others. She did not know if any of the
seikotsu aiki
would work here. She did not know whether to proceed.

Then she closed her eyes and sought the no-thought that was the Void. Here, instinct—and something more—guided her a sense of cosmic harmony. Using both thumbs at
kyusho
—vital spots—on either side of the unaligned bone, she pressed inward and apart. Heard the pop like a cork coming out of a bottle of champagne and thanked Buddha for strength and courage.

For a time after that, she knelt over him, slumped with fatigue and relief, her hot breath keeping the ice from forming on his naked back.

Then, gathering herself for the ordeal, she slung Saigō’s still unconscious form across her shoulders, settling his weight as comfortably as she could. As a weight lifter will, she rose with her burden and started off home.

“And that is how you came here,” he said.

Akiko nodded. “It was Saigō who told me of you; it was he who suggested that I seek entrance where he could not.”

“I consider that presumptuous of him,” he observed. “But hardly surprising. He was not fit to stay here. I do not believe that he is fit to stay anywhere for very long.”

She resented his words bitterly, knowing that Saigō had deliberately paved the path for her that he had sought for himself but had been denied.

Kyōki broke into her thoughts. “What is it that you seek here, Akiko-san? What do you believe I can provide you that others cannot?”

“I want to learn how to hide my spirit,” she said. “To exhibit perfect
wa
even when I am about to strike down my enemy.”

Kyōki poured them both more tea. He commenced to sip his. They sat cross-legged facing each other across the flagged stone floor. The castle in which they sat, he had told her, had been built by Ieyasu Tokugawa sometime during the first decade of the seventeenth century for a woman who was half-Portuguese and half-Japanese. A very special woman, Akiko had thought.

Outside, a
komuso
with a reed basket over his head played his bamboo flute in plangent fashion.

“Tell me,” he said after a time, “how a young girl comes to have so many deadly enemies.”

There was no recourse but to tell him all of it: of Ikan and
Fuyajo
, of Shimada, her father, and those who had set the
wakizashi
in his hands, guiding it in two powerful lifedenying strokes into his lower abdomen, destroying his
hara.
His life.
Seppuku.

Kyōki closed his diamond-shaped eyes. “It is gratifying to see such an unwavering expression of filial piety in one so young.” He took up the goldthread fan lying beside him and began a soft, fluttering motion at his cheek. It was feminine and, Akiko felt, unflattering.

Immediately Kyōki ceased this motion. His eyes pierced her, penetrating her thoroughly. The fan was a stilled butterfly at the side of his head. “Does my use of the fan disturb you, Akiko-san?”

She had to stifle the urge to lie to him. Saigō had cautioned her against this.
Kyōki-san will know,
he told her,
and at once you will be asked to leave.

The truth shamed Akiko and she felt blood rush into her cheeks. “The fan seems unbecoming to a great warrior such as yourself.”

“Or yourself.”

“I am no great warrior,
sensei.
”

“But you aspire to be.”

“Hai.”

“Then you spurn the fan.”

“As a woman I—”

She watched, openmouthed, as the fan hummed through the air, embedding itself in the exact center of a camphorwood chest across the expanse of the room.

“Not as a woman,” Kyōki said, “but as a warrior.” Unconcernedly, he sipped more tea. “Please retrieve my weapon,” he said when he had put down his porcelain cup.

Akiko rose and went across the room. She reached up and as she touched the thing, spread like the hand of Buddha, spearing the wood, he said, “This is no
ōgi,
no mere fan, you pull from my chest, Akiko-san. It is
gunsen
, a weapon of battle.”

As she brought it back to him, he said, “All ten ribs are of hand-forged steel, the fan itself a membrane of steel mesh that can slice through skin, flesh, viscera…even bone, with the proper strike.”

In his hands again the
gunsen
fluttered back and forth at his cheek, the docile butterfly returned to its chrysalis.

“Your room is on the second floor,” he said. “Directly below mine.”

“I have no parents; I make the heavens and the earth my parents. I have no home; I make
saika tanden
my home. I have no body; I make stoicism my body. I have no eyes; I make the flash of lightning my eyes. I have no strategy; I make
sakkatsu jizai*
my strategy. I have no designs; I make
kisan**
my designs. I have no principles; I make
rinkiohen***
my principles.”

Akiko, alone in the Room of All Shadows, knelt before the double line of joss sticks and long white tapers. Both were lit and the resulting scents pervaded the chamber. The atmosphere seemed to absorb her prayers as if it were listening.

Kyōki’s castle lay nestled in a glen shaggy with white birch and larch, acres of bright, blooming giant azaleas and stands of peach trees, one thousand meters above sea level in Asama
kogen.
These were the highlands—cool in summer, frosted in winter—just over 130 kilometers from Tokyo, northeast of the sprawling, jammed supertropolis, almost squarely in the center of Honshu, Japan’s main island.

The
kogen
were dominated by 2,500-meter Asama-yama, an active volcano whose upper slopes were kept sere and utterly barren by frequent eruptions.

On the opposite side of the highlands from where Kyōki’s castle stood, sweeping northeast off Asama-yama’s skirt, was Onioshidashi, a black, blasted lavascape aptly named after the monstrous outpouring of the earth’s depths in 1783; “The Devil’s Discharge.”

Parkland and villas of the rich were strewn all about here but none within seeing distance of the castle, named
Yami Doko
—Kite in the Darkness—by Kyōki soon after he came to live here.

Akiko had as little an idea when that was as she had about anything else in the
sensei
’s background. With her eyes alone she could tell that he was at least part Mongol: the slant to his eyes, the width and flatness of his cheekbones, as well as the hue of his skin. She could envision his ancestors, wrapped in wolf skins and beaten metal corselets, descending on horseback from the Chinese steppes, snowy wind at their backs, to raid the villages of the plains.

They worked within a rigidly formulaic framework that was without even the most minute deviation. This was in direct counterpart to her two years at the
ryu
in Kumamoto. Every moment of Akiko’s time in Asama was mapped out and had to be assiduously accounted for. A blank spot was cause for punishment. Excuses of any kind were not tolerated. Neither was illness, which was treated by Kyōki with various natural poultices and herbal combinations. He was a gifted
yogen
—chemist—and Akiko, who was rarely sick in any case, inevitably found herself recovered within ten hours. Meanwhile her studies—even the most taxing physical exercises—were performed uninterrupted.

For weeks at a time they lived in the wilderness, leaving the castle far behind. Often this occurred during inclement weather—in the dead of winter or during late summer and early autumn when successions of typhoons lashed the island’s southern coast, sending dark, whipping squalls into the interior like a dragon’s raking claws.

This was purposeful. He taught her how to use the elements and even, in many cases, to tame them. With them they took only
rokugu
, the ninja’s “six tools for traveling.” Five were all contained within the sixth,
uchitake
, a three-meter length of hollowed-out bamboo. Inside was stored medicine, a stone pencil, towel, hat, and
musubinawa
, an eight-meter coil of rope made out of women’s hair, lighter than regular rope and stronger.

They lived in trees and in the bush, by low-lying alpine streams, on rock outcroppings along Shiraito Falls, a staggeringly beautiful network of narrow water chutes climbing up a sheer, foliage-encrusted cliff face.

Tsuchigumo
was a technique that Kyōki claimed had been passed down to him through his father from Jinnai Ukifune, an assassin in the service of Nobunaga Oda, powerful feudal
daimyō
, unique among all ninja because he was a dwarf.

Tsuchigumo
was, as Kyōki put it, “bat in the rafters.” He taught her to cling to the tops of rooms where crossbeams and such could be employed with the aid of
nekode
, cat’s claws of forged steel. Hour after hour they hung in the darkness of the night, using arcane breath-control techniques to slow their metabolisms and therefore remain motionless until just before dawn.

At that time they would drop lithely and silently down onto the stone flooring, free of muscle knots and cramps, ready—if this were a real situation—to deliver a lethal blow to an unsuspecting enemy.