The Miko - 02 (83 page)

But he had accomplished one of his goals; had found out all that he needed to know. By her words he knew that she would not allow him to rise and walk away; that, whatever her personal feelings might be, she had been trained too well, her spirit in the end as weak as her first husband’s, the spell of
jahō
taking her over. He could never convince her of the truth. As Akutagawa-san had said, the force of
jahō
was so corrosive to mind and spirit that one always ran the terrible risk of succumbing to it rather than, as one did with all martial arts, harnessing it to one’s own needs.

Now he gazed upon her with eyes filled with new knowledge. For at last he saw who it was he was truly facing. She was
miko
, a sorceress who could reach out at any time, masking her true intent, and snuff out his life. It could come in the midst of a kiss or an embrace; he would never know the difference, never feel the flickering of her
wa
, the breakup of harmony by the spitting of aggression. He would never even know that she had reached for the Void.

Her intent was forever beyond his knowing, and he knew that he had been right to wait up in the tree for so long. He knew that he faced death. It did not seem ironic to him that it should come to him in the form of his first true love, only just and fitting. If he should die now, hers would be the last face that he would see. He would go down dreaming of Yukio.

“It is very still,” Akiko said softly. “The animals are hiding, the birds are nested, the insects sleep. Even the wind has ceased to blow. All for us.”

Her eyes were luminous. He imagined that he could see the moon reflected in their convex surfaces. They had the sheen of finest silk; they reminded him so much of Yukio’s eyes.

“For we are lovers, Nicholas. The last two true lovers alive on the face of the world. When we made love it was not just our bodies that were entwined, penetrating and being penetrated. It was our spirits as well.

“The clouds and the rain made our spirits one, Nicholas. Now we have our own tattoos, as indelibly etched as my dragons. We shall know each other for all time. However we may be reincarnated, whatever our
karma
dictates we must be, still will we recognize one another. As human or badger, plover or serpent. The spirit dance we performed will preserve our link.”

Had she moved perceptibly closer? Nicholas could not tell. Her words had become as luminous as her eyes, as the starlight that partially enveloped them where broad fans of shadow from the surrounding trees did not.

Was she leaning forward now? Did he feel the hard press of her jutting breasts against his chest? Did he feel her warmth bathing him, her breath like the scent of lilac on his cheek? In all the states he summoned up, both exalted and common, he felt only her
wa
, a glowing beacon, as constant as the sea.

He remembered their fevered night in Sato’s garden and thought he wanted that onrush all over again.
Sato.
Felt one of her arms coming around his back, lying along his shoulder, fingertips caressing the side of his neck. Remember Sato, he thought, and how you tailed him. Failed in your sacred oath to protect him. There was only one possible way out for him now.

“No!”

His cry echoed into the night. “I cannot allow this! I cannot love you, a
miko
!”

And as he pulled away from her half-embrace, he withdrew the short-bladed knife he had taken from Itami’s house. Though it belonged in her kitchen still its blade was finely honed, still it was a weapon of honor.

Without hesitation Nicholas drove the blade to the hilt into his abdomen. Blood flashed out, black in the darkness, glinting on his knees, the grass, Akiko’s lap.

Nicholas’ face was distorted by agony. His head trembled as he slashed horizontally from left to right across his lower belly. The place where
hara
resided.

Akiko was in shock. Her eyes were open wide. “Amida!” she breathed. There was so much blood! It ran in a torrent from him, from the center of his being, draining him of strength, of life.

So many conflicting emotions strived for dominance inside her. Elation and sorrow, shock and panic. Satisfaction and fear. Was this the end she had been seeking? Was this the culmination of her long thought out vengeance?

She knew that it was, but now she was beginning to suspect that it was not what she wanted. She had struggled all her life, it seemed, to be free of woman’s traditional role as servant to man. Her rejection of all that her mother had been, her revulsion for that lofty state of
tayu
had this as its basis. As did her decision to train in the most demanding of the martial arts: man’s work. All her life she had fought to take her place beside men as an equal.

But now she was coming to see that that obsession had put her in the position of becoming a pawn to the drives and hatreds of those certain men who she had thought she was closest to: Kyōki, Saigō, and, ultimately, Vice-Minister Shimada. She understood that more than any other person, her father had shaped the direction of her life. Just as Saigō’s father had done his. They were the same, then, she and Saigō. Exactly the same. Totally evil.

Too late had she made this discovery. It had taken the death of one she now knew she loved in a way she had loved no other man or woman.

She opened her mouth to speak, she opened her arms to show him her intent, but at that moment the earth beneath them commenced to roll as if it had been transmuted into water by
jaho
beyond even her ken.

Cannonfire crossed them, echoing eerily into the night, the sound bouncing off obstructions that had just a moment before not been there.

For in truth the world was dissolving, had opened up like a pair of gaping jaws. Wildflowers and bushes, trees and grasslands were eaten up, swamped down into the yawning pit that had no end.

Raw gases stung her nostrils, sulphur and the stench of molten metal.

And then she had lost her balance, was falling, rolling end over end, filled with vertigo so that she had no idea of where the sky was and where the earth. All she could do was reach upward, stretching and grabbing at fistfuls of crumbling soil.

Nicholas, too, was tumbling and rolling in the grip of the first earthquake shock, whose epicenter, as the Soviet satellite had accurately predicted, was not more than a kilometer away to the east.

He was sent flying, in fact, away from the spot where he and Akiko had been kneeling, away from the glistening pools of blood which had spurted out when he had knifed into the freshly killed fox he had strapped like, a cincture around his abdomen, beneath his kimono. He had suspected, rightly, that only a shock of the first magnitude could deflect the
jahō
for long enough.

He fetched up hard against rocks made sharp by fissures forming in their midst, dividing them, cracking them open like eggs.

Nicholas tried to regain his feet but the earth shudders were still too violent and he tumbled downward again. He had been thrown perhaps ten or fifteen meters from where he had been and now he lifted his head, searching for Akiko. He could not see her, but that was not surprising in all the chaos.

He was in the midst of a world gone mad. Where trees had been was nothing now but great holes like wounded gums. Those trees now protruded from the agonized earth like arrows shot into it by a giant archer far above his head, their webby root structures shaking themselves free of huge clods of earth.

In a moment, Nicholas began to crawl back the way he had come. It took him some time. He was obliged to make many detours and to stop several times while aftershocks vibrated beneath his hands and knees like the angry shouts of the gods.

He came finally to the fissure, a mighty, jagged rent in the universe. It was awesome to see open space where just moments before solid ground had been. It gave one pause, even one such as he who had been born here and thus was not a stranger to quakes. One never got used to them or ceased to be humbled by their titanic display of force.

In the hollow silence after the grinding of the quake, he thought he could hear a voice. Slowly, he crawled to the edge of the fissure. Its sides were as jagged and irregular as was its face.

He saw her down there. Her tiny oval face leaped up to him through the jumble of debris—rent rocks, split trees, and the like.

“Nicholas.”

He saw those eyes, luminous still. Yukio’s eyes. He moved forward toward her and felt the earth begin to give way beneath his chest. Dirt crumbled away from him in a torrent and she screamed.

Head cast down into that stygian gloom, he inched carefully backward. His eyes roved for another way down to her. Perhaps that tree just above her. But he could not see its underpinning and if he was wrong, if it would not hold his weight, she would be instantly crushed by its descent.

“Nicholas!”

Something in her voice drew his attention back to her. He peered down. No. It was her voice itself. It seemed to have changed not only pitch but timbre as well.

“Don’t move,” he cautioned her. “I can’t take a chance on coming down myself. There’s too much instability within the fissure. I’m going to find vines I can weave into a rope that will hold you.”

“No!”

The amount of anguish in her cry froze him.

“Don’t leave me, Nicholas. Not again!”

A rumbling had begun, deeper this time as if truly it were emanating from the bowels of the earth. Had he heard right? Nicholas asked himself. Had she said, “Not again”?

“Then I’m coming down after you!” he called.

“No, no! Amida, no!” He saw her face limned by starlight which was somehow stronger now after the quake. It was as if the universe were awakening from a deep slumber. “You’ll be killed!” There was movement from down there. He had already lowered himself halfway into the fissure, his bare toes searching for a substantial hold.

He saw Akiko reach for the bottom of the tree substructure, a massive tangle of roots like the Gordian knot. But she had no magic sword and could not unravel it.

The rumbling reached a crescendo and Nicholas heard the awful grinding of the world pulling itself apart. Deep below him, plates shifted, the pressure shooting upward. The fissure walls trembled and slid farther open. Even the sky seemed to judder in pain, the starlight winking out, as the earth heaved in exquisite agony.

Nicholas could hear nothing above the rush of noise that filled his ears to overflowing. He thought their drums might burst with the intensity of the vibration. He saw the tree shifting downward. He opened his mouth to scream, then he was obliged to turn his full attention on raising himself out of the lethal pit before he was cast down.

When he was able to look again, it was as if he gazed upon an entirely different world. There was no tree, no split rocks, none of the rills and valleys that he had recorded in his mind preparatory to his attempted descent.

Like a fragrant, fertile valley re-formed out of sere desert, all that he had first gazed upon was gone. And Akiko with it.

The first familiar person Nicholas saw when he left Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo was Tanya Vladimova. He was not particularly surprised to see her. He had never bothered to call Minck.

She was coming out of an elevator along the same bank in front of which Nicholas stood at the Okura.

“What happened to you?” she said, checking herself in mid-stride.

Nicholas’ elevator came and she got in with him. “You look like somebody put you through the meat grinder and forgot to turn the thing off.”

“Were you here for the quake?” It was the best he could do at the moment, and was not as inane a question as it seemed on the surface.

“Oh, yes.” Her head nodded. “It was quite frightening, I must say. The Japanese took it with just a bit more equanimity.” She was evincing a light tone and forcing it. Nicholas wondered why. “How about you?”

“No,” he said. “I missed the worst of it.”

She waited patiently while he opened the door to his room. “I was in L.A. once when a minor quake hit,” she said conversationally. “It was like here, really, though this one, I’m told, was far worse. No one paid the slightest attention to it. It was as if it did not exist.”

“That’s not at all how the Japanese view it,” Nicholas said as he went into the bathroom and turned on the taps, the shower. He was obliged to raise his voice over the sound of all the rushing water. “They accept earthquakes as part of nature. To Californians it’s like death: they’d rather not think about it.”

Fifteen minutes later, after a long, steaming shower followed by an icy one, he emerged, wreathed in towels. He stripped off the plastic bag used to keep his newly bandaged fingers dry. “I’m glad you’re here, actually.”

“Oh, good,” she said, staring at his hand. “I’ve come as Minck’s messenger girl, really. The focus of our hunt has shifted since your meeting with him last week. Away from Protorov, toward
Tenchi.
”

Perhaps it was the fatigue that gripped him or else Akiko was still on his mind: how wholly she had become Yukio or some semblance of Yukio that he still held sacrosanct and pristine in his memory. Perhaps it was only his imagination but it was his decided feeling that the
kami
of his first beloved had somehow taken hold of her lookalike at the end, filling her heart with love and compassion where before there had been only hate and a burning need for revenge. In the end, that might have been foolish of him, but he did not think so. He was too aware of the intertwining of life and death.

In any event, he missed the falseness to her voice that normally he might have picked up. He was not fully attuned to this conversation; his thoughts were elsewhere. Relaxing his overworked muscles he was diffused, without concentration, and therefore vulnerable.

“That’s just as well,” he said, turning away from her to rummage through his dresser for fresh clothes, “because Protorov has ceased to be a threat to anyone.”

“What do you mean?” Tanya said, though she knew very well.

“I mean,” Nicholas said, “that I killed him.” He turned back in time to see the surprise in her eyes when he said, “I’ve also broken
Tenchi
wide open.”