Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 02, page 39
She was just bringing the pistol out from behind her when she felt the presence to her left and thought, The second one! She felt pressure on her larynx and, of course, reflexively tried to breathe. When she could not, panic rose within her and she cried out, bringing the pistol up in a blur, her forefinger already squeezing, squeezing, anything to get oxygen into her straining lungs.
The roar of the discharge caused her to scream in rage and fear. Concussion struck her eardrums like a physical blow and she staggered, already retching from the intense stench of the cordite and the heat, searing and instantaneous, that had brushed by her like the hand of death.
Light blinded her and she fetched up against a wooden wall, sliding down it as her legs gave out. Something was in her eyes and she put her free hand up, wiping at her forehead. Her hair was matted and wet, filled with grit that rolled slickly through her fingers.
Blood black on the night, its coppery stench filling her nostrils, making her gag all over again, making her wipe again and again at her face, crying now in great gulping sobs.
A shadow looming over her and instinctively she brought the
pistol upward, almost all control gone now so that the barrel weaved back and forth. She tried to get at the trigger again but her finger wouldn’t respond to her commands and then the gun was gone from her weakened grasp and she was broken, sobbing still, whispering through it, “Don’t take me back, I don’t want to go back.”
Lifted bodily off the street, a breeze against her hot, streaked cheek for an instant and then a creak, a slam, the noises of a bolt being shot home and the warmth of a house, stealing over her, a place unfamiliar but only one fact surfacing: it was not Fuyajo.
Her head went down…
A face swam into view, like the man in the moon, pockmarked and huge, descending through a network of sere branches as spiky as a stag’s antlers.
Akiko cried out, tried to throw her arms across her face to protect it. She had the sensation of falling and shooting forward at the same time, spinning like a leaf in the wind, toppling from the safety of… what?
The man in the moon lifted away, and it was like a weight being pulled off her chest.
“Is this better?” The voice was soft and lilting, a country accent.
“I can’t… breathe.” Her voice was like a rodent’s squeak and she realized that her mouth and throat were so parched that she could not summon up saliva.
“In time you will be able to do everything.” The man in the moon smiled, or so it seemed to Akiko. She still had trouble seeing as if she were peering through a windowpane streaked with running rainwater.
“You look blurry,” she whispered through cracked lips.
“When you stop crying,” the gentle voice told her, “you will no longer have that problem.” She slept for a time after that, sliding down into a vertiginous whirlpool, a troubled slumber in which her fear, brought to the surface, would not allow her to slip deeply into unconsciousness.
Rather, she fought in a series of battle-scarred dreams, on the cusp of sleep, her eyelids fluttering constantly, her limbs thrashing and twitching like a dog’s.
When, at last, she awoke it was near night again and it was as if no time had passed though, in reality, more than eighteen hours had elapsed from her ordeal in the street.
“Where did you get this weapon?”
It was the first question he asked her. She knew the answer of
course, but the effort required in opening her mouth and translating thought into speech seemed beyond her.
He put an enormous lopsided wooden bowl of larmen dosanko in front of her and, sitting cross-legged on the tatami beside the futon on which she lay, laced his fingers beneath his chin and contemplated her silently.
Akiko rose to her haunches. The scent of the steaming noodle soup was overpowering, blotting out all other sensation or thought. Only when she was finished eating did she notice the sleek metal and pearl of the pistol lying by his side. It was this he was referring to when he had asked her the question.
She looked back at the rumpled futon. Its fabric was light but in spots deep, rust-colored stains had turned the beautiful cotton leathery and stiff. The sight set Akiko’s heart to hammering again, and something must have showed in her eyes because the man sitting across from her smiled and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, Kodomo-gunjin.”
Akiko put her fingertips up to the right side of her forehead, near her hairline. A cessation of hunger had made her aware of a painful pulsing there. She felt the bulge of a bandage. “Why do you call me Little Soldier?”
“Perhaps,” he said softly, leaning forward to push the pistol across the tatami toward her, “for the same reason you carry this weapon.”
He cocked his head. It was no wonder she had first thought of him as the man in the moon for his face was as round as a full moon’s, with pockmarked cheeks and a flat Chinese nose. He had a long, wispy mustache drooping down around the corners of his mouth but little other hair. Overall his face seemed as soft as raw dough.
He bowed now. “I am Sun Hsiung. How may I call you?” “You have already named me, haven’t you? Kodomo-gunjin.” He nodded. “As you wish.”
She leaned forward and took the pistol off the tatami. It seemed quite heavy to her now. She did not look at him when she spoke next. “What happened… last night?”
Sun Hsiung put his forearms on the points of his knees. “You shot the… man who was holding you. You discharged one bullet, which entered his skull through the socket of his left eye. It splintered the ridge of bone just above and lodged in his brain.”
“He’s… dead?”
“Quite.”
She swallowed hard. “And the other one?”
“He was coming for you when I arrived on the scene. He was going to kill you, I believe. I had to stop him.” Akiko opened her mouth to ask another question but immediately thought better of it. “They may send more.” Sun Hsiung shrugged. “Perhaps.”
She put her finger around the trigger and hefted the pistol. “I’ll shoot them, too.” Sun Hsiung considered her for a moment. He had not asked her who it was who might send more thugs after her or even why these had been dispatched. “That would be most unwise, I think.” Her look was defiant. “Why? It saved my life.” He rose, leaving her there in silence to learn her first lesson.
It was not the pistol that had saved Akiko’s life but the advent of Sun Hsiung’s intervention. When she had worked that through sufficiently so that she could see the ramifications, she unwound from her sitting position and went to him.
He was outside, in back, tending to his tiny, exquisite bonsai garden. Akiko stood at the edge of it, a giant blundering into a minute world.
“I want to learn,” she said softly.
The rice-paper lantern swung from its black iron hook, its light falling across Sun Hsiung’s shoulders as he toiled. He did not turn around or make any motion that he had heard her or, indeed, was aware of her presence at all.
“I want you to teach me what you know.”
She looked down at the weapon she was still holding in her hand. There was an odd kind of security in its heft and warmth in her hand. And it was something of her mother’s.
Slowly, carefully, she made her way through the tiny sculptured trees to where he was working on hands and knees.
“Please,” she whispered, kneeling down as best she could in the narrow stone path and bending far forward in a kowtow. She extended the firearm in her open palm. “Take this as payment. It is all I have.”
Sun Hsiung set his gleaming tools aside and slowly turned around. He bowed to her and, lifting the pistol from her open hand, murmured, “Domo arigato, Kodomo-gunjin.”
She had almost killed herself that night as well as the thug. That was why her forehead was bandaged, why, when she finally removed it, there was a reddish weal that gradually metamorphosed into a small white furrow of puckered skin. The bullet that eventually killed her assailant had nicked her as well. Too close. She was glad she had given the pistol to Sun Hsiung.
The beginnings of her training surprised her. Days commenced at five in the morning. Pupil and sensei began their exercises in the dark, building wind, the cardiovascular system. In the pale light of dawn they were into Tai Chi Chuan, slow, languorous movements that increased a sense of balance and limb coordination not unlike ballet.
From midmorning to midafternoon Sun Hsiung left her alone in the house to read selections of certain books he would provide for her. Akiko was an excellent reader, with superb retention and a large vocabulary. She was diligent in her studies, at times even rapt.
When Sun Hsiung returned from his daily errands abroad they would retire to the bonsai garden and the variables of the weather, each with a rice-paper pad, a small sable brush, and a pot of ink. At first Akiko was nonplussed. Her heart was burning with fury and often she shook from an excess of released adrenaline. Her head buzzed with swirling emotions and she would call up those memories from that night, all fear leeched from her, instead, a cold, calculating hatred growing wildly like a weed in an untended garden.
So she balked at the idea of painting. She could put up with the rather gentle Tai Chi, the long hours of studious repose but this… this was just too much.
The first time she was handed the pad and brush, she said as much. Sun Hsiung looked down at her and said, “Kodomo-gunjin, I fear that I have named you too well. You must learn peace before you can be taught the ways of war.”
“But painting…” Her tone made the word synonymous with garbage collection.
Silently, Sun Hsiung considered whether he had made a mistake. He wondered if this wild young thing could be taught the most difficult lesson of patience. He shrugged inwardly. Her own karma would determine that; it was his karma to teach her. After that…
“Before we can start on the protective aspects of your training, your heart must be purged of hatred,” he said. “To do that you will require a conduit. I place the leech on the inside of your arm and blood is drained from you.”
“But they will not wait long to come after me again.”
“You are no longer alone in the world, Kodomo-gunjin,” he said, placing the pot of ink beside her.
Her eyes swung away from him and contemplated the vast, snowy expanse of the paper lying on her lap. “But I don’t know how to paint,” she said in a plaintive voice.
Sun Hsiung smiled down at her. “Then let us begin with the fundamentals.” Over the succeeding months painting became her favorite part of the day, and she came to cherish the sound of her sensei’s key in the lock at precisely the same time each day. Lifting her head up, she would look out the window to see the sun striking the bamboo wall of the tiny garden and recognize the light for the finest of the day. Eagerly, then, she would close her books and gather up their painting materials, meeting him at the fusuma out to the garden, her mind quivering in anticipation of the new lesson.
Too, at first, the advent of afternoon rain would depress her, for that certain light would not be present and they would forsake their painting and turn to other lessons. But later on, when she became more adept, she would look forward to the rain for then they would sit just inside the open fusuma where it was warm and dry and begin to use the diffuse light, the oblique intermittent lines of the rain as the basis for their paintings.
How could Akiko have ever thought that she would be so elated by foul weather? When others were slowly wending their way home through the slicked streets, bent over beneath their ama-gasa against the rain and wind, shivering and damp, she would be busy dipping her brush in ink, putting it to paper.
And, so gradually that she was not at first aware of it, the hatred did indeed fade from her heart, flowing out through the creative conduit Sun Hsiung intuited was right for her. Her paintings softened, flowing more easily over the paper, gaining a kind of organic power that gathered in her lines and spaces, impressing even the sensei who had spent so long at this pursuit.
Thus there came a time when Sun Hsiung judged it right for her to begin the more difficult aspects of her training. On a day when the snow had fallen heavily, a sere blanket covering the greens and browns of Japan, he kept her up all night, beginning the long process. He did this with full knowledge of what this might do to her and to him. For in truth he had never before had a female pupil and had he been of another temperament he would have felt a certain trepidation.
In fact, he recognized that on some level it was odd that he had accepted her sex so readily. His native China was so different in its concept of women. Sun Hsiung knew that his father found intelligent women who showed any kind of talent troublesome. “Sooner or later,” he would tell his son, “they will open their mouths and talk back to you, and then what use is their talent?”
In Japan as well as in China a woman was expected to follow
the dictates of her father until she was married. Then she was required to obey her husband and, in the event of his death, her eldest son.
The worst sin a wife could commit was to fail to bear children. In that event, according to certain ancient codes, she was expected to leave. In some cases she could choose to accept her husband’s siring a child via a mistress or, failing that, adopting a child of one of her husband’s relatives.
A wife’s adultery caused her to be immediately divorced, but a man could have as many mistresses as he chose. In fact, a law enacted in 1870 in Japan established kinship between parent and child to be in the first degree and kinship between a man and his mistress to be in the second degree. Although this was rescinded ten years later, the custom of taking mistresses continued unabated.
When the emperor Mutsuhito ended his reign in 1912 it was rumored that the son who succeeded him as the emperor Taisho had been borne not by Mutsuhito’s wife but by his mistress. Taisho’s reign was brief; in 1926 he was succeeded by his own son, Hirohito.
In recalling all this history Sun Hsiung again reminded himself what a renegade he had been and still was. He had fled mainland China many years before because of the oppressive nature of the society. The fact was that he did not find subservience in anyone attractive, particularly in a mate. He had, consciously or no, dedicated his life to the pursuit of strength, and he differed markedly from the feudal Japanese samurai who fed on strength by day and by night wished only for the obeisance of gentle women.
He looked at his Little Soldier’s working body now in the coppery lamplight, a thin sheen of sweat turning her pale skin glowing and burnished.
He asked himself whether he would look upon a male body with the same set of conflicting emotions which seemed to plague him. Would he be so acutely aware of the play of her back muscles, the rippling of her thighs as she stretched and twisted in the Tai Chi? She performed it with such startling skill and agility, it was difficult for Sun Hsiung to believe she had been at it for six months rather than six years.
His eyes stole down to the workings of her buttocks as she lifted one leg and spun, and he was profoundly ashamed of the instincts which rose within him. And yet he could not help them.
He was a man who had always dealt with his desire in precisely the same way he did all his other requirements: when he felt the need for it he entered the new karyukai district and slaked his thirst. Yet those times had all been of his own choosing and his
iron control had dictated the nights he would perform those erotic exercises to the delight of not only himself but his partner as well.
Now, for the first time since he was a young, untrained lad, his desire rose unbidden, a deceitful serpent twining about him, enlacing him within its languorous coils. Angry, he steeled his mind against the onslaught, but his mind had nothing to do with it. He was a man, after all, who was in touch with the totality of his being, and he knew full well that only modern man chose to live completely within his mind.
And it was Sun Hsiung’s body that was speaking now and he knew deep down where his essence resided that he must respond to its calling in some manner.
That morning, while his pupil still slept off the night’s lessons, he stole from the house and availed himself of the pleasures of the willow world. But now, though he felt the pleasure rippling through him at what was being done to him, though he shot his seed twice within the span of time he was with the tayu, these were only surface sensations and while the storm raged, in the depths there was only motionlessness and silence.
He could not say that he had not enjoyed his stay within the precincts of the happy field. He had felt the clouds and rain but yet his spirit was roaming restless. Though his member was for the moment satiated, still the core of him remained unfulfilled.
Sun Hsiung wondered at this all the way back to his house and, turning the key in the lock and entering once again the sanctum of his domain, he at once understood the nature of his agitation.
For as he went through the silent rooms, he came upon his pupil’s sleeping quarters. The fusuma was partly open, as it always was, and Sun Hsiung paused to check on her. She was still asleep, her face turned to the side, toward him. She was on her back, one leg stuck straight out, the other bent sharply at the knee so that she had the electric appearance of leaping even in repose.
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 jaho to rule such a thing out. But from such a one as his Little Soldier? Why, she had had no training.
