Blood Ninja (3 page)

“Like mother, like son,” said Hiro.

“What do you mean?”

“When the merchant told that story, your mother went pale. Ran off back to the village. She would have forgotten the rice, if I hadn’t chased after her.”

Taro frowned. It wasn’t like his mother to overlook something like that, especially where food was concerned. She took great care of the flow of goods into and out of the house, always making sure not to pay over the odds for anything.

“You know what I think?” said Hiro. “I think the
ronin
want to stir up unrest. You spread a few stories about peasants getting killed by imaginary monsters, and pretty soon no one feels safe. They want to make things difficult for Lord Oda.”

“You’re probably right,” said Taro. “A lot of them served his enemies.” The
ronin
were known to despise Lord Oda, and to blame him for the loss of the their honor, when Oda’s troops destroyed the armies belonging to Lord Yoshimoto. That war had affected everyone—even Taro and Hiro. It was fleeing the violence inflicted by Lord Yoshimoto’s samurai that had brought Hiro’s parents to the village of Shirahama, like so many other peasants of the interior who’d been forced outward to the coast, and a new life of fishing that they had had to learn quickly, or perish.

But Hiro’s parents had not learned quickly enough, and that was why they were dead.

Taro felt a little better now. Of
course
the
ronin
were seeking to destabilize Lord Oda. He was the strongest daimyo the Kanto had ever known, and strong samurai always made bitter enemies. His heroism, his extraordinary ability with the blade, and his genius for the tactics of battle had made him a god to his people, and a demon to those he had defeated. It was said that when he was first named a
kensei
—a “sword saint”—in recognition of his mastery of the
katana
, he barely went a day without being challenged by some samurai desperate to make his name ring out over the land. All of them had died.

And when Lord Oda had lost the use of his right arm in battle, he had simply switched his sword to the other hand, and become once again a
kensei
.

Yes, he was the kind of man who could provoke the weak to make up silly rumors.

Taro shouldered his bow, clapped Hiro on the back, and set off toward the village. He didn’t know that later on that night he would get all the adventure he wished for, or that real adventure was not like the feats he had heard of in stories.

Real adventure involved pain, loss, and blood. Sometimes all at once.

They passed Hiro’s hut first.

When Taro’s father had brought him back to the village after the death of Hiro’s parents, Taro had been so badly injured that he had almost died of blood loss. Seeing what Taro had risked to save the chubby little boy, his parents had taken Hiro in, lavishing all the care on him that they wished they could give to their son.

But Taro had been in the healer’s hands, and the Buddha’s, and they could do nothing for him. Finally, on the seventh day, Taro awoke from fever dreams. His wound was already healing and, miraculously, infection had been held at bay. He returned to find a new brother in his home.

A couple of years ago, though, Hiro had earned enough from his wrestling and fishing to acquire a small shack only a few hundred meters from the sea that had taken his parents. Hanging from a wooden nail above the door was the open jaw of a shark, white against the dark wood.

Even now, when Taro saw the jaws and their serrated teeth,
he would sometimes shudder. But Hiro would never get rid of the thing. It was a talisman, almost, of their friendship—a tangible reminder of what Taro had done for him.

That day itself was a little blurred in Taro’s memory, by time and also because for many days afterward he had been unconscious, first from blood loss and later from fever. It had been a bright summer’s day, the breeze bringing scents of pine and dry seaweed. Taro had been up on the headland, playing with his bow. The first he had known something was wrong was when he’d heard screams, and looked down to see a little boat in the bay, people splashing around it.

He’d seen the blood next.

The villagers had warned the refugees from inland about the
mako
who patrolled the waters, the sleek, large sharks that followed the tuna. But the inlanders must have thought it just a superstition, or a story made up to frighten them, perhaps because there were no monsters to kill people where they came from, only samurai and wars.

Hiro’s parents, ignoring the warnings, had cut up their fish and thrown them into the water around their boat, thinking to attract more fish into their nets. All they had attracted was a
mako
, and it had capsized their boat with no trouble at all.

Of course, Taro hadn’t known any of that then. All he’d known was that someone was in trouble. He ran down to the beach, threw himself into the water, and swam out, not thinking for one moment of his own safety. Diving into the murk, he found a chubby young boy, drowning. He seized the boy and dragged him back to shore.

“My mother!” gasped the boy when Taro dragged him onto the sand. “Did you see my mother?”

Taro shook his head, winded.

“A monster came from the sea and …
bit
her,” said the boy. “I tried to find her, but I can’t swim, and my father can’t either …”

Taro looked out again at the dark slick on the sea, and pursed his lips grimly. A
mako
attack. The boy’s parents were surely dead. But he couldn’t just leave it at that. Without a word to the boy
he checked that his knife was in his belt and dived again into the waves, swimming out toward the slick.

He didn’t find anything, but when he was swimming back to shore, he did feel a rough impact against his side, and then the shark was circling and coming for him again, its mouth open. The salt water stinging his open eyes, he fumbled the knife from his belt, and that was when the shark collided with his shoulder, biting down, and he felt pain flooding his chest.

Blood ribboned from his wound into the clear water. He was surprised that alongside his pain he felt no fear. Only an all-consuming fury at this beast that had orphaned the boy on the beach, and looked like it was going to kill him too. Dizzy from the bleeding and the pain of moving his arm, Taro snapped his hips aside on the shark’s next pass, threw his arms around the coarse, rough body, and stabbed down with his knife.

After that, Taro’s memory failed him, but he must have fought like a demon from Enma’s hell realm, because his father said the shark was more wound than flesh in the end. When it was dead—and this was the part Taro could never remember, but that had bonded Hiro to him forever—Taro dragged its weight into shallow water, then hauled the carcass up onto the sand.

Collapsing to his knees in front of Hiro, he gestured to the dead shark. “There,” he said. Then he passed out, and Hiro ran screaming for help, and it wasn’t till three days later that Taro awoke and asked how the little orphaned boy was doing.

Now the two of them never spoke of that day. Hiro kept the jaws on his hut, Taro kept the scar on his shoulder, and that was that. The two boys had grown up as brothers, and even now that Hiro lived on his own, they spent most of every day together. Taro’s mother had wept when Hiro had left their home, waving smoke from the cooking fire away from her face, impatiently, as if it were that which had made her eyes water and not Hiro’s going. But it was a small dwelling place for four, especially when one of them was as big as Hiro. The best way to repay them their kindness, said Hiro, was to give them their home back.

As the two friends entered the village, the sun dropped below the mountains to the west, setting fire to their peaks.

“Well,” said Taro. “Another day gone. What shall we do tomorrow?”

“I had it in mind that I might visit some friends for tea,” said Hiro.

“Ah. I was going to have a new kimono made. I thought perhaps a pattern of peony flowers and birds. Then I might visit my sword smith and pick up my new
katana
.”

None of these things would happen: Taro would spend the next day hunting with his bow, as always, and Hiro would spend the day wrestling strangers, as always.

Taro and Hiro walked past the wooden houses of the village, light spilling from the paper shoji windows onto sun-dried ground. But no light shone from the hut Taro shared with his parents, and as he approached it, he frowned. His mother should have been back by now, lighting the fire, preparing food. He had been looking forward to showing her his rabbits.

Taro glanced at the bay, scanning it for the forms of the ama, black against the now-dark water. When he saw the boat, he let out a sigh. He could see his mother’s little boat over on the far northern side of the bay, below the promontory on which stood an ancient red torii shrine, its sweeping roof resembling a dragon’s back. The other amas were nowhere to be seen—perhaps they were on the other side of the finger of rock, diving near the shrine to the Princess of the Hidden Waters, who protected the amas from harm.

But even the Princess of the Hidden Waters would be no help to Taro’s mother if she got into trouble in
those
waters.

“What’s wrong?” said Hiro, sensing Taro’s anxiety.

Taro pointed to the boat. “My mother. She’s very near the wreck.” As he spoke, he saw her head break the surface, her dark hair matted to her scalp as she pulled herself into the boat and took up the oars.

“Gods,” said Hiro. “What’s she doing?”

“I don’t know,” said Taro. “She told me she wasn’t going to dive there anymore.”

Everyone knew that the part of the bay in which his mother was diving was unsafe—
especially
the ama. It was his mother and her friends who had told Taro about the royal ship that had gone down there centuries before, and how its wreck had cursed the waters. They spoke of the hungry ghosts of its sailors—
gaki
—that had been left by the suddenness of their drowning forever barred from enlightenment, and could only now relieve their eternal hunger by causing others to drown as they had drowned.

The amas spoke of an enormous octopus, which had stolen one ama away, and made a wife of her corpse.

But above all, they spoke of the dangerous, unnatural currents, and the possibility of death for anyone who dived there.

Taro turned to Hiro. “You go home. I want to make sure she’s all right.” He hurried down the hill toward the shore.

It was bad enough that one of his parents should be dying, without his mother killing herself too.

Taro watched his mother’s every move as she put some rice on to boil. He kept his eyes on her movements all the time. He knew that amas could be hurt by diving too deep and coming up too quickly, and he didn’t like the pallor of his mother’s skin. A couple of times recently he had seen thin trickles of blood coming from her ears, which she had wiped away quickly, refusing to answer questions about it. He feared that there might be more blood too, when he wasn’t looking. Amas could dive only so long—eventually even the strongest went deaf, or worse, as the coral of the sea took root in their ears.

She turned to him, her eyes dark pits of shadow in the dim light of the little hut. With the glow of the fire behind her, she seemed ghostlike, thin, weak.

“I’m not going to break, you know,” she said. “There’s no need to worry about me so much.”

Taro shrugged. “I don’t like it,” he said. “You told me you wouldn’t dive in deep water.” He didn’t say,
or near the wreck
, but the accusation hung between them anyway.

“I needed some pearls,” said his mother. “With your father ill …”

Taro glanced over at her diving bag. He’d seen her take out some abalone—not much, in fact—but no pearls. “You didn’t find any?” he asked.

His mother looked up quickly. “No,” she said. “Sometimes the sea takes but doesn’t give.”

“Takes what?” said Taro.

His mother shook her head. “Nothing, Taro. Nothing.”

But Taro knew it was
not
nothing. What the sea took, eventually, if you dived its depths for long enough, was your hearing, your sight, eventually your life. It worked its way into you, calcifying you, making you slowly into rock or reef.

Taro’s mother busied herself with the rice, averting her eyes from his, clearly wanting to avoid further discussion of her diving. On the other side of the curtained partition, Taro could hear his father’s heavy breathing. Leaving his mother’s side for a moment, he went to peer in to where his father lay. The old man snored, oblivious—he had been bed-bound by illness for months now, his body clinging to life even as his spirit seemed to have made up its mind to depart the human realm. He lay on his back, mouth and eyes wide open, but no sound issued from the former and no light of understanding from the latter.

As Taro looked down at his father’s frail frame, he couldn’t believe that this was the same man who had taught him spearfishing, who had showed him how to keep his ears from popping when diving right down to the floor of the bay. Steeling himself, Taro knelt by the bed, and kissed his father on the forehead. He made a prayer to Amida Buddha, to fish his father’s soul back from whichever dark depths it swam in. “Come back,” he said. “You are the only father I have.” Even as he said it, he knew it was childish, stupid.