Linnear 02 - The Miko (49 page)

But such was not to be. In the spring of 1958, when Akiko was thirteen, Ikan could not be roused from her futon. Fright flew through Fuyajo like an evil kami, turning the girls nervous and short-tempered. All conversation dropped to a whisper as the doctor arrived and took the long, slow climb up to her room. Akiko was kept with a group of the girls and they forcibly restrained her from ascending.

There was no life left within Ikan’s glorious husk. The old physician shook his head from side to side and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He sat on the edge of her futon and stared down upon the pale face and thought that he had never seen such magnificent human beauty in his life.

By her side he found an empty bottle of sake and a small vial. This, too, was empty, save for a light dusting of white powder along its curved inside. The doctor dipped his little finger and touched the white tip to his tongue. His head nodded again, his tongue continued its clucking.

He heard movement behind him and he quickly pocketed the vial. Perhaps there was something for him to do here, he thought. For when those who ran Fuyajo asked him the cause of death, he lifted his shoulders, let them fall resignedly, and told them she had died of heart failure, which in a sense was true.

He felt no compunction about lying to them or even falsifying the death certificate. In fact he felt ennobled by the deed. He had read the papers concerning Vice-Minister Shimada’s shocking suicide and in its aftermath the unraveling of the evidence against him. This woman had endured enough, he thought. Let her death be a peaceful, natural one; a death that will cause no further ripples of evil talk.

Those who ran Fuyajo wasted no time in explaining to Akiko what had happened. And at last it dawned on her what the composition of her life would be from this moment on until the day she died, perhaps in precisely the same manner that her mother had expired. And that knowledge was totally unacceptable to her.

That night she gathered up her belongings, much as Ikan had done the night before her departure from her family’s farm deep in the countryside, and several items of her mother’s that she loved and did not want to leave to the scavengers at Fuyajo. Stuffing these, too, into a small, battered bamboo suitcase, she stole out of the building in the dead of night. The height of the varied activities served to shield her from discovery.

Soon she was crossing the narrow street and, turning a corner, hurried down a dark alley, moving quickly and surely until she had left the Yoshiwara far behind her. She never once looked back, and she never returned.

They came after her, of course. They had every right to. She was an enormously valuable commodity and they had a great many years invested in her. There were no Yakuza involved in running Fuyajo and the Boryokudan held no piece of it. Still, those who had founded the Castle That Knows No Night were hard businessmen and their descendants to whom the running of the brothel now devolved were much like their ancestors. And though the Occupation Forces had begun to disband the Yoshiwara, and Fuyajo was thus forced to move, they did not take kindly to Akiko’s defection. In fact, they wished to put an end to it as swiftly as possible. To that end they dispatched two thugs to return her to her proper home and, if that were not practical, to exact from her the highest possible penalty for her treacherous deed.

The first Akiko suspected that she was being followed was when she saw two shadows moving at once, one slightly ahead of her and one perhaps two blocks behind her. She would never have seen the shadows at allfor they were absolutely silent had it not been for the cat. Four tiny kittens had been suckling at the cat’s distended teats when Akiko stumbled into her territory and, startled, she had arisen and, arching her back, hissed at the intruding shape, baring her teeth and glaring carnelian eyes into the wan light.

Akiko gasped, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, and she skidded to one side, her head and shoulders moving away from the angered cat even as her feet and legs were still sliding along the pavement toward it. That’s when she saw the twin movements, and her eyes went wide.

She pressed herself against a cool wall, looked to front and back. Now there was nothing. Silence. The absence of traffic was eerie and not even a koban, a police call box, around.

She was still in the Asakusa district, filled with the old traditional ways, Tokyo’s last remnants from ages gone by. The buildings here were small and low, of wood and oiled paper as they once had been throughout Japan, no steel and glass towers as in other sectors of the city.

Akiko, her heart still in her throat, sidled away from the bristling cat, certain now that the long arm of Fuyajo was stalking her. But there was no way they were going to bring her back to that hated place, she decided. She would die first. And not before she hurt someone badly.

A red rage beat through her like a tide, an accumulated sizzling she was still only dimly aware of. Quickly she knelt down and as she did so, a dark flicker came to the corner of her eye, a swift blur like a racing cloud obscuring for a moment the face of the moon.

Unhesitatingly she opened her bamboo suitcase and took out the pistol. It was fairly small, a pearl-handled .22 caliber, well oiled and in good operating condition. It was fully loaded, she had double-checked that before she had removed it from its hiding place beneath her mother’s futon. Why Dean would have such an implement in her possession Akiko could not fathom, but the day she had discovered it more than a year ago she had had enough sense not to tell anyone, not even her mother, what she had found. And tonight she had not wanted to leave it behind. Now she knew why.

They were closing in. Akiko swiftly closed her suitcase and stood calmly, the pistol hidden behind her. Curiously, she felt no fear. She had been born into the night, and darkness held none of the primitive terror it did for many people. She was at home in its furtive light and rather enjoyed the anonymity its shadows afforded her. Night at Fuyajo would find her rising from her futon to roam the many rooms at will, honing her instincts and her hand-eye coordination, stealthily climbing back stairs and crawling through vent passageways in order to observe the myriad couples.

One came. Lithe and slender, he blended into the darkness so that he was almost upon her before she became aware of his presence. She turned her head, startled despite herself, giving a strangled little cry, angry with herself for not sensing him sooner.

“What do you want?” Her voice was a husky whisper, little more than the night wind which rustled the leaves of the cypress above her head.

Sound, too, could betray him, so he remained silent. And now, unbidden, Akiko felt fear flutter her heart. Her eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated to their maximum as she peered into the blackness in order to pick out some tiny gleam that would make of him something more than a wraith.

“I know you’re there,” she said softly, willing her voice not to tremble. “If you come near me, I’ll kill you.” But despite her bravado, she began to tremble. She felt chilled to the bone and everything around her seemed strange and forbidding.

On the verge of tears, Akiko made a decision. She knew that the longer she waited the more certain it was that she would lose her nerve. Already tremors coursed through her tightly coiled muscles, wracking her like ague. It was now or never, and she would just have to trust her eyes. She had not seen him move from the patch of shadow so close to her so that must mean that he had not. Visions of ghosts and shape-changing creatures were for children.

I am afraid, she told herself in the calmest inner voice she could summon up. But he’ll kill me if I let him or, at the very least, drag me back to Fuyajo, which would certainly be worse than death.

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.