Lord Oda's Revenge (36 page)

 

T
ARO RUSHED TO
his mother, but she evaporated in front of his eyes, turned to hazy mist. He looked up the hill and there she was again, farther away from the village, still speaking to him in that nonsense language.

The language of the dead
, he thought with a shiver.

Again and again she appeared, disappeared, and then shimmered into being again farther along the path. It was as if she were leading him away from Shirahama, and that was all right with him. He did not understand how it could be that she had not returned with the other spirits at the end of
obon
, and a chill went through him when he thought of it.
What if it is my fault?
he thought.
What if I'm keeping her here because of my love for her, as Mokuren did?
He had never felt such a mixture of emotions – to see his mother, even as a pale ghost, filled him with gladness, and yet he was afraid, too, and worried for her soul.

As he neared the Kyoto road, she appeared right in front of him, speaking more urgently this time. He felt a great weariness settle on him.

‘I can't understand you,' he said.

His mother's face fell, sadness settling soft on her features. She spoke again, and again he distinguished no words he knew.
He stepped forward, to try to touch her, and she was gone.

Oh, gods
, he thought.
I am being haunted, like Hayao, and I don't know whether to be happy or sad.

A moment later he saw men ahead of him, blocking the path and standing among the cedar trees. Had his mother been trying to warn him again? The place was close to where he'd killed the rabbit, the day when his life changed forever, when ninjas sent by Lord Oda arrived in Shirahama and killed his father.

This is Oda's territory, his province,
thought Taro.
I was arrogant to think that wouldn't matter.

He could turn and run, but there would be no point. Besides, he'd seen the ghosts turn to crabs before his eyes – he knew that there was more to the world than most people saw, and that made him think that just possibly prophecies were real too, and he might not die on this anonymous path. Or if he did die, then just as well. He would rejoin his mother – maybe Hana, too.

That wasn't all of it, though. There was also the anger that burned in his chest when he drew closer and saw that the men wore the Oda
mon
on their breastplates, and on the tusked and horned helmets on their heads. The need for revenge was like something trying to force its way out of him by charring his flesh, some fire-breathing demon living within his flesh, beneath the cage of his ribs. He understood now how Yukiko must have felt about those she considered guilty of her sister Heiko's death.

Taro kept walking, but slowed. He scanned the path ahead, counting the men, checking where they stood. He had only a sword to defend him, and there were at least eight of them. Some of them had bows, he could see. Well, he could send some of them to hell, at least. Even as he thought all this he was gauging the distance to the nearest bow, wondering if he could get to it in
time to nock an arrow to the string – he had always been good with bows.

‘Stop, boy,' said the biggest man. His helmet was a demon's face, leering and pulling its tongue.

Taro stopped.

‘You must be Taro. We've been waiting for you.' The man drew his
katana
. ‘Hand over the ball.'

‘I don't have it,' said Taro.

‘You expect me to believe that?'

‘I don't expect you to do anything. I'm just telling you I don't have it.'

The samurai sighed. ‘Where is it, then?'

‘The last I saw of it, a samurai had it. He wasn't wearing the Oda
mon
.'

A ripple of unease ran through the men at that. Taro heard several of them draw in breath, heard it whistle over their lips and tongues. His senses turned more acute, he had noticed, when a fight was brewing. His hand twitched at his side, wanting to go to the sword.

‘Liar,' said the big man, evidently a
hatamoto
, judging by the spear he carried with the Oda
mon
on a small pennant – and so a prominent member of the Oda hierarchy. ‘There are only Oda samurai in these parts.'

‘That's strange,' said Taro. ‘Because the men who took the ball were being fired on by a ship flying the Oda flag. It seems to me your enemies must have the ball. Maybe even Lord Tokugawa.' As he said it, a thought flashed through his mind. The big man on the ship – it couldn't have been Lord Tokugawa, could it?

No, it was impossible. The daimyo would not be on a ship in Shirahama bay, deep in Oda territory. It would be tactical madness.

The leader took a step towards Taro. ‘Give us the ball or die, ninja scum,' he said.

‘Not much of a choice,' said Taro, ‘when I don't have the ball.' But he moved forward anyway, his hand outstretched, fingers closed, as if clutching something. The
hatamoto
took the bait – leaned towards him, looking down at his hand. Taro flicked his hand and the sand he'd put in his pocket sprayed out, hitting the man in the eyes. He followed with a right-hand strike to the neck, his large ring striking a pressure point on the
hatamoto
's neck and causing his legs to give way, as if the tendons at the back of his knees had been severed.

Taro used the man's bulk as a shield to take the first three arrows that flew towards him. Then he pushed the corpse to the ground and rushed at the last man to fire – the one who'd be slowest to reload. He still hadn't drawn his sword – instead he jumped at the man, clung to his shoulders, and flipped over him, turning in the air. He landed behind the man, hugged him tight, and dragged him, twisting, to the ground. An arrow whooshed over his head as they fell. He bit deep into the man's neck, tearing open the windpipe. Limbs flailed. He registered in some deep part of him the iron beauty of blood on his tongue, but he didn't drink – he didn't have time. Still, some of the life force trickled down his throat, a warm blessing.

With one hand, he snapped the quiver from the dying man's back, and with the other he tore the bow from his loose fingers. He came up on his knees, aimed, fired. A samurai staggered, clutching at the feathers suddenly protruding from his throat, gagging on blood.

Taro nocked, drew, fired – a smooth rhythm, and his arrows took one archer in the heart, one in the stomach, and another,
who had turned to run, in the back. The one who had been hit in the stomach went down on his knees beside the tree he had been using for cover, but still started to arm his bow once more. Taro put another arrow in his eye.

The world had shrunk to this moment, this scene before him. He could hear nothing but his own heartbeat,
whoosh-boom, whoosh-boom, whoosh-boom
. He wasn't aware of the sunlight falling through the leaves, the distant smell of the sea, the crying of birds. He was aware only of the other men, and him, and the work that would have to be done to put them in the grave. He wasn't even thinking about revenge, not really. He was just conscious of a consuming imperative, which was to kill these Oda samurai, to give them a taste of what they had done to the monks of Mount Hiei, to his mother, to Hana.

A lithe samurai with bushy eyebrows beneath his mask came at Taro, sword swinging wildly. It was no kata Taro had ever seen – he thought it was pure fear and desperation turned into movement. Taro didn't even bother deflecting the blow, just let it swing harmlessly past, and brought his sword up into the undefended side of the man, splitting him from his armpit to his opposite shoulder. There might have been a gurgling sound, though Taro may have imagined it because he saw the blood bubble from the man's mouth.

Two more samurai crept towards him – he was surprised to see that they appeared to be the only ones still living. He bounced his sword in his hand, half invitation and half taunt. He suddenly became aware that he was screaming, though he hadn't heard that either.

A horrible thought went through his head, almost as if someone else was thinking it.
They're already dead
, said the thought.
They just don't know it yet
.

There must have been a
clang
that rang out through the trees when his blade met the onrushing sword of the first man – but he didn't hear it. He focused on the eyes of his enemies, watching for their next moves. He blocked, parried, slashed. These two were good, he realized. They were driving him back, cramping his movements, keeping his sword so busy defending that he wasn't able to draw blood. He glanced down, to avoid a stone or a corpse at his feet – it could have been either – and a line of fire traced itself down his arm.

Blood dripped from the wound. It wasn't deep but it was bad, anyway, it meant he was losing. He saw one of the samurai – blankly, he noted that the man was missing most of his teeth – grin at him. Swords flashed, spun, danced. He was growing weaker.

Then, an opening. The man on his right stepped awkwardly, catching his foot on the armour of a downed archer. He recovered quickly, getting his sword up in a block – but Taro wasn't concerned with that. What the pause from the right-hand man had enabled him to see was that the samurai on the left was coming at him with a classic kata, and he raised his sword, deflected, took off the man's jaw with a devastating blow that continued in a blood-spattered right-hand arc, finished by biting into the other man's shoulder.

Shaking and convulsing, the left-hand man went down – though again, his companion was stronger. He twisted away from Taro's sword, the blood running down his arm forming an almost exact counterpoint to Taro's own wound, as if Taro were facing himself across a mirror, a nightmare version of himself in Oda armour.

The samurai spat. ‘Now we're equal,' he said, as if this were some kind of stupid childhood game.

‘No,' said Taro. ‘We're not. You're a samurai and I'm a fisherman.'

‘So?' said the man.

‘So I don't bother with things like honour,' said Taro. He brought his hands together as if to grip his sword with both, then flicked his left wrist. A throwing star embedded itself in the man's cheek, or rather it was there so quickly and suddenly it was as if it had started out within him, and grown outward through the flesh. Observing Shusaku's actions had taught Taro always to carry such things; somewhere in the folds of his cloak were also gold coins, explosives, daggers disguised as quills.

The man grinned again – it seemed a fixation with him – and leaped forward, pressing Taro back with a flurry of strikes. Taro met them easily, though he gave ground anyway, to give the man a good death, if nothing else.

‘You missed,' said the man.

‘No,' said Taro. ‘I didn't.' Just then the man's leg gave way beneath him and he crashed heavily to the ground – Taro heard a crunch as his knee hit a rock and broke. He clutched at his windpipe, his eyes going big and bulging.

‘Poison,' said Taro. ‘Just the thing for ninja scum like me.'

The samurai was starting to turn an alarming purple colour. Taro decapitated him with a single blow, to put him out of his misery. Then he limped over to the leader's body. He must have pulled something in his leg during the fight, though he couldn't think when. He looked down into the proud, arrogant, stupid eyes that stared out blankly through the mask. The Oda
mon
was set in the middle of the section of steel that covered the man's forehead. Then, as he looked into the dead eyes, it wasn't the
hatamoto
he saw any more but Hana, lying with the scrolls
clasped to her chest, not moving, and then it was his mother, too still in her white clothes.

Without warning, a tsunami of fury washed away any trace of Taro for a moment, any trace of a human being, and left him a demon of revenge. He screamed and this time he knew he was screaming. He brought his sword down, brought it down again, again. He felt blood hot against his face, like hell's rain, and he kept stabbing down, butchering the already dead body.

Then there were great racking sobs going through him, and as he shook the sword fell from his fingers and struck the ground wetly. He was crying, he realized, and his tears mingled with the blood on his face, and there was a sound coming out of him that was like a broken bellows, a terrible, sad, lonely sound.

He gazed around him, at the broken bodies and the blood. He gazed inside him, and saw that his mother was still dead and Hana might be too, and it still hurt. None of their deaths had done anything to help him; his revenge was a hollow thing – a rice bowl with nothing in it but chopsticks.

Feeling sick, he dragged himself to his feet and lurched from that place.
If I kill Yukiko, and Lord Oda – will it feel this empty?
he wondered. He couldn't think about that now – it made his head hurt. He
had
to kill them – they had killed his mother, had taken Hana from him. It was because of Lord Oda that all of this had happened, that his father had died – the man he'd thought was his father – and his mother, too.

And there was something else. If he didn't cling to revenge, to the desire to hurt those who had hurt him, then what was there? The Buddha ball was nothing – a golden trinket. Perhaps there was a real ball somewhere, and he would look for it, of course he would. He wasn't going to give up on reviving Hana. But in his mind that quest was shapeless, amorphous. He didn't know
how he was ever going to begin to find the real Buddha ball, even if it existed.

A small, quiet voice inside him – a voice he didn't like, a snivelling voice – also told him that Hana might not wake as he wanted her to, might not wake to embrace him and take him for her husband but to stand by Hayao's side, to marry the samurai she clearly deserved. He told that voice to shut up; it made his skin crawl.

As he took the path, he turned and saw his mother's ghost following him. It didn't even surprise him any more – he accepted it, with a weary horror. His mother was grey against the green of the grass, she was shaking her head, over and over, and she was weeping. She had seen him kill those men, he realized – had seen him lose control of his anger, anoint himself with blood.