Lord Oda's Revenge (40 page)

‘As an offering?' said the abbot.

‘No,' said Taro. ‘The blood is for me.'

 

T
ATTOOS HAD BEEN
etched into the skin of her arms and her face, Sanskrit symbols meant to help her on her journey.

And they worked
, thought Taro bitterly.
They sped her on her way to the realm of hungry ghosts. . .

But she was at peace now. He kissed his mother's forehead and then untied her white kimono at the neck. The abbot was standing to one side, seemingly uncomfortable with this desecration of the dead, but Taro had
been
to death. He was aware that his mother's body was nothing now but sinews, meat, and bone. The essential part of her had dissipated into brightly glowing light. He remembered that part at least.

With the intricate ties undone, he parted the kimono so that he could see the middle of her chest, where the ribs met. There was an old scar there, a silvery line that ran down her collarbone, a hand-span long. His mother had always told him that she was wounded in childhood, falling onto a sharp agricultural tool.

Taro wondered why he had never questioned this dubious story before.

He traced his finger along the scar. Then, taking a deep breath, he raised his other hand – the hand that was holding a
very sharp knife.

Holding the air in his lungs, he pressed down with the blade, and was surprised when no blood welled up. But he supposed the body had been drying here on the mountaintop for nearly a month, turning slowly from living flesh into earth. He was glad there was no blood, anyway. It made what he was doing seem less an act of violence, and more a ritual performed on the corpse – or at least that was one of the advantages.

It also removed any temptation. She was his mother, but he was still a vampire, and a weak one too, his
qi
depleted by days of haunting and near starvation. He wasn't sure he could resist the smell of blood at full strength, let alone now.

Drawing the knife towards him, he expected to have to cut through the ribs, but met with almost no resistance. The skin opened up smoothly, like earth behind the blade of a plough. Suddenly Taro's fingers trembled, and he dropped the knife. It bounced off her chest and clattered on the ground.

‘Sorry. . .,' he said. ‘I can't do it.'

He felt more than saw the abbot move up beside him, stooping to pick up the knife. He turned away. Hiro clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You did well to even start it,' he said.

The abbot was far too old and wise to gasp as he withdrew what lay inside Taro's mother's chest. But he did suck in air through his teeth, making a whistling noise. Taro turned to see, and the abbot handed over what he had found.

It was small – much smaller than the golden, false ball. But it felt heavy in his hands.

‘It's not even gold!' said Little Kawabata.

Taro frowned at him. ‘No,' he said. ‘It's not.'

The object he was holding was a tiny, perfect sphere. The outer layer seemed to be a kind of glass. Beneath this was a layer
of air, which in places – he was turning it in his hands to examine it – was white and opaque with what seemed to be clouds. Inside, beneath the air, was a smaller sphere. Mostly blue, it was also covered with strange, warped shapes of green, and at the top and bottom were circular coverings of white.

‘It's a representation of the world,' said the abbot. ‘As it would look from up there.' He pointed up at the sky.

‘Don't be silly!' said Hiro. ‘That can't be the world! If it was round like that we'd all slide off.'

‘Idiot!' said Little Kawabata. ‘Have you never seen a globe? My father saw one when he had to kill a Portuguese merchant.'

They entered into a loud discussion, but Taro was still looking at the ball. ‘I'm not sure it's a
representation
,' he said. ‘Look.' The others leaned over and peered into the ball, as Taro held his finger over the clouds.

‘What am I looking at?' asked Little Kawabata.

‘Wait,' said Taro.

It was the abbot who saw it first. ‘Oh, my,' he said.

The clouds were
moving
.

 

A
T FIRST
T
ARO
thought an earthquake was coming. But he could see that the others didn't feel it, this thrumming, vibrating feeling. It was the ball that was doing it, he realized. It was humming to itself, and the noise and movement were tiny, but the impression was of unbelievable, enormous power, which just happened to be contained in something small.

Taro looked closer, and then he was falling through clouds, air rushing at him, whipping his hair, forcing itself into his nostrils, a hollow whooshing in his stomach. He broke through the clouds and then he was in blue sky, in freefall, the sensation of speed thrilling and terrifying at once – he passed a gull and it squealed, wheeling away from him. And then his breath stopped with terror when he saw that there was ocean below him, the sharp waves rising to meet him, very fast, getting bigger and bigger, and soon he was going to crash into the water. He leaned back and—

He was standing with his friends again.

He twisted the ball, peered in close to the green. Instantly he was falling through clear air, unobscured by clouds, only the moon was out on this side of the world, and glowing fatly in the evening sky. Rushing towards him was a landscape like nothing
he had ever seen, a whole country, it seemed, made entirely of beach sand. This great beach stretched out thousands of
ri
in every direction, scattered with a sparse covering of tough-looking trees, and uninterrupted by rivers or lakes of any kind.

Taro leaned his head to try to work out where the sea was, but the ground was moving towards him so quickly that he finally pulled back, and found himself on the mountain again, his mother's body before him.

‘Are you all right?' asked Hiro.

Taro grinned. ‘Yes. Yes, I'm all right.'

‘What does it do? Is it. . . real?'

‘Yes,' said Taro. ‘I think it is.'

‘Make something happen,' said Little Kawabata.

‘I plan to,' said Taro. He turned to Hayao, and the abbot. ‘Take me to Hana,' he said.

 

H
E WASN
'
T SURE
what he was doing as he descended the stone steps, or even as he stood in the wooden structure that had been erected around her body. She looked the same as when he had left her – hair dark and glossy, eyes closed, skin almost luminous in its paleness. Her chest rose and fell gently with her slow breathing. The abbot and Hayao had kept her alive, as they had promised. Now the two of them, as well as Hiro and Little Kawabata, waited anxiously outside the shrine.

Taro wanted to be alone for this, and not least because he didn't know how it was going to work – or if it was going to work, even. The sutras did not record how the Buddha had saved his disciple, and Taro was hoping, perhaps naively, that the ball would somehow show him the way.

He held the ball over Hana's sleeping form and gazed into it. Shadows chased one another over the sea; tiny stars covered half the earth, blanketed in darkness. He concentrated on the tiny sun, which rotated gradually around the bright side of the miniature earth in his hands. If death was darkness, then the sun was its opposite. Holding it in his sight, he felt gravity let go of him, and then he was plunging down towards the ball of fire, his skin burning up with the heat.

Previously he had pulled back, before the ground crushed him or the sea closed itself around him. But this time he closed his eyes and fell. His stomach slid down and backwards, seemingly into his legs, as if trying to abandon his plummeting body. The glow from the sun grew brighter and brighter, even through his eyelids, until he might as well have had his eyes open.

The pain grew more and more intense, until he couldn't bear it any more, and he felt blackness overtake him. The last thing he was aware of thinking was,
Please let Hana wake up
.

He fell into the sun, and he didn't burn. When he was conscious again of anything, he was crossing that jewelled bridge that was not jewelled, and he was once again in death, though he had entered it another way. This time his body was shining, and he knew that last time he had entered death as a dead man; this time it was the ball that had brought him, and he was under the Buddha's protection. He would not know the speech of the dead, and if they talked to him he would understand nothing.

He walked past Enma's throne, and the
kami
of death cowered from him, covering his eyes. Taro smiled. He continued, over the mountains and seas, and finally he came to the place where the dead were. Shades pressed at him from all sides, shadows looking for a sun to cast them. He thought of Hana, and then the dead before him parted, and he passed through them. He climbed a thousand mountains and then the quality of the light changed, and he knew he was no longer in hell. In fact there was no longer any ground beneath his feet – he was standing in darkness, surrounded by stars.

Hana
, he thought.
Hana.

 

K
ENJI
K
IRA WAS
screaming. He had been screaming since he came to Enma's realm. There were no demons poking at him with swords, no pots for boiling. Instead he was in a field of dead men, surrounded by the stench of decay, and there were no spirits around him and no demons either, and yet he knew he was in hell.

He was trapped again, among the rotting bodies. His leg was once again shattered beneath a horse – was it his horse? He thought perhaps it was – and the low things were feasting on his fallen comrades. He saw the maggots crawl from their mouths, he saw the rats gnawing at their entrails.

He had known from the beginning that one day the rats would finish their meals, and they would turn on him, and eat him, too. Even on the first day he had felt things crawling on his flesh, and he had tried to brush them away, screaming, always screaming.