The Incense Game (20 page)

Tahara, Deguchi, and Kitano began to chant in a language, full of hisses and singsong intonations, that Hirata couldn’t understand. They’d told him it was ancient Chinese. He recited the syllables he’d memorized with no idea of their meaning. Tahara took a swig from the flask, then passed it around. When his turn came, Hirata drank. The potion tasted like exotic flowers mixed with sewage, fruit, and spices, and distilled into powerful liquor. It burned down his throat and hit his stomach as if he’d swallowed a red-hot cannonball. He gagged and coughed.

Unaffected, Tahara, Deguchi, and Kitano chanted louder, faster. Heat spread through Hirata. His muscles, nerves, and bones were on fire. He held up his hands, expecting to see them blacken and wither. His fingers distorted into white, branching, rootlike shapes. Gasping, he glanced around the circle. Tahara’s, Deguchi’s, and Kitano’s images swam, fragmented, and recoalesced.

“What’s happening to me?” he cried.

“The spell is working.” The chanting continued. “You’re going into a trance.”

The words seemed to come from all of the men. The echo ricocheted off the trees. Strange colors swirled, orange and mauve and iridescent blue. Out of the corner of his eye Hirata saw movement in the forest.

“Who’s there?” he demanded.

As his eyes chased the movement, a figure reappeared and disappeared, a shadow with a horned helmet, a flared armor tunic, and jutting swords. It was larger than any man, a giant. Power radiated from it in waves that boomed and pulsed.

“It’s the spirit. He’s come for you.”

Terror filled Hirata. He didn’t care that the spirit could give him the powers he craved. He only wanted to run away. But his legs were numb as stone; they wouldn’t move. He clawed the air with his hands. They turned numb and useless, too. He spun as he toppled. He sprawled on his back across the altar stone.

The trees above him leaned inward, their trunks like the sides of a funnel, the sky at the far, narrow end. Tahara, Deguchi, and Kitano extended their arms around the altar, hands touching. They stared down at Hirata, their lips moving as they chanted. Their voices sent pressure waves crashing against his ears. Veins of fiery light crossed, linked, and dissolved around him. His heart thumped so hard that he thought it would explode.

“Stop or I’ll die!” he screamed.

The men’s faces, bent over him, shone with exultation. The moon expanded and contracted in rhythm with their chanting. With each expansion it grew larger, exerting a force that sucked Hirata toward the sky. He felt himself rising through the funnel of trees. As he reached the treetops, his point of view suddenly inverted. He was looking down at the clearing. He saw himself lying on the altar, enmeshed in fire-veins, his face a mask of panic, surrounded by Tahara, Deguchi, and Kitano. He tried to call to them, but they didn’t look up. They didn’t know that his spirit had left his body.

The universe upended in another disorienting shift. The moon filled Hirata’s vision. Black clouds streamed across it like ink on water. They gathered into the shape of a samurai in full armor on horseback. It was the warrior from the forest. His image enlarged as Hirata rose into the sky and the moon expanded. Now the warrior charged his mount toward Hirata. His form took on definition. Hirata could see the plates of his helmet and armor tunic, his eyes glowing above the iron face shield. He drew his sword, which shone as if forged from lightning.

Hirata screamed again. He heard the faint, feeble sound from his earthbound body. The men’s chanting followed him as he rose faster and faster. Another deep, garbled voice joined theirs, speaking unintelligible words. It was the warrior’s. The noises mixed into a cacophony that grew louder as he accelerated. The earth fell away beneath him. He saw Edo, the castle, and the hills shrink in a landscape of mountains and rivers and lights from distant cities, then the islands of Japan floating in the sea, dwarfed by foreign continents. The men’s chanting pursued him as he whirled through the vacuum of space.

Celestial bodies appeared—a gigantic ball of red, swirling gas; an orange-and-black-striped orb encircled by a sparkling ring. Stars magnified into white suns with molten, turbulent centers. Hirata’s acceleration suddenly reversed. Now he was falling. Planets and stars streaked by him in columns of light. The chanting rose to an inaudible pitch. Below, the earth soared up to meet him. Mountains raised jagged peaks. Wind shrieked in his ears. Friction burned him as the round gap in the trees around the clearing in the forest swallowed him. He landed with a crash that shattered perception, extinguished thought in silent, empty blackness.

*   *   *

EXCRUCIATING PAIN BURNED
down Hirata’s left arm. A tiger with teeth made of fire was gnawing on it. He moaned and writhed. Hands restrained him. Voices called his name. He awakened to find himself lying on the cold, hard altar stone. The circle of sky above the treetops was pale blue with morning. Tahara, Deguchi, and Kitano pinned him down, their anxious faces bent over him. Hirata raised his head. He was back in his body, alive. When he tried to wiggle his feet and fingers, they obeyed. He gasped with relief.

“What happened?” he said, wondering if his experience had been a hallucination.

“Nothing.” Tahara sounded disappointed. “You just screamed all night.”

“Didn’t you see the warrior?” Hirata demanded as he sat up. His arm still hurt terribly.

“No. You mean you did? This is the first time we’ve managed to evoke him in months, and he appeared only to you.” Vexation tinged Kitano’s voice.

“What happened? Did he tell you anything?” Tahara asked eagerly.

Hirata described how he’d been transported out of his body, into the cosmos. “Something’s wrong with my arm.” The rest of his body was stiff with cold, but the pain burned and throbbed from the tiger’s fiery fangs. He pushed up his sleeve.

The skin on his arm glowed as if from flames underneath. The other men exclaimed. Tiny bright lines appeared within the glow. The pain went from excruciating to unbearable. Hirata rolled off the altar stone onto the ground. He frantically scraped snow against his arm. The snow melted and steamed. As the cold penetrated his skin, the glow faded; the pain eased.

Deguchi crouched, pointing at Hirata’s arm. Tahara said, “Look!”

A line of precisely written characters adorned his skin from bicep to wrist. Hirata stared in amazement. They were bloodred, but when he touched them, they were smooth, dry, and painless, like a tattoo. “Did you do this to me while I was in the trance?” he demanded.

“No. It’s a message from the spirit,” Kitano said.

Hirata saw that Kitano was speaking the truth. All three men beheld the message with genuine awe. Repulsed and horrified, Hirata tried to rub the characters off. Tahara restrained him and read the message: “‘Bring Lord Tokugawa Ienobu to the shogun’s garden at the hour of the cock, the day after tomorrow.’”

In the moment of stunned silence that ensued, a breeze disturbed the forest.

“This is the first time the spirit has sent a written message,” Tahara said.

“How did he communicate with you other times?” Hirata was so distraught that he could barely get the words out.

“He spoke to us,” Kitano said.

Hirata remembered the voice he’d heard. The characters wavered before his eyes. He felt nauseated.

“Ienobu is the first person he’s mentioned by name,” Kitano said, “except for—”

Tahara silenced him with a glance.

“Except for me? The spirit mentioned me?” Nobody answered Hirata, but he knew he was right. Fresh shock hit him. “What did it say? When was this?”

“Three years ago,” Tahara admitted. “He asked us who our fellow disciples were. He told us to invite you to join our society.”

Now Hirata knew why they’d invited him even though they were reluctant to share their secrets. The message branded on his arm gave him a clue to what the spirit wanted with him. “He needs someone who moves in the inner circle of power. The three of you don’t. You can’t do things for him there. But I can.”

“More or less.” Tahara’s casual tone sounded forced. Hirata could tell that he and the others resented the fact that although they’d learned how to work the magic spells, Hirata was the one for whom the spirit had special plans.

“Well, I won’t meddle with Lord Ienobu,” Hirata said. “We can’t know what will happen as a result. I won’t be responsible for bringing harm to the shogun’s nephew.”

He rolled down his sleeve, covering the message, and started to walk away. Deguchi stepped in front of him. The men’s aura began to pulse threateningly.

“You have to do it,” Tahara said. “The spirit commands us.”

“Why can’t he do things for himself?”

“He’s disembodied energy,” Kitano said. “He knows everything because he can go everywhere and spy on everyone, but he has no physical form, and he can’t act on humans or communicate with them except during rituals.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

Tahara parted with more information as stingily as if he were squeezing blood from a vein. “He’s the ghost of a soldier who died on the battlefield at Sekigahara.”

That was the battle at which Tokugawa Ieyasu had defeated his rival warlords; later, he’d become the first Tokugawa shogun. Hirata remembered that the spirit’s armor had looked bulky and old-fashioned. “How does that qualify him to decide what destiny is and how it should be fulfilled?”

“He’s not the one who decides,” Kitano said. “He’s only a conduit between us and the gods of the cosmos.”

“And they said I should trot Ienobu into the shogun’s garden as if he were a puppet? Oh, well, then. Of course everybody has to do what the ‘gods of the cosmos’ say.” Hirata pushed past Deguchi.

The men blocked his exit from the clearing. “You took an oath when you joined our society,” Tahara reminded Hirata. “You swore to abide by all its decisions.”

“I have a say in our decision about whether to follow the ghost’s orders,” Hirata retorted, “and I’ve decided I won’t.”

Tahara smiled with all his charm. “All you have to do is arrange for Ienobu to walk through the garden. What could it hurt?”

“Are you serious?” Hirata stared. “Have you forgotten about Yoritomo? No, I won’t do it. I’m quitting the society.”

“Sorry, but we can’t allow that.” Tahara’s eyes were steely above his smile. Deguchi’s blazed with anger.

“How are you going to stop me? Kill me?” Hirata laughed. “Who’ll be the ghost’s errand boy then?”

“No, we’ll kill Chamberlain Sano,” Kitano said.

Horror sent a chill through Hirata’s blood. Rage enflamed him. “I won’t let you near Sano!”

“The only way you can protect Sano is by doing the spirit’s bidding. But how can we convince you?” Tahara felt under his coat and pulled out a small object, which he held up for Hirata to examine.

It was a flat, rectangular wooden tag with a white string looped through a hole at one end, the kind sold at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Worshippers wrote prayers on them and tied them on fences or posts outside the buildings. This tag had a sword artistically drawn on it in red ink.

“Memorize this,” Tahara said, and tucked the tag back under his coat. He smiled as he and his friends stepped aside and let Hirata go.

21

THE RISING SUN
lightened the sky over Edo Castle from black to muddy gray. Outside the women’s quarters, vapor filled the air, as if the earth had exhaled a clammy, disease-laden breath. Inside, Priest Ryuko stood at the threshold of the shogun’s mother’s chamber.

“You sent for me, my lady?”

“Yes! You certainly took your time getting here.” Lady Keisho-in made shooing gestures at the attendants who knelt around the pillow-covered bed on which she lounged. “Go, go! My dearest priest and I have private business to discuss!”

The attendants hastily left. Priest Ryuko knelt by Lady Keisho-in and took her hand. She wore a rich red brocade robe that snarled with gilded dragons, and so many ornaments spangled her puff of dyed-black hair that it looked like a pincushion. Thick white makeup, and scarlet rouge on her cheeks and lips, hid some of the ravages of age. But Priest Ryuko noticed the food stains on the robe, the veined, loose skin on the hand he held, and her stale, old-womanish smell. He felt repugnance mixed with affection.

“Is something wrong?” Through the thin walls he could hear the chatter quiet down as news of his presence spread and the women pricked up their ears to listen.

“‘Wrong?’” Lady Keisho-in snorted, in a manner more suited to the commoner she was than to the highest-ranking woman in Japan. “I would call it a disaster!”

Although he knew Lady Keisho-in had a tendency to exaggerate, her anxiety disturbed Priest Ryuko. Her mood and her well-being had such a great impact on his. Their fates had been intertwined for more than twenty years, since a series of incidents in the women’s quarters had first brought him here. Minor vandalism that included broken makeup jars and torn clothes, and anonymous letters that contained insults, threats, and malicious rumors, had thrown the ladies and servants into an uproar. The shogun blamed the trouble on fox spirits masquerading as humans. He asked the abbot at Z
ō
j
ō
Temple to send an exorcist. The abbot sent Ryuko, a handsome, personable priest who’d enjoyed great success with women before he’d taken his vow of celibacy.

Lady Keisho-in’s face had lit up with smiles the moment she saw him. She and her attendants followed him as he marched through the women’s quarter, chanted prayers, and burned incense sticks. They giggled excitedly. He had been afraid the exorcism would fail and he would be punished. But when he walked down the line of women, shouting at the fox spirits to come out, and waving incense smoke over them, a young lady-in-waiting broke down in tears. She confessed that she was responsible for the incidents.

The other women fell on her. They hit, scratched, and kicked her until the palace guards came and took her away, to have her put to death. The other women cheered. Priest Ryuko backed away, shocked by the violence and his success.

“My hero!” Lady Keisho-in dimpled at him. “Don’t be in such a hurry to leave.”