The Nicholas Linnear Novels (139 page)

When she was fully undressed and toweling herself off, she confronted him, turning to him face to face. “What is it here that fascinates you so?” As she said this she twisted the towel back over her shoulder so there was nothing for him to miss.

“If it’s sex you’re talking about,” he said, “I’ve had my share of it.” He seemed to be staring at a point below her navel. Perhaps at the spot where her curling glossy pubic hair began.

“I don’t give it that freely,” she said simply. “What makes you think I’d give it to you.”

“You’re naked, aren’t you? You barely know me.”

“If I was like this and I did know you well,” she observed, “there’d be far more of a chance.”

“You mean this isn’t an invitation?”

“If you want me, that’s your problem,” she said beginning to pull on her clothes. “It was you who did not allow me the privacy to undress.”

He watched her for a moment, then abruptly swung away. Striding to the metal door he unlocked it and busied himself with unfastening the square symbol of the
ryu
from the door. He put it aside and began to work on the crimson lacquer so that no marks of its presence remained.

Akiko was curious but knew better than to ask him why he was going to the trouble of erasing all evidence of the
ryu
’s presence in the warehouse. Since this third-floor door was the only one that led out to a landing and the outside, it was the only one that concerned him.

Dressed, Akiko picked up her bag and went out past him. She watched him carefully padlock the door.

“I have no place to stay,” she said.

He gave her a key out of his pocket. “There’s a spare bedroom,” he said. “Don’t touch anything else in the house.” He wrote a street address down for her. “Wait for me,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Three weeks later they were in the countryside, surrounded by Mandarin orange groves. Much of the southern island was still rural, retaining a high degree of the old ways. Saigō said he liked that.

Even this far south the snow lay heavily banked, glossy on its surface, crackling underfoot with the thinnest crust of ice, as delicate as Ming porcelain. In the moonlight it was luminescent, pushing back the spectral darkness.

Their breath hung in the air, their words made visible in albescent puffs, as connected as an island chain.

Much had changed in Akiko’s life in this time, and she wondered if the same could be so for him. With almost any other person she would have known the answer.

It had begun three weeks ago when he had come back deep into the night, opening the house door with absolute silence. Akiko had been dreaming, but even so his spirit obtruded into the beta level in which her mind drifted while her consciousness slept.

She opened her eyes and was fully awake. This had never surprised her because she had been born with the ability but it confounded others.

Saigō, standing in the shadows just inside the doorway, said, “Were you asleep?”

If he were any good at all, he would know the answer to that, so she said, “No. You wanted me to wait for you. I did.”

He came into the room on the balls of his feet and she felt the spitting of his spirit again, the anarchic emanations of a spiteful child. She did not flinch from him or give any sign, no matter how remote, that she knew of his intent. To do so would remove her greatest power over him. Also, it would frighten him and she could not afford that.

After he had hit her and assuaged his own weaknesses, he said, “There is a package outside. Go and fetch it.” His voice was absolutely normal.

Akiko got up and went past him. As she did so she felt the dullness of his spirit like a sated serpent, dozing. On the stoop she found, to her surprise, a young girl of her own age. She was leaning against the doorframe and she was shivering. Putting one arm around her, Akiko took her inside.

The young girl stumbled over the doorjamb and fell heavily against Akiko, who was obliged to support her entirely for three or four steps. The young girl was late in recovering, and in the warm lamplight inside Akiko looked at her.

Her face was beautiful but as dulled as Saigō’s spirit. The pupils of her large eyes were heavily dilated and there was a subtle musk emanating from between her half open lips.

“She is drugged,” Akiko said.

“Indeed.” His reaction was no more than if she had said, She’s Japanese. “Put her to bed,” he said a trifle wearily. “She will share your room.”

Without another word, Akiko did as he ordered her. When she had put the young girl to sleep on the one cotton
futon
, wrapping her carefully in wool blankets, she returned to the living room. She watched Saigō. He had sunk onto the
tatami
, his snow-covered coat crumpled around him like a frozen lily. His chin was on his chest and his head was nodding. His eyes were not quite closed.

For a moment Akiko wondered what would happen if she took him now; she knew that she could do it and if that were to be her strategy she would find no better time. He was at full
kyo.

But at that moment his head snapped up and he glared at her like a viper poised to strike. Immediately, sensing the acute danger, she washed her mind of taking the offensive, and sinking down, knelt before him, her hands open and in her lap.

His eyes became hooded and at last he had fallen asleep. Akiko dozed as well. But once she awoke just before dawn, her attention focused. Across from her Saigō still slept, his breathing deep and regular and slow. Still she could not rid herself of the feeling that he continued to watch her.

Work at the
dōjō
was difficult in the extreme. All life there appeared to come to a stop when she approached. All were polite to her, but there was no harmony when she was about, and no one was more aware of this than she.

She felt that the
sensei
distrusted her and the students disliked her. There was no help they would give her if it were not a matter of face that they do so. She had never felt so alone, adrift, absolutely cut off from everything and everyone. It was as if she were an iceberg in the tropics that the sun refused to melt. If she existed at all for them it was as a wound which refused to heal.

They wished her gone and she knew it. Still she refused to knuckle under the force of their combined will. Men had never dictated the course of her life and she was not about to allow them to now. She had fought against that, perhaps, from the moment of her birth. Her will was cast in the terrible shades of steel—a thousandfold—that went into the creation of the
katana
, the sword of honor. Did they actually think that they could break her?

But, oh, how they tried! For a start, the
sensei
put her in with the slowest group of students, those young men who, Akiko judged, would be forced to leave the
ryu
within six months. Inside an hour she had made an astoundingly accurate assessment of their abilities. All were at a lower level than she was. It was a deliberate slap in the face, but rather than allow herself to feel humiliation she resolved to use this maneuver to her own advantage.

As any student new to a particular
ryu
will do, she sat silent and rapt during the
sensei
’s lessons, watching with concentration the exercises and, later, the strike-defense combinations being illustrated.

All of this was material that Sun Hsiung had taught her and which she had mastered years ago. Her mien was that of the learning student attempting to absorb the new and complicated. For the moment she was content to give them what they expected.

When it came her time to practice the moves, the
sensei
gave way to one of the students in the class. Another deliberate slap in the face, for all who had gone before her had worked directly with the
sensei.

She was given a polished wooden pole perhaps half the thickness of a
bokken
—the wooden
kendo
practice sword—and three times as long. She arranged herself on the polished wooden floorboards, encompassed by wood. She did not ignore this aspect of her surroundings, taking her cue from the qualities of hardwood that the Japanese most prized: flexibility and durability.

Went into
shinki kiitsu
and, lifting her pole at the last possible instant, she easily knocked the student off his feet as he attacked.

Within the silence surrounding the class, the
sensei
sent the next boy at her. The result was the same, though she varied her response to his attack.

Now the
sensei
sent two of his pupils at her at once. Akiko still knelt staring straight ahead. She did not have to turn her head in order to know where the second student was or what he was doing.
Shinki kiitsu
revealed his strategy to her. Both her fists gripped the wooden pole lightly yet firmly at its exact center; this was essential because she was employing the fulcrum concept and balance was crucial.

She kept her place, at a disadvantage because she did not have her feet. But there was a lot she could do with her upper torso.

Concentrating on the Void, she felt the advancement from behind her. She torqued her shoulders, dipping her right side and bringing it up to increase momentum and thus power. The pole whistled through the air, slammed into the student’s rib cage, sending him flying.

The opposite end of the pole—now the lower end—began its upward swing at just that moment, its rounded end jamming lightly into the oncoming second student’s throat. He sat down hard on his buttocks, a stunned look on his face.

It was only then, as her concentration broke its intense focus, that she became aware of the interest from other quarters of the
dōjō.
What she had thought to be an isolated incident had been observed by fully three-quarters of the
ryu.

But if she suspected that the
sensei
of her class would now accord her the honor of performing against him, she was mistaken. Again the school sought to subtly humiliate her. The
sensei
bade her rise. Taking the pole from her, he led her across the
dōjō
floor to where Saigō’s class was working. He left her in care of another
sensei
, a dour-faced individual with severe pockmarks across his cheeks and chin.

He bowed formally to her. “Welcome,” he said, though he did not for a moment mean it. It was as if she were a
gaijin
in her own country.

His hard-calloused hand, as yellow as tallow, extended. “Please be kind enough to assume
kokyū suru.
”
Kokyū suru
was an attack stance but as with all Japanese words and phrases it had another meaning; it also meant, “breathe.”

“Jin-san.”

The student he had named stepped forward, bowing toward his
sensei. “Hai.”

“It seems that Ofuda-san has been inadvertently put in the wrong class through an administrative oversight. We do not wish for such an occurrence to happen again. Would you be so kind as to convince us that with us she has found her proper place.” So saying he retreated to the edge of the circle formed by the rest of the class.

Out of the corner of her eye Akiko could see Saigō standing relaxed and calm. Was he curious about how she would fare in his more advanced class? Was he wishing that it were he instead of Jin-san who had been chosen to test her?

There was no bowing done within this
dōjō
circle as there would be in any other form of martial discipline in Japan. They were ninja here; the code of
bushido
—the creed of the
samurai
—was meaningless to them. Though honor was not.

Jin-san stood facing her, his feet apart to about the width of his shoulders. His fisted hands were held before him at waist height, the left cupped over the right.

There was something disturbing in this stance that Akiko could not quite put her finger on. Then he moved and were it not for the fact that she could read his spirit, anticipating his physical strike, she would have been finished even before she had a chance to parry.

As it was, she barely made it. Her foreknowledge allowed her to both prepare her spirit and focus her attention on the unknown. Therefore she saw the glint of the
manrikigusari
—literally “the chain with the strength of ten thousand men”—consisting of two feet of hand-forged iron chain with three-and-one-half-inch blunt-ended weights attached to each end.

And now she knew what had disturbed her about Jin-san’s stance: it was
goho-no-kamae,
one of the openings or
kamae
in spike and chain fighting.

Jin-san was already halfway toward her, his arms spread so that the
manrikigusari
hung in a loose arc between his fists. He would seek
makiotoshi
, she knew, winding the chain about her neck, because not only was it essential that he defeat her but also that he do so quickly and decisively.

She did not make the mistake of trying to grab for the chain. She knew that she could expect only a weight in her eye for her trouble or, if she were foolish enough to manage a two-handed grasp, crushed knuckles.

Therefore she sought to ignore the
manrikigusari
entirely as a target. She bent her torso only slightly—and to the side, not, as he had expected, away from the attack. This allowed some of her own momentum to build up while she came inside the attack, using her left side as a wedge combined with his own forward momentum to strike at
ekika
, a vital spot just beneath the armpits. The
ate
broke both Jin-san’s rhythm and his concentration. Thus cut off from the Void, he was easy to take down.

The pockmarked
sensei
said nothing as Jin-san got shakily to his feet and returned to the sanctuary of the circle’s edge. But Akiko could feel a great leap in the onlookers’ tension.

In her memory there was something absolutely otherworldly in the next several minutes. How many times had she relived the
sensei
’s next movements, watching as if in slow motion as he turned toward the press of his students and uttered the word, “Saigō-san.”

There was no hesitation, no eye contact, nothing at all in Saigo’s demeanor to tell her what was in his mind. But she knew that in the next instant, as they came at each other, the fate of their relationship, present and future, would be spelled out.