Blood and Chrysanthemums (17 page)

At last he bowed his acceptance.

Naomasa tried to insist that it was his place to fight for me but I ordered him to hold his position and control his soldiers. If I perished, he could do what he wished. What he would do, of course, was obey my orders and surrender. It would never occur to him, as it would to me, to dishonour his lord by refusing to die. There was nothing I could do about that except win.

The wall of soldiers parted to let me pass. I tied back my kimono sleeves and moved to meet the bandit in a small patch of flat land between the road and the trees.

“I am Iwashiro Yukinaga. May I be honoured with the name of my opponent?” he asked.

“Fujiwara Sadamori,” I replied and bowed briefly.

“I will see that prayers are said for your spirit. Please remember that this was your suggestion and do not blame me for your passing.”

“You should fear my sword more than my ghost,” I advised him and he grinned fiercely.

“I fear nothing. My sword is a Muramasa, passed down through the sons of my family. It has been drawn and now it must taste blood before its demon will rest.”

“There will be blood,” I promised and then the talking was done. We circled on the dead grass. His sword, much finer than mine, looked like a wand of moonlight. Muramasa blades were cursed, it was said. They had absorbed the madness of their maker and, once drawn, their bloodthirsty hunger must be slaked. They caused the murder of kin and the suicide of their owners. But I feared only its edge, not its spirit.

He was very good. His movements were like silk, his concentration as pure and total as a prayer. In the moments that we watched each other’s eyes, I believed he knew that I was not what I appeared to be, but the knowledge did not sway him. His strike, when it came, was quick and sure. That I was not cleaved from shoulder to hip was only because I was not there, my immortal speed putting my body an inch beyond the blade. My own sword touched his side beneath his ribs and stopped when it struck his spine.

As I looked into his dead eyes, I heard my men begin to cheer. I lowered his body to the ground and loosened his fingers from about the hilt of his sword. It fit into my hand as if it had been waiting for me.

When I turned around, the bandits were gone. Naomasa and my warriors bowed to me and I nodded, then walked back and climbed into my palanquin. As it lifted, I began to clean my sword.

The procession moved on.

There is fire. I feel its heat, sweeping up behind me in the narrow tunnel along which I run. I know in a moment that it will catch me. Then my blood will boil, my bones melt, my skin blacken and dissolve. When it has passed, there will be no ash, no soot. There will be no sign that I have ever existed. In the second before it reaches me, I scream.

I awoke, this time to the darkness of my room at the roadside inn. For a moment, I felt the heat of the fire on my skin. A shiver followed, as the heat turned to chill. I did not dream often any more. That I had endured the same dream twice disturbed me. I had nearly perished in a fire once, but it now seemed a small thing compared to the inferno that roared in my dream. The fire in my nightmare seemed large enough to burn all of Japan, to consume the whole world.

I heard steps in the corridor outside my room. There was a mutter of voices beyond the screens, then a soft knock. I rose from my mat and reached for my swords; my own short sword and the Muramasa blade. The screen slid open and Naomasa bowed his way into the room.

“Forgive the intrusion, my lord. I know you said you did not wish to be disturbed until the Hour of the Dog but there is a messenger here from Edo. He begs leave to speak to you.” The frown lines around Naomasa’s mouth suggested the messenger had insisted rather than begged.

“Very well. Have him come here in a few moments. Send the innkeeper with sake and food.”

Naomasa bowed again and I turned to open the screens to the garden. The small courtyard was shadowy with twilight but I saw the gleam of the pale grey kimono of one of my soldiers as he shifted in his watch.

Behind, one of the inn maids scurried in to remove the bedding. Another arrived with a tray of sake and rice. When Naomasa returned with a messenger, I was seated in the centre of the room, my swords laid on the floor beside me.

I had not believed that the messenger had actually come from Edo, but, looking at the man’s haggard face and trembling limbs as he sat back from his bow, I began to think it possible. He must have set a punishing pace to reach us in such a state.

“My lord,” he began, his eyes carefully lowered. “I have been sent by your commander in Edo. There has been a great misfortune.” His voice faltered and I saw Naomasa frown at his back. “A day after you left the city, there was an earthquake.” I nodded, for those were common enough. Better an earthquake than a war, I supposed, or a summons from the shogun. “And a fire.” Those words drew me back from my premature relief.

“A fire.” I said the words and saw the man blanch and lower his eyes again.

“Yes, my lord. Our regiment fought it but . . . forgive us, Lord Sadamori, our efforts were unsuccessful. We saved what we could but . . .”

“My house?”

“It burned to the ground.”

There was another question to ask but I could not seem to say the words. They were blotted out by a great, hungry roaring in my ears. At last, my mouth worked.

“My wife?”

“She died, my lord.”

Then the fire swept up behind me and caught me at last. There was nothing but burning blackness in my mind. When it faded, I found that I was standing, holding the cursed Muramasa blade in my hand inches from the throat of the prostrate messenger. He was babbling something, his words muffled by the floor mats against which he pressed his face.

“Please kill me, my lord. I was the sentry. I failed to see the fire soon enough. The commander wished to commit
seppuku
immediately but he would not without your order. We have failed you, my lord, we are unworthy. Please end my shame.”

For a moment, I wanted nothing more than to see his blood soaking into the floor, to lift his lifeless head and drink from his severed throat. The burning inside me had not vanished, was only banked, but I forced myself to think.

“No. You are not permitted to kill yourselves. Return to the commander and tell him to guard my interests in Edo. Guard the rubble of my house. Guard the grave of my wife. You are not permitted to die.”

He began to plead again but Naomasa knew enough to get him from the room and shut the screens.

I thought of Tomoe, running down a corridor, fire at her heels. I thought of my waking dreams, which were lies, and my sleeping nightmares, which were the truth.

Even in mad grief, I was clever. I could not help it. I left a note for Naomasa, leaving the stewardship of my army in his hands, as I left the stewardship of my land in the hands of my most trusted mortal servant. Out of habit, I prepared for a future I did not even want to imagine any more.

The sentry in the garden did not see me leave.

In the mountains, there would be cool darkness to blot the scarlet flames from my sight. In the mountains, there would be a restless band of thieves waiting for a leader bloodier and more cruel than they. In the mountains, there would be blood to sate my new sword’s demons and quench the fire in my burning heart.

October, 1902

For seventy-five years, my band of outlaws ruled the road. This was not as impressive as it sounds for it was a relatively minor highway. It was not like the Tokaido Highway that ran from Edo to Kyoto and provided fine pickings for the bandits who hunted along it. We exacted what “tolls” we could from noble and peasant alike and from the growing group of merchants who had begun to be more prosperous than their aristocratic betters. There was enough violence and profit to satisfy both my men and me.

The bandits were a hard and brutal lot. They had viewed their previous leader, the
ronin
, with almost superstitious dread and transferred it quite willingly to me when I came upon them. They knew I was not quite mortal but seemed to take pride in the fact. It was considered an honour to bleed into a cup and offer it to me. Between such offerings and the bandits that I killed, punishment for rebellion or treachery, I never lacked for blood. Yet I slept lightly for those decades, for their loyalty and my safety lasted only as long as they respected and feared me.

In time, of course, the fire in my heart died. One night I looked around at my ragged band, drinking and gambling by the fire, and felt nothing but disgust. All of the original gang, whom I had grown through habit and value, were dead or gone. None of the new recruits knew my true name. I discovered that I missed the sound of the city, the touch of silk, the sweet scent of perfumed women. I missed the subtle pleasure of poetry and music. I missed the view from the porch of my old home.

That night, I left the camp and returned to the world—a world that was about to undergo the greatest upheaval in history.

In 1853, the black ships of Commodore Perry sailed into Nagasaki harbour and demanded that the government open the country to trade. The age of the shoguns was over.

In the years since, it seems that everything has changed. We govern our land like Westerners. We construct our buildings to look like theirs. We learn their science, their technology, their languages. Old men mutter that we are losing our souls to them.

Perhaps we are. But I remember the time just before my own first birth when we took our culture and our government from the great Chinese dynasties of the mainland. Took them and absorbed them and transmuted them into the thing we now call Japan. In the end, I believe we will do the same with the West. What is in our hearts to do and value, we will keep. The rest we will play at until it ceases to interest us and then it will pass as if it had never been.

I say “we” still, as if I were the same as the people of this land. There were many times during my long centuries that I felt as if I were a demon who only held the shape of a man. I could understand those about me, and use that understanding to manipulate them, but I was not the same as they were. In all those years, I never met another of my own kind. The Lady of the Autumn Moon vanished as if she had truly come from the pages of the ghost story I emulated in telling the tale. If she had any other blood-offspring such as I, I have never come across them.

Now I have found my kin, if only in the pages of a novel. I know that what I am is called “vampire” in one foreign language, “
nosferatu
” in another. If the fiction exists, distorted and twisted as it may be, then surely the truth must as well. Somewhere, beings such as I sleep away the day and rise with the moon, disguise their unchanging faces, and dream of blood.

They will not look like me, that is true. The first time I met Westerners, they seemed like strange, ugly monsters; tall, ungainly, swathed in their tight, uncomfortable clothing. I have become accustomed to them now and have learned to judge nationality and rank by the clues of their appearance. I have learned to read their expressions and understand, in some distant fashion, their motivations. I wonder if their vampires walk among them as I do among my own people. I wonder what it would be like to be a vampire in that strange, guilt-riddled, god-controlled world.

I have even allowed the Westerners here, to my old estates which I have regained through hard work and ruthless cunning. My guests are scholars, fascinated by the poetry of this land, and I have preserved a sizeable collection of scrolls. They ply me with questions I must be careful not to answer too clearly. They are secretly amused at my fascination with the parts of their literature and folklore they themselves disdain but they humour me nonetheless.

I know that some of them secretly think me a barbarian dressed in a man’s suit, an exotic specimen of a strange culture. Three hundred and fifty years ago, when they first reached our shores, we thought the same of them.

I think that their disdain distresses my mortal servant, Hiroshi, more than it does me. I shall have to speak to him about it and assure him I take no offence, lest his pride cause him to inadvertently betray the secret he has been raised since childhood to protect. As for myself, I manage to find contempt amusing, most of the time. This is especially easy when they exclaim and chatter over a poem and I can smile and silently remember its creator. In my bleaker moments, I remind myself that I could kill any of them with one blow from the blade that I am no longer allowed to wear—or with my hands.

There is only one of the Westerners who seems to sense I am not at all what I pretend to be. It is the quiet sister of the most pompous of the group. She is a scholar in her own right, with a keen insight into the poetry of the great women of the time of my first birth. I think perhaps their spirits must call to hers, even across a thousand years. There have been moments when I have seen her watching me as if she senses my inner thoughts.

She is not beautiful, as Tamakatsura was. She has no solidity, no physical presence, as Tomoe had. She has hair the colour of autumn leaves and eyes like the sea. I have wondered what that hair would look like spread out on silk. I have wondered what it would be like to trace the blue veins I can see beneath the strange white skin of her wrists. I have wondered what dreams she has and what dreams, sleeping or waking, she might welcome if I were to slip into her room and offer them to her.

I have wondered how the blood of the West might taste.