Blood and Chrysanthemums (22 page)

“Does it matter whether I approve? The curse is as much yours as ours. You have the right to use it as you wish. As a vampire, Takashi would be no danger to us. I am more curious as to why. It was certainly not out of any concern for my lieutenant.”

“It’s a long story,” Ardeth said shortly.

“They all are. Especially ours,” Fujiwara observed with wry humour. “I can guess at some of it. You are angry at Dimitri Rozokov. Whatever past wounds you have caused each other I do not know, but tonight it hurt you that he spoke of your creation as if he regretted it. You are also angry at me. So you rebelled against us both with the weapon that was nearest at hand.”

It hurt to hear her reasons, which had seemed so complex and intense, reduced to those simple words. It hurt even more to realize that those simple words were the truth. The pain turned her voice sharp. “Why would I be angry at you?”

“Because you came here looking for answers and I do not have them.”

“No, you don’t,” she replied honestly, turning to look at him. Her frankness did not seem to disturb him.

“Even if I—or Dimitri—had answers, you should ask yourself if you would listen to them, any more than you listened to your parents when you were a girl. There are some things only time can make real for you. You will not know the true strength of the need we have until you try to give it up. You will not truly know that you will not die until you stand at the grave of your sister and your sister’s children. Even now, I can tell you these things and you might say that you believe them—but you will not feel them as true until they happen to you. There is no secret to this existence. There is no ‘way of the vampire’ to teach you. My way was mine alone. You must find your own.”

“I knew you’d say that. All along, in my heart, I knew that’s what you’d say.”

“Your heart is wiser than your years would suggest.”

“That doesn’t make it any easier.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Fujiwara acknowledged. “Do you have someplace to stay?” The abrupt change in subject surprised her for a moment, then Ardeth shook her heard. She had made no plans and acknowledged with painful amusement that some part of her had expected to return to the apartment in Banff. “Stay here then. I have some business to complete tomorrow evening and I would be very honoured if you would stay and see it done.”

“What kind of business?” she asked, but he only smiled and shook his head.

“Tomorrow night is soon enough. Now, I must go and talk to Takashi and Dimitri. You stay out here and look at the moon.” He smiled again. “If I were a century younger and you a mortal, I might linger with you and compose a poem or two.” Ardeth could not help her laughter. It would take a much stronger woman than she, she acknowledged, to resist the charm that had been practised for almost a thousand years.

“I’ll bet you did that with all the girls.” Fujiwara chuckled and bowed with more flourish than she had seen before. Then he left her alone to look up at a moon that gave her neither poetry nor answers.

They have gone now to their uneasy shelters. Dimitri Rozokov has returned with my driver to Banff. Takashi and my men are split between this building and the other down the road. Takashi chose the other, though I am not certain whether it is to avoid Ardeth or me. Ardeth has found a room I am certain is not the one in which she and Takashi struggled with their dreams and their vengeance.

Before he left, Dimitri returned this diary. I will give it back to him when he returns tomorrow night, but I could not resist the urge to write this last entry.

I have no desire to record in detail the events of this night. I suspect I would turn it into either melodrama or comedy. The creative urge has not entirely left me—nor has the urge to arrange events so that they are aesthetically pleasing.

There is even symmetry in our wounds and sorrows. Dimitri and I, abandoned in one fashion or another by our vampire mothers. Takashi and Ardeth seeking new fathers for their lost ones and then rebelling against what they found. Ardeth and Dimitri struggling to find some manner of love that reconciles their inhuman need and their mortal emotions.

Would it have been like that with Tomoe and me? Perhaps not, for it was a different time, a different world. Yet for all that distance, the hearts of mortals have always been the same. What is forbidden may differ between cultures—for the West it has been the sex that defies the laws of their god and in my land it has been the love that refuses to bow to obligation and duty—but the hearts and bodies of mortals will always want that which is denied.

Even I, not mortal at all in one sense, am mortal in all the others. I want that which has been denied.

But I am the only one of this night’s seekers whose search ended in success. I came to this country looking for another of my kind and I discovered two of them. Yamagata had less luck in his quest for immortality. If the answers that Dimitri and Ardeth hunger for exist, they do so somewhere beyond the range of experience.

My other search, the one I began after my guests left, is also done. I have found the place, an open bank by a lake, where it is to be done. It is not the place I imagined when I first had these thoughts years ago but it will suffice. The mountains and trees of this place have some echoes of my homeland in them.

When I stood on the ground I have chosen, I thought of the playwright, Hidekane. I have never forgotten him, as he predicted. At home, locked away, is a scroll that contains the text of the play he wrote for me, procured in great secrecy and at great cost. I have read it at least once each century. I know the words very well. It was not hard to hear them in the wind that came down from the peaks to find me as I stood beside the lake:

Behind the mountains

the moon goes down

As I must go

But upon the mountains

The moon must rise again

As I must rise.

There is no rest.

I say that when I left Japan I did not know what answer I might find at the end of the journey. Yet if that is true, why did I bring my swords? The Muramasa blade waits for me, wrapped in its silken bag, dreaming of blood.

I can hear a footstep on the stairs. Akiko is coming. She will be sleepy-eyed and tousled, drawn from her bed by my call. There is always something peaceful about her, as if she possesses some essence, some certainty that the rest of us can only grope after in the dark. She soothes my unnatural heart. I wonder if she too has some secret scar, some secret quest. Perhaps I will ask her.

I think that I will have her stay for a while, when we have done our dance of desire and survival.

For this one morning, I will go to sleep in her arms, as mortal lovers do.

What a strange procession we must make, Ardeth thought as she followed the path through the forest twilight. If we meet any other hikers on the trail, we’re likely to be the gossip of Banff for a week. But it was late in the season and the
yakuza
guards had reported that no one had gone up the path all day so the chances of meeting anyone descending seemed slim.

The gang members, seemingly interchangeable in their dark suits and glowers, trailed behind her now. She could hear the occasional incomprehensible comment from them, most likely complaints about the rough trail or the state of their feet in their city shoes. Or about the distance they were forced to keep from their
oyabun
and his lieutenant, who headed the procession. Ardeth had arrived in the middle of an argument about it, or so Akiko had translated. Fujiwara had resolved it with a gruff command but, though they bowed, none of them seemed to take the order with good grace—at least at this safe distance.

She suspected one or two of their short bursts of laughter, distinctly ribald in tone, must have had to do with her. If she had known that Fujiwara’s mysterious business involved a hike through the woods, she would have worn her jeans and running shoes instead of her short skirt.

Ahead of her, Akiko was sensibly attired in flat shoes and loose trousers. A coat wrapped around her body. Over her shoulder was a large bag that she had assured Ardeth was quite light, rejecting her offer to carry it for a while.

Beyond her, Rozokov walked without concern for the darkening trail, his long coat brushing against the bushes, his pale head topping the dark ones around him. Ardeth tried not to look at him but failed, her eyes inexorably drawn to the grey gleam of his hair.

She could not see Yamagata, but knew he was following on Fujiwara’s heels. His face had been closed and uncommunicative when they had encountered each other at the lodge but, in an unguarded moment, their eyes had met and Ardeth had been appalled to feel a flush burn across her cheeks, fired by a tangle of embarrassment and sexual heat. He had looked away quickly, his mouth tightening. Had he regained his nerve so soon? she wondered as she stepped over a log that had fallen across the path. If he has, will you keep your promise?

To distract herself from that question, she thought of Fujiwara, who led their odd group. She had been surprised to see him dressed in a green kimono, patterned with a crest in the shape of a flower, and wide trousers of silk. Two gold-hilted swords in dark scabbards were tucked through the white sash at his waist. She had almost laughed when she saw the strange sandals with wooden clog soles he was wearing but now had to admit that they did not seem to hinder his pace at all.

Ardeth looked up through the tall pines that hovered over the path. The sky had darkened somewhat, the blue shading into indigo to the east and crimson in the west. The sun must be just above the mountains now, she guessed. They would have to come back down the path in the full darkness. She was sure that the prospect did not appeal to the city-bred
yakuza
and decided to make sure she stayed well away from them during the journey back. She had seen the bulge of shoulder holsters under their jackets and had no desire to be in the way if the night made them nervous.

At last, the forest around them thinned and the path ended. They emerged onto an open bank land, which sloped sharply down to a small lake. Thirty feet separated the line of the forest from the point where the ground began to drop away and it was more than one hundred to the place where the trees moved in again. The bank faced west, towards the sunset where the sky was striped with orange clouds. Ardeth looked around, taking in the circle of spiky branches behind her, the brittle, sand-coloured grass that covered the bank, the cold grey-green of the lake below them. On the far shore, a scattering of deciduous trees burned like embers among the pines. Beyond the lake, the mountains swept up in sharp, dark lines to white, snowy peaks. There was a strange, desolate beauty about the scene.

She shivered and put her hands in the pockets of her jacket, as if the action could counter the chill that swept her. The small group hovered on the edge of the clearing for a moment, then Akiko moved. She walked with unhurried steps to the centre of the open land, near the edge of the slope. There she set down her bag and began to unpack it. A large white mat emerged to be rolled out on the ground. A small lacquered box followed and was set to the side. Then she tucked the bag behind her heels and bowed to Fujiwara, who had walked to stand nearby. He returned the gesture and knelt in the centre of the mat.

Curious and uncertain, Ardeth could not help her glance at Rozokov. He met her gaze expressionlessly for a moment, then one shoulder lifted in a faint shrug. When he looked away, she realized that Yamagata and his men had assembled, settling themselves on their knees before their
oyabun
. Yamagata sat alone, the other men in pairs behind him. Whatever the nature of this strange ritual, they knew that this formal action was required of them, though she suspected from the uncertain glances they exchanged that they did not know what else to expect.

“Come forward, my friends, my brother and sister,” Fujiwara called to them. Kneeling seemed too awkward, so Ardeth stationed herself just behind and to the left of the last
yakuza.
She noticed with strange amusement that Rozokov took the position at the right. Trying to fit in, she thought, to keep the balance. There was a long moment of silence as Fujiwara carefully removed the two swords from his sash and arranged them before him, two crescent slashes of ebony on the white of his mat.

“I know that you must wonder at this,” he said at last, looking up. “But please indulge the dramatics of an old man, who has long been fond of remaking his reality as art. I had thought originally to do this thing in private and in my own land. But even my plans sometimes do not go smoothly and I know that this is the moment that it must be done. My heart has learned, as my intellect always knew, that I am not the only one of my kind. I have faced the truth that my existence, even my love, has caused great pain, though I never meant to. I have long known that this moment must someday some. Yet despite this knowledge, I am not beyond fear . . . so I recreate my old world in ritual in the hopes that it will give me comfort.”

Ardeth heard the sharp hiss of breath from the
yakuza
in front of her. Yamagata’s shoulders tensed as if he were waiting for a blow. Fujiwara switched to Japanese suddenly and, his explanations incomprehensible to her, she could only search for clues in their faces and actions. Akiko crept forward with the lacquered box and opened it slowly. Fujiwara withdrew a bundle of papers wrapped in silken ribbons and set them on his lap as he spoke to Yamagata. At last, he held them out and the man moved forward to take them. He crouched there for a moment, saying something she could not hear, then Fujiwara touched his bent head lightly. As Yamagata returned to his place, she saw his face and realized that he was crying.

Why would he cry? she wondered. Fujiwara just handed over the keys to the kingdom, I would guess. Isn’t that what he wanted, as well as immortality? He knew Fujiwara was planning to retire . . . and he got the hard news about his inheritance last night, so surely he’s not weeping about that. Besides, she thought with an edge of bitter humour, he knows where he can get that, if he wants it.

“Dimitri,” Fujiwara said suddenly and she looked at Rozokov. His jaw looked clenched, his shoulders sharp, as if he was struggling to keep his own emotions concealed. He knows, she thought suddenly. Whatever is going on here, he knows. She watched as he walked to the edge of the mat and knelt with surprising grace. “I would be honoured if you would keep my diary.” Fujiwara held out a slender book and Rozokov took it slowly, turning it over in his hands before he tucked it inside his coat. He rose and moved to step away but Fujiwara stopped him. “No. Please wait here. I have another favour to ask of you.”

Rozokov froze, his head bent, then he nodded and stepped to one side. Fujiwara spoke again in Japanese. When he was done, six dark heads bent to the ground. When Akiko lifted her face again, Ardeth saw the tears brimming in her eyes.

He’s going away, she thought, then swallowed hard. Not going away, she realized. Not just going away.

His voice quiet and amused, echoed in her ears. “Kill himself? No one does, not anymore.” No modern Japanese did anyway. But he was not modern. He was old beyond her wildest imaginings.

Protests sprang to her lips but she bit them back. What could she say? Don’t go because I need you? But he had no answers for her, except the answer that his own long existence comprised. Don’t go because I could love you? Not the way I love Rozokov, but like a brother, like the older brother I never had?

His voice came again: “You will not know some things are true until you live them for yourself.” She had suffered one great loss in her life in her parents’ death. Now she realized that the price of her new existence was more than the blood. It was the endless series of losses she would suffer from this day on, more than any mortal could imagine. That the first was one of her own kind was only another of the terrible ironies that seemed to be so much a part of the vampiric state.

There were tears in her eyes and she wiped at them savagely. When they were gone, she saw that Rozokov had knelt once again at Fujiwara’s side. The Japanese vampire lifted the longer of his two swords and set it in Rozokov’s hands. Their voices were quiet, inaudible no doubt to the
yakuza
who knelt beside her, but Ardeth could hear them clearly. “You know how to use a sword, I trust.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“I will use my short sword to cut once to the right and then up. When I am done, please strike off my head. The blade is a Muramasa and will strike true.” Ardeth saw his lips twist. “It has a taste for blood.”

“Brother, please . . .”

“It is my time. I am tired. I had no choice about how I began this life but I can choose how to end it. I am grateful that my country’s traditions provide a ritual that is just as final for vampires as for mortals. It is customary for a warrior’s second to strike off his head. It would honour me if you would assist me.”

After a long moment, Rozokov bent his head. “The honour is mine.” He stood up and shifted to stand by Fujiwara’s right shoulder. Ardeth watched him draw the blade and grip its hilt in both hands, testing the weight. Behind him, the sun burned, half-devoured by the ridge of mountains. Its light touched the uplifted blade and turned it crimson.

Fujiwara ceremoniously unsheathed his other sword, setting the naked blade on the mat as he loosened his sash and bared his chest and abdomen. His face was composed and serene as he lifted the sword again. Was it so easy to let go, Ardeth wondered. After a thousand years of struggle to stay alive, could he surrender it so simply? Something quivered in her nerves; a shiver of fear, a dark wave of despair and regret. Whether it was his emotion or her own she couldn’t tell, but for a moment it drowned her. She waited for something to take its place but there was nothing. No fear, no pain, not even resolution. Only a great emptiness.

He grunted as the sword went in. Ardeth felt the pain shoot through her and clutched her stomach only to discover it had gone as quickly as it had come. He drew the blade across his abdomen, exhaled an agonized breath, then turned the sword to drag it up towards his ribs.

The sun-touched blade flashed down towards the back of Fujiwara’s neck. Ardeth closed her eyes instinctively. When she forced them open, there was a crumpled tangle of green kimono and brown limbs lying on the ground. Akiko was wrapping something in white silk. Blood began to stain the mat.

She looked at Rozokov, who was standing over the headless body, the sword still held in his hands. He lifted his head and his eyes met hers. There was grief in them but, behind it, a strange relief as well. I might have to do that for him some day, she thought with terrible clarity. I might have to stand second to him when he decides to take his own life.

Her feet moved as her eyes filled with tears again. They knew her path even if her mind did not. The sword fell from Rozokov’s hands and he gathered her into his arms as if she had never left them. For a while, the old hurts were forgotten in the new one.

When they drew apart, Yamagata was there, the abandoned swords in his hands. “They are yours. He chose you for his second. They are yours,” he explained, but Rozokov shook his head.

“He left you his empire. They belong to you. He gave me gifts enough,” Rozokov said and Yamagata stared at him for a moment then nodded.

“We will take care of the body.” He glanced at his gang members, who had already begun to roll up the blood-stained mat.

“Do you think there will be any trouble?” Ardeth asked, thinking of death certificates and autopsies. Yamagata glanced at her with a grim smile.

“Nothing that I cannot handle.” The desperation of the night before was gone, replaced by the confidence that must have allowed his rise through the
yakuza
ranks. He is
oyabun
now, she thought, and he likes it. For now, that is enough for him.

She turned away from the cluster of black-suited figures crouched by the body. It seemed an indignity that he should leave one. It would be better if we just turned into dust, she thought, like in the movies. She looked across the lake. The sun had vanished behind the teeth of the mountains, leaving only a bloody line of light outlining them.

“Do you want to go home?” Rozokov asked quietly and she nodded.

“Yes.”