Daughter of the Sword (40 page)

“General Itō is an old friend of mine,” said Matsumori. Keiji noticed the two of them were equal in height, though the general was stockier, rounder, more muscular. “A mentor, in fact. He recommends you highly, Kiyama. I cannot see why.”

“Begging your pardon, General Matsumori. I will not be late again.”

“Not to my station you won’t. I’ll have you toting a rifle in the East Indies and fighting off dysentery if you’re ever less than ten minutes early. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Keiji spent the first day of his career in Military Intelligence cleaning toilets.

57

She’s fine,” the old butcher said, smiling. “She has a
lot
of questions about how to cut up a pig. We ate
nigiri
together for lunch, and I was just going to take her for some skewered chicken when you happened by.”

“Thank you,” said Keiji. “Many thanks. I—I’m afraid I haven’t any money with me. My billfold, it was stolen this—well, it went missing earlier. I wonder if I could repay you tomorrow for your kindness?”

The old man set his teeth for a fleeting moment. “If it weren’t for that uniform, son, I’d say you were having me on.”

“Understandable, sir. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Go on home. Take her with you too,
neh
? I don’t mind babysitting, but I’ve enough grandkids around the house already.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

Keiji crouched down and touched the little girl on the back of her hand. “How would you like to come home with me?”

“I was listening, you know. I’m not deaf.”

“Oh. I know that. I just— Say, what’s your name?”

“Shoji Hayano.”

“Well, Hayano, how would it be if you had dinner at my house tonight?”

She crossed her arms and looked at the ground—or would have looked at it, if only her eyes were healthy. It was the gesture a sighted
child might have made; Keiji guessed she must have lost her vision later in life.

At length she asked, “Can we come back here tomorrow?”

“If you want to.”

“All right, then. I don’t want to miss my mom when she comes back.”

They walked together hand in hand, the street mostly empty, the air wet with the scent of evaporating rain. “Hayano, can you tell me what you said this morning about the tiger?”

“Uh-huh. The tiger is hunting a woman. He needs to kill her. But his house will wash away if he leaves to find her.”

“That’s not what you said this morning.”

Hayano pursed her lips. “Yes it is.”

“No. You said…Never mind. Hayano-chan, where is the tiger?”

“With you, silly.”

“No. This morning you said something about a mountain.”

“Yes. The tiger lives on the mountain. But he has to leave it to get the woman, and if he does that, the mountain will go away.”

Keiji stopped and knelt next to the girl. “What does that mean, Hayano?”

She giggled at him. “Silly! It means what it means.”

He could hear her stomach growling. “Hayano, where is the tiger? Is it with me or is it in the mountains?”

“No!” She laughed again. “It
lives
on the mountain, but it
stays
with you.”

He took her by the hand and set her tiny, dirty fingertips on the pommel of his
tachi
. “This is my most prized possession, Hayano. Its name is Tiger on the Mountain. Do you know what it is?”

“It’s a sword, silly. Anyone can see that.”

“How did you know the name of the sword this morning?”

She pursed her lips. “This game is boring. Can we go to your house now?”

“Please, Hayano. Please?”

“Bo-ring.”

And that was the end of that.

“Kei-kun,” his father said as Keiji slid open the shoji. “I’m glad you’re home. I just finished making dinner this minute.”

“I told you I’d be working until six,” he called back to the dining room. “I also told you I’d fix this door when I got home. You didn’t have to do it.”

Keiji heard the clink of ceramic being set on the table, along with his father’s long explanation of patching the shoji panels and how Keiji’s mother certainly couldn’t do it and of course Keiji was going to be at work all day. Keiji listened for as long as it took to wriggle out of his boots and socks, then interrupted him. “Dad, I wanted to talk to you about inviting a guest for dinner.”

“Oh! How wonderful. A girl, I hope.”

“Well, yes. Sort of.”

He heard stockings rustling against the floor as his father bustled toward the entryway. “Excellent! It doesn’t do for a man your age to go unmarried, especially not now that you’ve been promoted and— Oh.”

“Dad, this is Shoji Hayano. She’s lost her mother. She’s obviously been injured too. I thought she might eat with us. And spend the night, maybe.”

“Ah. Well, yes, of course. Hello, Hayano-chan. I’m Kiyama Ryoichi. Do come in.”

Dinner was albacore over rice, accompanied by pumpkin and eggplant tempura. Hayano declared it delicious. “Where is your mom, Keiji-san? Doesn’t she like eggplant?”

Ryoichi laughed. “Keiji’s momma is very sick, sweetheart. She doesn’t eat at the table; I’ll bring her food after we’ve finished.”

“Oh.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Why is she sick?”

“She has what’s called an infection,” said Ryoichi. “She had surgery, and the cut the doctor made got infected, and now she has to stay away from everything that could make it dirty. She’s not even supposed to breathe anything that could be dirty. That’s why she has to stay in her room; the smoke from the stove could make her sicker.”

“Oh. I had surgery once. On my eyes.” She took another bite of fish.

“Did you?” Keiji’s father nodded thoughtfully. “And did you get an infection?”

“Nope.”

“That’s very good.” He ate his last thin slice of pumpkin, then began assembling a plate for his wife. “Kei-kun, when she’s finished, draw her a bath,
neh
? The poor dear’s cheeks are dirty.”

58

Keiji’s parents’ house was small, without a spare room, so he laid out Hayano’s futon at the foot of his own. He shuddered to think what the neighbors might say—it wasn’t as if he and Hayano were blood relatives—but as he saw it, impropriety had to give way to necessity.

The next morning he woke an hour early to prevent a repeat of the day before. He was out the door in record time, Hayano in tow with a band of fresh white cloth about her eyes. They made their way down the road under a bright sky, orange clouds on the eastern horizon suggesting late morning rain.

Hayano chattered as they walked, her discussion wandering as capriciously as a dog chasing squirrels. Keiji hoped he could steer the conversation toward Tiger on the Mountain, but when she latched her thoughts on to something, she was remarkably persistent about sticking to it until she latched on to something else.

At last, outside the butcher shop and within sight of his duty station, he said, “Hayano, can you tell me what you see when you see the tiger on the mountain?”

She smiled. “I told you already.”

“Please?”

Suddenly her face grew grim. “Uh-oh,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Earthquake. Coming soon. We better hide.”

Keiji looked around. No one in the street was panicked. Even the butcher’s caged chickens were calm. “Are you sure?”

“Mm-hm.” She tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the butcher shop. “Come on! We have to hurry!”

“Hayano, that shop is much too small. Little buildings like that fall down in earthquakes. Let’s go to the Intelligence building; it’s big and it’s made of—”

Her hand slipped from his, and she dashed headlong into the butcher shop.

Keiji ran after her, wincing as he saw her collide with the butcher’s counter. She bounced off as only children can, barely missing a step. Just as Keiji entered the shop, the ground rumbled.

No matter how many earthquakes he lived through, he always found them disconcerting. They seemed both to drag on forever and to take no time at all. Ground was not supposed to make noise. Nor was it supposed to move. Nothing was as it should have been.

Now chickens squawked and knives rattled on the counters and people in the street shrieked and sought cover. A huge shock wave told Keiji the quake would be getting worse. “Hayano!” he shouted over the din. “Come on! Climb on my back! I’m going to try to get you to the Intelligence building! It’s big and made of concrete. It’ll—”

“This place is fine. Nothing bad will happen to us here.”

“This place is hardly more than a shack! We need to get—”

“No. The tiger is here. We’ll be okay.”

A loud crack, and a light pole fell across the entryway to the Intelligence building. Roof tiles rained on the street, shattering. Then it was over.

Across the road, water sloshed back and forth in the big tanks of the fishmonger. His aquarium still stood but his shop was a ruin all around it. Next door, the greengrocer’s building had fallen in on itself like a house of cards. Next door to that, a restaurant was on fire and people were already rushing to put it out.

Apart from a few upset chickens, the butcher shop was unharmed.

Keiji’s mouth fell open. His heart hammered at his ribs, while Hayano’s face was inexplicably serene. “How…?” It took him a moment to put together anything more articulate than that. “You knew we’d be safe,” he said at last. “How?”

“I told you. The tiger is here. Nothing bad can happen where the tiger is.”

“Hayano, look around. The entire neighborhood is a ruin.”

That got a frown out of her. She crossed her arms with a petulant flourish; wrinkles creased her nose and her lips pursed to a hair-thin slit. “I
can’t
look around, Keiji-san. You’re
mean
.”

Keiji looked stupidly at his own hand, which pointed a useless finger at the burning restaurant. His head sagged and he smacked his forehead with his palm. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me to say. I wasn’t thinking. The earthquake has me all rattled up.”

“Well, you should listen to me, then,” she said, still cross. “I
told
you we’d be safe.”

Keiji’s head sagged again. “You’re right. You told me. Can you tell me how you knew this building wouldn’t fall? I’ll listen this time.”

“No. Ask me later. Right now I don’t like you.”

Shit, Keiji thought. He didn’t know her all that well, but even a perfect stranger could see she wouldn’t change her mind anytime soon. What do you know about parenting? he asked himself. It might have been smarter to just take her to the police and let them sort her out. Smarter, maybe, and certainly easier, but this little girl had just saved his life. He owed her better treatment than simply passing her off to some stranger to dump her off in an orphanage somewhere. Besides, if he let her go, the thousand questions he had for her would never find answers.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m going to go to work, all right? But I’m going to come find you later, and I promise I’ll be nice. You stay here with the butcher and make sure he gets you something to eat. Tell him I said you two should have dessert after lunch.”

“Now you’re just trying to bribe me,” Hayano said.

I sure am, Keiji thought. Damned if I know what else to do. How do parents do this every day? “I’ll come back later,” he told her, squatting on his haunches so he could put his hands on her skinny shoulders. “We’ll have some dinner together, and maybe later you can tell me what you want to tell me. I promise I’ll listen.”

“Maybe,” said Hayano.

It was as big a chink in the armor as he could ask for. He trotted out of the shop, wondering whether he was quitting while he was ahead, or whether he was deep in a hole and had only stopped digging.

59

Not bad,” General Matsumori said as Keiji stepped over the fallen light pole. “Even with an earthquake you’re forty-five minutes early.”

The general was in his shirtsleeves again, standing with his hands folded behind his back to survey the damage. “You’re early yourself, sir,” Keiji said.

“I don’t sleep. Come. Let’s go to my office.”

They climbed four flights of stairs in silence, Matsumori limping slightly as they walked. A whiff of dust lingered on the air, probably shaken loose from the rafters. The building was otherwise intact, though Keiji wondered how many thousands of pages had rattled loose from their shelves and scattered themselves over the floors. And even for being empty the building was strangely silent, a stunned, post-earthquake silence.

“You all right, Kiyama? Not the type to let a quake rattle you, are you?”

“No, sir. It’s something else. A little blind girl…well, she told me the earthquake was going to happen before it did. She pulled me into the only shop that survived the tremors.”

“Ah. Good luck, that. Good thing she was blind too. Probably heard it coming. I hear they’ve got ears like a dog.”

“Maybe, sir. It didn’t feel like that, though. It felt like she knew what was going to happen.”

“Ha! Maybe we should conscript her into Intelligence.”

They reached the general’s office, with smoke from nearby fires rising along the skyline his windows overlooked. Matsumori shut the door. “General Itō tells me you have the makings of a good strategist, Kiyama. He says you’re foresightful. Is that so?”

“The general is most generous, sir. I—”

“Prove it, then. What of the East Indies? If you were in my position, how would you proceed?”

“Your position, sir?”

“Yes. If you were charged with the logistics for the Pacific war, how would you handle the East Indies?”

Keiji swallowed. He felts his cheeks flush. “Sir, I haven’t read your daily reports. Without those, I’m sure I couldn’t—”

“Pah! Show some backbone, Lieutenant. Hazard a guess.”

“Given what I know, sir, given only what I’ve read in the newspapers…well, with due respect, sir, I would abandon the East Indies.”

Matsumori sat behind his desk, a bemused smile on his face. It was a Western-style desk, a blocky maple thing in keeping with the rest of the room. “Would you now? May I ask why?”

“Because the Dutch aren’t our problem. We should be more concerned about the British and the Americans.”