Linnear 01 - The Ninja (36 page)

One moment Saigo was unarmed, the next - perhaps a tenth of a second later - he had struck with lethal force. But even as he had used the iai draw Nicholas had been swivelling backwards on his right foot so that he now faced Saigo with his left side only. The blow, which had been meant for Nicholas’s heart, now swept down into empty air and with his left-hand bokken Nicholas made contact, sweeping the katana’s blade up and away from him, swivelled again so that for an instant his back was to his opponent, driving the blade away still, using the other’s momentum. Then he had completed the circular sweep and his right-hand bokken slashed into Saigo’s exposed left side. The waterwheel.

He stood now with the entire class watching him, his feet spread, his bokken on either side of him, staring down at Saigo’s sprawled form. There would be, he knew, a wicked purple welt raising the flesh where he had hit the other which would stay with him for more than a week.

There was absolute silence in the room; the kind of stillness that weighs on the ears until it becomes in itself painful.

Nicholas saw nothing but the face of his cousin staring up at him. Never in his life had he seen a look which contained so much hate. Nicholas had caused him to lose face in front of the ryu; he, a graduate, felled by one of the pupils. The intensity of their silent private war was such that for a moment it appeared as if lightning might light the room.

Then Kansatsu had clapped his hands twice and the onlookers broke up; class was out for the day.

Nicholas found that he was trembling, the muscles jumping as if out of control under the sheath of his skin. Tension and adrenalin both still coursed through him, having been released in enormous quantities by the stress situation. His mind knew that that was over but his body needed more time to accommodate itself to a return to normalcy.

He breathed deeply, in and out. It was like a shudder.

When he returned home that evening, it was not one of the servants who opened the door at his approach. Nor was it Cheong. It was, rather, Yukio.

He had not seen her in three years and then it was only one brief afternoon at a family funeral. It had been three and a half years since their incendiary meeting and he had never forgotten her.

She bowed. ‘Good evening, Nicholas.’ She wore a. dove-grey kimono with platinum-coloured threads running through it vertically. It had a midnight-blue wheel-and-spoke pattern that recalled the signs of the feudal daiymyo.

He bowed in return. ‘Good evening, Yukio.’

She stood aside for him to enter, her eyes on the floor in front of her. ‘You are surprised to see me.’

He put his bag down, never taking his eyes off her face. ‘I haven’t seen you in years.’

‘Aunt Itami brought me this afternoon while you were at the dojo. I came up to stay with them but the house is being partially remodelled, including the spare bedroom.’

He took her through the house, out of the back shoji. They stepped out into the night in the Zen garden.

It was clear, just a few stray clouds rising like wisps of smoke low on the horizon. The full moon was enormous, its reflected light turning the air aqueous; everything was bathed in blue shadows. He watched the soft light outline her profile, throwing her eyes into deep shadow. She might have been a statue at the Shinto shrine hidden within the cryptomeria. They might have been under water.

A nightingale called softly from the treetops high over their heads, and farther away came the long, lonely hoot of a snow owl.

‘I’ve never been to Kyoto,’ he said. It was where she lived.

‘You must come some time.’ Her head turned slightly. She was staring at the mountains of the rocks, raising themselves like living entities above the lawn of round stones. Her voice was like velvet in the night. They stood quite still, not touching. ‘It’s very beautiful.’

Not as beautiful as you, Nicholas thought. He felt his heart beating hard. ‘I still remember what happened.’

She turned to face him and the moonlight glinted off her pupils. ‘What do you mean?’

Now he felt a fool. ‘At the party.’ He paused. ‘When we danced…’

She laughed a bit self-consciously. ‘Oh, that. I had forgotten.’

He felt a bit deflated. He had felt before that part of her coming here was because of him. He saw how idiotic that was now. That one incident had happened three and a half years ago. Why should she remember it?

‘Was Saigo at the dojo today?’

‘Yes. I hadn’t seen him for some time. He’s joined another ryu, I expect.’

‘Perhaps that’s why he goes to Kyushu a lot.’

He stared at her. ‘Kyushu?’

She nodded. ‘It’s my Uncle Satsugai’s doing, I’m certain. They’re always plotting this or that when they’re together. I can’t imagine that Saigo would take it into his head on his own to go so far away. Anyway, it’s a secret, I know that much.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I asked Aunt Itami once and she acted as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said.’

‘I’m sure it’s nothing, then.’

Yukio merely shrugged, putting her arms across her breasts. ‘Can we go in? I’m hungry.’

They went into the house and Nicholas excused himself. He went off to his room and, throwing off his dirty robe, padded into the bathroom. He turned on the shower, stepped inside the stall. Someone as traditional as Itami would, perhaps, prefer the bath but Nicholas had no such predispositions.

It was good to feel the hot water on his body and he began to soap himself, his thoughts on the day at the dojo. He had wanted to talk to Kansatsu after the match with Saigo but that had proved impossible. Why hadn’t he mentioned the match to Yukio? There had been ample opportunity when she had brought up Saigo. He shrugged, dismissing the thought.

He turned his head, curious. A shadow had been thrown against the frosted glass of the shower-stall. It condensed in size. The person was coming into the bathroom. He turned off the water, opened the door. He stood perfectly still. Water beaded his skin, glistening in the fluorescent light of the bathroom, which had turned her skin opalescent.

‘You are quite beautiful,’ Yukio said. She was naked. She held a bath towel over one arm. She did not offer it to him.

He watched her face for any sign of what she might be thinking. He thought of her words. He saw hunger in her eyes.

He was seventeen and she two years his senior. In terms of chronology it wasn’t much but now it seemed like light-years. Despite all his training, his careful schooling, his cool intellect, he felt lost beside her, as if she were some doorway to a world for which he had been totally unprepared.

She took one step towards him. Her lips opened and she said something. It might have been as mundane as ‘Do you want this?’ He couldn’t tell. One leg was extended in front of the other, as his had been earlier at the dojo as the beginning of the interlacing cross. Her tiny ankle, the flesh of the calf, the extended knee, the long sweep of her thigh.

Something inside him, high up at the top of his brain, seemed to rise up, beginning to float away, as if someone unknown had chopped at the last cables holding him to the earth. It went twisting away, diminishing in size with such rapidity that he forgot that it had ever been a part of him. ‘Come here,’ he said thickly and his hand reached out, brushing the towel from her arm. It pooled on the glistening tile floor as her arms lifted to him.

‘Yukio.’ But a breath.

Her breasts were high and round, the dark nipples long and already very hard. Her narrow waist, her creamy belly. The dark mound of her mons was highly arched.

Her arms came around him and he enclosed her open mouth.

She slid her body against his, not using her hand at all, only her lips against his own, down his neck, back upwards again, almost desperate in their urgency. Her breasts rubbed along the wet flesh of his chest, picking up the moisture; her mound was against him, gently massaging.

Her lips were at his ear and he heard her whisper, ‘Turn on the water.’

He half turned, reaching behind them both to spin the taps. Hot water gushed down, inundating them, and as he turned back to her, he found that he was already deep inside her. He gasped. By what magic had she accomplished that? Sensations rolled like liquid thunder upward from his groin, engulfing him.

As he began to move against her, he saw her head float back, upturned, the wet hair cascading down like a stream at midnight. Her face was in the rush of water, her eyes rolling backwards, and her mouth wide open in a soundless scream. He could hear panting. Her arms came up, reaching over their bobbing heads to grasp the slippery chrome spout. Her knuckles turned white. Her thighs rose until they were locked around his waist and he was supporting her with his body. Her belly ground in hard circular movements as if she could not get enough of him and he was obliged to put his hands on her waist so that she wouldn’t throw, herself from their wet connection. The fierce heaving’s of her body mounted. It was like trying to hang on to a wild animal in the shuddering throes of death.

She began to scream now and abruptly he understood why she had wanted the water on. The pleasure was becoming unbearable and his legs began to tremble with the effort and the straining for release. Dimly he became aware that she was saying something to him.

‘Hit me,’ she moaned. ‘Hit me.’

He thought that in this state he must have misheard her but she repeated it over and over, a litany. Her breasts shook; rivulets of moisture ran down her supple flesh. Her body was arched backward, her hands still gripping the spout, their body’s pistoning frantically.

She was gasping and moaning and he didn’t think that he could hold out much longer. Her body seemed bottom-heavy.

‘Please!’ she cried to him. ‘Please, please, please!’ But he would not raise a hand to her. ‘I know,’ she gasped out, her lips against his ear. The hot rain crashing against them, her hard nipples scraping his chest. ‘I know what happened today -at the dojo.’ Her voice was ragged and there were uneven gaps between the words. Still, he heard her. ‘I know - oh! Hit me, darling. Hit me!’ And then, savagely, ‘I fucked Saigo, just as I’m fucking you now I’

He struck her then, as she wanted him to do, indeed, as she needed him to do.

‘Oh!’ she cried out, her body arching. ‘Oh, oh, oh, darling! I’m going!’

And, in that moment, he felt a ring of muscles deep inside her gripping him, clamping his flesh in exquisite torment, and he too cried out, his legs giving way at last. Her fists slipped from the spout and they collapsed to the bottom of the stall, the water on them, all around them, the steam rising. Her arms came around him, pulling him hard against her, both of them still in orgasm.

The clouds were on fire.

The sun, sliding downwards in its arc, broke across the oblique shoulder of Fuji, turning the sky to crimson. As quickly as it had come, the flare faded as the sun dipped behind the mountain and all that was left was traces of pink, slowly healing wounds on the undersides of the passing clouds. Soon they had turned grey. The lights were lit.

Kansatsu sat cross-legged in the centre of the dojo. Nicholas faced him. Nothing was said. The students, the other sensei had departed for the night. These two stayed on, breathing.

‘Tell me,’ Kansatsu said at last, ‘what you have learned from the Go Rin No Sho.’ His eyes remained closed.

‘There is good in it,’ said Nicholas. ‘And evil.’

‘That is rare, Nicholas.’

‘On the contrary, sensei.’

‘So?’

‘I don’t think anything in life is all good or all bad.’

Kansatsu opened his eyes and nodded. ‘You have learned well, Nicholas. You are an astute student. It is a bad idea to rely too heavily on one discipline or .one strategy set. This quickly becomes ingrained and one’s thinking stagnates. Rely only on the situation that presents itself. If you let notions of strategy dictate to you, you will surely be defeated.” He closed his eyes again. ‘You would be surprised, Nicholas, at the number of quite good students who make that mistake. Sensei, too.’

For a time there was silence between them. From outside Nicholas heard the muffled cough of a car starting. It drove off, the beams from its headlights swinging briefly across his field of vision. Darkness returned. A plover twittered, took off in a soft clatter.

Nicholas cleared his throat. ‘I have read it all.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘To be truthful, I don’t know what to think.’

‘Do the ninja interest you, Nicholas?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why do you hesitate?’

‘I didn’t know I had.’

‘Then you had better look inside yourself.’

He thought for a moment. ‘I guess I feel I should have said no.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ninjutsu seems a forbidden topic.”

‘Arcane, yes. Forbidden, no.’ Kansatsu stared at Nicholas across the small space between them. ‘Even here in Japan, there is surprisingly little known about the ninja. They are from a segment of society about which no Japanese can be proud. But ninjutsu is an ancient art. It came from China, or so it is commonly said. I do not think that anyone could tell you with absolute certainty.

‘The ninja were not bound by the Way of the Warrior. Bushido was only a word to them. Their rise was swift. Because they were so successful, the bushi used them more and more. As their wealth increased, so did the sophistication and diversity of their techniques. There came a time, then, when the samurai came to the ninja to learn. Thus the Way became perverted.

‘There are many ryu in Japan. More than in any official governmental count. Among these, the variety of disciplines taught is virtually limitless. Good and evil are sometimes propounded indiscriminately.’ He did not have to ask if Nicholas was following his line of thought. Darkness, now; the clouds obscuring the moon. Only man-made lights shone.

‘To be a true champion, Nicholas, one must explore the darkness, too.’

That evening, Cheong took Nicholas aside. They went into the Colonel’s study. It smelled of tobacco smoke and leather. Along with the kitchen, it was a Western room in an otherwise very traditional Japanese house.

Cheong sat sideways on the high-backed wooden chair in front of the Colonel’s rolltop desk. Nicholas sat on the leather couch, near her.