Linnear 02 - The Miko (51 page)

A tiny cry escaped Sun Hsiung’s lips as he bent his head in worship. And Akiko, closing her eyes in rapture as she felt his lips encompassing first one nipple then the other, stroked the back of his neck in the expert manner she had observed for so long in Fuyajo, sensing now with her own newly learned knowledge the proper nerve bundles and, running her fingertips down their buried lengths, how to keep them burning with electric energy or to calm them into a euphoric stupor.

And yet it was not enough; she was impatient and her right hand snaked between their bodies, seeking to grasp in physical substance what she had reached out for during the last rising moments of sleep when something inside her had become aware of a presence beside her, then sensing that it was Sun Hsiung, and, lastly, picking up the intensely sexual emanations emerging from him. Thus she had reached out for him while still in the beta level of twilight cerebration and, on the cusp of consciousness, she had moved her wa across the infinity of space between them.

Now she had in her hand what her mind had touched, and she cupped his heavy scrotum in her palm while her fingers gently probed the soft skin just beneath, midway to his anus.

Sun Hsiung, who had been involved with the pristine symmetry of her breasts, abruptly felt the exquisite invasion of her fingers and thought he was going to perish with joy. She was moving to the core of him, accelerating his pulse rate. He felt inordinately heavy and ponderous, a human put into a sun bear’s shaggy body. His mind no longer worked correctly, all the crystal passageways that had led him so successfully through the labyrinth of logic had crumbled. He felt caught up in a power beyond his imagining.

Involuntarily he groaned as her astounding ministrations accelerated his passion further. With a low growl, he finished stripping them both of the robes. Swinging her around on the futon, he put his calloused palms flat on her thighs, moving them slowly inward along the incredibly soft flesh there. With infinite slowness he parted the stems of her legs and gazed lovingly down at the moist petals of the flower thus revealed.

His nostrils quivered at her musky scent. He felt his erection leap in her hands, the crown expanding, straining for release. It was as if she possessed a natural aphrodisiac that turned the air heady and thick as honey.

Her soft, high mount was within reach of his lips. Never had he hungered for another with such profound desire. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on these next few moments.

Her hair, just beginning to come in, grew only along the center strip of her pubic mound, leaving the sides as smooth and bare as a small child’s gully. This only increased his ardor since he had before him both woman and girl. Without another moment of hesitation, he pulled apart her shining lips with his thumbs.

When Akiko felt the heated stab of his tongue in her core, she arched up with her hips, crying out in inarticulate delight; She felt as if the sun had detached itself from the heavens and had been pressed up between her thighs. Too, she found that if she worked on him at the same time, her pleasure was increased tenfold.

She moved upward slightly on him, craning her long neck until she could press her lips to the skin just behind his scrotum. She felt the heavy trembling of his member as she did so and she began a low vibratory growl in her throat, pressing more directly against him in order to pass on the sensation.

Above her, his nose and tongue gliding along her slippery surfaces, Sun Hsiung’s eyes almost crossed with the intensity of the ecstasy he was experiencing. It was as if he had not just recently been drained twice by the tayu in the koryukai; it was as if he had not had sex in many years.

His tongue laved her from crown to stem and back again as if he could not get enough of her taste. Soon he felt the quivering of her powerful muscles high up along the insides of her thighs and he concentrated feverishly on the core of her, now expanded and pulsing in delicious surrender. He heard her gurgle and gasp beneath him, felt the electric swipe of her pointed nipples against his belly as she worked busily on him.

He wanted to give her her first real orgasm but he did not know how long he could hold out. She had not directly touched the crown of his erection yet he knew that soon he must jet his seed even with no direct touch.

Part of him marveled at this feat as he continued with his erotic stimulation. And now she was in spasm, the ridged muscles rippling just below the surface of her skin, her thighs pulled wide apart and her buttocks as hard as rocks. He could feel the ultimate vibrations beginning inside her.

And then, unexpectedly, he felt her insinuate herself out from beneath him, felt himself turned on his back, watched, wide-eyed, as she mounted him, inserting just the tip of him inside her.

He gasped, and involuntarily his hips lept upward off the futon as the liquid electric first contact threatened to overwhelm him.

Her hips moved back and forth, stimulating the crown of his penis, first the top then the underside, back and forth in a rhythm that took his breath away. Then she was sliding down farther and he had to put his hands on her waist, her own over his, pushing, helping himself through the natural barrier of tissue.

And then like the burst of a cannon’s fusillade he was through, his shaft sliding all the way up her. He felt her puffed-out lips against his scrotum and then, as she reached around, her fingers caressing him there, urging him onward.

She crouched over him, sliding her breasts and nipples hard against his flesh, her small, white teeth bared slightly as she worked her nips against him, building an irreversible tension within him.

Sun Hsiung gritted his teeth, the cords at the sides of his neck standing out like steel cables. He grunted continuously, all the way inside her now, but his eyes were open, staring up at her face, wanting to wait for her.

And the trembling came to her again, this time in great wracking pulses, shivering her hot sheath around him. It was the last straw and he felt-himself melting, all his energy, all his reserves of strength flowing down the ribboning muscles of his thighs to his loins, pooling like quicksilver in his scrotum. As her cupping palm urged him onward, as her sheath fluttered around his expanding penis, he felt a great series of throbs, an unutterably delicious warmth overpowering him combined with an enormous desire to penetrate her farther than he had any other woman.

Then she was crying out as her hips blurred, as she worked herself on him, rubbing and stroking, her sweet breath with a hint of his own musk in his face, her damp unbound hair a tender veil across his eyes. A heavy undulation across her abdomen and belly, her muscles fluting in spasm, and he felt silken fingers grasping him, stroking him anew with such tenderness that, miraculously, he felt a return of his waning orgasm, gathering once again in him as if he were a female, regenerating another form of pleasure entirely, one of which he had been ignorant all his life.

Something inside herthat same thing that had reached out to him in slumber and caressed himlifted him up with her so that they experienced her orgasm together, united in a kind of spirit dance Sun Hsiung had previously only experienced at the very height of the highest level of combat, when lives hung in the balance and death hung by his side.

Shaken like a leaf in a tempest, Sun Hsiung allowed the full force of her marvelous power to blast through him. He rose with her on wings of ecstasy and, his renewed erection quivering, shot again within her dripping sex all that he could muster.

Years later, the memory of that evening remained fresh inside him. And so it was that she came before him, now fully a woman, and said to him, bowing as she did so, “Sensei, I wish to learn one more thing.” Sun Hsiung’s belly contracted and his heart went cold, for he had known of this moment almost from the first. And dreading its coming, he had erased its specter from his mind. Until now. For now was the time.

“And what is that?” he inquired, his voice faint in the flickering lamplight which served to illuminate one small patch of the surrounding darkness.

Akiko’s forehead was against the tatami. Her shining black hair was pulled tightly back from her exquisite face, tied in a long ponytaila Chinese fashion unknown to her but pleasing to Sun Hsiungthat lay curled across one shoulder and her upper back. She wore a kimono of crimsons, golds, and flame oranges, a match for the autumnal foliage beyond their front door.

“I wish to learn how to disguise my wa.” Her voice was calm and free of excess emotion. She had proved to be an enormously gifted pupil. “Ever since I discovered the talent in me, I have longed to know this.”

“Why is that, Kodomo-gunjin?”

“Because I feel somehow incomplete without it.”

Sun Hsiung nodded once. “I understand.” He thought about saying more.

“There is no need to warn me, sensei,” she said, catching the essence of his emanation.

“It is more dangerous than even you can suspect.” Their eyes locked, Akiko submitted entirely to his will now, her whole being attuned to his words, sensing their import beyond the fact that nothing could dissuade her from her karma.

“I am not afraid of death or dying,” she said softly.

“Corporeal death is far from the worst eventuality.” Abruptly the room seemed webbed with bioluminescent strands, the building of their spirits, pulsing with vitality, making of this place a power spot. “These forces you seek are beyond even our understanding; they are so elemental that they may only be controlled partially. And in those other moments they may change you; they may corrupt all that you have learned here.”

Within the echoing silence that engulfed them both, Akiko bowed her head. “I understand. I will guard myself carefully against just such corruption.”

“Then this is where you must go,” Sun Hsiung said, sliding a folded slip of paper across the tatami to her.

The next morning, as she finished her packing, he took her painting pad and brush from her. “You cannot take these where you are going, Little Soldier.”

And for the first time Akiko had a sense of the depth of the darkness into which she was descending. “This saddens me, sen-sei.”

Those were the last words Sun Hsiung heard her utter. They drank one last cup of tea together. Moments later she hefted her bags and, bowing formally, left him.

It was the first time that she had performed chano-yu for him, the pupil serving the sensei as new sensei. For a long time after that Sun Hsiung sat before his tiny cold teacup, the dark green leaves clinging tenaciously to its bottom like a vine refusing to die.

Then, slowly and carefully, as if he were made of delicate crystal, he crawled across the tatami to where her painting pad with its black finger of the sable brush lay.

He reached out and picked up the pad, drawing it toward him as his eyes studied the calming confluence of forces within the bonsai garden. He heard the plaintive call of a plover through the partially open fusuma; he was quite unaware of the coolness in the room.

And with the pad pressed tightly against his chest, he began a slow rocking on his haunches.

At last one salty tear slid down his weathered cheek, to drop silently on the edge of the pad, immediately absorbed by the sheets of paper, gone forever.

[Release the trigger]

HONG KONG/WASHINGTON/TOKYO/ MAUI/RALEIGH/HOKKAIDO

SPRING, PRESENT

“I am afraid, Mr. Nangi, that the news is a good deal worse than either you or I first imagined.”

Tanzan Nangi sat sipping his pale gold jasmine tea, staring out the set of windows that faced the Botanical Gardens on Hong Kong Island’s Mid-Levels. Just beyond was Victoria Gap, high up on the Peak.

He was high up above the Central District in the All-Asia Bank’s executive offices, a glass and steel tower in the middle of Des Voeux Road Central.

“Go on,” Nangi said placidly as he tapped the ash from his cigarette into a crystal ashtray on the desk in front of him.

Allan Su glanced briefly down at the oversized buff folder he was clutching although it was apparent that he hardly needed to do that. He wiped at his upper lip, then ran his fingers through his hair. He was a small, compact Chinese of Shanghainese extraction who was normally calm and clear headed. Now his obvious anxiety filled the room like a strange perfume.

He began to pace back and forth over the antique Bhokara. “To give you an example, we have three-quarters interest in the Wan Fa housing project in the New Territories in Tai Po Kau.

The first mortgage has already been refinanced once and is on the verge of being so again. That would necessitate a second mortgage, which we cannot afford.

“We need an occupancy rate of seventy-six percent to break even at this point. The units should be renting for sixteen thousand Hong Kong dollars a month; we’re lucky if we get five thousand now. Since the announcement by the Communists no one wants to live in such an ‘unstable’ area that ‘could be overrun at any moment.’”

Allan Su stopped his pacing long enough to slam the folder down on the polished teak desktop on a pile of other such folders. “The list is almost endless.” There was true disgust in his voice. “Anthony Chin could not have done us more damage were he secretly working for one of our competitors.”

“Was he?” Nangi inquired.

“In this city, who knows?” Su’s shoulders lifted and fell. “But I doubt it. Several of the other banks were caught the same as us, though none to such a degree.” He shook his head. “No, I think Mr. Chin was merely greedy, and greed, Mr. Nangi, is the worst enemy of good judgment.”

Nangi bent forward and poured more tea. Then he settled himself more comfortably in Allan Su’s high-backed leather chair and contemplated the terraced network of white and pale ochre high rises that sprouted from the slopes of Victoria Peak, a forest of concrete.

“Tell me, Mr. Su, when was your last severe earthquake?”

Momentarily nonplussed by the question, Allan Su blinked his eyes behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Why, it’s been almost two years now, I believe.”