The Shadow and the Star (63 page)

"
Sumimasen, "
Samuel said. "For this, my debt to you will never end." He looked at Leda, and she remembered to bow to him. Softly, before she raised her head, he said in a slurred and tender voice, "Leda, when I tell you, the instant I tell you, you get off this boat. Overboard."

She straightened up abruptly. "Pardon me?"

"Do as I tell you. Whatever happens." His mouth grew hard. "Whatever happens."

"But�"

"Silence!" He strode to her suddenly, shoving her by the shoulder into a place against the rail, with his back to the others. "Listen to me, wife," he said fiercely through his teeth, "I'm telling you that if you don't do exactly what I say, you won't get home alive, and neither will I. This is no costume party. If I tell you to go over the rail, you go. Understand?" He shook her by the collar. "Now�start to cry. Do it!"

Leda was already halfway to weeping with shock. She didn't understand; it made no sense. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. "Samuel—"

"They can't leave until the tide turns. Four hours. No matter what happens, Leda. Into the water when I tell you. Do as I say no matter what happens."

Real tears of fright began to fill her eyes. "What's going to happen?"

He made a rough sound and pushed away. He faced Mr. Ikeno with his back straight, the bloodstain at his collar dark against the creamy linen. "
Yoi shiyo. "

The Japanese man responded at length in his own language, with a gesture toward the sword and toward himself. Samuel hesitated, then inclined his head, as if assenting to a decision.

Mr. Ikeno issued orders to his men. Everyone's demeanor had become grave, every move deliberate. Another mat was laid before the first, a second, shorter sword with a plain hilt placed on it. Samuel knelt at the point of the second sword, a graceful folding of his body. He touched his forehead to the back of his palms on the mat and straightened.

Mr. Ikeno also knelt. He sat facing Samuel, and picked up the shorter sword. With ritual deliberation, he drew it out of the sheath and released the blade from the hilt as he'd done to the other. He wiped the blade with a cloth, slowly, in silence, the only sound the gentle, watery swash of tiny waves against the island.

Leda was not certain that she liked this. She watched Mr. Ikeno pat over the blade a little pillow, like a powder puff, leaving a light dust. With another cloth, he wiped the white powder away, even more slowly, more carefully.

The clean steel gleamed. Mr. Ikeno turned it over and over in his hands, examining it. Then he extended it, bared tang first, toward Samuel.

Leda held onto the low iron rail of the fishing boat. Her cheeks felt hot. The summer straw hat gave her little shade from the mid-afternoon sun. Samuel wore no hat at all; his hair caught light, concentrated it, as the blade in his hand rippled sun along its length. He studied it, observing the edge, and then handed it back to Mr. Ikeno.

Samuel sat motionless while the Japanese man oiled a cloth and applied it to the sword as carefully as he'd wiped it clean. He reseated the blade in its stark hilt and replaced it on the mat, without the sheath, with the naked point directed toward Samuel.

Then he picked up the sword with the golden hilt and began the same ritual.

Leda drew in a breath. They were going to have a sword fight. She could see that this was some kind of ceremonial preparation. Her heart thumped in her throat. "Samuel," she said in a quavery voice. "I would like us to go home."

Mr. Ikeno looked up at her, as if a sea gull had spoken. He ceased his cleansing of the sword.

For a moment, Samuel was silent. Then he said to Mr. Ikeno, "
Gomen nasai
."

Mr. Ikeno held the long blade. He nodded. "
So. "

Samuel sheathed the shorter sword, laid it down, rose and came toward her. He touched her arm and leaned close to her ear. "We can't go home. Listen to me, do what I say; that's all I ask."

"What's going to happen?"

He rested the tips of his fingers against her cheek. "Please, Leda."

"What's going to
happen
?"

He only looked into her eyes. Leda swallowed in a dry throat, frightened. She caught his coat.

"Samuel—I won't have this! I won't have it."

"Do you love me?"

Her lips parted. "Yes!"

"Then depend on me. Do what I tell you. Cry if you want, scream if you want. Just listen for what I tell you, and do it."

"This is a nightmare."

He drew his fingers down her jaw. "I love you, Leda. Don't forget."

She stared at the bloodstain on his collar. Her throat was tight with terror. Her mouth opened on protests that wouldn't come.

He smiled faintly. "And don't forget to breathe."

"Samuel! If anything happens to you—!"

"Don't forget," he whispered.

Samuel left her. He faced Ikeno and the short, unadorned
harakiri-gatana
, with its double edge and workmanlike hilt wrapped in black silk thread. He knelt, with proper salute, and focused his attention on the Gokuakuma.

Ikeno had offered him a backhanded honor:
kaishaku
, to act his second, to stand as a relation, finishing off the ritual suicide with the demon blade. To save Samuel the full pain of the act, and retain the noble principle—as he grasped the sword and plunged it into himself, Ikeno would strike off his head.

It was a kindness, and a tacit assumption that a Westerner couldn't take it; wouldn't have the discipline to cut himself left to right, up and down, and then thrust the blade in his own throat, as a true warrior.

Samuel watched the hands that polished the Gokuakuma. Loving hands, like a mother caressing a child, smoothing the cloth lengthwise to purify the blade. Ikeno took his time. A Japanese sword was tested by noting how many bodies of dead enemies it could cut through at one stroke. This blade, unused for centuries, would be verified on Samuel.

Ikeno inspected the Gokuakuma inch by inch. He extended the blade to Samuel, allowed him to look at it without touching it, to judge the razor edge and the burnished steel, unrusted, shining without flaw in a blaze that brought the carved
tengu
to life, made the beak and claws seem to writhe as the sword moved.

Samuel bowed in acknowledgment. Ikeno placed the blade in its golden hilt and tapped the pin in place. He sheathed the Gokuakuma and stood up, taking his position behind Samuel.

In his mind, Samuel chanted the
kuji
, and conjured the strength of the nine symbols that his hands did not form. He listened, hearing nothing, and felt, experiencing nothing, and breathed the void, until there was nothing but earth, water, wind, fire, and the unremarkable sword in front of him.

Time, and the sword. Infinite time.

The moon shines on the water, and the water slips past, and past, and past, while the moon's reflection never moves.

The boat drifted on the incoming tide, and then the turn, the horizon creeping past.

He thought, and did not think, of Leda. Of Dojun.

It was like dying,
zanshin
.

The old song came to him, the first song, the shark's song.

And sometime, in that endless time, he heard the sound of tuneless bells. One carillon. Two. Three.

Leda
, he thought.
Leda
!

He reached for the blade and lifted it.

Leda felt a trickle of perspiration slide from her nape to
her collar. It was hours—she knew it had been hours, because she'd watched as Mr. Ikeno stood behind Samuel, holding the red-and-gold sword in both hands, by the hilt and the scabbard, his shadow lengthening, crawling across the deck with immeasurable slowness as the boat turned.

Everyone waited. It was like a dream. All the silence, the endless silence, this place, these men; Samuel, with the bloodstain on his collar and the swords that drew light from everywhere and turned it to gold and silver and steel.

It was because it was a dream that she didn't move when the shadow caught her eye, sweeping beneath the rail and the boat. Then she turned her head slightly, unwilling to look away from Samuel. It drifted past again.

She jerked.

Her body seemed to lose every nerve, everything that held her in place. She twitched once, all over, and froze. The edge of her vision darkened.

Breathe.

She gasped for air. And then she turned right around and looked down—and it had to be a dream. It was a hideous, unthinkable dream, a dark nightmare half as long as the fishing boat, moving streamlined and slow, now nosing at the hull, now floating beneath, and now disappearing into the depths with one sudden flick of the tail.

She opened her mouth. No sound at all emerged. She began to weep silently, staring around at the others who seemed oblivious to anything but Samuel and Mr. Ikeno.

Through the quiet, she heard tinny bells, the tuneless clatter from the rice paddies onshore—such a mundane, earthly sound that it didn't seem to fit anything. She felt as she'd felt in dreams, as if she were trying to cry out and couldn't move, as if everything happened like slow honey from a jar.

She saw Samuel bow before the blade on the mat. With a sound of wind, of a chanted whisper, Mr. Ikeno drew his sword.

He spread his legs and lifted the golden hilt, grasping it in both hands. The sword ate up the sun, spawning a bead of fire at the point.

The image froze in her eyes. She stared at the dazzle of the steel poised over Samuel's head.

No
, she thought.
No
!

She heard a scream: she felt hard hands on her arms, holding her back; she watched Samuel lift the sword from the mat. He raised it in one fist.

As he drove it toward himself, the other blade came sweeping down.

And the screaming was her own:
No, no, no
!

Samuel's body collapsed like a boneless doll, like a cab horse she'd seen fall dead in the street. Mr. Ikeno pitched over him, and Samuel was dead, butchered, crumpled on the deck with his killer, but he was yelling at her
Now, in the water now
!

In the water.

Samuel came out of a roll with both swords in his hands. He pivoted, driving his foot into Mr. Ikeno's chin with a force that hurled the man backward, his head slamming into the cabin wall. His crewman released her arms, lunging for a hooked spear from the deck.

"Leda!" Samuel shouted. "
Go
!"

His voice was a tangible agent, a force that pushed her. She gripped the rail, and looked down, and there was the shark gliding out from beneath the hull, breaking the surface with a horrible fin.

As she turned, Samuel evaded the wicked point of the spear, a step sideways and in, past the hook. He smashed down with the plain hilt onto his attacker's hand and drove his elbow up under the man's arm, sent knee into kneecap with a force that Leda heard crack bone. The man endured it without a sound, swinging the hook as he went down. The fierce slash made a low whirling note in the air. It cut open Samuel's cheek, a bright line of instant crimson.

He scrambled back, like a cat half-falling from a tree. His short sword flickered, slicing fingers from the spear as the injured man twisted away, trailing blood when Samuel kicked it overboard.