Autumn Bridge (65 page)

The boy looks up. His kite of fantastically colored sparrows stands out against the sky like a jeweled fragment of rainbow. He laughs, and hears the laughter of his mother and father grow closer as he runs toward them, as the kite rises higher and higher.

The man wants to see his mother, not the kite, and the man tries to will the boy’s head to turn and—

“Lord Genji!”

He heard a voice, anxious, distant, faint.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Hidé, his most loyal retainer. But where was his topknot, his kimono, his swords? Genji revived further. He remembered that Hidé was dead, killed saving his life in one of the many failed assassination attempts his enemies had made against him over the years. The topknot, kimono, and sword had gone the way of the Shogun and the Great Lords and the samurai. They were gone forever. This young man who looked so much like Hidé was his son Iwao.

Iwao turned to the bodyguard behind him and said, “Inform the chairman Lord Genji has taken ill and will not make his speech to the Diet today.”

“Wait.” Genji sits up. “I will be ready to go in a moment.” He knew this delay, caused by his third and final vision, would give his assassin precisely the time he needed to get into place. He could not help but be amused by the irony, though it would take his life. The very occurrence of his third vision will have enabled his first vision to come true. “Help me to the carriage.”

Genji regretted that he had failed to fully utilize the vision, had failed to look as closely as he should have at his mother. Was she as beautiful as he remembered? He would die with the answer still mysterious.

Yet he had learned something, something precious. His vision of the past would not guide his future, because his remaining future could be measured in a few hundred heartbeats. Instead, he was given a vision of his happy childhood. Genji had always remembered it as full of shame and sorrow. He had forgotten those joyous days, when the three of them were perhaps the happiest little family in all the isles of Japan.

“My lord?”

They had arrived. Genji stepped from the carriage.

“Are you sure you are well enough to speak today, my lord?”

“Quite well enough.”

The timing of his final vision assisted his assassin in another way. Genji’s bodyguards, concerned about the seizure and his resultant unsteadiness on his feet, paid more attention to him than they should, and less to potential dangers lurking in the crowd.

Prediction and result were intertwined and inseparable. When he was a child, he had not understood this. He had wondered how Lady Shizuka could know so much of the future, and still be unable to prevent the treacheries that were known to her even before they were conceived. Now, at the end of his life, that mystery was cleared away.

Knowing the future was like knowing the past. Events could not be controlled or altered, only one’s attitude toward them. Like the earth itself, the heart had directions. Bitterness, anguish, fear, and hatred lay one way; equanimity, gratitude, kindness, and love another.

This ability to choose the heart’s direction was the true power of the prophet, which was no more than the only true power of every human being.

How fortunate he had been in the love he had given and the love he had received.

Loud voices of contention came from the Diet chamber. Iwao stepped to one side and opened the door for him.

Okumichi Genji, a Peer of the Realm, Minister without Portfolio in the government of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Mutsuhito, former Great Lord of Akaoka Domain, lover of geisha and missionary and helpless murderer of both, smiled that slight, self-mocking smile that was so often misunderstood, and walked calmly toward the fulfillment of his vision.

Emily’s love for Genji was certain and unshakable. Her limbs, her senses, her life, her earthly happiness, her place in heaven, she would sacrifice all for him without complaint. If to save his soul it were necessary to cast herself into the deepest pit of hell, she would plunge joyfully into the flames, for what greater happiness could there be than to insure the salvation of her beloved? In the innocence of her youth, she had imagined that such love once attained would thereafter unfailingly guide her every step. How naive a thought that had been.

Love, she had discovered, was not entirely a matter of the spirit.

She had lately begun experiencing certain disturbing physical symptoms when she was in Genji’s presence, particularly when they were alone together. Even worse, she did not find the resultant sensations wholly unpleasant. Her upbringing and her faith prevented her from focusing too closely on them. Still, she could not help noticing that their effects were powerful and intimate. There was no real danger as long as Genji found her repulsive. His lack of feelings for her were her best defense against her own for him. Lately, however, she thought she had caught him looking at her in the peculiarly intense way characteristic of men whose animal natures have temporarily overcome the restraints of morality and civilization. When she had seen that look, she was not embarrassed or horrified, as she would have been in the past. Instead, she felt herself blushing, and her skin tingled most distressingly beneath her clothing. If he forgot himself, could she resist him? She did not think she possessed the will. This problem was easily resolved by her departure if her chief concern was her chastity. It was not. Genji’s immortal soul was in the balance.

If she departed, she would keep from being an unintended instrument of carnal sin. But in thinking that way, was she not merely putting herself before him by cloaking her self-concern in righteousness? Genji had numerous opportunities for carnality apart from her. In addition to the ubiquitous geisha, there were now the two unfortunate young women who had recently entered a most degrading slavery in his household as concubines. Over the years, Emily felt she had made steady progress in turning him away from the iniquitous paths of his ancestors. But from such occurrences, it was easy to see that the work was perilously incomplete.

Far worse than these lapses into the temptations of the flesh was his continued blasphemous spiritual diffusion. He professed submission to the divine will and omnipotence of the Father, gratitude for the sacrifice and resurrection of the Son, solace in the forgiving and protective embrace of the Holy Spirit. Yet he would not admit that the myriad Buddhas and gods were superstition only. Further, he still practiced the worship of nothingness advocated by the mad Patriarchs of the Zen cult. He said it was not worship at all, but how else could it be characterized?

It is only letting go, he liked to say.

Was that not the very opposite of salvation, which was a holding on to the words and grace of Our Savior?

Genji suffered from the great affliction common to his countrymen: the ability to embrace many contradictory beliefs at the same time. He saw no problem in being Buddhist, Shinto, Christian, all at once. He could believe in free will, and just as firmly believe in predestination. He could accept the True Word and nothingness with the same amen.

Of all the ways in which he went astray, the most dangerous was his certainty of the prophetic gift supposedly vested in his bloodline. His grandfather, the late Lord Kiyori, had been so empowered, according to Genji, as well as his uncle, the patricide Shigeru. He no longer claimed it for himself, but that was only because he knew such a claim offended her most profound beliefs. Keeping silent about a heretical view to which one subscribed did not lead to divine forgiveness. Silence only compounded the sin.

Her departure would surely signal the end of his conversion from paganism to Christianity. Only if she stayed with him and continued to provide steady, gentle guidance would there be any hope of Genji completing his reformation, and thereby assuring his salvation.

Which brought her back to the physical dangers of continued proximity.

All her efforts at reasoning seemed trapped in this logical circularity.

Emily’s dilemma was complicated further by the existence of the
Autumn Bridge
scrolls. They contained predictions that had seemingly come true. This was unsettling enough. Even more frightening, the narrative as a whole gave every indication of being addressed directly and specifically to Emily herself.

Lady Shizuka, the authoress of the scrolls, had died more than five hundred years before Emily was born.

There had to be another way to look at
Autumn Bridge
. Without Hanako to help her, she was linguistically hobbled. But if Emily looked with the eyes of a True Believer, and saw the words, not in a demonic light, but in the illumination of sincere Christian belief, would she not see the truth?

There was no alternative but to try.

She took up the last scroll, the twelfth, to look again at the final lines. She prayed she would interpret them afresh. She took a deep breath and opened the scroll.

Only faint, illegible marks remained, like vaporous wisps lingering over an extinguished fire. As Emily watched, these last remnants of Lady Shizuka’s writing faded away completely.

She went to the Mongol trunk and examined the other eleven scrolls. They were as blank as parchment upon which nothing had ever been written.

Emily leaned against the trunk of the apple tree. She had walked to the valley from the castle. The last time she had walked so far, she had been a girl leaving her parents’ farm for the last time. Then flames had risen into the sky behind her, emblems of an arsonous cleansing by her mother to wipe away worse crimes. Now the flames were within her, invisible, and none the less searing for being unseen and so neatly contained.

Now she had only her memory of
Autumn Bridge
to guide her. Could she trust it?

Lord Narihira dreamed the arrival of American beauty would signal the final triumph of our clan. He was right. But when he lived, there was not yet your America, so he misunderstood his dream. You were not a flower to be named to suit his hopes.

Emily had been so shocked by this passage, she had tried to blot it from her memory. Now she desperately strove to recover it, and in doing so, was utterly unsure of her accuracy. The reference to
your America
was chilling enough. But that
Autumn Bridge
should say
You were not a flower to be named to suit his hopes
verged on the satanic. Could
you
be anyone other than Emily?

Your daughter’s birth will clarify everything for him, but nothing for you. You will not long survive the nativity. She will hear much of you from her father. Since she will know you, let me tell of her, so you will know her as well. Her name will be the same as mine. You will insist on it with your dying breath. For this, I thank you.

Had she read what she thought she had read? A prediction of her union with Genji, and a prediction of her subsequent death in childbirth?

It couldn’t be. No one could predict the future but Jesus Christ and the prophets of the Old Testament. If the scrolls pretended to do so, then they were blasphemous, deceptive, evil. To prove their falsity, she need do no more than accept, upon its certain proffer, Charles Smith’s proposal of marriage. He would arrive within the week. Within the week, she could make lies of it all. But how would that help Genji? Her marriage to Charles would do nothing to turn Genji away from his belief in his own prophetic gift. This was the greatest danger to his immortal soul.

No matter how sincerely Genji proclaimed a belief in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, it could not be made consistent with his belief in himself as a prophet. The collision of righteousness and blasphemy would separate him forever from the mercy and forgiveness of Christ, and would doom him to be excluded from the Resurrection. She thought she could stand separation from him in this life. The thought of eternal separation was more than she could bear. Perhaps her motives, even in this, were less than holy.

She saw a horseman crest the ridge above the valley. It was Genji. As he rode toward her, she remembered that day, years ago, when he lay bleeding to death in the snow. She had held him in her arms and sworn an oath to God that she would not hesitate to sacrifice herself to save him. For an instant, the past was more vivid than the present.