Beneath an Opal Moon (9 page)

This was Onna. Or, more accurately, Onna-shōjin. This was, quite literally, a title rather than a name. It meant mistress, which is precisely what Onna was. No one knew her actual name and, because she had insisted on it at first, she had become Onna to all who spoke to her or of her.

“They're ready,” Onna said. She prided herself in knowing all her patrons' wishes after they had entered Saitō-gÅ«shi's portals once. At least as far as Moichi and Kossori were concerned, she had never been wrong.

The women were waiting for them in one of the small rooms. Golden trays with sweetmeats and a variety of exotic liqueurs from far-off lands, imported under Onna's express direction, covered a multitude of tabletops.

Two of the women were petite but well-rounded. They had pale skin and features so startlingly similar they could have been twins and perhaps they were. These were Kossori's. He never took less than two to bed. Actually, he had begun with three when he had first come here but he found that late at night other women from Saitō-gūshi's multi-tiered rooms would eventually slip into his bed after satisfying their own patrons. It seemed that gossip of this nature spread almost instantaneously throughout the building. Kossori was a superb lover with an unusually high capacity for extended sex. But even for him, four women a night was more than he could handle. Afterward, he confined himself scrupulously to two.

The third woman was one of a number whom Moichi invariably chose. She was slightly larger in frame than the other two, brown-haired and with a dusky olive-tinged skin which reminded Moichi of the Iskamen women he had left far behind. Try as he might he had never fully gotten used to the paleness of the Sha'angh'sei women.

“I will come to fetch you at the hour of the snake,” Kossori told Moichi as he gathered his women about him with his long arms.

“More likely it will be I who will have to come after you,” Moichi answered, and the women giggled.

He was not hungry or thirsty and so the woman led him out along a passageway smelling of cedar, its ceiling as dark as a starless night, and up a spiraling flight of stairs to the second story.

She opened a door and they went in. He heard the sound of the surging sea and he went across the room, parting the fluttering curtains. The window was open, overlooking the ocean. Onna, indeed, never forgot a thing no matter how minute it might seem superficially. She was, after all, in a business which was exclusively subjective and extremely personal and to forget
anything
a patron might desire would cause a disruption of harmony. And harmony was, in the end, what Saitō-gūshi was selling.

This room was built as if it were a captain's cabin aboard ship. It might have been the only one like it in all of Saitō-gūshi or, again, it might be one among many. There was no way of telling. And did it really matter?

A low fog was rolling in, billowing across the streets just high enough to reach a man's calfs. The moon was hidden by a bank of low-lying stratus, perfectly horizontal, hanging heavily in the otherwise spangled night sky.

Moichi felt a gentle touch on his shoulder and he turned around. The dark beams rose over her head obliquely, faithfully following the slant of the roof. The scent of cedar was strong even here but her musk was stronger. She came into his arms and kissed him with her open mouth. He felt the hot electric flick of her tongue. Her hands fluttered along his body and his robe slid, sighing, to the floor.

There was something tremendously erotic about being totally naked while she was still clothed and this reversal somehow reminded him of Elena. Had he chosen this woman because of that?

Her busy fingers reached for him and she gasped as she found him tumescent.

Abruptly, her robe was open, hanging from her like the wings of a bird, and she was using her thighs to climb his thick, muscular body, panting into the hollow of his neck.

Outside, in the spreading branches of an ancient pine tree, battered by the idai na nami but unbowed, a great owl blinked twice into the lamplight streaming through the window, called out, hooting into the night.

In the dead of night, he found himself standing in the center of a familiar street. He was in Sha'angh'sei but as he looked around he wondered how this could possibly be, for the street was totally deserted.

It was Green Dolphin Street, he was certain. For wasn't that the sign of
The Screaming Monkey
swaying in the wind almost directly in front of him? Yes, of course. And there was the alley where—

His head felt tight, as if someone were squeezing it in a giant vise. And now his nostrils dilated. What was that stench?

He looked down. In his hand was clutched a handwritten note. He squinted but the uncertain light made it impossible to read. Nevertheless, he knew what it said:
Meet me in the alley on Green Dolphin Street
.

And he had come, it seemed. But why to this alley out of all of those on this long winding street?

The stench seemed fiercer and somehow he knew that it was emanating from the alley on the other side of Green Dolphin Street. He should go there. It was why he had come, after all. But he seemed frozen in his tracks as if split apart, one half not obeying the other.

Fear rooted him to the spot.

He did not want to venture into that dank dark alleyway.

And now he saw himself as if from a height, an ethereal presence watching, helpless, as his body walked toward the alley.
No!
he wanted to cry out.
No, stop! Don't go in there!
But he seemed voiceless, too, unable to quell the feeling of mounting dread which filled him as he saw himself enter the ebon portal.

Yet now, instead of disappearing into the shadows, he found that he could follow himself and, as he did, the swinging sign of
The Screaming Monkey
, Green Dolphin Street, then all of Sha'angh'sei, disappeared as if it had never existed.

He saw, hovering, his body bending over a lumped shape, saw the corpse of the man from Kintai, destroyed, blasted, a hideous work of art, an abomination.

And then he knew that it was not this pathetic remnant of a human being which had terrified him but rather that thing which had perpetrated this evil.

He forced himself to again look upon that horror so that he should never forget and in that instant an idea began to occur to him. Perhaps it was the angle in which he found the body or, again, the kind of wreckage made of its appendages. Something. Something.…

“—chi, wake up.”

Someone shaking him, gently. But he almost had it now and he turned away, mumbling.

“Better let me do this.” Another voice and a firm grip, pulling him up, up, off the bed, out of sleep.

Annoyed, he used the side of his hand in a sword-strike, felt it caught in midair, halted by a grip of iron.

“Take it easy, my friend. Wake up.”

It was Kossori's voice. Moichi opened his eyes.

He left the bed without a word and dressed quickly. Looking back, he saw her sleek skin dappled in moonlight and he leaned over, kissed her lips.

Then they were away.

It was the dead of night. The moon had already long passed the zenith of its nocturnal path. Too low now even for the line of thick stratus, it hung huge and swollen and pale as bone just over the black rooftops, slipping, slipping away toward the horizon. The stars glittered coldly, seeming as close as the moon.

“We shall have to walk,” Kossori said. “I dare not summon a ricksha.” He glanced at Moichi. “Are you all right?”

Moichi forced a laugh but his face was sober. “Oh, yes. Just—I had a most peculiar dream, that's all.”

There were few people about now, one or two drunks staggering along buildings' walls, a family asleep, huddled in a sheltering doorway, a pair of fragile old men rolling dice. Shadows flitted, larger than life, skittering along the brickwork like a magic lantern show as they drew near night lights, then passed them.

After a time, Kossori said quietly, “Will you tell me then—about the dream?”

Moichi sighed heavily, still feeling mired in wisps of the nightmare. “I saw myself on Green Dolphin Street, opposite the alley where Aerent and I found the body of the man from Kintai.” A dog barked and then was still, padding hungrily through the rubbish strewn helter-skelter across an alley somewhere ahead of them. “I found myself examining that body again but now it seemed—I do not know, it seemed as if I was seeing it in a new light.” A light female voice came to them, wafting from a darkened second-story window in a building of brick to their left, singing a plaintive Sha'angh'sei folksong in the kubaru dialect.

“What was different this time?” Kossori asked.

“That's just it, I cannot remember.”

He could make out the words now. A tale of lost love.

“Ah, well. Perhaps it is not so important,” Kossori said.

In the village of my birth—

There is a fountain in a square—

Dappled, such a tiny square in among the beech—

It was there I met a man from the sea—

Smelling of rich brine, sea-lace twined about his feet—

“Dreams are often important,” continued Kossori. He shrugged philosophically. “At other times—who knows?”

I never saw him again, my great mer-man—

Perhaps he slipped away beneath the rolling waves—

But now I am in Sha'angh'sei—

And the sea is always with me—

My mer-man, ah!

They came abreast of a house recently gutted by fire and through the gap could see all the way to the upper reaches of the city. High on the hill, lights still shone brightly in the large mansions of the walled city where the rich hongs lived guarded by the paid protection of the Ching Pang. Here and there, sculptured trees defined themselves in the illumination, taking on an almost celestial corona. Closer to hand, a whippoorwill flitted from tree to tree, calling. Now they had left the human voice far behind.

They turned a corner. A light flared momentarily in an alley; the smell of sweet poppy smoke was pungent in the air.

“How did it begin for you,” Moichi asked. “The
koppo
.” Because he wanted to take his mind off the dream.

Kossori whistled tunelessly for a moment, imitating the whippoorwill, trying to get it to answer him, but either it could tell the difference between man and avian or it was gone. Moichi heard the dap-clap cadence of their boots against the gleaming cobbles of the street clearly in the night. The moonlight cast shadows as sharp as a sword-edge.

“It was self-defense, in the beginning.” Kossori's voice carried eerily in the stillness; only the cicadas gave concert, even the night birds had disappeared. “I could never successfully handle a dirk or a sword.” He shrugged. “After I got beaten into the dirt twice, I had had about enough.” The flames of Sha'angh'sei's night lights were narrow boundaries between which they passed like shades. Beyond, there seemed to be nought but empty space, echoing vertiginously.

“I had no home then,” Kossori continued, “and I went to the only place I knew well: the bund. When I was younger, I would be there before dawn, watching as the great three- and four-masted schooners maneuvered in to port or weighed anchor, their bellies full of produce, bound for distant shores. And”—here he chuckled—“I used to imagine myself stowing away far belowdecks, wedged between the huge sacks of rice where no one would find me, coming out only when we were far out to sea—too far to turn back—and presenting myself to the captain, some tall strong man with a face as tanned as leather, offering to work as a sailor or even a cabin boy to pay for my passage. No matter where we were bound. What difference to me?” He laughed softly. “But I lacked the guts, then—or, more likely, I had too much common sense even at that age to attempt such a foolhardy adventure. They would have made mincemeat of me.” He shook his head and began to whistle again, this time the notes heavier, darker, seeming to come at random as if this meandering melody would help summon his past back to him. “Still, I suppose some things are best left to the imagination, eh?” He pursed his lips, preparatory to whistling, then paused. “But you asked about the
koppo
. Ah, well. By that time I had already taken a piece of bamboo I had found in the market and was working out the placement of the air holes. It was a crude flietē, I admit, but I was quite the crude musician, then.” Laughter in a doorway, startlingly close by, abruptly cut off.

“I lived for a time on the ground floor of harttin along the bund, staying just long enough in each one to avoid discovery.” He smiled. “Once I fell asleep atop enormous sacks of poppy resin and dreamed the dream of emperors.

“The tasstan took me for a while but, of course, there was never enough to go around—of
anything
, food, clothing, you name it. It was heartbreaking and after several times filching half-rotting apples and moldy mushrooms, I gave it up and never went back to the boats. It was far too depressing a way of life.

“There was nothing for me then. Nothing at all. I wandered the wharves through the nights, working with the bamboo flietē, learning to play it slowly, wonderingly, ecstatically as one learns the body of a cherished lover. Sometimes the night cooks along the bund would hear me and call me in for a meal. But when I tell you that music was my only solace, I am not being melodramatic. And it was only my music which stopped me from tying a stone to my legs and dropping into the harbor.

“During these spells of depression, I would spend long hours trying to reason things out, morbidly returning to that heavy weight which I would certainly need, for I knew that I lacked the determination of spirit to voluntarily allow myself to go under and stay there until the water flooded my lungs.” He snorted, an almost derisive sound. “That, however, was not all idle cerebration. I had actually gone into the water one dark bleak night when I could no longer bear to be alone, when even the stars and the incandescent moon ceased to be my friends and it seemed as if I was the only person in all the world; everyone was a million kilometers away, on those cold stars.” He glanced at Moichi. “It sounds mad, I know, but the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became that it was real. I began to shiver and before I really knew it, I was stepping off the pier and was going down like lead. Down and down.” He shook his head convulsively. “That's when I knew it. Down there. It was a hell, terrifyingly real. I wanted life—to breathe, to see the moon and stars, the sun, to feel the rain and the wind; to live, to live!