Lord Oda's Revenge (24 page)

‘Fool!' said Lord Oda. ‘You were told to leave her in peace.'

‘I was on the other side of the mountain. And anyway, she betrayed you. I thought you would be pleased. . .'

‘Then you are a cretin,' said Lord Oda. ‘She was my only child. My
heir
. How could I want her dead?'

Yukiko edged backwards, seeing the fury and disorder in his eyes. She had not expected this. ‘I—I mean, I thought you ordered her to commit seppuku, that night when Taro attacked the tower.'

‘I did,' said Lord Oda. ‘But I was angry. I wasn't thinking. Besides, one of my concubines was with child then. But the pregnancy. . . failed. I have sired no other children.'

He coughed, then wiped his eye with his sleeve. Yukiko stared at him.
He's a weakling!
she thought. The great sword saint was shedding actual tears over his daughter.

‘She went into the Hokke-do as it burned, you say?' he asked at last.

‘Yes.'

‘So she died bravely. Like a samurai.'

‘I suppose so, yes,' said Yukiko, feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

‘That's good,' said Lord Oda, almost to himself. ‘Good.' He looked down. ‘She betrayed me – you're right about that – but she was beautiful, and headstrong and clever.' He looked at her as if for confirmation. Pathetic!

‘Er. . . yes,' said Yukiko.

‘And now, of course, I have a loyal girl in you, do I not?'

Yukiko nodded.

‘Good. Because if you fail me. . .' He drew his finger over his throat. Then he sat up straight and blinked slowly, as if to close his mind to the topic of Hana and open it again on more important matters. ‘What about Kira?' he asked.

‘Dead.'

‘With honour?'

‘No,' said Yukiko. ‘I killed him from behind. He cried.' She stared into the eyes of the daimyo, willing him to blink, to rebuke her. But he only shrugged.

‘And Taro?'

‘Alive. I killed his mother before his eyes.'

Now a hardness came into Lord Oda's expression. ‘You're sure this will work? I don't like to think that he's up there' – he waved a hand towards the general direction of Mount Hiei – ‘and I can't just go and make him tell me where it is.'

‘I explained this,' she said patiently. ‘He would never tell you. However, with his mother dead, he will go to the ball. He must. He is consumed now by thoughts of revenge, gnawing at him like rats. I know the feeling. He will go to what will give him power; to what will enable him to destroy us. He will seek out the ball.' She stretched her back, yawning. ‘Anyway, it's his closest link to his mother. I assume he will start by returning to
Shirahama, where he grew up.'

‘So he will go to Shirahama. Then he will seek the ball and its power.'

Yukiko sighed. ‘It's not the power that interests him, I don't think. He has more honour than that. Real honour, not samurai honour. It's tedious, I can tell you. He's always thinking about the right thing – that's why he's so dangerous. He makes people believe in him, and then they die. The ball is more than a source of power to him. It's an heirloom from his dead mother.
That
is why he will go to Shirahama.'

Lord Oda grinned. ‘You are a cold one, aren't you?'

‘No. It's the dead who are cold.'
And hungry,
she thought. Many times she had sensed her sister's presence – a different thing from seeing her in the backs of strangers – and had felt a draining of her strength. Many times she had woken sweating, and seen Heiko's face pale and drawn in the gleam of her sword, or the clear water of the well. Yukiko was haunted, she knew it. She only hoped the blood she was spilling would satisfy her dead sister.

‘You know he'll want to kill you?' the daimyo asked. ‘You're not concerned about that?'

‘No. He's weak. All I had to do was draw a second sword, and he became as defenceless as a baby.'

Lord Oda shrugged. ‘Very well. The risk is yours to take, anyway. But you had better be as tough as you say.'

‘I am.'

‘Well,' said Lord Oda, picking up a brush and dipping it into a pot of ink. ‘I suppose all we can do is wait, and hope he leads us to it.'

‘He will. And then, when you have it, you will seal our bargain.'

‘Hmm?'

‘You'll make me a vampire.'

‘Oh, yes,' said Lord Oda. He bared his lips, showing his long teeth. Then he bent his head, contemptuously indicating a broken thing that had once been a man, lying in the gloom at the back of the tent, its skin white and shrunken, so forcefully had it been drained of its blood. ‘If you
are
as tough as you say, I rather look forward to a meal with a bit more fight to it.'

 

T
ARO STOOD SWAYING
in the dawn light, as the many plumes of incense all around him mingled with the mist that rose from the grass. As always, Hiro was beside him – and Hayao was not far off, his face healthier than when Taro had first known him, though there was a sadness about the eyes that had not been there before.

‘I'm sorry,' said Hayao. ‘I promised you I would protect her.'

‘It's not your fault,' said Taro.

It's Yukiko's, and it's the samurais', and they will all die. It's Lord Oda's, and he will die too if he's not already dead; it doesn't matter to me.

It's mine, and when my enemies are dead I can die too, and rest
.

He blinked, his eyes sore from the sleepless night, but closing his eyelids was not enough to make the bodies disappear; nor to rebuild the halls of the monastery, which lay in ruins on the mountainside, their remaining beams and struts blackened, so that they seemed the skeletons of fell beasts. The samurai had so far not returned, but why would they need to? The monastery was destroyed, and only a handful of monks remained. The dead were assembled in greater numbers than their mourners.

Ahead of Taro, on a raised wooden bier, was his mother, lying beside Kenji Kira and the monks who had died in battle. Hiro had said that they should throw the man in a ravine, or give him to dogs to eat. But Taro had refused. Yukiko had wanted to defile Kiro's body – and he would do nothing to give Yukiko pleasure.

‘We give him his due rites,' he had said. ‘He was a human being. We will send his soul on correctly. Where it ends up is another matter entirely.'

‘I am proud of you,' the abbot had told him.

‘Really?' he'd replied. ‘I deserve none of your pride.' And then he had turned and stalked away.

Back in the awful present, Taro gazed at his mother's body. Like the monks, she was dressed in a clean white kimono, her head facing north, so that her soul might find its way to the Pure Land. Hana's body was not here. Although monks still searched the ruins of the Hokke-do, Taro was sure they would find nothing. The fire that had killed her had also cremated her, releasing her from physical attachment and scattering her ashes on the wind.

It was the morning after the battle, yet it felt like years had passed. Taro had not slept or eaten. All he wanted was to go to Shirahama and recover the ball from the bottom of the bay. When he had it in his hands, he would use it to draw Yukiko to him, and then he would kill her, and everyone who had fought with her.

For now, though, he had to wait. The abbot wished to begin the funeral ceremonies immediately, for fear that the souls of the dead might linger on as
gaki,
feeding on the few monks who remained. There was also the fear of disease, even if the abbot hadn't expressed it out loud. A month would pass between the
funeral rites and the cremation, while the monks continued to read the sutras and chant prayers, hoping to speed the souls of the dead to a glorious rebirth. With so many dead on the mountain, and the days already warming as spring began to turn to summer, the abbot could not risk waiting even a single day to begin the obsequies.

Taro viewed the corpses through vision blurred by tears, exhaustion, and incense. All night the monks had been chanting, repeating over and over again the last sutras taught by the Shakyamuni Buddha on the day of his death, hoping that the good karma accumulated by their repetition might cling to the dead. Taro fingered the
tazu
beads looped around his hand, the shining balls of jade seeming the only hard thing in a world that had become smoke, liquid, and the monotonous recitation of men. The words of the Buddha seemed to float through him, occasionally snagging like fish on the hooks of his consciousness.

Taro almost smiled. It was clear from the sutras he had heard echoing all night that he would never attain nirvana. He could no more include Lord Oda or Yukiko in his heart than he could step off this mountain and walk through the clouds to the sea. He had already made up his mind – as soon as the funeral rites
were over he would go to Shirahama to find the Buddha ball.

And he would use it to destroy his enemies.

He closed his eyes, meditating not on nothingness and the abandonment of desires, as the Buddha taught, but on the deaths of those who had taken his friends and family. The ninja who had killed his father. Yukiko. The nameless samurai who had burned the mountain, destroying the Hokke-do and Hana as if they were driftwood to be burned with no consequence. All those responsible would die, and their deaths would be only the beginning of their suffering, such are the torments reserved by hell for the killers of the innocent.

He had caused death before, and he had paid for it in pain and guilt – but this, this was different. This was vengeance.

When he opened his eyes again, the chanting had finally stopped. He saw that the sun had broken free of the mountains and now hung suspended in the eastern sky.

The abbot, who was standing by the bodies, motioned for Taro to come forward with the coins. Taro had six coins in his sleeve for his mother, so that she could pay her fare over the River of Three Crossings, the Sanzu, and thus enter the realm of death to be judged by Enma and be reborn, or wake in the light of the Pure Lands, or suffer forever in hell, as he decreed.
It will be the Pure Lands,
Taro thought.
It must.
Later today, when he left the mountain, he would lay a further six coins on the razed ground of the Hokke-do, in the hope that Hana might find them.

Approaching the bodies, he laid the coins on his mother's lap, his hand for a moment brushing against hers, which was cold as stone and no longer felt human. Taro hoped her journey would be easy. He believed in his heart it would be, for a person's crossing into death was determined by their karma, and who could have led a life of greater compassion than his mother? She
had avoided the meat of four-legged creatures, dived the holy waters off Shirahama, and worshipped regularly at the shrine of the Princess of the Hidden Waters, protector of amas. On her way into death she would walk over the bridge inlaid with pearls and gold, while the sinners waded through rivers of snakes.

The abbot held a razor in his hand, and now he inclined his head to Taro, an unspoken question. Taro nodded. The day before, the abbot had asked Taro's permission to grant his mother the status of a monk, in recognition of her sacrifice for the monastery's sake, and so her funeral was also her ordainment, and it was necessary that the abbot shave her hair.

Taro marvelled at the abbot's composure as he made a gesture to his fellow monks, then approached the bodies. All night the abbot had chanted the sutras, yet his eyes were clear and sharp, his movements flowing. Taro felt that were it not for Hiro's hand under his arm, he would simply collapse to the ground, and never get up again.

The abbot touched the razor to Taro's mother's forehead, and bowed his head. ‘Throughout the round of rebirth in the three realms, the bonds of love cannot be severed. To cast off human obligations and enter into the unconditioned is the true repayment of blessings.' He repeated the verse three times, then held out the razor to one of the monks, who held a stick of incense beneath it so that the scented smoke wreathed around the blade. Then he made the respectful
mudra
of
gassho,
the razor still held in his hands, before carefully shaving her hair.

‘In shaving off hair,' he said, ‘we pray that all living beings should be free from mental afflictions and in the end achieve nirvana.'

Holding Taro's eyes with his own, the abbot then placed a hand on the body and began to speak in a low voice. He had
warned Taro, earlier, that the ceremony was the same, whether the person about to be inducted into the Tendai ranks was living or dead, and so Taro knew that the abbot would speak to his mother as if she was alive.