Lord Oda's Revenge (32 page)

Taro knew that Kappas were notorious for drowning the unwary, latching onto them and dragging them down into the depths, to feast on their flesh and pick their bones clean. His heart was pounding, his legs and arms thrashing, while a detached and horrible part of his mind contemplated the idea that he might be about to die.

At least I'll see them all again
, he thought.
Shusaku. Mother
. . .

A Kappa swam into him, bashing his head with its shell, and stars exploded in front of his eyes again. He scrabbled for purchase on the reef, and thought he'd seized a piece of coral, but it turned out to be a Kappa's head. The thing twisted, making a sort of watery snarl, and tore at his hand with its teeth.

Then, just as he thought his fear could not reach a higher pitch, the water went dark. A cloud must have covered the moon, cutting off its light, and in the gloom he could barely
make out the demons intent on drowning him. The Kappas were so many that their shells brushed against one another, and the scraping and clicking of the ivory came at him now from all sides, out of an unknowable world of blackness.

And then something hard and sharp seized his leg.

Taro opened his mouth to scream and water rushed into his mouth. His lungs flared with agony, doubling him over, as his leg and arm were pulled closer to the sharp coral. He thought,
This is it
—

—and then there was an ama coming towards him out of the murk, trailing a wake of phosphorescence. The woman was lithe, dark-haired, and beautiful, and she glowed as if a private moon were shining on her alone. She was dressed in the traditional ama loincloth, her body smooth and strong. Taro had never seen her before, but he knew who she was – the woman from the prophetess's story; the one who had first dived for the ball and who had cursed the line of the emperors.

She was also, he realized suddenly, the Princess of the Hidden Waters. She and that long-ago ama were one and the same. . .

The glowing ama drifted to him and then stopped, gracefully hovering over the reef. She smiled, and Taro had never seen anything so pure or so perfect.

She has come to take me to Enma's realm
, he thought.
So this is what death is like. . .

But the woman didn't come closer. Instead her face twisted into a fierce mask of anger, and she swooped, powerful as a dolphin, at the Kappa that clutched Taro's arm. She rushed through the demon, as if it wasn't there, and indeed when Taro looked down the mouth was no longer gripping his arm, and the terrifying vision of the dog-limbed turtle was gone.

Moonlight reappeared, and the scene was bathed again in deep blue. Taro saw flashing white, all around him, a figure racing through the water in a protective circle. It dived on a Kappa, and the grotesque turtle became only water and bubbles.
She's saving me
, he thought with wonder.

His lungs fit to burst, Taro lunged forward to seize the ball, then pushed off the reef – he felt it tear the bottom of his foot, but that didn't matter now – and began to rise towards the surface. He knew he should not go up too quickly, but he could feel the pressure on him to let air into his lungs, and also knew that if he didn't get to the air above, he would gulp despite himself, and it wouldn't be air, it would be water flowing into his body. The golden ball was heavy in his hands, but he clung to it, holding it tight to his chest.

I have the ball I have the ball I have the ball
, he thought, over and over like a mantra. He would command vast armies, and drive them against the samurai of Lord Oda, crushing them like dragonflies between his hands. He would summon his mother to speak to him, and raise Hana from her deathlike sleep.

But first he had to live, and right now the water was pressing against him, searching with cold fingers at his eyes and his mouth and his nose, trying to force its way into him and make him one with the sea.

Panicked, but glad to be free of the demons, he saw the lightness of the surface as a rapidly nearing wall of white, and he prayed that he would reach it in time.

One heartbeat. . .

Two heartbeats. . .

Three heartbeats. . .

And then he broke the surface and air rushed into him like an invading spirit, angrily tearing his windpipe, as if to punish
him for having absconded from the kingdom of air. His eyes stung, and he saw the night sky, twinkling with stars, through vision blurred by sea or tears or both, it was impossible to tell.

He was alive.

He was safe.

 

S
HUSAKU STEADIED HIMSELF
by gripping the ship's rail. He could feel the sting of salt spray against his face, yet he could smell pine trees, and knew that they were close to land.

‘Is this the right place?' said Lord Tokugawa.

‘You've been here before,' said Shusaku. ‘It's where your son comes from.'

‘Yes,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘But I only ever saw it from the shore. You escaped by boat, you said. So tell me, are we there?'

Shusaku sighed. ‘I can't see. How would I know?'

‘Come now,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘You sneaked into the fortress of Hongan-ji, and you couldn't see then, either.'

Shusaku shrugged. It was true. He'd completed the daimyo's insane mission and had delivered one of the new guns to the warlike monks on the mountain. It had been complicated by the fact that Lord Oda's troops were readying themselves, and the monks believed an attack was imminent. Yet with the help of Jun, he had scaled the walls – considered impossible to climb – and gained access to the inner sanctum of the Pure Land sect, the Ikko-ikki. But nothing was over yet.

Back on the pirate boat, after the mission with the gun, the daimyo had greeted Shusaku warmly.

‘You succeeded?' he'd asked.

‘Yes.'

‘And the boy? He died?'

‘No. I left him at the monastery, with the Ikko-ikki. As you instructed.'

‘Good,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘He will prove useful there, I'm sure.' There had been a lot of commotion on the ship, and Shusaku had asked why.

‘Mount Hiei is burning,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘The pirates take it for an evil omen.'

‘The sacred mountain?' Shusaku had asked. ‘I heard gunfire from there. What is happening?'

‘I believe Lord Oda is making his move,' said the daimyo. ‘Foolish of him, of course. One should never begin play before knowing where all the pieces are.' With that, he had left Shusaku and retired belowdecks.

Then, with the rest of the guns distributed to the pirates, Lord Tokugawa had rendezvoused with his own ship, and now they were sailing up the eastern coast of Japan, heading for the place where Shusaku believed the Buddha ball to be, assuming he was correct in thinking that the amas must have kept it hidden in Shirahama bay, where the Princess first threw it. Lord Tokugawa was determined to recover it, and with it the assurance that he would be shogun.

‘Describe the place to me,' Shusaku said.

‘We're towards the north of a wide, shallow bay,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘There are lights on the coast, clinging to a steep mountainside. It looks familiar to me, but these coastal villages are so similar.'

‘Is there a torii gate ahead, on the promontory?'

A pause. ‘Yes.'

‘Then we're here. I'm not sure where the ball would be, if indeed it is here.' He hoped that Taro was far from here – still safe on the ninja mountain, preferably, if he was not dead. Shusaku wouldn't put it past the boy to try to recover the ball himself.

‘No matter,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘We'll lower anchor here. In the morning we'll have one of the local divers tell us where it is, and recover the ball for us.' None of the samurai could swim, or the sailors, either.

Shusaku could swim, of course – Lord Tokugawa knew that. All ninjas could swim. It was often the only way to get across a moat, and to the assassination within. But Shusaku was blind, and there was no one to guide. There had to be
some
things he couldn't do.

‘They might not know where it is,' he said to the daimyo. ‘And they might not go after it anyway. They're very superstitious. They believe certain parts of the bay to be cursed, or haunted, or both. They think it is fatal to dive there.'

Lord Tokugawa chuckled. ‘I'm sure they do. But they'll learn that it's fatal to refuse me too.'

Shusaku nodded, keeping his opinion to himself. Lord Tokugawa had become harder than he remembered him, more like the other daimyo than ever before. Shusaku remembered when he had been compassionate and quick to defend the weak. Shusaku himself had benefited from those traits, for he had once been a high-ranking samurai in Lord Tokugawa's army, and a minor lord himself. After he was made a vampire by a ninja who had fallen in love with him, Lord Tokugawa was appalled but did not cast him out as he might have, merely kept him in his employ, and Shusaku had been loyal to him ever since.

And yet Lord Tokugawa had been clever then, too, and his
superior skills in strategy often depended on surprise, treachery, and deceit. The man was utterly ruthless in his pursuit of power. Shusaku had seen him put innocent men to death without a backward glance, simply because they knew too much, or had associated with the wrong people. He was also unflinching in his imposition of what the samurai called honour, and had made people commit seppuku for the mildest offence.

Deep down, in fact, Shusaku had always sensed that the daimyo had kept him close not out of compassion – but out of strategy.

That was why Shusaku had kept Taro's survival from him. It was one thing for one of your samurai to be made a vampire, especially if that gave you a valuable connection to the ninjas. But the son of a daimyo? It was unthinkable. Taro would have been killed immediately.

Lord Tokugawa clapped Shusaku on the back. ‘Soon I'll have the ball,' he said. ‘And then nothing can stop me being shogun.'

‘You have to get hold of it first,' said Shusaku. ‘I'm not even sure that it's here. And even if it is, and you can convince the villagers to help you. . . Well, these are dangerous waters. You know what they say:
Kappa mo oboré-shini
.' The expression meant ‘Even Kappas drown.' Kappas were the water spirits that abounded in these parts, a sort of supernatural turtle that sometimes caught swimmers unaware and drowned them for fun. But even Kappas could drown, just as monkeys could fall from trees, and amas could get their foot caught in the coral and die. Shusaku didn't want Lord Tokugawa to blame him if he was thwarted – Shusaku had seen the daimyo kill too many of his followers who had failed him. And anyway, what if the villagers
didn't
help? Even the threat of death might not induce them to dive the wreck. . .

‘Oh no,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘I have every faith in you, and the good people of Shirahama. I believe I will have the ball in moments.'

‘Moments?' said Shusaku, confused.

‘Yes indeed,' said Lord Tokugawa, and Shusaku could hear mirth and triumph in his voice. ‘You see, a boy has just come to the surface by the ship, spluttering like a baby in a bath, and he's holding a golden ball in his hand.'

 

T
HERE WAS A
loud creak from behind him and Taro turned in the water, just as rough hands seized him under the arms and hauled him upward. The ball was snatched away from him. He thought for a moment that the Kappa had followed him to the surface, but then he landed hard on a wooden surface and looked up into the smiling faces of a group of samurai. At least, they looked like samurai – but none of them wore a
mon
to identify their family allegiance.

Almost as if they don't want to be recognized
, thought Taro.

The armed men were clustered around a big man with startlingly sharp eyes – obviously the leader.

‘Thank you,' said this man. He weighed the Buddha ball in his hand. ‘You have saved me a lot of trouble.'