Lord Oda's Revenge (6 page)

And then, when he had known that he was truly blind – that his vision was not coming back – he had begun to make his way out of Lord Oda's town, pretending to be little more than a pitiful beggar. He hoped Taro would return to the ninja mountain – he'd be safe there, or safer than anywhere else. He himself could not return. Kawabata would seize on just this chance to take over, to overthrow him. And besides, he was a freak now, a monster. Taro would have to fend for himself, much as Shusaku missed the boy.

‘And the marks?' said Lord Tokugawa, startling him back into the present. ‘The scars, on your skin?'

Shusaku's tattoos had been untouched by the fire, and now they stood proud of the skin, blacker and more pronounced than ever. Around them, surrounding them, interweaving them, was a mass of blistered red scar tissue, where Shusaku's flesh had been burned almost to the bone.

‘They were protection,' he said. ‘To help me against the other ninjas.'

‘Like Hoichi,' said Lord Tokugawa. It was the thing that came to everyone's mind – the story of the haunted man who was painted with the Heart Sutra by an abbot, in order to hide him from the sight of his ghosts. Specifically, the part of the Heart Sutra that said,
Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form.
This incantation, etched upon the body, prevented spirits from seeing a person, reminding them – for even spirits are Buddha's creatures – of the essential unreality of the phenomenal world.

‘Yes, like Hoichi,' said Shusaku. ‘And like Hoichi, I was punished.' In the story, the abbot had forgotten to paint Hoichi's ears, and so the ghosts had torn them off, in their anger, for ghosts are always hungry. He pointed to his eyes. ‘My eyes gave me away.
The man I was fighting cut them out with his sword.'

‘And the burns?'

Shusaku had not seen them, but Jun had described them to him – and others had too – so he knew what the lord meant. ‘The sun. I lay in full sunlight for an hour, or more, before I came to my senses.'

Lord Tokugawa gasped. ‘And you didn't die? I thought that was what happened with. . . your kind.'

‘No. I believe that the sutra saved me. The sun is a god, is she not?' In the Shinto religion that had held sway in Japan before the coming of the Buddha's teachings, and that had now been assimilated into Buddhist faith, the sun was called Amaterasu, and as a god she could no more ignore the Heart Sutra's command than a vampire could.

The sun, Shusaku believed, had not seen him completely – only the parts of him uncovered by tattoos. It had burned him to the quick, but only to a pattern, leaving the tattoos untouched.

‘Remarkable,' said Lord Tokugawa. He sucked his teeth. ‘But I have an idea,' he said, ‘of how you can redeem yourself for your failure.' He stood, and Shusaku heard him moving across the room. There was a shifting sound as of hard objects being moved, their friction against one another.

Shusaku bowed his head, waiting for the sound of the blade being drawn, then the whisper of its edge against the air, cutting the very atoms through which it moved – the last thing he would hear.

Instead something was placed in his hands. Something long and cold, mostly wooden, with a lever at one end, and decorated all over in metal, chased with flowers and thorns.

A gun.

‘Hold on to that,' said Lord Tokugawa. ‘You'll be needing it.'

 

‘S
HE IS A GAKI,
' said the priest. He had taken a room at the inn, and Taro, Hana, and Hiro had joined him there. The samurai sat cross-legged on the floor, ignorant of their presence, staring into the eyes of the woman who sat before him. ‘A hungry ghost.'

Taro murmured a silent prayer to Buddha. A ghost? But those things didn't exist, couldn't exist,
shouldn't
exist. He knew that only he, of all the people in the room, seemed able to see the woman, but there must be some rational explanation.

But then,
he reminded himself,
vampires don't exist either. . .

‘It's all right,' said the priest. ‘She won't hurt you. She has eyes only for him.' He nodded to the samurai.

‘Yes,' said Taro. ‘He is all she looks at.'

‘Can you describe her?' said the priest.

Taro looked at her, though he didn't like doing so. There was something unsettling about the woman, about the way that he could just – if he looked from the right angle – see the grain of the wooden floor through her. He had noticed her pallor before, the paper-whiteness of her skin. He hadn't noticed the black eyes – not black irises, but the whole eye black, as if ink had been dripped into her eye sockets, as if they
were the inkwells for the white paper of her body. He shivered uncontrollably.

‘Her eyes. . . her eyes are wrong. Black. Her hair is long and braided behind her head, in a single braid.' He forced himself to be more specific. ‘She has a beauty spot on her left cheek.'

The priest nodded. ‘She is as she was described to me, by one who knew her in life.'

‘Why don't
we
see her?' asked Hiro. He was adjusting the angle of his head, trying to perceive the woman in front of the samurai.

‘I don't know,' said the priest. ‘I can't even see her myself – I know she is there only because of the man's condition, and the way that sometimes he murmurs to someone who isn't present. And I have spent many years specializing in the exorcism of spirits. I once cured Lord Tokugawa, when he was sick in the mountains.' He peered at Taro. ‘There's something special about you,' he said.

Taro sighed. He was sick of people telling him that.

‘Did you hear that?' said Hiro, punching Taro's shoulder. ‘You're
special.
Perhaps I should erect a shrine to you, and people can come pray to your goodness.'

Taro pushed Hiro and the two grappled, briefly, before they were distracted by a mumbling from the haunted samurai. Taro and the others turned to him, but he did not seem to see them – his eyes looked through them, as if it were they who were the ghosts. Since he had spoken Hana's name, he had said nothing more.

‘He was so strong,' Hana said, a little distantly. She was looking at the samurai, Hayao. Taro felt a pang of jealousy. He wondered, suddenly, whether Hana had harboured feelings for the man when he was training her, when he'd been handsome and powerful. He dug his nails into his palms.

‘I believe you,' said the priest. ‘I was called in by his family when he was already sick. But he was a
hatamoto,
was he not?'

Hana nodded. ‘He was the best horseman in Lord Oda's army.'

‘And what about you? You were part of the household?'

‘I was. . . a serving girl. Lord Oda dismissed me when I failed to brew his tea properly.'

Taro didn't think the priest believed that, but the man nodded after a moment. ‘What seems certain to me is that fate has intervened in this meeting. You know this man, and your friend can see the ghost that is haunting him. I've never
heard
of a person who could see the hungry ghosts feeding on others. That I happened to meet you here, in this inn. . . I don't think it can be chance. I propose that we travel to Mount Hiei together.'

Taro considered for a moment. This could be part of some elaborate trap, he supposed, but it seemed too coincidental – if it hadn't been raining, they would not have stopped at this inn, but would have continued onward until full dark. Besides, five people would be safer than three. Or six, he thought with a shiver, if you included the ghost.

‘Very well,' he said. ‘Tomorrow we will take the road together.'

The priest smiled. ‘Wonderful.' He bowed. ‘My name is Oshi.'

Taro, Hana, and Hiro bowed and introduced themselves.

‘What is happening to Hayao?' asked Hana. ‘Is the ghost. . . feeding on him?' She glanced at Taro as she said this, a troubled expression on her face, and Taro felt a spasm in his stomach.
I'm a vampire,
he reminded himself.
I'm a monster. She will never love me.

‘Yes,' said Oshi. ‘She is hungry. She is feeding on his
qi.
Ghosts can consume no other food.'

Hana's eyes widened with horror. She glanced at Taro again, and he knew the same thing was going through her head:
the ghost is not unlike me.

‘Why him?' asked Hiro.

‘Mostly,' said Oshi, ‘a ghost will attach itself to a person for no reason, other than bad luck. The ghost of a man who drowned might seize another swimmer, in the same place, and cause that swimmer to drown too. It's said that if a drowned ghost kills another in the same manner, they are freed. Or a group of ghosts will take a liking to a person, because of a skill that person possesses, or a mere accident of his appearance.'

‘Like Hoichi,' said Taro. Heiko – Yukiko's sister – had told him the story of the blind musician who was haunted by the ghosts of the noble Heike family, so much did they love it when he played the
biwa
and sang to them the song of their clan's tragic destruction. Taro still couldn't help shivering when he thought of the blind man, surrounded by terrible figures whose presence he could not even apprehend, such was the darkness in which he moved.

‘Like Hoichi,' said Oshi, nodding. ‘Indeed, most of those who are haunted are like Hoichi. They don't know about it, because they don't see the
gaki
feeding on them. There is more than one kind of blindness. They may think they are ill, perhaps, but they don't suspect the truth.'

‘So what happens to them?' said Taro.

‘They die. A ghost is always hungry. It feeds on the life force until the victim dies.'

‘He'll die?' said Hana, horrified.

‘I'm afraid so. Unless the Tendai monks on Mount Hiei can help. I have exhausted my own abilities – nothing I have done has rid him of her. But the monks on Mount Hiei possess other
secrets. Sutras, and the like, that were written by the Buddha himself. It is the last chance. That is why I am walking to the mountain.'

‘So the person being haunted doesn't even know they are dying?' said Taro. ‘They don't see the ghost?'

Oshi spread his hands. ‘In most cases. But that is where priests like myself come in. We are consulted, usually by a family member, and if we arrive in time, we are often able to help. We give charms, prayers,
shiryo-yoke
to hang in the windows. These things help to keep the spirits away.'

‘Like Hoichi's writing.'

‘Exactly like that.'

Taro thought of Shusaku's tattoos. Would they have made him immune to ghosts, then, too? Of course, Shusaku was dead himself now, and Taro felt it as a stab in the stomach, as he always did when he remembered it. He wondered if the ninja master would be wandering the Pure Land alone, unseen by the other souls there, because of his protective marks.

That would be appalling. Unless, of course, Shusaku was in one of the hell realms. Then it would be a mercy.

‘But,' said Oshi, gesturing to the painfully thin samurai sitting on the wooden floor, ‘sometimes, as in this case, it is worse.'

‘Worse?'

‘Yes. A person is sometimes haunted by a ghost that is more. . . connected to them. Usually it is a karmic connection – perhaps someone with whom they were in love, in another lifetime, or in this one. These people see their ghosts – usually, they believe that the person is still living, because the ghost appears to them as a healthy human being. That is what happened to Hayao. The girl was his lover.'

Was it Taro's imagination, or did Hana blanch at that? He
must be imagining it. She couldn't have had feelings for this man Hayao. She'd come with Taro, hadn't she, when he'd walked out of Lord Oda's castle? Taro glanced at the samurai, sitting gazing into the eyes of the ghost that only he could see, perceiving her as a living woman. He shivered. ‘What happened?' he asked. He felt a desperate desire to know how the samurai had ended up with that thing of blood-drained skin, as well as a frisson of terror at the idea of being told. It was as if his skin was trying to go in two directions at once.

‘Yes,' said Hana. ‘Where did this ghost come from? When I left. . . Lord Oda's castle, he was fit and healthy. He was teaching me the bow.'

‘These things can happen quickly,' said Oshi. ‘But it's a long story. I will explain everything to you on the road, as we travel. As much as I can, anyway – I don't know the whole thing, because it was only once he was already haunted that I was called on to help. For now, I suggest we get some sleep. It's still a long walk to Mount Hiei.'

The five of them divided the floor space as best they could. Taro contrived to place himself as far as possible from Hayao. He couldn't bear the sight of those wasted, once handsome features, nor could he stand to be near the pale woman no one else could see. The woman never once looked at him – he didn't think she was aware of anyone but Hayao. But her very impossible presence was awful.