The Nicholas Linnear Novels (141 page)

The moment he felt the movement of her moist lips beneath his, the moment he became aware of her tongue emerging, probing, he was as hard as a rock and as ecstatically eager as a virgin.

And in regard to lovemaking he
was
a virgin. Tenderness and compassion held no domain inside him. Love was unknown.
Mi-chi.

Her breasts swelled to his touch, sensation buzzing from her erect nipples. He wanted to enter her almost immediately, such was his excitement. But Akiko persuaded him otherwise with her lips, her deft, knowing hands, and the clamp of her trembling thighs.

Near the end she held the base of his erection as tightly as she dared so that he would not ejaculate before either of them wanted him to. Meanwhile she teased his nipples with the tip of her tongue, his scrotum with a wave of her fingers, the head of his penis with the tender flesh of her inner thighs.

She rolled him around and around in that pliant grip until the friction became unbearable and he was so engorged that she took pity on them both and placed him at the font of her vagina.

With a long drawn-out groan he pushed into her, his eyelids fluttering, his chest heaving, until his slender hips crashed into hers and he was fully hilted.

She would not let him move, fearful that just one bull thrust would send his twanging emotions over the edge. Instead, she cupped her hands against his buttocks, fitting her to him as closely as possible. Then she commenced to squeeze and relax her inner muscles. The resulting contractions caused far less friction than if he were stroking into her. He would last longer though he was on the verge of orgasm when he entered her.

Akiko watched his face, feeling her emotions soaring not only from the liquid erotic contact but from what was written across his features. She reveled in the pleasure she was giving him; the banishment at least temporarily of the
kami
that haunted him day and night.

Sweat froze along their backs, riming them, making them into creatures of the winter countryside. Where they made contact their bodies were slick with juices as if hot oil had been poured between them.

Akiko’s eyes lost focus and she found her mind wandering as if in a dream. She was close herself. She made herself focus on Saigō. He was past seeing or hearing anything. His hard, lean body surged continually against her in minute ripples. Cords stood out along the sides of his neck and his teeth were gritted hard in his effort to continue the ecstasy. But he could not.

“Ohh, yes!” she cried, beside herself, biting his neck as she, too, lost herself in pleasure.

For a long time afterward he did not seem his old self. Remnants of what he had been, lost in her embrace, continued to hold sway like beautifully architectured ruins on a bloody battlefield.

He continued to cling to her, his breathing taking an unaccountably long time to return to normal. Even when they both became chilly and were forced to don clothing he did not wish to be apart.

Once, he began to weep silent tears. When she asked him what troubled him, he said, “I was remembering that bamboo we passed earlier. Oh, how I wish I could be like that tree, so resilient, so able to free itself of the greatest burden!”

But then, slowly, he returned to the Saigō she had known and, at length, they sat apart, not even their shoulders or hands touching. It seemed to Akiko that in some strange way he had become embarrassed by what they had done here, as if he had allowed himself to transgress against internal rules only he was aware of. She wished she could say that it was only the tears of which he was ashamed, but she feared that was not so.

It seemed to her that he was regretting the fact that he possessed emotions and needs just like every other human being. Akiko had been around him long enough to understand that Saigō had built for himself the concept of his own separatism from the entire human race.

If he believed in a god at all, it was this one. For his separation gave him power as the Void gave most others power. It allowed him to accept all that he did as necessary and right. Without that belief he—like a priest without Buddha—would be bereft.

But in this one instance, this turning away had hurt her terribly and she could not hold her tongue. Watching his face, she said, “You did not enjoy our joining, Saigō-san? You did not feel the outpouring of love as I did?”

His face screwed up derisively. “Love! Pah! There is no such thing!”

“Yet, before, you told me that you love Yukio,” Akiko persevered, though she felt a foreboding building inside her.

“What I feel for Yukio is none of your concern,” he snapped. “As for what I said, I used an equivalent word. What I feel for her is inexpressible in language. But certainly it is not love.”

“And for me?” She knew it would come to this, but her fear of what he might or might not say was insufficient for her to hold onto her words. “What do you feel for me, Saigō-san? Is it, too, inexpressible?”

“Questions, questions, and more questions. Why is it that all women know how to do is ask questions?” He lurched drunkenly to his feet. His breath was a steamy cloud before his lips. He was fully the warrior again. “I find questions insupportable, Akiko-san. You already know that about me yet you persist in asking them.”

“I am only human,” she said sadly. “Unlike you,
oyabun.
”

He laughed then, a low guttural sound. “
Oyabun
, eh? That is good, Akiko-san. Very, very good. You see me as your mentor, your overlord. Well, I’ll say this for you, you certainly know how to keep me in good humor.”

But already he suspected that the supposedly immutable continents of his being were shifting off their divine axis. Now with a brilliant flash daylight had begun to pour in through the resulting rent, flooding his world, scoring demarcations to a landscape alien to him. And in the shadowed recesses, flickering fires licked, funeral pyres to what had once been.

Looking at her now, it seemed abruptly clear to him that he, indeed, had never loved Yukio; had, in fact, not understood that feeling could be warm as well as cold.

As his eyes drank Akiko in he felt a return of the deep sexual throbbing she had elicited from him. He felt none of the aggressive rage toward her that he had felt toward Yukio or his many male lovers. He was astonished to find that with Akiko there was no anger at all, only this warmth that, belatedly, he could identify as comfort. And now he knew that all that he had said to her today was not as he had thought, to hurt her, but to unburden himself.

The sky had grown dark with low, surging clouds. The air was damp and leaden. It would rain or snow soon, depending on the balance of the temperature. A premature twilight was coming on, as purple as a new bruise.

“Storm coming from the northwest,” he said. “Time to go.” He wanted to pull his eyes away from her but he was like a child who had discovered his love of sweets; once in the shop he was reluctant to depart.

Yet at the same time he felt a need to break the tenuous connection that still linked them like a length of twined silk. It was important for him to regain a sense of himself, to know that all of him had not been transformed by this new feeling; that the iron warrior still beat strongly within him.

Thus he began without her, walking as if he had forgotten her existence. Then, as Akiko rose to follow him, she saw that something that was hidden from her vantage point had caught his attention. She watched as he turned off the path, heading into the pines on his left.

In a moment he was back. In his left hand he held a squirming ball of gray fur by the scruff of its neck.

“Eeya! Akiko-san, see what I’ve found! A wolf cub!”

Smiling, Akiko came toward him down the path. For just an instant he had the happy, carefree aspect of a little boy. It was so good to see that spark in him, she thought. If only this time could be extended.

At that moment, she became aware of a blur hurtling through the air toward him. She opened her mouth to scream a warning but it was already too late.

The great gray thing was already atop Saigō, snarling and clawing. Saigō staggered and fell sideways beneath the fury of the onslaught. Instinctively he dropped the cub but the mother was oblivious, attacking him with insane ferocity.

Akiko ran up, saw them twisting back and forth on the snowy ground. She bent down, trying to grab the wolf behind its neck in order to pull it off him.

But Saigō must have hit a patch of ice for he spun beneath her and, tumbling head over heels, man and beast flew over the embankment, down twenty feet to the riverbank.

Akiko, running to the edge, saw Saigō’s back arch, agony contorting his face. Then she was half sliding, half scrambling down the rock-strewn embankment. Landing on her buttocks, she lashed out with her foot, catching the wolf on the snout with the toe of her boot.

The animal leaped high into the air, yelping, and when it landed, turned and loped upward into the rising copse of pine where its cub still wandered, lost and bewildered.

Akiko knelt beside Saigō. His face, shoulder, and forearms were a mass of slashes. She saw a set of teeth marks just above his left wrist. All these were minor. But his spine was canted at an unnatural angle and his rolling, dilated pupils showed how much pain he was in.

With the utmost care she turned him onto his stomach. It was immediately clear to her that in his fall he had smashed part of his upper spine against the outcroppings of rock spiking the embankment.

Delicately she ran her fingertips, as a surgeon might, along the ragged, jutting spine. At least three vertebrae were involved, perhaps four.

She took a deep breath. Among other things Sun Hsiung had been a
koppo sensei.
With two fingers he could break any bone in the body of his enemy. That was
koppo
’s most commonplace and well known expertise. But Sun Hsiung had taught her the other aspect of
koppo: katsu.
It was a form of deep resuscitation.

Once she had seen him use
seikotsu
, an adjunct to
katsu
, and had begged him to teach her this more esoteric and difficult art. It was a form of bone-setting.

She slowed her breathing, knowing that if she began the process and failed, she would most likely doom Saigō to a life of partial paralysis. For him that would surely be a death sentence. But what was the alternative? She could not move him. She could not leave him for the time it would take her to search out a telephone. He was already in shock and unconscious. She could not ask his permission, and if she did not act swiftly the cold would infiltrate his natural defenses and kill him.

Without another thought, she put her fears aside and went to work on him. For twenty minutes she labored with only one brief interruption. As she had suspected, a fourth vertebra was involved, lower down than the others. She did not know if any of the
seikotsu aiki
would work here. She did not know whether to proceed.

Then she closed her eyes and sought the no-thought that was the Void. Here, instinct—and something more—guided her a sense of cosmic harmony. Using both thumbs at
kyusho
—vital spots—on either side of the unaligned bone, she pressed inward and apart. Heard the pop like a cork coming out of a bottle of champagne and thanked Buddha for strength and courage.

For a time after that, she knelt over him, slumped with fatigue and relief, her hot breath keeping the ice from forming on his naked back.

Then, gathering herself for the ordeal, she slung Saigō’s still unconscious form across her shoulders, settling his weight as comfortably as she could. As a weight lifter will, she rose with her burden and started off home.

“And that is how you came here,” he said.

Akiko nodded. “It was Saigō who told me of you; it was he who suggested that I seek entrance where he could not.”

“I consider that presumptuous of him,” he observed. “But hardly surprising. He was not fit to stay here. I do not believe that he is fit to stay anywhere for very long.”

She resented his words bitterly, knowing that Saigō had deliberately paved the path for her that he had sought for himself but had been denied.

Kyōki broke into her thoughts. “What is it that you seek here, Akiko-san? What do you believe I can provide you that others cannot?”

“I want to learn how to hide my spirit,” she said. “To exhibit perfect
wa
even when I am about to strike down my enemy.”

Kyōki poured them both more tea. He commenced to sip his. They sat cross-legged facing each other across the flagged stone floor. The castle in which they sat, he had told her, had been built by Ieyasu Tokugawa sometime during the first decade of the seventeenth century for a woman who was half-Portuguese and half-Japanese. A very special woman, Akiko had thought.

Outside, a
komuso
with a reed basket over his head played his bamboo flute in plangent fashion.

“Tell me,” he said after a time, “how a young girl comes to have so many deadly enemies.”

There was no recourse but to tell him all of it: of Ikan and
Fuyajo
, of Shimada, her father, and those who had set the
wakizashi
in his hands, guiding it in two powerful lifedenying strokes into his lower abdomen, destroying his
hara.
His life.
Seppuku.

Kyōki closed his diamond-shaped eyes. “It is gratifying to see such an unwavering expression of filial piety in one so young.” He took up the goldthread fan lying beside him and began a soft, fluttering motion at his cheek. It was feminine and, Akiko felt, unflattering.

Immediately Kyōki ceased this motion. His eyes pierced her, penetrating her thoroughly. The fan was a stilled butterfly at the side of his head. “Does my use of the fan disturb you, Akiko-san?”

She had to stifle the urge to lie to him. Saigō had cautioned her against this.
Kyōki-san will know,
he told her,
and at once you will be asked to leave.

The truth shamed Akiko and she felt blood rush into her cheeks. “The fan seems unbecoming to a great warrior such as yourself.”

“Or yourself.”

“I am no great warrior,
sensei.
”