The Nicholas Linnear Novels (206 page)

Senjin looked down into her Western face. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated a moment, but found that she could not help herself. She felt abruptly light-headed, the pulse of her heart like a drumbeat in her ears. “Despite what you’ve said about your English, you’re very self-assured in any language. I can tell that just by the way you move.” Startled by her own revelation, she blurted, “It’s uncanny. You remind me so much of my husband.”

“Thank you, but I am sure it is merely your imagination,” Senjin said, with that note of humility only the Japanese can project.

His face in the waning light had the aspect of a statue of a hero long forgotten. There was about him a blend of the stoic and the melancholy that pulled on Justine’s heartstrings.

“One learns in America,” Justine said, “never merely to
accept
an unpleasant situation, but to strive to overcome it.”

“Unpleasantness, Mrs. Linnear, is an inescapable element of life. The Japanese understand this implicitly.”

She watched him as he slowly circled her. “Surely suffering is a natural part of life. But do you really believe that unpleasantness is natural? That it must be accepted?”

“Oh, yes,” Senjin said. “Unpleasantness is essential to existence. Perhaps I should say
human
existence to be perfectly correct. By unpleasantness I mean pain. Without pain, Mrs. Linnear, there can be no pleasure, certainly ecstasy would be entirely unknown, because there would be nothing with which to contrast it. Do you see this?” He was smiling, but in a wholly different way. This was not the smile of the open innocent, but the knowing expression of a worldy man.

“Of course you have followed me so far. But there is more. Much more. Because it follows that pain can in itself be pleasurable. It can, in fact, provide a release of a magnitude never touched by ecstasy. You do not believe me? I can see that you do not. How can I persuade you save by example.”

Alarmed, Justine said, “Just what are you talking about, Mr. Omukae?”

The cyclist gave her a small bow. “Call me Senjin,” he said, taking her hand in a very Western gesture. “We are on sufficiently intimate terms to use our first names, don’t you think, Justine?”

“Was I ever outside?” Nicholas asked. “Did you lead me there?”

“You were outside,” Kansatsu said. “Yes.”

“But you were with me, I know that. I just couldn’t see you.”

“You were alone, Nicholas,” Kansatsu said. “Just as you are alone now.”

“I don’t understand.”

They sat in a plain stone-walled cell within Kansatsu’s monastery, just within the circumference of illumination from several fat votive candles. The light seemed ancient, given a three-dimensional quality by the scent of the burning candles.

“Remember,” Kansatsu said, “you have come many times to my retreat here on the Black Gendarme.”

“Did I also jump many times?” Nicholas asked. “Did I let go many times?”

“Ripples,” Kansatsu said, “spreading outward until they are spent upon the shore.”

“I let go,” Nicholas said. “In some point in time I let go.”

“But you did not fall,” Kansatsu said, “as you were afraid you would.”

“No,” Nicholas said, wonder still in his voice. “I hung in the Void, above the abyss that still terrifies me. All around me was the Black Gendarme, below and above. I was separated from it yet a part of it. It was as if I could fly.”

“Or suspend gravity.”

“What happened to me,
sensei
? Please. You must tell me. I am in an agony of knowing.”

“Find the answer, Nicholas. My answer will not be yours. Think.”

“I found…”

“Go on.”

“I found the Darkness.”

“Yes,” Kansatsu said. “This is what I meant you to find when I sent you to Kumamoto in the winter of 1963.”

“Instead, I confronted Saigo.”

“Forget the ox, Nicholas. The ox does not exist. I sent you to confront yourself.”

“No!” he shouted. Darkness was turning by degrees into light. But Nicholas was sickened by what was revealed.

“Think of the Darkness,” Kansatsu said. “There is only one law, one Way. You gave yourself up to the Darkness, and it protected you. The Darkness is what you have shunned for all your life. You have always known of it, Nicholas. You have chosen to turn away from it.”

“If what you say is true, that you sent me to confront myself, it would mean that Saigo and I are the same. He is me; I am him.” He thought in terror of Saigo’s enormous capacity for depravity and evil. “That cannot be!”

“Ah, but in a sense it is!” Kansatsu said. “And now you have the proof. Think back: it was your
mother
who explained the legacy of your grandfather’s emeralds to you, your mother who was tanjian just as your grandfather was, your mother who passed her gift and your grandfather’s legacy down to you.”

“But even though she was his favorite,” Nicholas said, “my mother was adopted by my ‘grandfather.’ No one knew where she came from.”

“That was what she told you,” Kansatsu said, “and no doubt there is much truth to the story. However, I would wager that your grandfather—if no one else—knew precisely her origin. And she became his favorite because he was tanjian and so was she. He could not pass down his gift through his genes, I’ll put another wager on that; the wife he took was not tanjian. But your mother was, and he saw in her the cycle renewing itself, and he loved her all the more for what she would provide for him.”

Nicholas stared at Kansatsu. Chunks of memory, stories of her past Cheong had told him in his youth that heretofore had made no sense, were now dislodged, rising, coming together into a recognizable whole.

Kansatsu accurately read Nicholas’s expression. He said, “Think back: you found the Darkness even though you are
Shiro Ninja.
This is impossible. Yet it has happened. You
know
that it has happened. Take no one else’s word for it but your own. The Darkness is the Way. It is that part of your true self that up until now you have not been able to face.

“Now you know the whole truth.” Kansatsu’s face was shining, lit by something more than the candles’ glow. “Nicholas, you are tanjian!”

Justine felt a sudden, almost painful stab of fear. “How do you know my first name? I haven’t told it to you.”

Senjin watched her in the last of the light. “Pain and pleasure. This is the way my mind works: on all possibilities at once. Or is it the only possibility?”

“Who are you?” Justine’s voice was tight. She was thinking, How do I get to a phone? Who do I call? Is there a 911 number in Japan? My God, how little I still know of everyday life here. “You’re not just a cyclist I almost hit.”

Senjin advanced on her, said, “I am alone. I have chosen to be alone.”

The taste of brass was in her mouth, a storm was brewing in her heart, and she tried to move away from him, as if she might free herself from a kind of palpable magnetism that seemed to have gripped her, to suffuse her with a frightening lassitude which increased the closer she was to Senjin.

Her cheeks were hot. “I…was thinking of my husband.”

“Were you? Are you certain of that?”

Justine looked up into his long, black eyes. She glimpsed an animus, iridescent as the scaly side of a fish, that drew her to its center like Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth, where crouched the Minotaur, breathing, waiting, patient as a god.

His eyes, as large as moons, seemed to burn with a cold light. Justine could not avert her gaze; in a moment she did not want to.

“I take no wife,” Senjin said. “I will have no family of my own.”

“So instead you live your solitary life, drifting like a cloud above the jam-packed earth.”

“I think I know your meaning.”

“You’re so terribly alone. How do you stand it?”

“When I was a child I was always lonely,” Senjin said. “I cried often, and was ashamed of my weakness. In time I overcame that.”

“And that’s your answer?” Justine said incredulously. “You see loneliness as a character flaw?”

“Certainly it is not a virtue,” Senjin said. “What else can it be?”

“It is, I think, the pain behind your eyes.” They were so close that she was breathing him in like the scent of an exotic orchid, blooming in the night. “It’s a scar on your soul.”

“Japanese do not believe in a soul.”

“Your spirit, then.” Justine knew that she should move away from him now, this instant, because she felt as heavy as lead. She recognized with a start the taste of brass in her mouth as lust. “I know you have a spirit if not a soul.”

“My spirit is pure,” Senjin said. “It is without emotion, therefore it requires no solace.” He put his hand gently over hers. For a moment Justine was paralyzed. Fantasy had now begun to spill over into reality, and the sudden presence of the two, as disparate as oil and water, made her feel queasy. She had no feeling in her legs, and she leaned against the wall, feeling its coolness against her burning skin.

“Justine?” Using her Christian name again, as intimate as a caress. His lips close to hers. Night coming down, a pull like the tide. Desire, mindless, savage, burning like a jewel at her throat.

Dear God, she thought, what’s happening to me?

“No!” Nicholas cried. “I can’t accept what you’re saying! I can’t be tanjian!”

“You are what you are, Nicholas,” Kansatsu said. “Karma. There is nothing I or even you can do about it.”

“I refuse to accept my karma. I reject any notion that I am tanjian. It simply cannot be!”

“Think of the Darkness,” Kansatsu said. “Remember what it felt like to hang suspended above the gorge.”

“It didn’t happen!” Nicholas shouted. “I dreamed it! I must have! Or I am dead. I died upon the Black Gendarme, as I suspected earlier.”

“You are alive, Nicholas. But the truth is that before this is over you may wish that you had died there.”

“Stop talking like that!” Nicholas was so agitated that he could not sit or even stand in one place. He paced back and forth like a wild animal made suddenly captive. “I have no wish to hear any more of this!”

“On the contrary, that is your only wish now,” Kansatsu said with great patience. “It is why you came here, why you risked a perilous journey in your currently fragile physical state.”

“I am
Shiro Ninja
!” Nicholas shouted in anguish and in fear. “Why do you talk when you can act? You can save me. Use Tau-tau. Undo what has been done to me!”

“Don’t you understand?” Kansatsu approached Nicholas, his aura, dark, iridescent blue-green like the body of an insect, preceding him. Nicholas shrank from him.

“Why should you fear me?” Then Kansatsu straightened. “It is not me you fear, Nicholas. It is that part of yourself lying long buried in the center of your spirit. Is it so hideous that you must fear it so?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Nicholas said, his misery clearly etched on his face.

“But you do,” Kansatsu said. “The Darkness is your friend, Nicholas. It saved you when the wind tore you off the face of the Black Gendarme. Why can’t you believe your own senses?”

“It was a dream, I tell you! What I saw, what I felt—it couldn’t have happened!”

“That way lies madness,” Kansatsu said. “Your senses are all you have to rely on.”

“But I
can’t
rely on them now. I am
Shiro Ninja
!”

“You are still Nicholas Linnear,” Kansatsu said. “Nothing will change that. Your spirit abides, Nicholas. It is indomitable. Only your own mounting fear can crush it.”

“The fear entangles me,
sensei
,” Nicholas whispered. He shivered suddenly and his teeth began to chatter furiously. “It will not let go its hold.”

“No!” Kansatsu said so sharply that Nicholas started. “It is you who are holding on to the fear. This fear is known and therefore can be handled. This other fear—the fear of the Darkness, of your heritage and all it implies—is the unknown. Better by far the former than the latter.”

Nicholas drew his legs up to his chest. He trembled as if he had the ague. “I am afraid,
sensei
.”

“Of what?”

“What if I
am
tanjian?”

“If that frightens you, Nicholas, let yourself feel the fear. At least give yourself that much freedom. Reach out once again and touch the Darkness.”

“I can’t. I seem paralyzed.”

“If you feel up to it,” Kansatsu said softly, “tell me what happened to my elder brother, Kyoki.”

Outside, a storm was whistling through the ravines and narrow gorges on the approach to the Black Gendarme. Hail rattled against the thatch roof of Kansatsu’s monastery. Real time had seemed to vanish, retreating down a well of gravity that kept the two of them in an orbit all to themselves.

Nicholas told Kansatsu what had transpired from the moment he saw Kyoki’s castle to the moment he left. When he was through, Kansatsu said, “How long do you think my elder brother had been dead when you discovered him?”

“Half a day. Perhaps less than that. Six hours.”

“Tell me, Nicholas, who knew you were going to the Asama highlands?”

“Only my wife and my close friend, Tanzan Nangi.”

“Do you trust this Nangi?”

“With my life,” Nicholas said.

Kansatsu fixed him with a stare. “It may yet come to that. I advise you to choose your words—and those you trust—most carefully.”

“I stand by what I said.”

Kansatsu said nothing.

Nicholas, growing anxious, said, “What are you thinking,
sensei
?”

“He must be an individual of enormous personal power, this murderer of my brother. He got to my brother before you could talk to him, so he must have known where you were headed. How was that accomplished? Did someone tell him, your wife, your friend Nangi? Or did he already know?”

“What are you saying,” Nicholas said angrily, “that Tanzan Nangi, with whom I have trusted my life, who is so crippled that he must walk with a cane, this man could be a
dorokusai,
a tanjian fanatic?”

“Someone managed to breach the castle’s defenses,” Kansatsu went on as if Nicholas’s outburst had not occurred, “to defeat my brother, a tanjian adept. We do not know how that was accomplished, either. Yes, there are many mysteries here that must be unraveled.”