The Nicholas Linnear Novels (73 page)

It saddened him greatly that he should “have been living a lie for all these years, believing that she had deceived him. But to know now that she had loved him as he had loved her was enough. She was gone from him, had been for a long time, except in his dreams. That memory was his and he would do for her what he did for his parents, light incense and say the prayers for them on the days of their birth.

Justine stirred beside him and he turned over on his back. Her right arm was beneath her head, the hand buried to the wrist beneath the crumpled pillow. He heard her soft even breathing….

In the high house filled with bars of bright golden sunlight and deep shade falling obliquely across the bare wooden floors Nicholas encountered So-Peng. He seemed not to have aged at all since the time the Colonel and Cheong had come to visit him. Tall and thin with bright black eyes and long hands, longer fingernails which clashed softly like the mandibles of some mythic creature, he stood in the center of the vaulted room, studying Nicholas.

“You have brought me a fine present. I am most grateful.”

Nicholas looked around, saw nothing. Only he and So-Peng. He did not understand.

“Where am I?”

“Somewhere,” said the old man, “east of the moon, east of the sun.”

“I don’t remember how I got here.” Nicholas felt panic overtake him. “I’ll never find it again.”

So-Peng smiled and his nails clashed together, the brittle sound of cicadas at noon. “You came here once. You will find your way again.”

And then Nicholas was alone in the high house, staring at himself in a long panel mirror.

Dawnlight, gentle and pale, woke him as it came in through the bedroom window. Justine was still asleep. He lifted the covers lightly, got out of bed.

He washed and dressed silently, went down the hallway into the kitchen to make himself a cup of green tea. He whirled the crushed leaves around and around the cup until they had dissolved. There was a fine froth on top, as pale a green as the mist in the mountains of Japan in autumn.

He sipped once, very slowly, savoring the bitter taste that was like no other in the world. Then he went into the living room. He turned on the light in the fish tank, fed the inhabitants.

It was a remarkably clear day. Clouds, very high up, stood sharply delineated, their striations as well defined as those in marble. They swayed in the high wind aloft. He opened the door, leaving only the screen door closed against the beach insects. The breeze swept in off the sea, rich and moist.

Justine was dreaming of a man whose face seemed to be all mouth. It was a lipless scar, like the horizon on the brink of a savage storm, black and ominous, opening and closing as lurid lightning forked and flickered far out.

It was screaming at her, over and over, the voice just a whisper; each whisper a lash that stung her heart, raising a welt, leaving a scar in its insidious wake.

She tried to get her mind in gear, to think coherently, but the screaming mouth confused her and she lay idling like a car in neutral.

The words the mouth was screaming at her poured down on her like hard rain, making her mind hurt until the only thing she wanted to do was to put her hands over her ears to blot out the terrible noise. But it went on and on and on.

The only way to make the mouth stop was to do what it said.

Now she wanted to wake up. Or she did not. She could not tell which. She began to whimper and cry. In her dream? Or for real? Which did she want to do? Wake up? Or continue to sleep? She was terrified and every moment she remained asleep the fear intensified.

She began to struggle. She felt steel crossing the palms of her hands.

Then her eyes snapped open.

Nicholas was on his knees, sitting straight-backed, facing the windows: the water and the dawn, when Justine came into the room. His eyes were closed, the handleless cup of green tea steaming in front of him. His spirit expanded, gyring high into the clear sky, reaching toward the high clouds.

Justine, eyes opened wide and burning quiet cold fire, stole silently past the bubbling fish tank. Her pale yellow nightgown swirled about her as if she were immersed in mist, rising up from the floor she walked, enwrapping her torso.

She turned and, reaching upward with her two hands, unsheathed the
katana
which hung on the wall just below Nicholas’
dai-katana.
She would have taken that but it was just out of her reach.

Now she turns, transfigured. Her eyes are not her own. The color is all wrong and the crimson motes have been obscured by the new blackness of the irises. Her face, she feels with a mixture of terror and exhilaration, is no longer feminine, though her figure is not altered. Like dark lightning flickering: adder, ant, man-thing. She shakes her head as her vision blurs. Colors seem strange; shapes bulk at her in different proportions. All of it has lost the extra dimensions with which she once saw the world. It is a cold and hateful place; joyless and as sere as the great Gobi.

Air bellows in and out of her lungs as if through some baleful force outside her ken and she curls up inside herself, crying and shivering.

Still her hands are calm and controlled as she places them one over the other around the wound leather handle of the
katana
, feeling its weight and its balance, knowing—and not knowing how she knows—the perfection of it.

Now her bare feet are placed slowly one before the other, at precise angles, as she draws ever closer to the muscular back at the front of the room.

Cool light floods her as she comes out from the shadows and she pauses a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the glare.

Now she is so close that it seems her harsh breath must brush his skin. Her arms are raised high over her head in preparation for the one lethal blow. One instant and it is all over: the striking of a match in the dark, the flick of one fingernail against another. The difference between life and death.

The tip of the
katana
begins to quiver as the killing energy is built up. One cannot use the
kiai
in this situation—the great scream that releases so much energy. How does she know this? she wonders. One must draw the power upward from the lower abdomen—more, more, the muscles are so weak.

And it is at this moment, as the
katana
commences its dark downward rush, that her core, at last seeing, begins to uncurl.

No!
she screamed to herself.
No no no!

But the blade was already a blur, cleaving the air as it went down and down and down and, despairing, she knew that it was far too late.

In flight, his spirit seemed to take on the characteristics of an old man. Not any old man but a particular one.

Nicholas, unbound, was old yet seemed not to feel the years. Rather, they hung over one bare, insubstantial arm like a series of silk scarves, each one a different color, corresponding to its memories.

In the sky of the new day he danced the dance of life, a delighted child who has nevertheless seen many things, experienced many days and nights. He fashioned stalks of wheat from the stuff of the clouds and, grasping one in each fist, swirled them around and around his head like crepe paper streamers.

Below him the continent of Asia stretched itself like an enormous tiger, yawning in the early morning, just beginning to stir. Yet it was the Asia of another time, before the advent of heavy industrialization, the revolution in China, the devastation of Vietnam and Cambodia. The air was like incense.

Nicholas became aware of Justine and the
katana
at the same instant. Had he not been so far away, the
haragei
would have picked up the intent far sooner. But he was relaxed and, for that moment, went unaware.

But in this last instant he had heard the bolt of black thunder and was already turning as the
katana
rushed down upon him.

There was, of course, no time for cerebration. Had he paused to think, even for the barest of instants, he would have died. As it was, it was closer than he liked to think about.

There are various methods of winning a battle without a sword. The one he knew best was Letting Go the Hilt and he used it now, instinctively reaching up with his arms crossed just past the wrists so that he came in
within
the arc of the blade, slamming Justine’s forearms away and up.

He was on his feet and she came at him with a horizontal cut from left to right and he knew then what had happened.

With a shattering cry, he extended his left leg, bending at the knee, and crossed his right arm over his left, applying a blow to her fists with the flat of his hand.

He stamped, startling her, and broke toward the
katana.
Halfway there, he realized that the blow he was about to deliver would shatter the bones in her wrists and instead grasped them, wrenching backward, right over left, until she cried out and the blade clattered to the floor.

Her knee came up and struck him in the pit of his stomach. Reflexively, he bent over and she pounded his back with both her fists.

The breath whooshed out of him but, in falling, he managed to use his forearms to sweep her off her feet. She fell heavily half atop him and immediately began to strike out.

Nicholas reached up through the rain of blows, touched the side of her neck. Something screamed. It came from her wide-open mouth, it used her vocal chords, but she never could have made that sound on her own. Her strange black eyes flew upward in their sockets until only the whites showed and then the lids came down and she slumped, unconscious, across him, her long hair half-covering the shining steel blade of the abandoned
katana.

It had been that second cut. Left to right. Justine was right-handed and would have cut from right to left. It was not Justine who wielded the blade. In any event, she would not have been able to handle the
katana
so well.

Saiminjutsu—the art of ninja hypnotism—was just one of the sub-specialities he had learned years ago. He worked over her for more than four hours—to undo was far more difficult than to do—using everything he had been taught, to exorcise the demon that had been planted in her.

Sweat dripped off them both like rain, mingling on the wooden floor, as he worked on and on until, at last, her body shuddered in his arms and she gave a fierce startled cry.

Within moments, she was in a sound sleep. But he would not give her up, even then, and held her, cradled protectively in his arms and lap, leaving her only once during the long heating day to relieve himself and to wet a towel with cool water so that he could place it over her forehead.

For almost all of the time, he stared down into her face, his features somehow different than they had been earlier. Once, the sound of the quiet bubbling of the fish tank intruded upon his thoughts and he looked briefly over at the denizens of the deep at play among the tall green columns of vegetation and the spiny backs of colored rocks. They regarded him impassively from beyond the glass, from another world entirely.

By the third day she had recovered fully. Before that, she slept on and off most of the time as one does when fighting off an evil disease.

During that time, Nicholas fed her and washed her, not minding at all. He would sit on the porch for long hours at a time, staring out at the sea, past the bathers and the sun worshipers as if they did not exist, but he did not go onto the beach nor near the water. He would not go that far away from her.

And when that day dawned when she opened her eyes and they were perfectly clear, the tiny scarlet motes in the left one as brilliant as fires on a plain, he put his arms around her and kissed her.

It was not until he had made them breakfast and she had taken in the paper that he told her what had happened. He told her everything because this was something she must know, to understand that she had had the strength and the courage to pull through. Because he never could have accomplished it on his own. She had fought the
Kōbudera
from the beginning.

“I am strong now.” She laughed. “As strong as you.”

“In a way,” he said, more seriously than she, “yes.”

She shuddered. “Such power needs getting used to.”

She read the paper while he cleaned up and the soft clatter of the dishes in the sink as he washed them made her feel cozy and warm.

“Afterward,” she said, “let’s go out on the beach.”

“We should. Summer’s almost gone. We should make the most of these last days out here. Anyway”—he wiped his hands—“there are a couple of people in the city I want you to get to know—”

“Nick—” She looked up from the paper.

He came over to where she was sitting. “Why the look?” He kissed her.

“Look at this.” She pushed the folded paper toward him.

He took it, dropped his gaze from her worried face.

“I ought to call Gelda,” she said as if from a distance.

Local Policeman Dead in Crash
(he read). The dateline was Key West, Florida. “Detective Lieutenant Lewis J. Croaker was found dead late yesterday in a rented car, a spokesman for the Monroe County Police Department reported. The car had apparently left the highway at high speed six miles east of Key West, rolled down an embankment and caught fire. Heavy rains and high winds, which have plagued this area for a day and a half, may have contributed to the accident, the spokesman said.

“Detective Lieutenant Croaker, 43, was apparently in Key West on vacation. Contacted at his office at One Police Plaza, Captain Michael C. Finnigan, Detective Lieutenant Croaker’s immediate superior, commented…”

But Nicholas had already stopped reading. There was a pounding in his chest, a hollow kind of thudding, echoing away as if he stood inside an empty shrine. His vision blurred and he seemed unaware that the paper was shredding through his clenched fingers.

“Nicholas…” Justine stood beside him, arms crossed, hands clasping her elbows impotently, the physical for the moment put precariously at bay by the emotional. “I can’t believe it.”

But he could, with that typically Asian perspective of the acceptance of events as they evolve. Karma, he thought savagely. But Croaker’s death was like a knife thrust into his bowels, a kind of seething pain that would not dissipate.