Читать книгу Tengu - John Donohue - Страница 12

5 BLADE SONG

The video footage was flat, and it obscured the subtlety of angle and timing. The old teacher regretted that. But the audience wasn’t trained to appreciate subtlety and the outcome was clear enough. That was all that mattered.

They watched it without comment, which was unusual. They were garrulous as a rule, excitable, and given to flowery discussion. The small old Japanese man in the corner was just the opposite. Words leaked from him in a cadence that was shaped by patience, the slow drip of insight squeezed out drop by drop only by the force of necessity. He felt no need for speech, certainly not here. The image on the television screen spoke for him.

The group’s mission had not moved him, but their timing had suited his purpose. They believed that they had sought him out. In reality, it had not been difficult for him to attract them. He would have preferred to remain in the mountains of his home islands, desiring familiar territory in which to execute his attack. But it was not to be—that meddler from Tokyo had seen to that.

They had asked for his knowledge and he had come, knowing that what they sought was a thing that was easy to bestow. It merely needed devotion, and they had that quality in abundance. He had left one island chain for another, abandoning the peaks and rice fields of his ancestors, spurning the cities that had grown up in sterile imitation of the West. His new pupils understood the decay that the West created. They, too, resented what had been done: legacies spurned and lives rendered pointless. The old teacher spoke to them through translators, but when his eyes looked into theirs, he saw a familiar glint. The anger and resentment needed no translation.

It was not a difficult task to teach them the techniques of his art. To create the warrior’s spirit was a deeper challenge. They were willing to fight, but had spent so long hiding that their impulse was always for ambush—a vicious blow to the back of the head, or the strike from a distance—a peaceful morning rent by the blast of a car bomb. It was sometimes effective, the old man knew, but it was a tactic ultimately shaped by fear. It was ironic in some ways. They hated the nations that had made them weak, and yet their very weakness drove them to rely on the technology of the people they hated.

The rushing bloom and fire of explosions entranced them. The old man watched them swell with pride and power as they spoke of it. They ignored the imprecision and gloried only in the fear that it created. The old man thought them foolish. He valued few things in this world, but precision was one of them.

Yet, he persisted in instructing them. They knew of guns and bombs, the things that brought death from afar. He had different, more feral skills to impart.

Deep down, he felt contempt for their tactics. They had chortled in glee at the video footage from New York, seeing in the storm of concrete dust and black smoke a great battle won. The old man did not care one way or the other about the lives snuffed out as the buildings pancaked down into the ground, but he knew that the true warrior faces his enemy. What their brothers had done was not the act of warriors, whatever they called themselves; it was homicidal demolition.

He did not speak to them about the warrior’s code. Instead, he made them into weapons themselves. This, at least, was a thing they understood, these young men from the hot, dry places of the world. It was their strength. They knew that the West searched for weapons in the hands, not in the eyes. It was a weakness in their enemy that they appreciated. And the old man helped them cultivate fragments of an ancient wisdom that would give them strength.

After a time, the young men grew to respect him, drawn by the bond between sensei and student. But their leaders watched with suspicion, their eyes bright and their hands fluttering as they murmured to each other in the throaty language of their home.

He was still an outsider, and while some of them trained with him, the group elders never fully trusted him. They demanded proof, a test of his effectiveness. It was a tradition from the isolated desert camps where so many had gotten their early training. The old teacher thought them foolish—such tests were wasteful. A good test was a dangerous thing, not to be undertaken lightly. And in an art that dealt with life and death, a flaw in technique would be disastrous. He felt contempt for the leaders—they were like impatient children eager to try new toys. They ran risks for no good reason. For men who sang the glories of an ancient way of life, they seemed to have forgotten patience. He shrugged inwardly, knowing it could not be helped. Their cause was not his. He was using them as surely as they were using him. The test would go forward as they wished, but he would shape it to ultimately serve his purpose, not theirs.

He had smiled grimly at their request. His face was a round one, although lined with age. His teeth were uneven and pointy, and his face was almost comical until you looked in his eyes. The more gifted of his students could feel the invisible energy roiling out of him as his anger flared in a brief eruption.

“You wish to see proof?” he had said, his eyes narrowing. “So. It is easily done.” He had selected his best students, pointing them out one by one with the iron-ribbed fan he habitually carried. They were solemn-faced, these young fighters, under the dual gaze of the sensei and the senior member of the brotherhood.

“To defeat an enemy,” the old man taught, “is not just to shatter his body. You must destroy his pride as well.” It was a dictum he had thought long and hard on. So he told them how they would go about the attack to prove themselves to the senior men.

In a crowded city, a kidnapping is strikingly easy to effect. And some of the men he trained had financed themselves in the lean years through just this means. When the targets had appeared, it was relatively simple. Their route was known beforehand. The panel truck pulled up and the targets were snatched away like so much walking laundry. The smothered cries and flurry of arms were swallowed up in the jostling noise of the streets.

But he had not come all this way merely to refine their approach to abduction. The targets—two U.S. servicemen—were delivered to an empty warehouse. A video camera recorded what followed. As their captors cut their bonds, the victims assessed their surroundings, rubbing wrists and eyes. The Americans scanned the ring of expectant faces. Their eyes widened as the fighters approached them—they were soldiers and sensed the approach of battle. The realization that they had been kidnapped for a purpose more sinister than ransom dawned on them and they set themselves for what was to come.

The council of elders reran the video to watch it again. Things of this nature should not take long, and the old sensei was glad to see that his students had learned at least that much. The attack against the soldiers had been unleashed with maximum force, like the great winds of his home islands that swept upon the unwary, churning the sea and sky into a maw hungry for destruction.

In the video footage, after the bodies lay broken and still on the ground, the old man saw himself approach. It looked as if he were checking for a pulse. The camera’s angle could not detect the paper he had slipped beneath one body. Which was as he planned. The footage ended and he left them to their self-congratulations and returned to his quarters.

The moon shone on him. His eyes captured sparks of light and glittered there in the shadows. He moved silently, drifting across the floor like the fog that gathered in the mountain hollows. He approached the sword rack. His daito, the paired long and short swords of the samurai, rested in their stands. The scabbards were dark and highly polished, but they felt warm as he touched them. The blades gave off an energy of their own. He could feel it. His ancestors told tales of weapons so inherently evil that they drove their owners mad. The old man knew of this ancient force, but he believed that it could be bent to a will that was powerful enough. His will.

His muscles were warm with the comforting ache of good use. But he knew his time was short, that the days burned away with finality. He needed to goad his victims into the trap while his strength was still with him. The video killings were the first step. Before he made the long trek to a strange land, the old master had pondered strategy for countless nights. His rage burned like an ember smoldering in the ashes. And, finally, a plan had crystallized, like some occult jewel emerging from a furnace.

The old man bowed before the wooden rack that held his swords. He lifted the katana, the long sword, and drew it from its scabbard. The blade was a milky white in the moonlight. The men he now trained had no use for the old techniques, and that was fine. The old man still had much to teach them. He made them into weapons of a different design. But he still held onto the old ways, and the discipline of his ancestors was both a challenge and a comfort in this strange place. He worked the blade through the darkness in exercises that were centuries old. The sword cut through the air again and again as his spirit fed on a new certainty. And, as that insight came, the sword sang a new song in the growing darkness.

With a final swoop, the katana was returned to its scabbard. Night spread like spilt ink and the camp grew quiet. The only noise was the rustle of leaves and the static-like chorus of insects. It had begun. He would test himself one last time. To revenge what had been lost. The old man closed his eyes and, motionless, could feel the silent weaving of his plan as it came together.