Dai-San - 03 Read Free

stiffening wind. The sun went behind a cloud and the air turned abruptly chill. Then its white face emerged and the heat returned. Farther off, patches of shadow stained the sea, mirroring the passage of the clouds racing across the sky.
    I cannot read your mind, if that is what you are thinking.
    ‘I did not really—’
    No. Of course not. She devoured the last slice of fish.
    ‘All right. It did cross my mind.’
    I saw Moichi kill that thing that the men caught.
    ‘The devilfish.’ Noted her change of subject.
    He slit its belly, did you see? Because they are viviparous. He made certain that the babies died too.
    ‘How would you know that?’ He was genuinely curious.
    I—do not know.
    ‘Have you ever been to sea?’
    It seems that I have, yes.
    ‘Perhaps then your people are sailors.’
    Oh no. I do not think so. She put the plate aside and, as she bent, her hair slid across her eyes, a swiftly flowing river of darkness. She stood up.
    ‘What then?’ He dissected her silence. ‘Try not to think. Watch the sea. What do you feel?’
    Her eyes traced the endless movement of the waves hurling themselves against the hull of the ship far below them. Up here, in the protection of their eyrie. Leaning on the stern rail, her chin on the backs of her slender white hands, she sighed, a red and gold leaf in an autumn storm.
    Perhaps merely a peasant from the north, a refugee of the war. As you first saw me.
    ‘Now I must tell you no.’
    A tear glistened in the corner of one eye and she blinked. It rolled down her cheek. He put his arm around her and she came against his hard body, giving in at last.
    I am adrift in the unknown and it terrifies me. Who am I, Ronin? What am I doing here? I feel as if I must not leave your side. I feel—a little like a corpse, drowned on a tide, thrown up onto an alien shore. I must—
    ‘What?’
    She threw her head, her hair flying, and wiped at her eyes.
    Tell me what happened in the forest near Kamado. When you emerged, you were so white that I feared you had lost blood from a severe wound.
    Ronin smiled bleakly.
    ‘Wounded? No. At least not in the sense you mean.’ He held the warmth of her body against him like a cloak. ‘I encountered a bizarre creature and it has been much on my mind of late.’ He shook his head as if in disbelief. ‘It was a man, Moeru, a man with a hart’s great head, black-furred, crowned by enormous treed antlers.’ His voice lowered and a hard edge crept into it. ‘I drew my sword but my fingers would not hold it. It came at me and my legs would not support me. It lifted a great black onyx sword over its head and then a strange thing occurred. It stared into my face and I saw within its very human eyes fear. We were locked together, neither able to act.’
    Aloft, the yards swung to and the canvas groaned as it caught the following wind, hurtling the schooner across the limitless sea. Muscles rippling, sailors sprang to the lines, securing the new set of the rigging. A man shouted, seeming far away, and Ronin heard the peculiar, dark voice of the first mate like hot pitch on a wound, recalling—
    This Hart of Darkness. Her blue-green eyes moved. Why does he disturb you so?
    ‘I—do not know. I faced him and felt as if—’
    Patiently, she waited for him to finish.
    ‘As if I was drowning.’
    And he? What do you suppose he felt?
    He looked at her curiously.
    ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. How would I know what he felt?’
    She shrugged.
    I thought you might know.
    He shook his head.
    What did you see in his face, Ronin?
    The Hart of Darkness swam before him, that strange mixture of man and beast. He saw the sleekly furred snout, the wide, blunt herbivorous teeth, the black, flaring nostrils, quivering as they sampled scents, the oval, human eyes, and abruptly he felt a chill at the center of his being, heard the cool click of Bonneduce the Last’s Bones, rolling over the patterned rug in the house in the City of Ten Thousand Paths so