Linnear 03 - White Ninja Read Free Page A

act. All at once, the calm, mirrored skin of tree and sky is shattered as ripples advance outwards from the trembling epicentre: Images of tree and sky waver, distorted out of reality, then disintegrate into chaos. And down below, the mysterious fish, hidden in veils of shadow, stir, squirming towards the surface.
    Was it not the same with Nicholas's decision to study ninjutsu?
    He floats. Time, like sensation, is wholly absent, banished to another, weightier realm, but recalling michi, he thinks of the stone basin on the grounds of his house northwest of Tokyo. Before it was his, it had belonged to Itami, his aunt; Saigo's mother. In his battle with Akiko, she had sheltered him, had aided him, and he had come to call her Haha-san, mother.
    Itami loved Nicholas, even though - perhaps partly because - he had killed Saigo, who had stalked Nicholas, murdering Nicholas's friends as he had come ever closer to killing Nicholas.
    Saigo was totally evil, Itami says. There was an uncanny purity to him that in other circumstances might have been admirable. I wished him dead. How could it be otherwise? Everything he came in contact with withered and died. He was a spirit-destroyer.
    If it had been the same with Akiko, Saigo's lover, she would surely have succeeded in destroying Nicholas. But her purity of purpose, her flame had encountered Nicholas's spirit, and had flickered in its power.
    Akiko, as part of Saigo's continuing revenge had, through extensive plastic surgery, taken the face of Nicholas's first love, Yukio. But against her will, Akiko had fallen in love with Nicholas. Because of her vow to Saigo, she was trapped into seeking Nicholas's death and, in the end, Nicholas knew he would have to kill her in order to save himself. But as he had confronted her, he
    had wondered whether he could bring himself to kill her for she, too, had engendered strong, dangerous feelings in him.
    Even now, suspended in nothingness, he is not certain of what he would have done, had not the gods intervened. The earthquake that hit north of Tokyo opened up the ground on which Akiko stood. Nicholas tried to save her, but she slipped away, down into the darkness, down into the shifting shadows beneath the rippling crust of the earth.
    I am not proud that I destroyed Saigo, your son, Nicholas says.
    Of course not, Itami says. You acted with honour. You are your mother's son.
    Itami is eighty when this exchange occurs, three years ago, an hour before the gods will take Akiko to their bosom in the centre of the earth. Six months later, Itami is dead, and Nicholas, weeping at her funeral, thinks of cherry blossoms at the height of their ethereal beauty, falling to the ground, where they are trampled under the feet of gaily scampering children.
    Sadness, unlike sensation, remains with him, bending his inner gaze to the slowly beating heart of his tiny daughter, blue-skinned, as fragile and translucent as a Ming vase. Kept alive by tubes and pure oxygen for three cruel weeks while she struggles valiantly to cling to what fragment of life was willed her, she finally expires.
    As if in a movie, Nicholas watches in mute despair Justine's mourning. He had not thought it possible for a human being to shed so many tears. For months, her anguish is absolute, blotting out the entire world around her.
    And how does Nicholas mourn? Not with tears, not with the self-absorbedness of body and spirit that the mother - within whose body the new life grew and who
    already shared with her that mysterious, intimate bond,
    soul abutting soul - must most wickedly shed like a serpent's dead skin. He dreams.
    He dreams of vapour curling. Lost, no direction home, he falls through vapour. Gravity drags at him with'such an inexorable pull that he knows he will drop a great distance. He knows that he has just begun to fall. And, knowing that with an absolute certainty, he wants nothing more than to stop falling. And cannot. He falls. He screams.
    And awakens, his body coiled and