The Assassin's Touch

25

A wavering flame burned in a lamp inside a room whose shutters were closed tight against the world. Thunder rumbled; rain spattered on the roof outside. On a mattress spread on the floor, Yugao and her lover lay naked together. He was on his back, his lean, muscular body straight and rigid. She embraced him, her breasts pressed against his side, her leg flung over his, her hair fanned over them. Their bare flesh shone golden in the lamplight. Yugao tenderly caressed his face. Adoration welled in her heart as her fingers trailed over the knife-edged bones of his brow, cheeks, and jaw. Her touch worshipped his mouth, so firm and stern. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, her samurai hero.

During her days in jail, and the years in the hinin settlement, she’d prayed that she would see him again. The memory of him had sustained her through all her hardships. Now she gazed yearningly into his eyes. Their darkness and depth made her dizzy, as though she were falling into them. But they looked through her, beyond her. She felt distant from him even while touching him, for he kept his spirit hidden in some faraway place. He hardly seemed to notice she was here.

A familiar loneliness saddened Yugao. Anxious to provoke some response from him, some sign that he cared for her, she pressed her mouth to the scars that etched his chest, souvenirs of countless swordfights. She teased his nipples with her tongue and felt them harden. As she moved her mouth downward, he stirred. She fondled his manhood, which swelled and curved upward; he breathed a sigh of pleasure. Desire for him quickened in Yugao, flushing her skin, tingling in her breasts, flooding her loins with heat. But when she took him into her mouth, he roughly pushed her away. He sat up and grabbed the short sword he kept by the bed. He held the blade upright in front of her face.

“Make love to it,” he ordered.

His voice was a hiss that reminded Yugao of ice sizzling on fire, of a snake readying to strike. His throat had been injured in combat and that was why he couldn’t talk except in a whisper. Yugao had heard the story from his comrades, in the teahouse where they’d met; he never told her anything personal about himself. Now his stare commanded her to do his bidding. The steel blade flickered with reflections of the lamp’s flame, as though it were alive. Yugao knew this ritual, which they’d enacted many times. He didn’t like her to touch him, and he avoided touching her as much as possible. Always he preferred that she pay her attentions to his weapon rather than his body during sex. She was afraid to ask why because he might get angry, but she must obey him, as she always had.

She knelt and ran her fingers up and down the cold, smooth blade. Her face, pitiful with her need for his approval, was mirrored in the shiny steel. Arousal smoldered in his eyes while he watched. His chest heaved as his breathing grew fast and shallow. Her own desire raged like flames inside her. She leaned over, extended her tongue, and slowly licked the blade from bottom to top, along its flat side. Then she licked down the razor-sharp edge. Yugao trembled with fear of cutting herself, but she saw his manhood rise erect. His enjoyment was hers. She moaned with the thrill of it.

Thunder cracked outside, shaking the floor, startling Yugao off balance. Her tongue slipped. She gasped as the blade sliced a tiny cut on her tongue; she tasted salty blood. She reared back on her heels. Her hand flew to her mouth. The sight of her wounded and in pain excited him to a frenzy. He shoved her down on the bed. Holding the sword across her throat, he thrust himself between her legs.

Yugao cried out with pleasure and terror as he moved inside her and the blade pressed against her skin. He knew he didn’t have to force her; she would let him do anything to her that he wanted. But he needed violence to be satisfied. He would cut her if he chose. He had in the past. Even as she clutched him to her and heaved up to meet his thrusts, she screamed and cringed away from the sword. His face strained and contorted while he moved faster and harder. His gaze locked onto hers.

She whirled into the black vortex of his eyes. Flashes of memory illuminated the darkness. She was a young girl in her family home. Her father lay atop her; he clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries as they coupled. In the morning there was blood on her bed. Her mother cursed and beat her.

But those days, and those people who had hurt her, were gone. She clung tight to her lover. He flung back his head, shouted, and thrust deep into her as he released. Her own release shuddered through her in paroxysms of rapture. Wild, incoherent cries burst from Yugao as she felt her spirit touch his at last.

Too soon, even before her sensations faded, he rose from her. He knelt on the floor across the room, his back to Yugao, while she lay drenched with their sweat and shivering in the sudden chill of his absence. She crept over to him and laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. He gazed into space, ignoring her.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

A long moment passed before he said, “Coming here was a mistake.”

The reproachful tone in his whisper stung Yugao. “Why? It’s quiet and comfortable and private. We have everything we need.” She gestured at the bedding, the soft floor cushions, the brazier filled with coal, the bundle of food, the jars of water and wine.

“It’s not safe here. And I’d be better off without you.” He shrugged her hand off him.

Yugao had a sudden memory of her father fondling her sister Umeko on his lap while she watched, jealous and deserted. “But we’re meant to be together,” Yugao said, wounded by his attitude. “Fate has reunited us.”

He laughed, a sound like metal rasping against metal. “This kind of fate will get us both killed. You’re a wanted criminal. The police will be looking for you. You’ll lead my enemies straight to me.”

“No, I won’t!” Yugao was distressed because he thought her such a liability while she loved him more than anything else in the world. “I’ve been careful. They’ll never find us here. I would never put you in danger. I love you. I’ll do anything to protect you.”

She would hide him, feed him, and give herself to him no matter how he treated her. She was his slave despite everything she knew about him.

When she’d met him at the teahouse, she’d set her heart on winning his love. He was different from the other men there. Most of them had nicer manners than he did, but she cared nothing for them. She could lure them with one smile, one seductive glance. The weak, stupid fools! But he ignored her efforts to attract him. This made Yugao want him in a way that she’d never wanted any man. For the first time in her life she felt physical desire. She grew determined to have him. Whenever he came to the teahouse, she flirted with him for all she was worth. Sometimes she would take another man out to the alley, hoping to make him jealous. Nothing worked.

He usually traveled on foot instead of riding a horse as most samurai of his rank did, and once, when he left the teahouse, she ran after him. He’d stopped, turned on her, and said, “Get lost. Leave me alone.”

But that had only whetted Yugao’s desire. The next time she followed him, she took care that he wouldn’t notice her among the crowds in the streets. She spent days trailing him all over Edo. From a safe distance she watched him meet and talk furtively with strange men. She was curious to know what he did, and one night she found out.

It was a cold, wet autumn evening. Yugao followed him through the mist that hung over the city, along roads almost deserted, to a neighborhood near the river. He’d stopped down the block from a brightly lit teahouse and taken cover in the doorway of a shop closed for the night. She’d hidden herself around the corner. Shivering in the chill dampness, she watched him watch the teahouse. Customers came and went. Hours passed; then two samurai emerged from the teahouse and walked down the street past Yugao.

He slipped out of the doorway and stole after them.

Yugao’s heart beat fast because she knew something exciting was about to happen. The mist was so thick she could hardly see to follow him and the two samurai. They were shadows that dissolved even though they were but twenty paces ahead. Their voices drifted back to Yugao. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their tones sounded urgent, frightened. Their steps quickened to a run. Yugao hurried forward, but soon she lost them. Then she heard a muffled cry, which she followed to an alley between two warehouses. She peered inside.

A breeze blowing through the alley from the river dispelled the mist. A body lay crumpled on the ground. Farther down the alley, two figures grappled and flailed in a violent embrace. Yugao heard a scream of agony. One figure fell with a thud. The other stood motionless. Yugao gaped in shock. He’d been stalking those samurai, and he’d just killed them both!

Now he saw her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Yugao realized that he meant to kill her so she could never tell anyone what he’d done. But she didn’t run away. His strength and daring awed her. Her desire for him burgeoned into a rampant hunger. Almost without conscious thought, Yugao moved toward him and opened her robes, baring her body to him.

He let the sword drop. He seized her and took her, against the wall of the warehouse, while his victims lay dead nearby. The brutality of the killings, and the danger that they would be caught, roused them both to a savage passion. For the first time Yugao experienced pleasure with a man. She didn’t care that he was a murderer. As they reached their climax, she screamed in triumph because she’d finally won him.

The next day, she asked him why he’d killed those men.

“They were the enemy,” was all he would say.

Later she heard about the murders from gossip at the teahouse. The two samurai had been retainers of Lord Matsudaira. He had issued an order that anyone with information about the murders should come forward. Yugao didn’t mind that her lover was wanted for such an important crime. She admired him all the more because he was taking on such a powerful enemy as Lord Matsudaira. She didn’t care why. She liked that he fought the people who’d wronged him. She gloried in having a man so brave.

But it soon became clear that she didn’t have him. After that night, they met often, always at cheap inns around Edo, and he’d taught her sex rituals he liked, but outside the bedchamber he ignored her the same as before. He never showed any affection to her. Desperate for his love, Yugao had taken extreme action.

What she’d done had infuriated him rather than pleased him. He’d dropped her and vanished like smoke. Yugao was devastated. Then more calamity struck. Her father was demoted to hinin. The family had moved to the settlement. She’d often gone looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found.

The war had turned her luck.

A month after the battle had ended, Yugao awakened in the middle of the night to hear a voice outside the window, hissing her name. It was the voice she’d longed to hear. She jumped out of bed and ran outside. She found him lying on the ground, bleeding from serious wounds, half dead. Yugao never knew what had happened to him or how he’d found her; he never said. What mattered was that he’d returned to her. She took him in and put him to bed in the lean-to where her sister Umeko entertained men. Umeko wasn’t pleased.

“That’s my room,” she said. “Get that sick, filthy hoodlum out of it!”

Their father took Umeko’s side; he always did. “If we’re caught sheltering a fugitive, we’ll get in trouble,” he told Yugao. “I’m going to report him to the police.”

“If you do, I’ll tell them you haven’t stopped committing incest,” Yugao retorted. “They’ll make your sentence longer.”

Her threat kept him and Umeko silent. That whole winter, she’d hidden her lover and nursed him back to health. When he was well, he began going out at night. He never said why, but Yugao knew he must be continuing his war against Lord Matsudaira. Sometimes he returned the next morning; sometimes he stayed away for days. Yugao waited in fear that he wouldn’t come back. She was terrified that he’d been killed. The last time, after he’d been gone a month, she went looking for him, in the places they used to meet. Finally she found him, but he was angry rather than glad to see her. Although she’d wept at his coldness, he’d spurned her: “I have work to do. You’ll be in my way. If I ever need you again, I’ll come to you.”

“Please let me stay with you,” she’d begged, “at least for a little while.”

She’d undressed and tried to seduce him. He’d drawn his sword and sliced off her left nipple. As she screamed in horror at the bloody wound, he’d shouted, “Go away, and don’t come back, or I’ll kill you next time!”

He’d finally instilled true fear of himself into Yugao. Heartbroken, she’d obeyed, thinking their relationship was over for good. She’d returned to the hovel, where her family had given her no sympathy. “Good riddance to him,” her father said. “You’re too ugly to keep a man,” Umeko said spitefully. Her mother had laughed at her grief. “Serves you right!”

“Someday you’ll pay for the way you treat me!” Yugao had cried in a furious rage.

Now they couldn’t hurt her anymore. Now the fire that had set her free had given her new hope of spending her life with him. But now, after she’d managed to track him down, he was slipping away from her again. He put his clothes on and said, “I shouldn’t have let you bring me here. The police will search the places and question the people that have connections with you. I can’t risk that they’ll find you and catch me by accident.”

As he peeked through the cracks in the window shutters to see if his enemies were stealing up outside, panic rose in Yugao. “If you don’t like it here, we’ll go somewhere else,” she said even though she hated to leave this sanctuary. She began flinging on her own clothes, a cheap undergarment and kimono she’d stolen from a shop.

The contempt in his glance cut her like a knife. “We’re not going together. I don’t want to lug around a piece of dangerous dead weight. It’s time we split up.”

“No!” Aghast, Yugao clung to him. “I won’t let you leave me!” He wrenched away from her with a sound of exasperation and turned his back on her, but she pressed herself against him. “Not after what I’ve done for you!”

He whirled to face her. The atmosphere between them vibrated with the history of the other things she’d done to win his love, besides nursing him and sheltering him. Yugao could almost smell blood in the air, pungent and metallic.

“I never asked you to do it.” Rage blazed in his eyes.

“But aren’t you glad I did? They were the enemy.”

“You were careless. You could have been caught. People knew about your connection to me. If the police had figured out what you’d done, they would have arrested us both for conspiracy even though you acted on your own.”

“But they didn’t. Fate is on our side. It protected us.”

He shook his head, and an incredulous laugh hissed from him. “Merciful gods, you’re insane! The sooner I’m rid of you, the better!”

He fastened his swords at his waist and stuffed a knapsack with his extra clothes and few other possessions.

“Wait!” Yugao said, frantic. Since her love and his obligation to her wouldn’t stop him, maybe practical reasons would. “You said the chamberlain and his troops are looking for you. You heard they’ve already raided places you’ve been hiding. If you leave, where will you go?”

“That’s my business. Not yours.” But his hands faltered as he tied the knot on the bundle.

Yugao pressed her advantage: “You should lie low for a while. The chamberlain will think you’ve left town. He’ll give up hunting you in Edo. Until then, this is the safest place for you.”

A scowl darkened his features. Yugao sensed him fighting logic, resisting her. She said, “Maybe you can find some cave to hide in, but who will bring you food? Your comrades are dead or scattered all over the country. Who else do you have to help you but me?”

With a sudden burst of temper, he flung his bundle across the room. It hit the wall, then plopped onto the floor. His expression was murderous as he dropped to his knees. Yugao didn’t care that he hated depending on her for survival. Kneeling behind him, she hugged him and laid her cheek against his, although he sat rigid in her embrace.

“Everything will be all right,” she said. “Together we’ll destroy our enemies. Then we’ll be happy together as we were meant to be. Trust me.”