WITH THE DAWN came another fire, and this one spread from the tips of his fingers to their knuckles, crawling like burning bugs, ever so slowly. This torture inched its way up his forearms, then spread across his chest, and in its wake, he was left with the ability to stretch his fingers, joint by joint, then his arms, and finally his legs and the rest of his body. Gasping at the pain as the blood filled his extremities, he began to pull himself to his feet, and so foreign was the bulk of his body to him that he felt as if he were hauling another person’s heavy carcass into the air; his legs were no longer his, but belonged to someone altogether lumpier and more clumsy.
He was staggering towards the door when the abbot stepped through it and – seeing Taro’s state – rushed forward to put a hand under his arm, supporting him. Behind him came Hiro, and when he saw Taro he gasped and ran to take his other arm. Hiro’s face was blackened with soot, his eyebrows and eyelashes singed. Taro wondered vaguely what had happened to him, could not for the moment remember when he had last seen his friend. Everything seemed very confused.
‘Oh, gods,’ Hiro said. ‘Taro. . . your mother.’
‘Yes,’ said Taro. It was all he could manage.
‘Was it. . . Kenji Kira?’ Hiro was looking at the man’s body on the ground, seeming so weak and emaciated in death that it was hard to imagine what a powerful enemy he had been in life.
‘No. Yukiko.’
Hiro made a choking sound. ‘She. . . was here?’
‘Yes.’
Inside the hall, men lay on all sides, some dead, some wounded. There was a sweet stench of blood, and the air was full of the groans and whimpers of the hurt. Taro looked around blankly. ‘The samurai?’ he asked.
‘Gone,’ said the abbot. ‘I was leading our strongest fighters. We were hiding among the trees by the meditation area, in case the samurai should breach our first defences. We were lucky – we escaped the guns. Thousands did not. But then, when the rain came, the guns were made useless. The samurai attacked with swords – and we were waiting for them.’
They emerged, finally, from the hall into the light, and Taro could see what the abbot meant: dead samurai lay everywhere. There were no monks, giving the impression that the samurai had been struck down by some vengeful act of god – the bodies of the defenders having been carried already into the halls, Taro guessed.
A single samurai knelt among the dead, his hands together, and Taro was about to question his survival when he turned, and Taro saw that it was the man who had been haunted. What had his name been? It all seemed a lifetime ago now.
The man nodded to Taro. ‘I owe allegiance to Lord Oda,’ he said. ‘But these monks saved my life. I had to fight by their side.’ It was a statement, but it carried the inflection of a question, of a plea.
‘Yes,’ said Taro, and the man nodded, a tear in his eye that might have been relief. Hayao, he thought. That’s his name.
Taro was becoming stronger by the moment, and now he turned all around, searching the scene that lay before him. He looked into Hiro’s eyes, and his friend glanced down, and in that moment he knew.
‘Hiro,’ he said. ‘Where’s Hana?’ The abbot looked at him strangely, and too late he remembered that she wasn’t Hana here, she was Hanako. He didn’t care.
Hiro still did not look up. ‘I think you had better come with us,’ he said in a flat voice.
‘No,’ said Taro, staggering. ‘No, no.’
Hiro’s face was twisted with pain. ‘I’m sorry, Taro,’ he said.